Chants for the Lammas Feast

The Wiccan holiday of Lammas is upon us, so let’s decide what to sing! Lammas is the first of the three harvest festivals celebrated by modern pagans and Goddess worshipers. Lammas is also called Lughnassad, for the Celtic god Lugh. It’s the festival of the first harvest, as Mabon (fall equinox) is the second harvest festival, and Samhain (Halloween) is the festival of the last harvest. (Think pumpkins!) A feast of abundant food is often part of any of these harvest festivals. It’s the time to celebrate the bounty of the Mother Earth Goddess. Sometimes a harvest feast happens in the midst of a ritual, during the “cakes and ale” part of the ritual. We, in the Crow Women, more often close our Lughnassad/Lammas ritual and then gather everyone to eat afterward. Either way, a song to express gratitude is called for before food is consumed. We jump on any chance to sing! In this post, I’ll review three chants for the Lammas feast.

Use Spring Blessing to bless your food anytime of the year

During the early days of the Crow Women, our favorite food-blessing song was “Spring Blessing” by Cynthia Crossen. We learned it from a cassette tape called Such is the Garden, put out in 1989 under the band name Pomegranate Rose. We’ve been singing it for twenty years, and really like the lilting waltz-time character of the song.

Goddess, we thank you for the gifts of your hand,
The flowering of springtime, the fruit of the land
When we gather together we know we are one
Let us open like flowers beneath your warm sun

Spring Blessing, Cynthia R. Crossen, (c) 1978

You can listen to this song by going to Cynthia Crossen’s website. From the “songfinder” menu, choose “purposes” and scroll down to “appreciating”. If you click on “Spring Blessing” a recording will pop up. We love Cynthia Crossen’s songwriting and encourage you to explore her website. It’s full of music resources for earth spirituality.

Harvest Chant is a justice-oriented food blessing

Another favorite of ours is “Harvest Chant” by T. Thorne Coyle. Thorn has a fun website, too, which focuses on her books and classes. Here are the lyrics to “Harvest Chant”:

Our hands will work for peace and justice
our hands will work to heal the land
gather round the harvest table
let us feast and bless the land

Harvest Chant, T. Thorn Coyle, (c) 1993

We first learned “Harvest Chant” from the CD Second Chants by Reclaiming. That recording runs just 56 seconds, but it’s great for learning harmony lines to the song.

Reclaiming (a fabulous activist organization of modern witches) released a new recording of the song on Campfire Chants: Songs for the Earth in 2016. It’s a groovy version that lasts 4 minutes and 28 seconds. There are no new lyrics–the song is expanded with creative arragements of the chant and a cool instrumental break. I find it interesting that the Crow Women and Reclaiming have developed along such a similar trajectory. Early recordings, such as their Chants and Second Chants, and our Crow Goddess, are fairly bare. There are just vocals and little bit of percussion. Those early pagan recordings were mostly seen as a resource for people to learn chants for rituals. For both the Crow Women and Reclaiming, more recent albums, such as our Seasons: A Pagan Journey Around the Wheel and their Campfire Chants, are much more elaborate, with higher production values, varied instrumentation and complex arrangements. Nowadays, we are producing records to listen to, as well as to learn chants from.

My contribution: A Pagan Grace

One of my favorite things to do as a pagan songwriter is to notice where there are only a few song choices in the pagan chant repertoire, and write a song to fill in the gap. I had some ideas for a pagan grace in my “songs in progress” folder. When we decided that our album Seasons would be about the Sabbats, I thought, “Great! My food blessing song will fit right into the Lughnassad part of the album”. So I got out my notes and finished it in a couple of hours. It goes like this:

Dear Goddess, we ask you to bless this our food. We say
to the elements making it our gratitude always.
May the gift of this sustenance give us the fuel today
to allow us to share our own gifts with the world, we pray.

A Pagan Grace, Alane Brown, (c) 2018

In addition to being sung at a ritual for Lammas, Mabon or Samhain, I hope families will use this regularly for meal blessings. It’s meant to reinforce the idea that every family member has gifts to share, and eating the meal provides the fuel to pursue those gifts. Gratitude is expressed to the elements, too, whether we mean the atoms the food is made of, or the pagan elements of fire, air, earth, water and spirit. As you can hear in this clip of the song, there are little tag phrases at the ends of the lines. Just for fun, the children (or adults) could playfully change the echoes to whatever they want. We pagans believe in mirth and reverance, after all. Maybe like this?

Dear Goddess, we ask you to bless this our food–so we can eat
to the elements making it our gratitude–except for the liver
May the gift of this sustenance give us the fuel–unleaded, please
to allow us to share our own gifts with the world–because we’re awesome

This Lammastide, I hope you’ll use “A Pagan Grace”, or one of the other songs reviewed here, to bless your food. We also have a song perfect for a Lammas ritual called “At Lammas” which we’ve written about previously on this blog.

Happy Lammas! We hope you feast well.

For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Alane and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.

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