Milk & Honey

I have been making a lot of cheese.

Over the past two weeks, I have made roughly fifteen pounds of farmer cheese, a mild variety that requires only vinegar for separating the curds from whey, about three pounds of ricotta (which is made by almost boiling the leftover whey), five pounds of queso blanco, and five pounds of manchego, my absolute favorite, though it won’t be aged enough for at least a month. I’ve also been making butter when I get a chance. It’s pretty easy to tell we have a cow, a Jersey named Fiona.

Fiona gives about three gallons of milk a day (we milk by hand, btw), which is far more than we can use, and that’s why we offer a milk share through our CSA. Even though we have eight shareholders, we still have far more milk than we can use. Which is okay with me. I hope to get enough cheese and butter stored by Thanksgiving to last us through the winter. But it takes time. Making soft cheeses is relatively quick—just a few hours including hanging and drying—but making aged cheeses is an all-day affair, and this is without considering the aging process, which can last anywhere from one to six months (even more in the case of Parmesan).

We also raise honeybees on our farm. Right now we’re down to two hives, but we’ve had up to six. Bees are hard. If I lost a quarter of my animals over the winter, I’d think I was an abject failure; but if a beekeeper loses a quarter of his or her bees, he or she will invariably say “I only lost a quarter!” Varroa mites, GMO crops and glyphosate (not on my farm, but I can’t keep the bees inside a fence), and the DNR spraying for mosquitoes (IN NOVEMBER!!!) provide incredible challenges to the beekeeper. Nevertheless, we usually manage to put up enough honey to last us through the year; and I’ll be pulling the last of the honey for our use next week, just before the goldenrod goes into full bloom and the honey starts to smell like damp socks (I’m not kidding). After the honey harvest comes in, I’ll try to put up another five gallons of mead that will probably be ready around Twelfth Night

All of this, of course, coincides with the way the agricultural year begins to wind down in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year. I have to get out to the gardens and pull the field onions and potatoes (including sweet potatoes), and get ready to process our surplus animals, not to mention that I need to prepare for the coming hunt of the deer this November. Being part of Creation requires this of me. I’m a farmer.

It is almost impossible, at this time of year, for me to not think of Waterloo Township, the hilly Michigan countryside where I live, as a land flowing with milk and honey. Because, quite literally, it is.

On the other hand, so, at least potentially, is every other piece of land. We all know the biblical promise:

“And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:7-8)

The land the Israelites came to, however, was not as fertile as one might think: through the help of God, they made it so. As Ellen Davis writes in her wonderful Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, the wager of the Israelites in their partnership with God is characterized by the requirement “to imagine their land as blessed precisely in the fragility that necessitates and therefore guarantees God’s answering attention.” [1] There is no reason to believe the same isn’t possible in any other geographical context.

Meanwhile, I have been haunted by something I bumped into while I was preparing Jesus the Imagination, Volume 3: Christ-Orpheus for publication. It was a reference to early Christian liturgies, before the codification that always accompanies State approval and morphs into a late-classical version of the “best practices” sloganeering that so infects academia and business today. Apparently, milk and honey were used sacramentally in liturgies just as much as bread and wine were. [2] I will definitely be following up on research in this direction when time allows, but I do know of people experimenting with the reintroduction of milk and honey as sacramental elements in modern liturgical settings, clandestine though they be. At first I didn’t like the idea, I must admit; but it’s grown on me.

Clearly, the image of milk and honey (both products of the female of their respective species) bears an appreciable amount of sophiological heft. And this is as it should be. It’s what’s missing. And for a culture essentially waging war on both the feminine and fertility, it has never been more needed. So much of this is described in the celebration of divine and human eros that is The Song of Songs:

“Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat the fruit of his apple trees. I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse, I have gathered my myrrh, with my aromatical spices: I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved.” (5:1)

Our own culture exhibits an incredible degree of insanity regarding farming. The assumption that agriculture can thrive without animals is one aspect of this nightmare only a bureaucrat could devise. And the promotion of insect protein and, yes, that acquired via cannibalism (but a softer, gentler cannibalism) to replace that from animals (including their milk) would be laughable were not the Archons pursuing it so aggressively.

So think of me, gentle friends, eating farmer cheese with basil, tomato, salt and pepper, sipping on a draft of fresh mead. Think of the feminine and fertility and how scarcity is the myth that tries to replace fecundity. For there is a richness to life the Archons will never comprehend.

“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God.” (Amos 9:13-15)

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

1. Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge, 2009), 27.

2. Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy (Grand Rapids, 2009), 20.

The Blessings of Lammas and Bread

Corn Doll

Lammas, or Loaf Mass, is a feast I would hope to see grow in popularity as more and more people look for a way to connect the Christian Year (or, we might say for our neopagan brothers and sisters, the Sacred Year) with the agrarian year, a synergy once assumed but now almost entirely neglected. Celebrated on August 1st, Lammas marks the midpoint between St. John’s Day (June 24th) and Michaelmas (September 29th), which, as you can easily see, hover near the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox respectively. May Day (May 1st), All Saints/All Souls (November 1st/ 2nd) and Candlemas/St. Brigid’s Day (February 1st/ 2nd) complete the cycle of half-turnings. And they all should be observed.

Traditionally, Lammas was celebrated as a harvest festival to mark to first grinding of the new wheat, so it is no wonder that the ancients associated this event with Christ and the Eucharist. (You have to suspect that this was part of the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lembas bread” in his mythopoesis). It is also the beginning of fair season—a tradition which persists in most rural areas to this day, though shorn of its sacred dimension. According to historian Ronald Hutton, in England the observation of the harvest season starting with Lammas was marked by “the crowning of girls as harvest queens by sets of reapers, the bringing home of the last load of corn covered in garlands, with loud acclamations, and the weaving of images from grain stalks.” [1] This season ended just before All Soul’s Day, after the surplus livestock were slaughtered and the meat salted for winter storage. Again, usually sans salting, this remains the practice in rural communities—I’ll be doing so myself this Fall with the surplus livestock on my farm. But, tragically, this moment in the cycle of life and sustenance is also deprived of its sacred dimension in almost all cases. This is something we should remedy.

You may have noticed something in my description of these mostly-vanished folk customs: they are incredibly sane and health-giving. I’ll take a harvest queen over the celebrated drag queens of our culture any day. Likewise, I’ll take bread and lamb from my farm over the diets of crickets and maggots being pushed by celebrities and the WEF. Because I’m not a fool.

Even the simple practice of making a corn dolly is a way to begin to resacralize our relationship to God, the Cosmos, and our food. Here at Stella Matutina Farm, we observe these practices and host a big and merry harvest festival at Michaelmas. The English folk tradition is rife with the remnants of such observations and practices. The ballad “John Barleycorn Must Die” is one iteration of this mythic and sacramental motif, but so is the tale of the Gingerbread Man. Put simply: something must die, that we might live. A basic lesson of life.

Steve Winwood deserves a round of applause.

According to T.F. Thiselton-Dyer in his magisterial British Popular Customs Present and Past (1876), another folk custom on Lammas was the visitation of sacred wells. I don’t know of any such wells nearby (though I plan on digging a well on my land for a hand pump very soon) but I know if I lived near a sacred well or spring… I’d be there! (Side note: I visited Chalice Well in Glastonbury many years ago and my eldest child was baptized with water I smuggled out of there. So arrest me.)

The Eucharistic connotations of Lammas bread, of course, are the most important: the magical act by which we eat the god who then inheres in us. Sir James Frazer in his classic text The Golden Bough, includes a section subtitled “Eating the God,” which is about the ritual eating of the divinity in contexts other than Christian, and he also associates it with first-fruits customs. “In these examples,” he writes, “the corn-spirit is represented and eaten in human shape [like a gingerbread man]. In other cases, though the new corn is not baked in loaves of human shape, still solemn ceremonies with which it is eaten suffice to indicate that it is partaken of sacramentally, that is, as the body of the corn-spirit.” [2]

Part of Frazer’s project, of course, was to show that Christianity’s god-eating was old news. But he didn’t really get it. What existed as a mythic imagination (though nonetheless very real) prior to Christ became historical and metaphysical reality through Christ’s institution of the Eucharist with the words “This is my body. This is my blood.”

They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work?

Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.

Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. (John 6:30-35)

What I am describing as an ideal here may strike some as quaint, or even a complete fantasy. I don’t think so. In fact, I think we are heading for what some have called a “New Middle Ages.” Those of us who survive the current chaos anyway. Rudolf Steiner, though he didn’t use that language, in his reimagination of the Christian year and festival life, certainly spoke to this, as did the Russian sophiologists Nikolai Berdyaev and Pavel Florensky. Florensky, surely one of the great polymaths of the twentieth century, put it this way:

“History has days and nights. Periods of night are dominated by the mystical element, noumenal will, susceptibility, femininity. Daytime periods of history are characterized by a more active, superficial interaction with the world, phenomenal will, masculinity. The Middle Ages were a period of night; the modern age is a daytime period. We are now at a threshold of a new Middle Ages. In its depths the Christian world-understanding is medieval. In the modern period the present world-understanding is useless. The present return to the Christian world-understanding shows us that we are at the threshold of a Middle Ages.” [3]

Actually, I think we are watching the desperation of the daytime period of the masculine in its death throes. The chaos in the Church, the machinations of the WEF & Co., the pathetic attempts by men to usurp the place of women and the feminine: these are symptoms of breakdown, not ascendancy. Their days are numbered.

And, as I often say, the way to realize the sophianic reality of the New Middle Ages is by embodying it. The things we do—the rituals we observe, the realities we celebrate, the communities we love, the foods we eat, the sacramentality of Things—make the Kingdom come to life.

So make the Kingdom come to life.

Alison Milbank on Lammas.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

1. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994), 44.

2. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (New York, 1927), 480.

3. Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science & Mysticism, trans. Boris Jakim (Semantron Press, 2014), 7.

In Memoriam: Christopher Bamford (1943-2022)

I don’t recall exactly when I first heard the name “Christopher Bamford,” who died Friday morning after a very long battle with cancer, but I do know it was when I was in my mid-twenties and starting to explore the world of ideas that eventually led me to a deeper search for Wisdom and to which I have devoted my life. I recall listening to cassette tapes someone loaned me from the Lindisfarne Association and hearing poet, literary critic, and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine’s admiration for Bamford as a philosopher. I also remember his introductions to other speakers at Lindisfarne (though I don’t recall what he said or who he was introducing). I had no idea how my path through life would be as a fellow traveler with Chris on the path to Wisdom.

I never met Chris in-person, though we did correspond over the last few years; but I did see him once. At the time, I was a Waldorf teacher at a teacher training course at Sunbridge College in New York and visiting the Steiner Books bookstore. For decades, Chris served as editor-in-chief at Steiner Books and his office was in the back of the bookstore. I saw him come out of his office, chat for a second with a clerk, and then disappear into his office. That was the extent of our physical contact. Not too impressive of a meeting. Still, he transformed that press into something impressive and, as my friend and Regeneration Podcast co-host Mike Sauter observes, Chris’s introductions were often the best parts of the books!

Prior to his work at Steiner Books, Chris founded the Lindisfarne Press and published or republished a number of exceptional books on what could be called implicit and explicit sophiological themes. We have a copy of Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, an anthology put together by Chris and William Parker Marsh that my wife bought before we were married—and I had a copy of Lindisfarne Letter 13, the original source of the book, though I have no idea what’s happened to it. Chris also shepherded the Esalen Institute/Lindisfarne Press’s Library of Russian Philosophy project, which saw new translations and retrofitted earlier translations of some of the great texts of Russian Sophiology, including works by Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov. Seriously, I do not know how I would have become myself without the ready availability of these thinkers in English. They were absolutely formative.

When I was working on my own anthology, the casebook The Heavenly Country (2016), Chris was exceedingly generous in allowing me to use a number of passages from Steiner Books/Lindisfarne books, including long excerpts from Bulgakov’s Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology and Steiner’s Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. And without charge!

Around that time, I was surprised when Chris expressed interest in attending the Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything conference at my farm in Summer of 2016, though he didn’t make it. It would have been nice. Alas.

Great interview made for the film The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner.

In addition to his gifts as an editor, Chris was also a gifted translator, and his translations of Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (uncle of the Polish Noble Laureate) are exquisite. In one of the email exchanges I had with Chris (in November 2019—just before the world went completely mad), he told me about a new translation project:

“I am more than half way through translating the complete Angelus Silesius Cherubinic Wanderer and will one day be looking for someone to read through it with a red pencil. “Silesius, of course, takes one deep into Eckhart, Tauler, Suse and the Friends of God territory…. the depths of which almost defy contemplation…”

I hope he was able to finish it. I’d love to read it. Earlier that year, he sent me a translation of one of Novalis’s Spiritual Songs:

Few know

love’s secret,

feel insatiability

and everlasting thirst.

The holy supper’s

celestial meaning

remains a riddle

to earthly senses,

but whoever has drawn

life’s breath

from warm, loved lips,

whoever’s heart holy fervor

has melted in quivering waves,

whoever’s eyes have ever lifted

to measure

heaven’s unfathomable depths—

that person will eat his body

and drink his blood

forever.

For who has guessed the earthly body’s

higher meaning?

Who can say

he understands the blood?

Once all is body,

ONE body, then swims

the blessed couple

in celestial blood—

O! that the world sea

would grow red

and rocks rise up

in fragrant flesh!

Then the magic meal would never end

nor love ever find satisfaction.

You can never have the beloved

inwardly enough, enough your own.

Transformed by ever gentler lips

the companion becomes

more inward, ever closer.

Warmer pleasure

thrills through the soul.

Thirstier, hungrier

grows the heart:

love’s bliss endures

from eternity to eternity.

If ever those fasting

once tasted,

they would abandon all,

and sit down with us

at longing’s table

that never grows empty.

They would never know

love’s unending fullness

and praise the sustenance

of body and blood.

But I think Chris’s greatest contribution was as a writer of deeply insightful, philosophically open, and spiritually profound prose. His book An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (2003) is as moving and enlightening a book as I have read. In fact, when I was teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Truth and Inquiry” at Siena Heights University in Michigan a few years ago, I used it as a textbook. Its table of contents, in fact, acts like a mirror in which I see my own interests and loves reflected—Sophia, the Eucharist, Hermeticism, Celtic Christianity, the Grail, Novalis, Romanticism, the Rose Cross, the Troubadours, and “Deserts and Gardens,” perhaps the best essay I’ve ever read on the Rosary. He writes with incredible felicity and grace—reading him is a pleasurable experience.

In June of 2020, Chris wrote me regarding a few publishing projects he had in the works, including a follow-up to An Endless Trace. In his words: “The Great Life: Learning to Live between Worlds. This a companion volume to An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. My old friend and co-creator of Lindisfarne Press, Will Marsh, is presently doing a final copy edit etc. Manuscript should be available by Fall.”

I forwarded the email to my publisher, who was very interested, but I don’t think Chris ever followed-up on it. It may be that he became too ill. I certainly hope it finds a publisher...and soon!

While I never had the grace to call Chris my friend (though, as you can see, he was very kind to me), several friends and acquaintances of mine did, including one of my very best friends, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, who has known Chris for decades. Over the past few years, as we knew Chris’s condition was not improving, I would get occasional updates on his health.

When Therese called me a few days ago and told me Chris was nearing his transitus, I joined her and others in keeping vigil over the leave-taking of this extraordinary and kind soul. In my place, I worked on a guitar arrangement for “And did those feet in ancient time” (also known as “Jerusalem”)—I’m sure Chris, who loved Blake as much as I do, would appreciate it, or at least the effort. I also reread some parts of An Endless Trace. I fear that if I begin quoting the book, I may just copy the whole thing, so beautiful is the prose and filled with truth and goodness the content, but I will suffice with a selection from “Deserts and Gardens”:

“I discovered this viriditas and the healing field of the soul implicit in the Rosary at a very difficult period of my life. It was one in which, forced by circumstances I was powerless to change, I was metaphorically brought to my knees and taught that life is meaning—always, inevitably, and necessarily filled with meaning, whether I recognized it or not. I learned that life always knew best, and was wise, and would always lift me up and carry me, whether I wanted it to or not. I learned, too, that all I could do was respond, with gratitude, praise, and reverence for whatever life brought. I learned that this was healing. I learned it with a force of revelation through the Rosary at the feet and in the presence of Mary Sophia.”

I am certain that revelation is a space which Christopher Bamford now inhabits in as full a way as possible.

Thank you, friend. I owe you so much.

Godspeed.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.