The Agrarian Wheel among the Kabyle people

Agriculture, the most important form of work, has enabled mankind to live and form societies. It was a female discovery. While men were busy chasing game or herding cattle, women, like plants, had the opportunity to observe the rhythm of development of natural phenomena – sowing and germination – and to try to reproduce them artificially.
Women, who were closely linked to the other centres of fertility (the earth and the moon), had a reputation for influencing and distributing fertility, which explains the dominant role they played in the early days of agriculture.
As we shall see from the Kabyle agrarian wheel, the central diamond-shaped ‘field’, crossed by the first furrow of the plough, reproduces the female sexual organ. The earth is the maternal womb from which humanity springs, germinated from its waters. It is the place to which the dead return and a symbol of resurrection, the dead, like buried grain, awaiting new life.
The agrarian “wheel” symbolises both the annual revolution of the earth’s seasons and the cycle of human life, united in the same cosmic destiny.
We see this wheel here, marvellously represented by the potter’s skilful fingers, in the decoration of a Maatka dish. The Maatkas are a group of villages perched on a mountain ridge south of Tizi-Ouzou [ …. ]
The agrarian calendar in Greater Kabylia begins on 25 August, four days before autumn: it is based less on months than on stages of rural work and phases of vegetation.
The decoration on the Maatkas plate, which is a kind of synthesis of these, comprises five registers arranged in a fan around a centre of rotation: they represent five essential periods of the year for agriculture.
The great cyclical wheel is driven in a circular movement from right to left, the direction in which the potters “write”, by a great peripheral snake, the symbol of eternal life through mutations; meandering like ocean waves around the circumference of the celestial vault, its body is an inexhaustible reserve of grain, of vital seeds. A sun is inscribed in the head. Expressing the idea of permanence, regeneration, perpetual vital power, the snake is solar heat and fecundating phallic symbol.
Register 1
Of the two small second serpents inscribed in the décor, one leaves the central part symbolising the earth through a “corridor” which is that of the Cancer gate, while the other, in the opposite direction, passing through the Capricorn gate, ascends towards the central rhombus which represents the earthly womb, bringing it fertility. Between the two serpents lies the first register of the agrarian cycle, the autumn period of ploughing and sowing that the Kabyles call anebdu, the beginning. The protective souls of the dead, symbolised by the little snake, have left the desolate land; the sowing season will bring their beneficial return to the land. Berber tradition compares marriage to weaving and, at the same time, to ploughing and sowing, represented here by two lozenges joined together: one decorated in black (the masculine colour), the other in red (the feminine colour), black and red also indicating heat and humidity. From this figure emerges a lozenge in the shape of a ploughshare, dominated by comet-shaped dots starting from four black dots in the shape of a cross, representing the grain sown in the furrow. All these figures are reflected in the right-hand margin of the decoration: the lower lozenge reproduces the four cross-shaped black dots symbolising the grain, the central, red lozenge is the field that the ploughshare in the main decoration seems to strike, while the top of the marginal motif combines black and red, in other words the image of fertilisation caused by the grain being thrown opposite. The left margin of the register, with its zigzagging lines, gives us both the undulations of the snake and the furrows of the fields bordered by festooned lines evoking irrigation water. At the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its lowest ebb, popular legend has it that the souls of the dead from the “netherworld” are brought up, responsible for the fertility of the green ears of corn. Here embodied in the second serpent with its beneficial breath, they return to preside over the renewal of the fields.
Register 2
Most ancient religions equate the snake with the phallic emblem and the rhombus, crossed by a median line, with the womb. On the present plate, the median line of the earthly matrix, taken from the projection of the celestial circumference, corresponds to the first furrow symbolising the opening of the plough, which, according to Kabyle custom, is ploughed each year by the eldest member of the family clan. In each half of the terrestrial quadrilateral, a sign appears: three black lines added perpendicularly to three red lines. Here we find the symbol of fertility in the union of the male and female principles. The image itself is exalted by its context: the union of circle and quadrilateral, of heaven and earth. The fertility instilled by the snake reaching the earth’s centre is represented by a series of dots running along the second register, that of winter germination beneath the apparent death of the fields. This fertility will be communicated during the period known as the “association of the moons”. The sign in B, followed by thirteen dashes marking the thirteen annual moons to come, is that of the last and the new “associated” lunar crescent. The “corridor” joining the waning moon of March to the new crescent of April is that of the transition where the world, according to the saying of the Kabyle peasants, passes “from one horn to the other” of the cosmic bull. In the symbolism of the archaic civilisations of the Mediterranean, the bull’s horns are both a substitute for the lunar crescent and for the fertilising power of celestial lightning. The geometric constructions of the various registers are woven with chequered patterns representing the plots of land: a key image used by both weavers and potters. The anthropomorphic decoration of the winter register seems to represent the earth covering in its entrails the future life of sowing.
Register 3
With the third register, under the combined effect of sun and rain, comes the period corresponding to the blossoming of vegetation. The 3-pointed cross that indicates the end of this period, together with the rain dots, is a solar sign that Гоп finds on other pottery, linked to the snake and the sun. The seven small lines in the margin, which seem projected onto the cosmic centre, could reflect the influence of the seven planetary heavens of the Ancients, delimiting the successive evolutionary areas of the six planets of the archaic repertoire: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, the furthest away from the solar system, being relatively “recent” discoveries: 1781, 1846, 1930).
 Register 4
The fourth section of the fan corresponds to the ripening period: it precedes the “corridor” of the summer solstice, when the days are the longest of the year and which marks the transition from ripe splendour to harvest. The median dash, caught between two series of three dots, symbolises the middle of the year, the culminating point equidistant between the rise of the day and its decline. Note that at this precise moment, the series of five-point crosses that accompanied the undulations of the great serpent is interrupted to make way, until fertilisation by sowing, for a succession of four-point crosses deprived of their vital centre.
Register 5
Fifth and last “time of the great wheel”: the time of harvest, marked by the symbol of the sheaf. The belly of the great serpent, on the edge of the plate, swells with the grain of an abundant harvest, which will serve as the seed of new life. In the second part of the register, no more signs appear. The earth has died in the remains of the harvested fields; all the plots have been scattered before the new distribution among the heads of families with oxen for ploughing. This is the period heralding autumn, when the songs of the ploughmen will evoke the eternity of God, transcending the fleeting cycle of the earth and its creatures. With the little snake, the souls of the dead leave the scorched and deserted earth to join, through the gate of Cancer, in the heart of the “World Below”, the supreme principle that generated them and from which new life will be born.
Source:
The text and The image are taken from the book:
Les grands symboles méditerranéens dans la poterie algérienne, by Jean-Bernard MOREAU.