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When my father died at the end of August, he left me a wheel of cheese.

We're big cheese-eaters in my family. Several times a year, I would open the front door to find a box of cheese waiting on the doorstep. À propos of nothing in particular, Dad would have decided that his son needed some cheese, and would send it along accordingly.

Cheese is a sacred food: sacred, in particular, to the Moon. Moon, milk, whiteness: it all fits. (Not to mention cattle, with their crescent-decrescent horns.) When they say that the Moon is made of green cheese, it's a reference to a wheel of ripening (“green”) cheese. Because the cheese isn't ripe yet, it's still uncut, i.e. round, like the full Moon.

That, of course, we refer to a round of cheese as a “wheel” is in itself a prime indicator of sanctity. To pagans, the Wheel—meaning the Cycle—is a prime symbol of Being. Time is a wheel, the world is a wheel, life is a wheel. To pagans, it's all wheels.

The last box of cheese that my father sent me before he died included a large (= five pound) wheel of Baby Swiss. It's sat in the refrigerator for months now, because once a wheel of cheese is cut, you've got to use it up, and there's no way that I could eat that much cheese before it would start to mold.

Well, Yule is coming up. One of the many things that I learned from my father—not from what he said, but from how he led his life—is that your job as a man is to see that your people are taken care of. If that means that you have to work two jobs, you work two jobs. If that means that you have to pick up a gun and shoot someone, then that's what you do. Not because you want to shoot anyone, not because you want to work two jobs. You do it because that's what it means to be a man.

I was never the son that my father expected; I never married or had a family. In the end, every man has to find his own way to manhood. There are many ways to be a man, and Dad always had the love to let me be my own kind.

So, Yule. We don't usually exchange gifts in the coven anymore—thank Goddess, we decided to discontinue that as-if-Yule-weren't-already-stressful-enough practice several years ago—but this year I've got something very special for everyone regardless.

“Milk” writes Julie Sahni in the introduction to her chapter on South Asian sweets, frequently dairy-based, “is the divine food of the Aryans.”

For Sahni, of course, “Aryan” means nothing like what it would have meant to Hitler. Sahni uses the term in its original sense: as the endonym (i.e. the name by which a given community knows itself) of the Sanskrit-speaking population that first entered the Indian Subcontinent between 5000 and 4000 years ago.

(A related population, also calling themselves the Ârya, the “Noble Ones,” went west into the Iranian plateau, and in fact the word “Iran” itself comes from the same root: “the Land of the Noble Ones.” According to Indo-Europeanist J. M. Mallory, the term “Aryan” properly describes only this ancient Indo-Iranian population or their descendants. No doubt Hitler would have been furious to discover that he wasn't really an Aryan.)

Milk is a miracle. If you slaughter a cow, you get food to feed the family for maybe a month. If, however, you milk the cow instead, you get enough food to feed the family for years. Divine food, indeed. Small wonder that the cow was the basic unit of value across the entire Indo-European diaspora.

In the Elder Days, human beings lost the ability to digest milk as they grew out of infancy, but with the advent of pastoralism back in the Neolithic, certain human populations acquired what is called “lactase persistence”: the useful genetic mutations that permit continued milk-drinking into adulthood. Julie Sahni's Indo-Aryan ancestors were one such population, and it's possible that this ability was one of the things that distinguished the Ârya from the peoples that they conquered in their travels.

Other populations with lactase persistence arose separately in Central Asia and West Central Africa. (Interestingly, the genetic mutations allowing for adult milk consumption among the world's three main populations of milk-drinkers are different mutations. Clearly, the ability to keep digesting dairy has high survival value.) Milk isn't just the divine food of the Aryans; it's also the divine food of the Mongols, and of the Maasai, and the Fulani.

I love buttermilk, or rather, the probiotic cultured dairy product that, these days, we call buttermilk.

(Historic buttermilk was the liquid residue left behind after the milk solids had been churned out into butter, but nowadays only butter-makers have access to this.)

I grew up drinking buttermilk in mid-century Pittsburgh—the Posches are an old Viennese family who, like most Central Europeans, relish sour flavors—and I still drink two or three glasses of it every day.

One of the things that I especially love about buttermilk is that it's easy. Other cultured dairy products—yogurt, kefir—require that you heat the milk to near-boiling, then let it cool until it's reached the right temperature to inoculate it with the appropriate culture. This is a big pain. It makes a mess of the cooking pot. If the temperature of your milk is too hot, it kills the culture. If it's not hot enough, it doesn't activate the culture, and you have to start the whole, laborious process over again.

Not buttermilk. Dump half a cup of buttermilk into a large, clean bowl. Add a quart of milk, and cover. Come back 24 hours later, and voilà: buttermilk. (You'll want to whisk it first before decanting, of course, to homogenize the texture.)

For years, I've just bought commercial buttermilk from the store and used that as my culture. One strain I managed to keep going for almost two years.

But cultures mutate over time, and eventually it's time for a new one. When this happened most recently, I tried four different local buttermilks, one after another, all without acceptable results. One had a nasty, ropey texture; one culture wouldn't take; one had a foul flavor; one was completely flavorless.

So I did what all early 21st-century people in despair do: I turned to the internet.

Taste the milk, the milk of the Mother:

drink from the fountain, the fountain of life.

(Paganistani chant)

Roughly 9000 years ago, some of my ancestors underwent a genetic mutation that enabled them to continue drinking milk into adulthood.

Boy, am I ever glad that they did.

We hear a lot about libations in Pagan spiritual traditions.

A libation is simply an offering of a liquid, poured out in either a casual or formal ritual setting. A casual example would be the nights my friends and family gather around the fire out in our orchard to celebrate the seasons. Once the fire is lit, I pour out the first bit of my drink in thanks to the spirits of the land, my ancestors, and the divine in general. A more formal example might be the pouring out of wine onto the ground or into a bowl during a seasonal ritual.