Consider the immemorial pancake.

Child of Earth, Sun, and Thunder, one of humanity's most ancient and sacred foods.

Every pancake is a charm, as round and golden as the Sun. Every one you eat brings Spring just a little closer. That's why this is pancake time, the arc of the year between the February cross-quarter and Spring Evenday.

The pancake incarnates differently in every cuisine, but in my opinion it reaches its apotheosis in the yeasted buckwheat pancakes of Russia, blini. They say that when you start the sponge for blini, you should take it out to the woods so that the full Moon can shine on it.

You can judge their antiquity by the name. Blini comes from the same ancient root that gave us mill, meal, and molar. From the same root also comes mallet, malleus (as in Malleus Maleficarum, “hammer of the 'witches'”), and Mjöllnir, the name of Þórr's thunder hammer: “crusher.” Really, there should be a shrine to Thunder in every flour-mill in the world.

Blini are one of the great sacred foods of the North. You serve them at sacred times: births, weddings, deaths.

And now: that final, axial arc of the year between winter and spring.

The Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, the original Tribe of Witches, knew the month of February as Solmonað, what today we would call Sommath.

According to Bede of Jarrow, this meant “month of cakes.”

Any guess what kind?

It's time for some sympathetic magic, folks. Fire up grandma's old iron skillet, gather around the stove, and join in the communion of the ancestors. Let us now partake of one of our people's oldest and most sacred foods, which we've eaten since the end of the last Ice Age, if not before: older than bread, older than the oven, the humble pancake, child of Earth, Sun, and Thunder.

And every warming bite brings Spring just a little closer.