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I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood in Pittsburgh and most of my friends went to St. Gabe's up on the hill so, although my family wasn't Catholic, I heard all the stories anyway. My favorite was the one about the little boy and the cookies.

The Little Boy and the Cookies

In preparation for First Communion, Sister X's second grade class was learning about the doctrine of the Real Presence: that Christ is literally, physically, present in the Eucharist.

Sweet, thought one little kid. After school one day he sneaked into church and knocked on the door of the tabernacle, the ritual cupboard on the altar in which the reserved eucharist is kept.

Hey, Jesus, he said, I brought you some cookies, and he laid out in front of the tabernacle the cookies that he'd saved from his lunch that day.

Preparing for mass next morning, Father Y found the cookies and, after (no doubt) puzzling a bit, ate them.

After school that day, the kid sneaked back into church. Pleased to see that his previous day's offering had been accepted, he once again knocked on the tabernacle door, and said: Hey Jesus, I brought you some more cookies. Once again he duly laid out that day's offering.

This went on for several days. Finally, one morning, the priest says, indignantly, Who's bringing all of these cookies?

(This line always got a laugh.)

The little girl was heartbroken.

They killed him! she sobbed. They killed him!

And him so tall and shining, and his antlers reaching up, up, up to the trees, and his velvet muzzle that you wanted to stroke.

And he called you his bonny wee bird, and his daughter.

And he came down from the altar and danced, danced with everyone.

And him so shining and full of life, and now he's dead. He's dead.

The mother takes the child into her arms and holds her head against her shoulder.

Oh, but only see, she whispers into her ear, turning her around again to face the altar.

I stood on a subway platform as trains roared by, oblivious, paralyzed. I had been frozen by a brief, polite encounter with a former co-worker, a few weeks after I’d been laid off from my very first job, as a community college English teacher. My last set of students—young men in practical disciplines — had filled their evaluations with comments on my dress and appearance: “She should wear shorter skirts.” “She should wear more make-up.” It was decided my relationship with them had been “too personal", and my contract was not extended. Standing on the platform, remembering all this, a renewed sense of shame burned in my heart.

Over the years I would understand what happened better, with a more sophisticated eye. But at the time I was looking for emergency first aid. And I found it in the practice of “offering it up.”

So: here was my evil plan.

Step 1. To lay the groundwork, as it were, the first year we'd do the presentation: “Sacrifice in Theory and Practice.”

Step 2. The next year, we'd bring in the cute little lambie and let the kids get to know it through the course of the festival.

Then at the big ritual we'd kill it and eat it.

Needless to say, we never even got to Step 1.

***

Thirty years ago, they wouldn't even let us talk about sacrifice at PSG. “Too controversial,” they said.

Well, that was 30 years ago, and this is Paganistan.

Moral of the story: Don't wait for Step 2.

25 years ago, they wouldn't let me give this workshop at PSG.

"Too controversial," they said.

But you'll be able to hear it in full—new and improved—at next year's Paganicon 2019.

Lucky you.

Sacrifice Revisited

Animal sacrifice having been one of the primary expressions of public worship in the old days, the ancestors took it pretty much for granted, and as a result, there are, rather surprisingly, no step-by-step descriptions in the surviving literature of how sacrifices were actually performed.

So here's the entire ritual, as reconstructed by Classicist Ken Dowden in his 2000 book European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (174).

Just in time for Pantheacon.

The world began with a sacrifice.

That's how the ancestors saw it, 6000 years ago.

6000 years later, that's still how witches see it.

Throughout Indo-Europeandom (and beyond it as well), one finds tales of the Primal Sacrifice. A divine or semi-divine being is killed; from his body, the world as we know it is created.

And so sacrifice becomes the central rite of public worship. Every sacrifice reenacts—reembodies—that primal, cosmogonic sacrifice.

Every sacrifice recreates the world.

Moreover, this is a true story. Truly, life lives on life. No matter what kind of -vore you are, others die so that you can eat them and live.