BREAD AND WINE

Bread and Wine is a novel written by Ignazio Silone finished while in exile and first published in 1936 in a German language edition in Switzerland as Brot und Wein, and in an English translation by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher in London in the same year. An Italian version, Pane e vino followed in 1937.
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The Eucharist (also known as Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, among other names) is a rite or act of worship that most Christians perform in order to fulfill the instruction that they believe Jesus gave his disciples, at his last meal with them before being turned over to his executioners, to do "in remembrance of him" certain actions that he did at that meal.
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Bread and Wine "The outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace," bread and wine stand at once for the actual elements used in initiation ceremonies and for the attainments of which they are symbolic. Taking the Bacchic Mysteries as an example, wine was given as the blood of the grape and of Bacchus, blood signifying life, and Bacchus representing the mystic Logos which "was made flesh." So the whole rite means the imparting to the candidate of the divine life by conscious union of his lower self with the god within -- a union brought about by the self-devised efforts of the lower self. In the same way, bread or grain symbolized the intellectual aspect of the attainment, intellect being the "body" of the spiritual influx.
The Christian sacrament was adopted from the pagan rite. The Protestant Churches administer the sacrament in both bread and wine as the symbol of a divine grace received by the devout participant. The Catholic Church teaches that the sacred elements are actually transubstantiated by miraculous means into the blood and body of Christ, denying the cup or the wine to the laity, and regarding the rite as propitiatory for the sins of the participants and of mankind in general. The old pagan rite contained the idea that partaking of the wine meant allying oneself with the vital energy of the spiritual divinity within the neophyte, and the partaking of the bread was symbolic of a similar union of the neophyte's mentality with the cosmic mind for which the bread stood. See also SOMA ; Wine