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“For [god/goddess], because he/she heard my cry.”

What would you be willing to give in order to get rid of the Troll-in-Chief?

The ex-voto—the vowed or votive offering—is a fine example of a spiritual technology inherited from the ancestors but sorely underutilized today.

Here's how it works. You're hoping for outcome X. So you make a vow to Deity Y: If you will bring about Outcome X, I will, in return, give you Z.

I will:

Sacrifice a fine bull.

Commission a statue of you.

Throw that beautiful boar's-head torc into the Mississippi.

It's a contingency vow. If X, then Z. No X, no Z.

If it all sounds just a little transactional, bear in mind that this practice is firmly grounded in our divine pagan gifting economy: Do ut des, a gift for a gift.

Be warned: if Deity Y comes through for you, do not fail to follow up with Z. Do not. There are lots of stories about those who didn't*, and—believe me—you don't want to hear any of them, much less become one. As Alexander the Great always used to say, It doesn't pay to be stingy with the gods.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, as you may have heard, there's an election coming up.

I'm eyeball-deep in the revisions and updates to Labrys & Horns. As I sift through the conversations we've had in Ariadne's Tribe and the notes I've taken over the past couple of years, the gods and goddesses are sorting themselves into pairs and trios - something I hadn't really expected.

When we began putting together a Minoan pantheon for modern Pagan spiritual practice, we were working with the garbled fragments that have come down via Greek mythology plus some useful information in the fields of archaeoastronomy, dance ethnography, and comparative mythology. We found lots of deities, but they didn't shake out into a human-style family tree the way so many other European pantheons did.

It’s fun that the abbreviation for ‘retrograde’ in astrology is the same as the abbreviation for ‘prescription’ in medicine. This post will be about using tarot as a prescription to ease the suffering sometimes brought on by Mercury retrograde.

The first Mercury retrograde of 2020 began February 16 and will be with us through March 10. While astrologers suggest this will be the easiest of the three Mercury retrogrades of 2020, many of us are already experiencing hurt feelings and communication kerfuffles.

As in Scotland deer are said to be the fairies' cattle, so in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, wild goats are known as the fairies' flocks.

A certain Kalasha man was once benighted while hunting in the mountains, and decided to spend the night in a particular cave.

In the middle of the night, he was awakened by the sound of many people entering the cave. These were the fairies. When they lit a fire, he saw that they had with them a fine, fat ibex. This they proceeded to slaughter, joint, and roast.

They gave some meat to the man. He ate it, but hid two ribs in his shirt.

When the fairies were finished eating, they reassembled the goat's bones in its hide.

“Where are the two ribs?” they asked, but the man said nothing, so the fairies made two ribs from sticks of juniper, the fairies' tree. When they had laid them in place on the skin, the goat sprang up alive again, hale and hearty.

“We give this ibex to Such-and-so,” they said, naming another Kalasha man known to the hunter.

The man fell asleep, and in the morning found himself alone in the cave.

Going out to resume his hunt, he heard gunfire. Following the sound of the shot, he found the very man that the fairies had named, who had just shot a fine, fat ibex.

“Let me help you,” the first hunter said, and the two of them proceeded to skin and butcher the animal. They found that two of its ribs were wooden.

The wild goats of the mountains, the ibexes and markhors, belong to the fairies. No one successfully hunts them without their permission.

 “The gods receive no offerings from dirty hands.”

(Hesiod)

So: at Paganicon next month we'll be doing a big, public ritual for the many-named and many-hued Lady of Spring.

Here's the downside: We' ll be doing it in a cowanish and public place, to whit, a hotel.

Here's the resulting problem: Ritual of this sort demands a high state of ritual purity, and public spaces such as hotels are not generally in a ritually clean state.

So what do you do? Obviously we can't expect to maintain the same high degree of ritual cleanliness that one does back home at the temple.

So we do what pagans have always done: we make do.

As the procession bearing the Offerings and the Holy Things proceeds through the hotel to the Place of Offering, it will be preceded—even before the drums—by one bearing the rose water and the leafy spray for sprinkling.

(And surely those who bear the Offerings and the Holy Things will have washed themselves well beforehand, hands and forearms to the elbows.)

As she cleanses, she will cry out in the ancient language of the Tribe of Witches.

Sticks and twigs

As you may have noticed from your reading, I treasure cinnamon incense. It brings a positive energy to your space, an appealingly sweet and spicy scent. It also brings prosperity and calm. What could be better? This may become one of your favorites, as well as it is truly easy to make.

Gather together: