THE MOHAWKS THREW A FISH INTO THE HOLE with the seeds of corn. An ancient Scottish farmer would plant a loaf of bread soaked in milk and holy water in the first furrow he plowed. An old black man in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn will only plant out his sweet potato eyes in a small packing box. Some Chinese farmers moved soil from their mulberry plots into their rice fields and vice versa. And in archaic Yamato, the emperor would engage in intercourse with a virgin in the newly opened furrow.
All these preparations are not merely symbolic. They express the fundamentally sexual nature of agriculture far more directly than does the arcane numerology by which we, each spring, add to our plot three pounds of lime per hundred square feet, five pounds of 5-10-5 fertilizer, half a bale of peat moss, and a sprinkling of bone meal, just for good measure.
The digging sticks of primitive tribes were often made explicitly in the shapes of phalloi, just as are the dibbles sold in every garden catalogue today. (Indeed, I have often wondered whether “dibble” is the diminutive of “dildoe.”) And no man who has followed the plow can fail to feel how the thrust of it comes straight from his loins, and how his hips turn as the plow turns.
In fact, the influence is probably the other way around. In the evolution of the angiosperms, the seed-bearing plants, it was demonstrated that the better the contact of the seed with the matrix of the earth, the more likely was germination. So seeds found ways to be inserted into the earth, either by taking projectile shapes, like the wild oats of the California coast; by being buried by animals, as are acorns by squirrels; by supplying their own starter-matrix, as do pomes such as apples and pears, or by being digested in the tracts of animals and excreted with an earthen covering of manure.
Fertility among the mammals is simply a different study in the same vein, one where the male principle, for a change, plays a more precise role. Were we not so uncomfortable with sexual organs, the study of mammalian penises would delight us. In variety of form and fitness for function, they have the beautiful diversity of the diatomaceous world, but with a warmer humor about them. Indeed, it is only through warm blood—expanding into sinus cavities in the veins and arteries of the organ—that it can function as it does.
A human penis is blunt and simple compared to those of other mammals. Of course, the fact that ours are not withdrawn safely into a sheath “when not in use” (as one dictionary delicately puts it) puts a premium on simplicity and smoothness. An opossum, on the other hand, sports a two-petaled penis that looks like a dolphin’s open mouth. The anteater’s, too, is double, but shaped like a branch pruned back to two stumps. The bull has a strange tower with a deflated balloonlike appendage at the end; the ram has a pile with a slender string attached; and the short-tailed shrew has a long and deeply arched member like a coat hook.
It is rather presumptuous then to say that a digging stick is made to look like a phallus. The phallus is an event in the history of digging.
Yet more sexual than the digging acts themselves are their timing. The basic tool of agriculture is not so much the plow as the calendar. And the calendar, though men have kept it, belongs to women. The calendar ruled agricultural civilizations as much as the clock rules ours. The meaning of time is different for them. When the sage of Ecclesiastes recites his poem on time, “To everything there is a season,” he refers to seasons, not to hours.
It is hard from our time-ridden vantage point to imagine the situation in ancient Sumer, when two cities a few miles apart might suddenly find themselves in different months of the year. In their efforts to produce a calendar that would yield reliable information about the times for different agricultural tasks, these newly settled cultures decided on a thirty-day cycle. Unfortunately, it quickly got out of synch—a lunar month actually measures about 27.3 days—so that the month of “barley planting” would occur when it was actually harvest time. Whenever things got out of hand, the local priestly cadre had the authority to intercalate an extra month, to set the schedule back on track. Unfortunately, different cities adopted different solutions, so it would have been possible to miss your business appointments by several months.
This is what happens when men try to deal with women’s business. Indeed, the pull of the moon exerts a far more obvious effect upon a woman than upon a man. Menstruation provides an exquisitely sensitive organic calendar.
Until very recent times, not only the rhythm of the moon, but those of the planets and the zodiac were widely assumed to affect the times and types of planting. Astrology formalized these relationships, yet every peasant knew informally how to regulate seedtime by the signs:
Sow peas and beans in the wane of the moon
Who soweth sooner, he sows too soon,
That they with the planet rest and rise
And flourish with bearing most plentiful and wise.
Why should this be? What governs the rising of the sap? What influences the way that the human endocrine system, which, unlike the bloodstream or the breath, is not driven by any internal pump, distributes its fluids? The idea is that the waxing moon draws fluids upward— in the stem and in the bodies of humans and animals—and the waning moon draws them down again. This seemed self-evident to peoples of earlier times. Shakespeare writes of the “tides in the affairs of men that taken at the flood do augur fortune.” He is speaking not from metaphor, but from a long tradition of knowledge about lunar and planetary influence.
For planting, this has been taken to mean that plants that fruit above-ground should generally be planted in the moon’s second quarter, so that they and their fluids are drawn upward and their fruits grow into juicy ripeness. Root crops, on the other hands, are to be planted in the waning moon, so that their energy is stored underground. Peas and beans and other vining crops were meant to be sown then, too, so that they would establish firm roots before beginning their astonishingly rapid ascent and spread.