Pagan Godspell

Greetings, Pagani, from the clover-rich fields of the not-so-wild midwest! The hills are heavy with sweetness, and the sky blushes weekly with steel gray clouds that shatter in the night. Roasted sweet corn is the hallmark of this season here, delicious even as its industrial cousins, bred not for delight but for fattening feedlot cattle for inhumane slaughter or producing industrial “food” products, rustle bright with fireflies and despair at dusk. Lammas is nigh.

And as my thoughts turn to the mysteries of bread and feast, community and play and work, they turn also to ponderings on the nature of sacrifice. Lammas is, after all, in addition to all those wonderful other things, a feast of sacrifice. The grain is cut and threshed – John Barleycorn must die to feed the people. We pause in our playing and in the glory of the first harvest to think heavy thoughts about the fall of the Beloved*, to wonder at the sacrament of death and service, of what we might also give in our eternal exchange with the Mama, the Powers and the Spirits. On what we make sacred in our actions and our words.

Sacrifice is a scary word. You know the image that comes to mind – I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate. Given sacrifice’s bloody bad rap, born out of the same cultural machine that gave us B-movie witches and fictional occultists in all their murderous, bespangled and toad-guts-covered glory, many folks nowadays seem a lot more comfortable with the term “offering.” Of course, I grok offerings too. But though sacrifice and offering are wed in and through to each other in deeply entangled and delicious ways – there are subtle differences, and it is to this deeply evocative concept of sacrifice, not offering, that I give my thoughts, prayers and ruminations this time of year.

As always, my first thoughts on the notion of sacrifice cycle through the endless loop of questions that plague earth-conscious Pagani more and more these days – what will it take for us to change? Whose side am I on? What would I give? There is no question that sacrifices will have to be made in order for us to go on living and singing and dancing on this gorgeous mossy stone we call home. Those of us capable of making some of these early sacrifices (acknowledging that there are privilege barriers that will mean that various people will have the ability to make different choices than others) are especially put upon to ask ourselves how much we can give up now in order to preserve the integrity of our biosphere.

The etymological meaning of the word “sacrifice” comes from the Old French sacrifise and the Latin sacrificium – sacra, meaning sacred or sacred rites, and facere, meaning “to do, to make, to perform.”** Thus, sacrifice can be literally translated to mean “to perform sacred rites” or “to make sacred.” Throughout the history of culture and spirit and time, sacrifice has been woven into the blood and sinew of our relationship with the Mama and all the powers and spirits. When you eat, something dies. A sacred thing, that. As you breathe, something is given, and that is sacred. Our recognition of that fact is one of the pulsing hearts in the vast breastbone of ritual, and is made manifest particularly at this time of the year, as the summer becomes tinged with a defiant heat sliding into the purple dark, breathing out its waning, and all Ripe Things know the hour of their blessing death. What is it that we are making holy in return? The reciprocity of the Nature of Things asks us a burning question. To live is to require sacrifices of others. What are we willing to give up to live in right relationship with the Mama?

Thus it may be that as we sacrifice, say, the convenience of being able to be anywhere we like in a moment’s notice via the dubious miracle of planes, trains and automobiles, we reestablish our understanding of the sacred in the earth. It may be crucial and necessary that we give up sleep, struggling in the hot night over the death of bees. That we give up the security of our careers to fight for justice, or the safety of our person to sit in a tree for two years and be threatened by those who want to cut it down. Or that we give up oranges in the midwest. From little to big, these sacrifices that spring out of our authentic relationships with the planet are sacred acts – more so than that, they further the awakening of the people to the miracle of the green diamond planet we’ve forgotten, and I would even go so far as to say that they contribute towards the monumental task of restoring the ecstatic stores of magic that riot in the Wild when the Feral Soul is unbound. They make Sacred. Holy work, the tides of Lammas.

Yet lest we forget, sacrifice is also wedded in time and culture and image to the spectre of that most Beautiful Angel, Death – terrible and lonely, lovely and wise. The year has begun to die. It is now, it the teeth of glorious abundance, that we sow the seeds of deep awareness of impending death – marking the passing of the Beloved, the Mystery of the One that will Come Again. Would I die to feed my people? How do you begin to say thank you for something that goes so deep? The answer to this question is in every rite we perform and every sacrifice we make – every gift we bring to our communities, every word we unravel and claim.

I will never tire of the year and its movement. I am ever in awe of this miracle. In the orgy of summer, Death is a secret stealing up through the veins of trees, making ready Its autumn table.

All Hail to the Beloved in the Light of the Scythe. All Hail to the Red Woman who Mourns Him. They stir. They wait. The bread is risen. A stolen, precious beauty has peopled the secret places in the blue notes of evening. Loss and glory. I lift my hands. Death and service. Sacrifice and Sanctuary. In the hot nights. In the sweet water.

The mourning doves rush out of the tiger lilies in the hour after dawn breaks and sing the names of everything that is. That’s your name they’re calling.  It’s my name too.

John Barleycorn

There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three man made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn was dead.

Then they let him lie for a very long time
Till the rain from heaven did fall,
Then little Sir John sprung up his head,
And soon amazed them all.
They let him stand till midsummer
Till he looked both pale and wan,
And little Sir John he growed a long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with the scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee,
They rolled him and tied him by the waist,
And served him most barbarously.
They hired men with the sharp pitchforks
Who pricked him to the heart,
And the loader he served him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him round and round the field
Till they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn mow
of poor John Barleycorn.
They hired men with the crab-tree sticks
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller he served him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

Here’s little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,
And brandy in a glass;
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the stronger man at last.
And the huntsman he can’t hunt the fox,
Nor so loudly blow his horn,
And the tinker he can’t mend kettles or pots
Without a little of Barleycorn.

———-

*In my practice, the Beloved is the God Who Comes, Who Dies, and Comes Again…Beautiful Gift, Star in the Vine. Yet there are parallels that resonate deeply with me in the Eleusinian context – that the Beloved is also a name for Demeter’s lost Kore, Transformed into that incomparable Queen who gives Comfort to the Dead. Thus, and in so many ways, the Beloved (and any other god/dess), defies, epitomizes and revolutionizes gender all in the same moment. There is much that is mutable in my understanding of the Shining Ones. With any luck, I will never ever believe I have any sort of good grasp of how They work. The Mystery is too delicious – why would I ever give that up?

**It is pedantic in its way to rely on the etymological meanings of words. Words are living beings, and they evolve and become over time in the same way any plant or animal does – they adapt. Thus, words “on the ground” do in some ways carry more weight for us as contemporaries than their older, more archaic definitions. Certainly I wouldn’t dismiss the fact that the word sacrifice has evolved to mean something unsavory and oftentimes immoral, or even theologically suspect (for instance, I do take issue with a theology of sacrifice espoused by some Christians, that the sacrifice of Christ for his people [or even, as they say, all people everywhere and for all time] was the only or the greatest sacrifice that supersedes all others). However, I am also a huge word nerd, and it is an undeniable fact that there is a powerful magic in words. Thus, I find that digging even a small amount (a light chicken-scratching such as I do) into the literal translation of a word or its etymological history at the least reveals the multilayered nature of a word, nestled together like a Russian nesting doll, and at the most can have the amazing effect of triggering whole epiphanies in their revelations. In the act of using the archaic or literal translation of a word to perceive it in a new/old light (shining in through a dusty window), we become empowered to incorporate that word into a new worldview – we enact a small part of the greatest magic – we become players in Change. This is my understanding of some of the power behind the “reclamation” of various words by liberation movements and communities. To know and digest a word at its many layers and to look at it in a new light, or a new darkness, robs that word of its power to destroy you by inviting it instead into the free road of your heartsblood.