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4, 2, 3, 7.

That's how you offer the lamp to a Hindu god.

Puja, also known as arati, is the major Hindu rite of temple service, in which various items—water, incense, fire, a flower (read: water, air, fire, earth) are presented to the deity indwelling the murti (statue), and then consumed by the worshiper herself.

(There's an entire theology encoded in this ritual, but I'll leave you to suss that for yourself.)

Each item is circled in the air—sunwise, of course—before the deity a certain number of times. That's where the numbers cited above come in.

• Four small circles to the god's feet.
• Two small circles to the god's navel.
• Three small circles to the god's face.
• Seven large circles around the god's entire body.

Why, I asked my friend, head pujari at the local ISCKON center, those particular numbers to those particular parts of the god?

My friend didn't know. He had, in fact, asked the same question of his teacher, who likewise did not know. While in altar training, my friend had asked all around. No one in the community seemed to know.

(This isn't really surprising. Sometimes things become so ingrained in a tradition that it simply never occurs to anyone to ask.)

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see to the heart of a given matter. I'm a ritualist myself, of a different, though related, tradition. So here, for what it's worth, is my best guess as to the meanings:

Gods, it's like watching a rape that I'm powerless to stop. I can't bring myself to look away, but the very act of looking seems in itself unclean, an act of complicity.

I feel like a war voyeur.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has become a hideous kind of live entertainment as we watch it play out in real-time. Somehow my obsessive interest in what's happening seems to me prurient, ghoulish even. Something Nascar-ish is happening here: you don't really want wrecks, but the potential smell of blood has its own allure. In candor, the wrecks are the draw.

Well, war is interesting: a terrible truth, but a truth nonetheless. I think of the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Táin, those culturally-foundational war epics. War is reality of the most extreme sort.

From the safety of somewhere else, I watch the suffering of others with fascinated horror. Try as I might, I feel myself in a state of perpetual uncleanness. How do I dare make offerings, do the sacred and necessary work, in such a state of mental impurity?

Yet the sacred work must still be done: without it, the world would fail. Better an imperfect offering than no offering at all. I turn off the radio, take a deep breath, wash my hands, and do my best to clear my mind as I enter the temple to make the morning offering.

The secret temple stands in the heart of the war zone.

Few people even know that it is there.

Through the chaos, the mayhem, the uncertainty, the liturgies continue.

May the people have life. May the people have food. May the people have beauty.

Twice daily, the priest makes the offering and prays on the people's behalf.

May the people have life. May the people have food. May the people have beauty.

In all times, year in, year out, the liturgies continue.

May the people have life. May the people have food. May the people have beauty.

Now, in time of conflict, to the three traditional prayers, the priest adds a fourth:

Here at Temple of the Moon, we offer and pray twice daily to the Moon and the Horned for the health and well-being of pagans everywhere.

In numbers lies efficacy. No matter where you are, you can join your prayers to ours.

Here's how.

(Note: The Threefold Salute is a gesture of reverence and affirmation that takes several forms:

Threefold Salute

Touch heart, lips, and brow

or

Touch brow, lips, and heart

or

[if you're really pious and/or spry]

Touch brow, lips, and heart

Bow, touch ground

Rising, touch heart, lips, and brow)

Daily Offering, with Threefold Prayer

Who would expect to be confronted with a theological conundrum upon walking into a supermarket? Welcome to the Wonderful World of Paganism.

I've gone over to my neighborhood Asian market to pick up some tofu. (At a buck-fifteen per cake, it's still the best deal in town.) Just inside the door, in his little shrine on the floor, sits Weng Shen the Door God. Flanked by electric candles, he scowls as good door-wards do. Before him burns a bowl of electric incense.

The porcelain bowl filled with gravel looks just like a real incense bowl, if you ignore the electric cord that runs through a hole at the back of the shrine. Even the “sticks” of incense—I assume that they're plastic—could almost pass for the real thing, if it weren't for those uniform glowing red electric tips.

So here's the conundrum. Is a symbolic offering still an offering? Does electric incense “count”?

I suppose that the answer to this question depends upon what you mean by “count.”

The Romans (of course) had a phrase for it.

Absit omen: “May it not be an omen.”

As resident priest here at the Temple of the Moon, I make offerings twice daily—mornings and evenings—and pray for the well-being of pagan peoples everywhere. As one might expect of a pagan temple, the prayers take different forms depending on what time of year it is.

The prayers, of course, are recited from memory. Twice now during the last few days, I've slipped up and started prayers in their Winter form. Both times, thankfully, I've managed to catch myself before I'd got very far, and corrected the prayers to the proper Summer form instead.

But now I'm starting to worry. Even though, here in the North, Winter is the general default setting, somehow (whether rightly or wrongly) when things go wrong in ritual, they seem to take on a super-charged significance.

Did you know that you've got people making offerings on your behalf every day?

At the Temple of the Moon, that's what we do.

Here at the Temple of the Moon, we offer and pray twice daily, morning and evening.

At each offering, along with the more specific prayers, we pray for the well-being of pagans everywhere, old and new alike.

That means you. Remember that next time that you're feeling stressed.

And, of course, we're not the only ones. In temples and shrines across Pagandom, the same thing happens every day.

Know them or don't, people are offering, and praying, for you. Every day they do this: and, indeed, across the world, our numbers grow daily.

You, too, can join this worldwide offering.