Blót-monað, the ancestors called it: Sacrifice-Month.* Or one could say (as the ancestors did, in their pragmatic way) Blood-month. It still goes on.

Deer-hunting begins this weekend here in Minnesota. Hunting opener is generally the first full weekend of November. (Just coincidence, I'm sure. Yeah, right.) Blood on the leaves.

It's the season of the Dead, yes, but let us not forget what the witches in their wisdom have always remembered: it's also the time of the Rut.** The fawns that Old Green Eyes sires right now will be born about Bealtaine, sure. Blood and spooge: Old Craft in the nutshell.

It may not be much of a calendar as such things go, but it's ours.

 

I've never gone hunting—Hell, I've never even fired a gun—but I was fortunate enough to grow up around honorable hunters who respected the power of guns and willingly accepted the responsibilities that taking another life entails. Like the Horned Whom I serve, I'm vegetarian—since I was 18, in fact—but when I know a hunter who does things the right way, then I unfailingly make my ritual eating, my wild eucharist. And if I were in hunting camp, I'd receive the blood on my brow along with the rest. His blood be upon us and upon our children.

The “deer-harvest,” they call it. Every year in Minnesota the harvest takes, on average, 241,000 deer and 2 or 3 hunters. Life for life, a gift for a gift. Every pagan knows that you have to give back if you're going to take: a terrible truth, but inescapable. Sacrifice continues, as it always has and always will, because it's in the nature of things.

Blood on the leaves.

Blood Month.

Stag run through with a spear

Stag hung from a tree

Stag strung up to bleed

Glory, Stag, to thee


*Had history gone otherwise, and the word remained in continuous use, we would in all likelihood today be calling November Blommath.

**As the saying goes, there's a little Bealtaine in every Samhain, a little Samhain in every Bealtaine.