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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in chocolate

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Holy and Sacred Chocolate

Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus was certainly right when he gave the cacao tree the genus name Theobroma, which means “food of the gods.” Those of us in the throes of winter take comfort in wrapping our cold hands around a steaming mug of hot chocolate.
        The Maya, Aztec, and Olmec regarded cacao as a sacred plant. In Mayan and Aztec mythology, the plant was a gift from the feathered serpent god. The seeds were used as offerings to deities, often sprinkled with blood from priests who ceremonially cut themselves and was given to victims prior to sacrifice. A cup of chocolate would provide more solace and a last cigarette.
        The Aztec belief that cacao was an aphrodisiac lingered in Europe after it was introduced in the sixteenth century. In Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, cacao is placed on home altars and at gravesites to share with loved ones who have passed and ancestors.
        Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as white chocolate. After cacao seeds are shelled, they are ground into a liquid from which the fat (cocoa butter) is separated from the cocoa powder. Later in the chocolate making process the two ingredients are reunited. Cocoa butter is the basis of white chocolate along with milk, sugar, and a few other ingredients. BTW, you’re not seeing typos, the spelling cacao refers to the raw beans and cocoa, a product made from the beans.
        Magically cacao is associated with happiness (that’s no surprise), love, prosperity, and sex, which is why it makes perfect sense to give your lover a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day or any occasion. As part of a spell to attract prosperity and wealth, wrap a cacao bean in the highest denomination bank note you have in your wallet. When celebrating an esbat, place a piece of round white chocolate on your altar. And there’s nothing better to ground and center your energy after magic and ritual than eating a piece of chocolate. Blessed be.

 

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

When I think about Imbolc, I often think about hot chocolate. Since dairy is highlighted on the Imbolc menu in some form or another, this could be the perfect time to search out the best hot chocolate in the area. While you’re sipping—and possibly dipping—a cookie in your rich chocolaty cocoa, meditate on where you’ve come since the holidays and where you’d like to continue in the months to come.

I’ve written about Imbolc before for Pagan Square, including a meditative cross-country ski you could take during this time of the year.

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I celebrated Groundhog Day today with a home-baked chocolate chip muffin; from a mix not from scratch, and a glass of coconut milk

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Lose the Chocolate

Ostara's the time when many would say: Loose the chocolate.

But me, I say: Lose the chocolate.

For religious reasons, lose it.

***

I live in Minnesota. It is wrong—wrong—that, in the stores here, apples should be expensive, and bananas cheap.

Wrong.

 ***

Chocolate, like copal and bananas, is an exotic visitor from the fabled Southern lands of Ever-Summer. There's the connection with Ostara: think of it as sympathetic magic.

In a few years, most of the world's cacao trees, grown unsustainably in inappropriate places where—as a cash crop—their cultivation has helped to destroy sustainable local agriculture, will be dead from cacao blight, anyway.

By then, of course, oil will be running out in good earnest, and it will no longer be economically feasible to move foodstuffs over large distances.

Then chocolate will once again become the expensive exotic that, by rights, it ought to be.

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Birch beer is an old northern drink. I once split a bottle of it with a friend while standing under the tower on Glastonbury Tor i
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I remember back in the 80's they kept trying to pass off carob as chocolate. It never tasted right to me. Then back in the 00's
Pagan News Beagle: Earthy Thursday, May 25 2017

What does Chernobyl look like decades after the deadly nuclear accident? Can chocolate help prevent heart disease? And how can we stop the assault on science in our culture? These questions and others considered in Earthy Thursday, our segment on science and Earth-related news! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

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Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
b2ap3_thumbnail_image_20141209-185713_1.jpgGluten and sugar free.
 
Pagans do not have to worry about lumps of coal in our Yule stockings. But you can have chocolate lumps instead, yum!
 
My approach to the ecstatic path is down to earth and often quite simple. For example, last year I made a list of things to 1) keep my spirits up during the Yule season and 2) help create a happy season for other people.
 
Inventing a new chocolate recipe was on the list. … Well, the list didn’t just include inventing new chocolate yumminess. The real point was I would consume said yumminess. :-)
 
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and will use the recipe again this year. Here it is:
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