Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Foundation Offerings
The offering bears the prayer.
The ancestors thought long and hard about their foundation offerings.
In their choices, we see their intent, their wit and (like enough) their humor.
When the New Stone and Copper Age ancestors of Old Europe built a new house, they buried beneath its floor a little model of a house, lovingly rendered in ceramic detail.
No one needs to tell you what that means.
To the ancestors, it was obvious that when you built something important like a house or a temple, you first laid an offering in the ground to bear the embodied prayers of the builders.
We too have thought long and hard about what offerings to lay beneath the Bull Stone, when we raise it to mark the Marriage Point of Earth with Sky, of Land with People.
There will be three.
- A bronze bull. From this, the Stone takes its name. This offering bears our prayers for the herds.
- A chert spearhead. Here on the banks of the Kickapoo River, Indigenous peoples gathered chert for spearheads and arrow-points. This offerings bears our prayers for the hunt.
- An ear of corn. This is the mystery offering, bearing our prayers for the fields. The archaeologists will never find it, but it will be there, nonetheless, unseen, one with the Land.
As in our day we build for the pagan future, let us think long and hard about the foundation offerings that we lay down beneath what is to come.
For this is the Way of the Ancestors: a technology of prayer.
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