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.
Burning Local
Well, that's it, then: the last of the sweetgrass braided.
Summer braiding for winter burning.
Sweetgrass, cedar, sage: here up North, our trinity of local incenses.
There's copal, of course: exotic resin of the fabled southern Lands of Ever-Summer.
But mostly, we burn local, just as we always have.
Back in the Old World, it was the same. Frankincense, myrrh: exotic imports from the resin-cultures to the South.
Up North, we mostly burned local.
There's no common Indo-European word for incense (the old Witch word was reckels, literally “little smokes”), but if the IE-speaking ancestors did indeed have an incense culture, one could perhaps make a case for juniper, still burned as a sacred smoke in the Gaelic-speaking Hebrides, in Germany on Weihnachtsabend, and among the Kalasha, the last remaining pagans of the Hindu Kush.
Here in the Heartland we still burn it, though we call it cedar. Just possibly we've been doing this for the last 4000 years.
If not longer.
After nearly 40 years in the Midwest I find that, for me, sweetgrass is what sacred smells like. Not infrequently, walking around at a festival, I'll suddenly catch a whiff.
Even though no one is burning any.
Copal is all very well. It's precious, for the highdays, a fitting gift for the Newborn Sun at Yule.
But for everyday sacredness, there's sweetgrass, sage, and cedar. Funny to think that, in other places, these are the precious exotics.
Up here, we grow our own.
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