My Regular Pagan Holiday Post
August 1 in the northern hemisphere is celebrated as Lammas, the first harvest day. In South America it is Pachamama Day, the start of the growing season.
I first encountered the idea more than fifty years ago, but I didn’t recognize its importance until much later.
While reading Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, I kept noticing one name in the footnotes: Alfred Crosby. The name stopped me. Crosby had taught history at my alma mater, Washington State University, and I had been his student.
At the time I knew him simply as a professor. I had no idea I was sitting in the classroom of a historian who would change the way the world understood history.
In 1972 Crosby published The Columbian Exchange, introducing a revolutionary way of thinking about European conquest. History, he argued, was not driven only by kings, generals, and battles. Plants, animals, microbes, and ecosystems were just as important. His work essentially created the field of environmental history.
The Columbian Exchange describes the enormous movement of crops, livestock, diseases, technologies, and cultures between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Potatoes, tomatoes, and corn transformed Europe, Africa, and Asia. Horses and cattle transformed the Americas. But the deadliest travelers were invisible.
In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby argued that European conquest depended as much on biology as on military power. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases swept through Indigenous populations that had no immunity. Entire societies were devastated before they could organize resistance. Europeans inherited landscapes emptied by epidemics as much as they conquered them by force.
Charles Mann takes the story even further. He argues that the Americas were home to far larger populations than historians once believed—perhaps tens of millions more. The continent Europeans imagined as a wilderness had actually been carefully managed for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Forests, fields, rivers, and grasslands all bore the imprint of human stewardship.
The tragedy becomes even greater in that light. Not only were millions of people lost; countless traditions, languages, and ways of understanding the natural world nearly disappeared with them.
Nearly—but not entirely.
Some traditions survived.
Every August 1, Indigenous communities across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina celebrate Pachamama Raymi, or Festival of Mother Earth, one of the oldest pre-Hispanic ceremonies still practiced in South America. Pachamama, from the Quechua words pacha (world, space, or time) and mama (mother), is often translated as Mother Earth. But she is more than the ground beneath our feet. She represents the living world that nourishes all life. Pachamama is the fertility goddess in Inca mythology, responsible for planting, harvesting, creating mountains and earthquakes, as well as the very existence of life on Earth.
The celebration coincides with the start of the agricultural season in the southern hemisphere and centers on a simple but profound idea: reciprocity.
The Earth feeds us. We must feed the Earth.
On August 1, farmers allow their fields to rest. Families prepare offerings of cooked foods, corn, potatoes, fruits, coca leaves, medicinal herbs, chicha, seeds, and flowers. A small hole is dug in the ground—symbolically Pachamama’s mouth—and the gifts are placed into the earth. The offering is not payment but gratitude, an acknowledgment that human life depends on the generosity of the land.
It is, in essence, Thanksgiving.
Long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, Andean peoples had developed a tradition that recognized what modern environmental science is only beginning to emphasize: humans are not separate from nature. We exist because of it.
The ritual feels remarkably relevant today. We celebrate technological progress while exhausting soils, warming the climate, polluting rivers, and treating the Earth as an endless warehouse of resources. Pachamama Day offers another way of thinking—not about ownership, but relationship; not about extraction, but reciprocity.
I find myself wishing we had something similar in our Western culture.
Our Thanksgiving has become centered on football, shopping, and overeating, with little reflection on the land that produces our food or on the Indigenous peoples who first cultivated many of the crops on our tables. Imagine setting aside a single day each year not to consume more, but to acknowledge our dependence on healthy soil, clean water, pollinating insects, and the astonishing web of life that makes our existence possible.
Perhaps that is why Crosby’s work and Pachamama Day seem connected to me.
Crosby taught that history cannot be understood without ecology. The Andean peoples never separated the two in the first place.
One explains how civilizations rose and fell. The other reminds us how to live.
As August 1 approaches, I think about the professor whose lectures made a great impression on me, the civilizations whose knowledge survived against overwhelming odds, and the simple wisdom embodied in a handful of food returned to the soil.
The Earth has always sustained us.
Perhaps it’s time we remembered to say thank you.
tradeswomn musings 