Dear Somatisers,

Our marketing agency tells us we absolutely must make all of you strongly associate Mother’s Day with Soma Cacao. They have suggested we share images of devoted children bringing their mothers Somas in bed, or tired mothers with impeccable hair sitting down to a cup of Soma Cacao after a long and trying day. They have prescribed jingles (“how does your mother know you love her? Soma Cacao is how!”) and choreographed dances - but it’s not quite the Soma tune.

Both of us are lucky to still have our mothers, and we’re travelling to Sydney to see them on Mother’s Day. Actually we’ll be seeing them together - though Rose and I met on a beach in Mexican cacao country, our parents live a few hundred metres apart in Sydney, and have become close friends. They meet at least once a month for scones and Scrabble, our mothers are constantly trying to outdo each other with inventive baking, they go for walks together, and turn up as a horde to swarm our house each Christmas holiday. On Mother’s Day both our families will meet in the morning for Cacao and Croquet. Rose and I have been invited - we suspect mostly to provide free cacao.

The link between chocolate and Mother’s Day is mostly commercial, and the result of clever marketing in the twentieth century. Mother’s Day is now one of the top five chocolate-buying seasons of the year, behind Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween (this statistic uses American data). Somehow, news of this never reached our customers at Soma, where Mother’s Day is really just another day for our little business.

Modern Mother’s Day evolved from medieval Mothering Sunday, which was originally a day (generally the fourth Sunday of Lent) when people attended their Mother Church, or the grandest church of the region in which they lived.

 During the Industrial Revolution, as people moved farther from home, Mothering Sunday transformed into a holiday when workers were granted leave to travel home to visit their Mother Church. Slowly, with time and affection, Mother Church became the human mother, and people went home to visit her.

The modern world is strange, in the sense that many of us live in cities, buy our groceries in packets in supermarkets, and try to tame nature to fit our neat little gardens. Ancient people were much more aware of the mother quality - the richness of life that bursts forth to find new expression. Almost every society in human history has worshipped one or many mother deities. They had a sense of the wonder that is motherhood, in which human mothers also participate. It is a really miracle that a woman’s body knows how to take next to nothing - a couple of cells - and somehow grow it into a perfect human body in which a soul can live, feel, know, and love. The intersection of the material and spiritual inspired awe in our ancestors, and inspires it in us still, only we moderners have so many other things to distract us from this awe.

The ancient people of tropical Mesoamerica often worshipped mother deities with cacao. The Maya goddess Ix Chel, patroness of the sweat lodge (where Maya women customarily gave birth), childbirth, and healing, an aged jaguar goddess known as “Lady of the Rainbows,” was offered cacao during her ritual month of Zip. Maya women used to take cacao offerings to her shrines in the Yucatan to ensure a fruitful marriage. (The name Isla Mujeres, ‘Island of Women,’ was given by Hernán Cortes to an island containing one of these shrines).

The Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, patroness of beauty and young mothers, was offered cacao in her rituals. The god K’Awiil, a lightning god, one of whose feet was a snake’s mouth from which new life could emerge, was thought to both bring fortune in child-bearing, and also to fertilise cacao trees during the rainy season.

We live in a world where so much is constantly being created - perhaps more than ever before. But we have forgotten, in large part, that whatever is new is always miraculous.

We hope, as you take your mum (and yourself) a Mother’s Day cup of Soma Cacao next weekend, that you remember the miracle of life emerging from life, and thank her for living that miracle out with you.

After which, we will be playing croquet.

With honey and a little lavender,

Rose, Alistair, and the team at Soma Cacao