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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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  • 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
The Witch-King of Lithuania

Europe's last pagan monarch was Gediminas (ca. 1275-1341), Grand Duke of Lithuania. He championed the Old Worship throughout his life, and although he tolerated various forms of Christianity—he even formed a political alliance with the pope against the Teutonic Knights—it was his policy to punish proselytizing with death; he was cremated according to traditional rites (including, allegedly, human sacrifice) in 1342.

Although his heirs eventually decided to throw in their lot with the Roman church, the Gediminid dynasty ruled Lithuania for more than 200 years. History remembers Gediminas as a tolerant and enlightened ruler.

Lithuanian folklore remembers its last pagan prince with fondness. He is credited with the founding of Vilnius, Lithuania's capital city. On a hunting trip he is said to have dreamed of an iron wolf, standing on a hill at the confluence of the Vilnia and Neris, whose howls filled the world. The high priest of Lithuania interpreted this dream to mean that a city built on that hill would be known throughout the world.

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