The Daily: 28 September 2025

I read quite a lot of folklore, mostly tied to the ritual year in temperate climates, mostly those regions where I understand the languages and cultures, mostly places I have lived or have personally known through family and friends. So, mostly those places influenced or reshaped (as in my own country) by EuroWestern colonial culture.

Inevitably, I have had to teach myself to look past those influences, which are always strongest among the type of privileged people who record history and anthropology. All things written in English about other cultures are deeply flawed by the preconceptions and biases of authors writing in English, not a little of which is simply the language itself. English does not describe other cultures very accurately. So many qualifying assumptions are woven into these words. We can’t even talk about many things because we have no words…

But once you have a friend from outside this culture point out even one erroneous unquestioned assumption, you start to see it everywhere. Especially if you live in a female body… In which reading an average history book is an exercise in managing cognitive dissonance…

Why am I talking about this on the last Sunday in September? Because this is the day that I am celebrating Harvest Home… and there is such a load of disinformation on traditions from this time of year…

The trope that makes my teeth hurt is “sacrifice of grain gods” or some such scape-goat for male fertility. There are so many things wrong with this tale, if it is to be believed in a literal sense and not simply a metaphor for the death of the growing season.

But even as a metaphor it doesn’t work, does it. Because the growing season is not male. Because the growing season is not human. But most importantly, because the growing season is dying. No ritual death is going to stop that from happening. Grain is actually dead well before we harvest it. It’s an annual grass. We cut it after it has set seed and dried sufficiently to easily release that seed. Grain gods don’t die at our hands. If anything they might be using us to live. We spread them all over the planet, giving them everything they want to live a full plant life. And then when they have lived their best lives, they allow us to take their seed… so that we’ll spread it around again next year…

But still we tell these stories of ritual sacrifice, repeating them ad nauseam. Typically, they go something like this…

The harvest was going along nicely. The grain was standing tall and golden with full seed heads and sturdy stalks. There would be bread and beer and plentiful thatching. The rain which had fallen since Midsummer had finally moved on, leaving clear skies and cooler temperatures. Good weather for hard work.

And hard work it was, hour after hour, bending and scything, bloodied by the brittle stalks, burned by the sun. 

But it was going well. The last field was under the scythe. The carts were piled high and rumbling off to the threshing floor. The final sheaf would be cut before nightfall.

And oh, how perilous was that task! The final refuge of the fay spirit of the corn. To cut her down was to court evil, to bring misfortune on all. 

So the ancients decreed that the final stand would be cut by lot. The men would line up and blindly toss their blades. Whichever succeeded in felling the corn spirit would be crowned king of the harvest. 

The neck, the neck! went up the cry. And the new Harvest Lord would victoriously march the last sheaf to the village square where all manner of delectable foods were given to him by fawning village maidens. Strong ale was tapped and the Lord drank more than any other. All made merry, for another harvest was brought in safely.

But what of the ill fortune? you say…

Well, the ritual was not yet complete. 

After the feasting and merriment, the time was come to contain the calamity, to appease the spirits, to wash all hands clean of the taint. And so the Harvest Lord was plied with strong drink laced with soporific herbs, until he could stand no longer. Then they carried him from the tavern, heaping him into the cart and driving out of the village.

Only a few made this journey.

They drove beyond the fields and farms, deep into the woodlands, until they came to a narrow track into the trees. Here they unloaded the Lord and carried him through the wood to a clearing. All lined with hemlock and yew and willow, this place contained but one rough-hewn pillar of slate. And to this pillar they bound the Lord.

Then, almost gently, the scythe cut into the Lord’s neck. His blood gushed out, pooling at his feet. None dared touch that blood, for in that gore was all the contagion of ill fortune. The Lord must die to save the people from the wrath of the spirit world. 

And so he did… each year, bleeding out his life tied to that pillar.

Fun stuff, no?

Here’s another one…

The people were afraid. It was said that some god was offended and required propitiation. Hailstones fell on the fields. Black blight covered the orchards. Foul vapors oozed from the land, sickening the herds. Pestilence and plagues ravaged the villagers. 

And so they built a giant wicker man. As high as four men standing on each other’s shoulders and stout as a tax collector. They felled a mighty willow and wove the branches into a giant belly and grasping arms. They made a rude face and wild hair from the many leaves. They gave the man a club to rest upon his shoulder. And then they began to fill the maw.

The gods demanded blood. And so blood was shed. The best of the goats and cattle. The finest of the wooly sheep and proud horses. But that was not enough. 

The gods demanded blood from those who had caused the offense. And so, in a frenzy, the weak were set upon, bound and tossed in with the slain livestock.

And then the pyre was lit.

This story was originally told by Julius Caesar, a sight that he claims to have witnessed, sort of. But there are many variants of the Burning Man. It’s a tale repeated over millennia, one that has inspired modern replication. We build massive, monstrous scape-goats and lay upon them all our bad luck and unfulfilled dreams. Then we light the ogres on fire and dance in a brighter future. I’ve even heard that the word “bonfire” comes from “bone-fire”, alluding to this brand of ritual sacrifice.

But… 

Have you ever tried to burn bones? Probably not… You toss the chicken bones in the trash and don’t think about what happens to them next. So let me tell you… bone takes some fierce heat to burn. Even hollow chicken bones. Put them in the wood stove and they will still be there days later, scorched perhaps, but not burnt. But a cast iron stove would melt before a human skeleton could be burned. 

Burning bodies in a willow cage? I mean, how could a willow cage hold bodies, if indeed it could even be made to stand upright? Willow is not notably strong. It’s also not notably rigid… It’s not notably cagey…

But have you ever tried to burn willow? Probably not… Because it doesn’t burn. Not well anyway. Not without a good deal of other fuel to keep it burning. Willow is a water plant. If you do manage to light it, it will spit and fizz and smoke, and soon it will smother itself. A wicker man is not likely to burn hot enough to even scald the victims, though they might die of smoke inhalation — along with everyone else in the vicinity. (Which is how most witches and heretics died, even on good wood. There was always a body to deal with after the fire…)

In any case, this is clearly fiction… with bad plotting… and far too much stress put on the suspension of disbelief…

These stories of sacrifice always fail very basic analysis. Which would be fine if they were just stories, not purportedly true. But old Julius claimed to be speaking gospel truth. Indeed, he used these gruesome images of savages menacing the borderlands to justify his equally gruesome imperial conquests. And still today… Nobody ever questions the many anthropologists who assert that most of our traditions, especially those around the harvest, harken back to human sacrifice. We believe in these bloody fairy tales. In fact, I would argue that we willfully, intentionally believe. Because believing in a dark past is essential to justifying our faith in progress and a bright future (which also fails basic analysis…).

Some of this is our desire to feel superior. This is how such stories started after all. Old Julius was a master propagandist. His imperial march through Europe was eulogized as a mission to bring the light of civilization to the benighted barbarians. And look how barbaric they are! says Julius… They burn their enemies alive! (Which… let’s just point out… was an actual practice in Rome… and remained so for centuries… though without the wicker giant.) But we believe these tales because we want to be better than… something… better than the past, better than those who aren’t like us, better than ourselves. We would never light a human on fire. (Except when we do…) So we believe, eliding our way over and around the illogical and improbable details, latching on to the important big picture — Those people burned people! Just to appease their vile gods! They were ignorant, superstitious, and horrible! We are so much better!

There are other reasons we love to believe this horror of our forebears… We see violence in ourselves and in our culture, so we project that onto the past. To maintain our superiority, the past must be more violent than the present. Nasty, brutish and short. We see degradation and destruction around us, so we focus our gaze on any tiny scrap of evidence that the past was a more degraded time filled with acts of wanton waste. Man the hunter, running the Pleistocene mammals to extinction…

These are demonizing tales. Nature is always red in tooth and claw and demands blood. Nature is also always female, the blood-thirsty demon of feminine fertility. The ancients were forced to kneel before her, opening their own veins in propitiation. But virile modern man has subdued and controlled the chaos… sort of… 

Now, it is true that humans from all times and places have offered sacrifices to… whatever. And we do love burning things. (We will go on about our big brains and language, but the real distinguishing thing about us is that we are the only Earth-being that loves fire…) But human sacrifice? Or even sacrifice of useful things? Perhaps a bit of aromatic herbs or oils to please the spirits. But there are more ritually broken pots than bones. And truthfully, there are very few bones at all… just a few bog bodies and an occasional skull which may or may not have been detached from a living person.

If there were such a glade of ritual sacrifice, where year after year the Harvest Lord was killed to please the gods, there would be such a pile of bones. In a temperate climate, it would take up to a quarter a century to decompose each skeleton. Sometimes longer. That’s at least twenty-five bodies lying about in varying degrees of decomposition every time a new Lord is walked into that clearing. And in the desert or bogs or very cold regions, those bones would still be lying about today… I suppose one could argue that nature would eat its way through the victims, carrying off the refuse. We don’t see piles of bones because they’ve been scattered. But that’s still a lot of bodies that we don’t see in the archeological record…

Which is another hole in the tale… A village might be able to lose a young male now and then, maybe a whole slew in the odd war. But every year? And every year the most able worker?

Villages are not large places… 

The ritual slaughter of even one young man each year, never mind a few dozen plus livestock (if old Julius is to be believed), would undermine population stability rather quickly. And, of course, that victim is someone’s child, someone’s lover, someone’s friend. In a small village, it’s likely that there will be more people opposing the victim’s death than supporting it. For every potential sacrifice… So who is going to force all those people to give up their loved one? (And for what…)

Similarly, how many villages must be depleted to fill a wicker man with victims? Where were those victims jailed until they could be thrown on the pyre? Who guarded them and how were they fed and housed? And then how many would it take to force those victims onto the pyre? I can’t imagine any of them going willingly…

Well, then…

This essay has definitely wandered into some dark places… I don’t like thinking about these things. But I really don’t like that we don’t think about these things. We read some “expert” saying that human sacrifices were common at the harvest games — and we just accept that bullshit! No matter how nonsensical it is. Because we want to believe ourselves better than the past. Because we want to believe the present, this not terribly bright moment that we inhabit, is an improvement in the human state. Because we want to believe that modernity is progress and progress is good. Or just because we want to demonize what we don’t understand.

Or at least those who write about these things do… the rest of us just don’t think that much about any of it at all. Not even enough to notice the glaring discrepancies. 

But I read a lot of this stuff… and it is glaring… and sometimes I want to burn books.

Or slap authors…

Because here they have the leisure, the imperative, to look into time and read the bones. (Or lack thereof…) To tell the beautiful stories as they are, not as conquering men told them. To reveal common humanity, the banal alongside the sublime. But mostly just to tell it like it is. And they don’t.

That is changing. For one thing, there are more women writing, and, as I said, women are rather predisposed to see the flaws in the dominance narrative. Our bodies don’t fit into those stories. Our wishes and dreams and experiences never correspond. Plus, we just don’t have as much invested in the “this is the best time ever” modern theme. Because it’s apparently not. Not that the past was rosy, but it also wasn’t arguably worse than the present… And some things, many things, were probably better. Or we wouldn’t be alive as a species by this point…

One of the better things was undoubtedly the celebrations. Harvest celebrations! Can we moderns even imagine what that was like? Every year the entire town would just stop work. For days, weeks. And there would be music and feasting and theatre and sport and dancing and romancing… and more feasting… Everybody participated. It was unheard of to leave someone out of the celebration, no matter their means. It was a celebration for every body. Everyone had a full belly and a happy smile. And everyone was truly grateful that the harvest was brought home. Because the alternative was horrifying… though that really didn’t happen too often… because humans are pretty good at finding food as long as we are free to do so. (It’s property rights that cause starvation, not failed harvests…)

In days of yore, people actually lived their lives. They had time to celebrate the harvest. They had time to do the harvest, to bring it in and turn it into delicious food for their own bodies.

And there was no reason to offer a sacrifice… The land and the people worked together to make the harvest. A good harvest, like all good things, comes from mutual benefit, where all needs are met in the balance. There is continual reciprocity. Not sacrifice, but perhaps sacrament, if you are of a spiritual bent. (And most farmers are… because we’re working with unseen and clearly superior beings…)

Most importantly, everyone had a hand in this harvest. It was not the work of some distant place, fruits of the labor of others (if we remember that there is labor involved at all…). The harvest was life… for everyone. 

In modern times, the harvest is decorative gourd season and pumpkin spice lattes and football… and far too many hungry bellies… and no time to notice that we’re not living… so we tell stories of make-believe victims… to dull our own pain in the comparison…

Well, I aim to change all that! I say we take back the harvest. That we all participate. That we all have enough. That we all celebrate and know what it is we are celebrating. 

We might still burn the odd ogre. We do like fire… But we’re not propitiating vengeful gods. (If that is even a thing…) We’re pleasing ourselves. Maybe thumbing our nose at want, but still the Burning Man is no sacrifice, just fierce joy. A scream at the skies saying Here we are, alive! For another harvest!

And that is reason to celebrate!

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025