Tiny thread on bread..

In our tradition, bread is a very important object vis-a-vis symbolism. In Ancient Greek, it is called "artos". The word is clearly cognate with the word for the bear, "arktos". Ergo, "artos" means "of the bear". If we turn a bit to Latin, we have the word

..."artus", meaning "limbs". Ergo, bread was, for classical peoples, the limb of Mother Earth, of the She-Bear!

The poet and Stoic philosopher Cleanthes speaks of the harvest season as "the cutting off of Demeter's (Mother Earth's) limbs". Of course, this refers to the cutting

...of wheat. From wheat, bread is made (Duh).

Moreover, the harvest season of autumn, in which the Equinox is contained, was celebrated with a sword dance in which the symbolic death of the crop deity occurred. The idol of the deity was made out of the husks of wheat...

... that had been harvested. In Greece, that god was Dionysus, known for this case by the epithet "Licnites" ("he who dances", here amongst the swords). A similar pattern we see in Saxony, with the epithet Seaxneat, given to Freyr and meaning "amongst seax swords".

But, back on the bread, the cut wheat is in itself a ritualistic death, paralleling the ritual death of the initiate before the reincarnation, id est his descent into the barrow. The placement of the bread in the oven is symbolic for the fetus in the womb, the young child...

...(aged 7) in the burial mound. The round cake form which ancients usually gave to the bread was also named "plax" and "plakous", meaning, of course, "placenta".

A similar pattern is observed with the word "brotos", which means "person". It comes from the same PIE root that...

...gives us the word "break" in English (contractions that break the amniotic bag) and it is obviously cognate with the German word "brot", meaning "bread". So, the symbolism is very deep and actually pan-European.

Thanks for reading.

Dixi.