This week a date of historic and literary note rolls around: “Lammas Eve,” which is the night before we’re halfway through the summer.
This cross quarter day or halfway point is traditionally celebrated on August 1st, in accord with the first fruits, or, specifically, the first wheat harvest of the season. The word Lammas derives from “loaf mass,” and was the ceremonial celebration held at the beginning of the harvest season as a gesture of gratitude and blessing for an abundant yield in the relationship between earth and sun.
In the New Testament, the story of the Feeding of the Multitude with five loaves and two fishes occurs at this time of the year, and in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s nurse babbles on in the Ist Act about how Juliet was born at “Lammas Eve,” Wednesday this week.
The fives loaves and two fishes of the biblical narrative are often related to the constellations Virgo, the grain goddess, and Pisces, the fishes. In Shakespeare, it’s not hard to imagine Juliet’s nurse maid as Virgo, and later in the Ist Act, Juliet’s mother implies that marriage is a natural state between man and woman when she says “the fish lives in the sea.”
The constellation Virgo is sloping westward in this season, its brightest star Spica brilliant and alone in the southwest where soon Venus will appear, like Juliet, who says,
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
