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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Perkunas

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

Who is the patron god of matches?

While, on the face of it, this question may seem a frivolous one, it's actually asking something much deeper: What would a contemporary pagan society look like?

I recently learned the answer to both questions grâce à my longtime friend and colleague Prudence Priest, the newly-anointed official Ambasadress to the US of Romuva, the Lithuanian pagan movement.

Check out this box of matches that she brought back from a recent trip to the Baltics, which proudly sports the image of Perkunas, Lord of Lightning, the Lithuanian Thunderer. (Note the three leaves from the oak, His sacred tree; it is, of course, oak wood that feeds the ever-burning Fires in His sacred groves.) He drives His thunder-chariot drawn by a matched pair of horses, one black, one white.

This latter detail I find quite striking. Doubtless it refers to Thunder's ambivalent nature: Life-giving/Death-dealing, lord of both rain and lightning-blast. Thunder, after all, rides both by day and by night.

Now, you might think that the patron deity of matches might be whichever Fire god or Hearth goddess is worshiped locally. But, of course, these are the patrons of a fire already burning. It's the Lord of lightning who presides over the striking of Fire.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I can't help but think here of Old Craft mythology, in which the Horned as Lighber ("light-bearer" = Latin lucifer) steals the Fir
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I once read that matches used to be known as Lucifers. Having read Ovid's Metamorphosis that didn't make sense to me. There is n

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Amber Power

Some friends of mine own a Baltic imports store: best amber this side of the Mississippi. I was looking at a case of hand-carved wooden items, including some beautiful wooden spoons.

A woman came over and began looking at the spoons. “This one is labeled 'sacred spoon,' but it looks just like the rest of them,” she said. “What makes this one sacred and not the others?”

A reasonable question, certainly. As it happened, I knew the answer, because the owner of the store had told me about it a few days before. “It's sacred because it was carved out of wood from a tree that was struck by lightning,” I told her. In fact, the tree in question had been the oldest and most sacred oak in a grove sacred to Thunder; the oak, of course, is Thunder's tree. Oak struck by lightning in a grove sacred to Thunder: heap big juju.

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Wow, Jason: talk about power. Thunder speed your negotiation.
  • Me
    Me says #
    Thanks, Steven. He's amenable so far. We're just waiting to see if the tree will have to be taken or if the arborist feels like it
  • Me
    Me says #
    I'm in negotiation with an old acquaintance, even as I type, with someone for a piece of this tree. By all the gods above and be

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

The next divinity from the “God Graveyard” list is the very well documented Lithuanian Perkunas.  He is very similar to Zeus and Jupiter.  One website described him as a cross between Odin and Thor. 

b2ap3_thumbnail_243px-Mikalojus_Konstantinas_Ciurlionis_-_PERKUNAS_THOR_-_1909.jpg

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