Breaking Bread
The sabbat just past the intersection of curds and whey
It seeems entirely appropriate for Lammas that I have become an insufferable breadmaker. Finally I get it and simultaneously I now want to make every kind of bread there is and roll it warm in a tea towel and arrive with a long flat knife and good butter. I have never been a baker, though I am a very regular roaster. Not a cakemaker but well known to whip up a formidable pav that would make your grandmother weep for the old desserts, made with sugar and love instead of chia and control.
There are just so many places we lost our way.
You may recall the obscure sourdough wagon that careened through the middle of Covidia in mid 2020? As celebrities without their glam but their egos still safely isolated warbled Imagine at their own reflections and dolphins leapt smugly through Venetian canals happily on holiday from humanity, everyone discovered that their daily bread was in fact an everyday treasure. The mindless latte and carb loading that once fortified us in all kinds of brazen ways was suddenly something we had taken for granted. Pandemic baking, as it later became known, took hold of idle hands and fried nerves rescuing baking aisle sales that had been flatlining since 2016. Can you imagine telling any of our great grandmothers that everyone had stopped buying flour? And then explaining how when we made everything quick and easy, we ripped the heart as well as the guts right out of our nourishment.
Lockdown was quite the fever dream all told. A strange reversal of everyone’s fortune except the grinning profiteers and a deft inversion of all the old norms. 2020’s grand conjunction had been written in the stars for aeons and soundly ignored by anyone other than astrologers. I still have my Saturn Pluto sandwich board. Then as now with another looming planetary gamechanger, there isn’t a singular narrative. No sure things, no safe bets. Universally disquieting and reeking of what you can sense in the air already this fledgling year. Sulfur and injustice, acrid terror that breeds worse, the hollow disbelief as chaos snowballs. Time bending and arcing like a snake. The sense that things have gotten loose, out of bounds and beyond reeling in. That what we could once appeal to as leadership or process, devil or saviour is hopelessly flimsy, failing us all in real time. The air feels ripe for the kind of revolution that only arrives once the rules no longer mean anything. Power breaks them on the way down as it hurls itself from the top of the mountain only to realise its idling human failing too late.
Then, as now, it sends me. Into my garden and my kitchen, my hands quickening in soil or flour, scents and calming sensibilities, my head only settling when I’m away from the screaming screens. For me, that did not start in lockdown. Not when the world didn’t end in 2012 and even way back before it didn’t fail at the tail of the century. My garden and my kitchen have always been the safest spaces in my world, built to hold me and keep me no matter what. Most all of my Resources For The Revolution can be found within arms reach or footstep, practices and traditions that operate just like prayers. Repeating rituals that occupy the mind and let the body temper. The actual way that magic weaves itself into all the tendrils of my life is through an unwavering devotion to my care and keeping and of the places and spaces I live in and the people and creatures who share them with me. Precious ingredients that I cherish because I have lived without all of them. I can, but I am fortunate enough to know I don’t want to. So in the end and at every new beginning they are the ones, the things, the bits and peaces, the prayers and devotions that matter the most on a continuing basis. Perhaps it is that mottled well loved recipe that has always been my complex carbs, whose willing exchange feeds my soul no matter how the world disturbs it.
On the wheel of the year there is a spoke that runs down the line between solstice and equinox. When the sun reaches that midpoint it is halfway through Aquarius. Tomorrow that will also find us caught in the glitching middle of Pluto and the eclipse. Urania turning back on its head. Almost every day of February delivers an out of the box screamer, prophetic planetary collusion or a revolutionary lifequake (and you can chart them all with our Coven Electric Witch’s Calendar). Well may we bake. Forewarned is more than just forearmed. Knowledge is power after all, darklings. Maybe buy a lottery ticket on the 23rd. Don’t even bother with the 14th this year. Gather your magic beans and save them for the fated day that has never been seen before. Throw them all over your left shoulder then.
On the southern end of that wheel where Summer is baking us on to the parched earth and all kinds of sharks are hunting in the shallows, the spoke marks the first of three harvest celebrations. Even here, even now, Lammas is far more than long days and short nights, sunburn and good growing conditions for the garden. It’s an old word for bread made from the grain of the first harvest. Ground into flour, mixed into a little water, a sprinkle of salt and a dash of vinegar, tipped into a tin and baked into far more than the sum of its parts. A loaf like a seed, able to feed so much more than we can imagine, forgotten when we can gorge on everything at our fingertips.
In response to the startling rise in food insecurity happening in places in the world where she had always believed food to be secure, Catie Gett of The Staple Store in Melbourne offered her Grandma Biddy’s magical bread recipe as a gift in honour of her grandmother and her Mum. An adaptation of an Irish soda bread recipe that her grandma would feed travellers sitting at the bottom of the stairs. She would feed them whatever was in the pot on the stove and a slice of soda bread and cup of tea. Catie watched her Mum similarly feed neighbourhoods of people using simple recipes like soda bread and rock cakes. Last night I baked it for my friends the old way and we ate it together before we ran to see the moon.
Perhaps that is what Lammas really whispers about, from a time when communal living and collective effort was the not just the only way to make it through the dark times of Winter and warmongering. The perpetual baking and breaking of bread nodding to a fundamental human kindness, a generosity of spirit that tech and convenience seems to have rendered easily forgotten. Crumbs swept off a table by a circadian modulation frequency coming to a phone near you, and a lifetime of eating out of plastic and talking to screens.
My neighbour caught me today coaxing our newest creature feature out for a cuppa in the sunshine with a parsley leaf and half a cherry tomato. A baby bearded dragon has taken up residence in my flowers, frolicking in the water bowls and resting among the green serene. I am already in his thrall.
This evening as the sun set behind a cotton wool sky and the moon hid her face from the day, I left him the rest of my daily bread. I’ll make more for us all in the morning. The cicadas have arrived and the old year is finally starting to make way. I can feel its skin itching and the sound of hooves echoing at night. Soon everything spills over and the firebird that lives inside me will finally take flight.
Our Coven meets in the morn at the crack of dawn as the wheel creaks the sabbat, lighting candles in windows all over the world. Our February Witch’s Calendar is waving in the breeze by our fire. Readings and channel, shadow sessions and imaginal journeys, ritual and rites of passage.
There are all kinds of ways to handle revolution, darklings.
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2026