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I participated in an online May pagan celebration in a mainstream, non-pagan-specific space dedicated to fragrance, and it was amazing. The May Day week coincided with a celebration for C.'s birthday, so there was lots of celebrating going on in my house offline as well. The houseguest celebrations ended up lasting much longer than originally planned and that led to some changes in my Days of the Week fragrance selections. 

The week of May Eve and May Day 2025 the Gourmand board on the Fragrantica forum held online pagan celebrations. The host dedicated each day to a different set of deities and cultural groups, including Ostara, Flora (celebrating Floralia), Lada (and Slavic culture), Brigit, and others. She started the week off with a role playing adventure, inviting the participants to choose names as various nonhuman beings such as nymphs. I chose to be a hobbit for the week.

Today we're exploring the senses other than taste. In Asatru and heathenry, the most common sacrifice is sumbel, that is, making a toast. The person honoring the god or other power drinks the beverage, so the person is experiencing and consuming the thing given to the god. Other sacrifices work the same way. For example, an offering of dance is the person giving the offering doing the dance. A person burning a special candle experiences the light and scent. And so on.

As mentioned in Part 1, I wanted to find ways of honoring the gods and powers other than by eating and drinking because as part of my Gila Lizard Powers I no longer have the same relationship with food and drink as I did before.

Typical Asatru holiday rituals involve toasts. Many holiday celebrations include feasts as part of the holiday. There lies before us a whole world of senses to explore besides taste, though. There are of course also many actions beyond the sensory and beyond simply giving a thing, and I'll get to those in a future part of this series, but first I want to focus on the senses other than taste.

This will be a multi part series, starting with this overview which includes a section on: why now in my personal journey. I'll review some terms, and then get to the senses other than taste: hearing, sight, touch, smell, and proprioception. Then I'll go over some actions one can do that don't involve the senses, such as donating to causes, and some meditations and journeys inward and through the other worlds leaving the body and the sensory world behind.

Priest:

Great Stag,

our stag,

we hunger.

Father,

will you feed?

Horned:

Everything between

my left hand and my right

I give to you,

my beloved people.

Body and soul,

whole and all:

I give myself

to you.

(All pelt the Horned with grain.)

If you're not willing to sacrifice yourself for your people, you're not fit to lead.

Pagans know about sacrificial kings. In the past, this may have been—sometimes—a literal matter. But mostly, it's about the nature of leadership.

Sometimes, you have to put other people's interests before your own.

Trust Joe Biden to do what he sees as best for his people and his country.

His decision to pass the torch was courageous. I'm sure that it wasn't what he wanted. That's the nature of leadership. That's the nature of sacrifice.

That, ultimately, is what made him fit to lead.

Here's something else that pagans understand: sacrifice renews the world.

CW: animal sacrifice, human sacrifice

When I shared last week's post about what's missing in Minoan art on social media, I got an interesting response from a fellow Pagan writer, who guessed (before reading the post) that what was missing was war and violence.

There's something to that, but it's not a simple subject.

This conversation could have taken place before any sacrificial procession in antiquity.

In fact, it happened last week at the 2021 Midwest Grand Sabbat.

Why do we cover our heads when making sacrifice?

That's an interesting question, R___. Let me tell you both what I know, and what I infer.

The custom of covering the head while sacrificing is so old that everyone simply takes it for granted. I've never heard even one story explaining why we do it; by all authorities, the practice is simply assumed.

This, of course, is in itself odd: religious practices tend to accrete explanatory stories around them.

As a show of respect? Well, that's the reason sometimes given, though it's worth asking why a covered head should be considered more respectful than an uncovered one.

So let me speak instead out of my own experience: I can give you two good reasons, and both are to do with focus.

The first is the focus of the officiant. When offering, your entire focus needs to be on the act you are performing. Draping the head cuts off the peripheral vision and damps down the hearing, preventing—or at least lessening—the chance of distraction.

The second is the focus of those in attendance. As human beings, we automatically look to one another's faces. The act of draping the head de-emphasizes the face, and says: Look not at me, but at what I am doing; which, of course, is exactly the point in ritual.