What would you do if you came down one morning and found shit on the altar?

Literal shit?

It happened to a friend of mine.

She'd recently moved the household altar, with its antlered Grinnygog* and photos of the dead, from a wall-shelf upstairs to a beautiful painted alcove downstairs. By aesthetic standards, the move was a quantum improvement, and yet, there it was: desecration.

What do you do when there's shit on the altar? Well, first you wash everything as thoroughly as you can, and strew the altar with salt.

Then you figure out what's going on, and what you need to do about it.

It turns out that the shit wasn't actually shit, but—hardly an improvement—spew.

The kitty had jumped up on the altar, eaten the food offerings, and then puked them back up. Yuck.

Well, kitties will be kitties. Still, when it comes to the sacred, these things don't just happen.

As it turns out, the problem wasn't the new altar, but the old one. My friend hadn't “deconsecrated” it (deconsecrating something is to consecrating it as taking down a circle is to putting one up) before putting it to secular use.

And what was that new use?

Storing diapers.

Diapers...shit: it's elegant, really. Articulately elegant.

Sometimes the gods speak to us directly, but—in my experience, anyway—that's rare. More often, they speak through indirection, and leave us to figure it out for ourselves.

Why?

Because communication between species is necessarily paraverbal.

Because the gods speak in symbols.

Because they want us to think for ourselves.

*A “himmage” of the Horned God.