Pagan Paths

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Samhain Chickens--Are we doing this Rite?

b2ap3_thumbnail_boar.jpgBefore I sat down to write this, I had to wash the blood off my hands.

Seriously. I did.

This week, blogs and discussions on animal sacrifice in Paganism made angry waves through the web-o-sphere and I commented on more than one, "WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE KILLING ANIMALS IN THEIR CIRCLES???" I was envisioning "Little Jenny Wiccan from the Suburbs" stabbing a lizard in a Circle she'd drawn in her garage, chanting names of Gods she'd looked up on the internet that afternoon. I was appalled, scared, and was prepping mess of press statements to explain what I've been telling the masses for years: "PAGANS DON'T DO THAT!"

Yep. I was wrong. I was wrong about the rites of others and, I realized, rites I also do.

Today I carefully tread around the puddles of don't-want-to-know at the vivero (poulterer) to get our Samhain chicken killed, thinking about how my ignorance had teetered dangerously toward hypocrisy. I have an animal sacrifice of my own--I just hadn't seen it that way.

b2ap3_thumbnail_Screen-shot-2014-11-07-at-8.01.14-AM.pngEvery year, I walk up the street to the stinky, squawking shop by the 1 train and select a chicken. The poulterer shows it to me, and I offer a deep, squeamish prayer to Hekate that the scared bird will come back as a beloved house cat in its next life. This year, like most years, I spent the fifteen-twenty minutes waiting between the cages while the poulterer does his work, churning through layers of self-loathing. Sadist, murderer, ego maniac, hateful human--all just a few words I think of myself in the space between the cages. Like the chicken fucking cares that I said a prayer for her before she died? Who the shit am I to take a life? I'm a terrible monster and even worse, I've brought my community into it.  

Every year, I think I should stop doing this practice. I think I'll finally go vegan--or even just vegetarian again, even though it's never worked for me. I'm borderline anemic even in the best of meat and iron-supplement times. But this year, as always, I thought about my previous meal--which was a delicious chicken ceasar salad. I gave no thought to the chicken who died for my lunch when I ate it. It probably died in a factory farm. It surely didn't get a prayer said over it. As I walked home through the rainy streets, I thought about all the animals who died over the past year so I could eat. I thought about the turkey my partner and I ordered from a local farmer, who only had a few weeks left in the yard before it would end up in our oven. I prayed for the animals and for their forgiveness when I got home. Then I ripped the heart, liver and kidneys from my most recent victim, stuck her in my refrigerator, and sat down to write this blog (after I washed my hands thoroughly). 

b2ap3_thumbnail_moral.jpgIs it right for Pagans, or anyone, do perform animal sacrifice in the name of religion?

In this blog, River Devora describes her Jewish roots, in which the killing of animals without proper sanctity is an abomination. She also noted that the ritual technologies of both Santeria and Heathenry are both more sanctified as well as generally more humane than those killed for food production.

David Salisbury mentions in his blog that older traditions embraced legal slavery and even human sacrifice and therefore, the way things used to be done is no basis for how things are done, now and that the killing of an animal for ritual purposes is led by ego.

More blogs and comment threads fielded more arguments--all of which had validity. We are animals and animals eat other animals. Isn't it better that we do so in sacred context? We are animals, but we have evolved past a lot of our ancestral ways--isn't it better that evolve past this, too? Animals killed in the name of the Gods--who are we to say that's what the Divine wants, but who are we to say that it isn't? Traditions have kept culture's Spirits alive through times of brutal hardship, but some Traditions have been used to affirm oppression (think "Traditional marriage" or "Traditional women's roles"). Is Tradition a valid reason to preserve a practice?

b2ap3_thumbnail_1103121834.jpgThe debate gets more complicated when issues of colonialism, racism, environmental, poverty issues and the position of animals' right are rightfully included. I find myself in a boring middle ground. Who would I be to say that the Gods want me to slit a chicken's throat in Circle...but I'm certainly in no place to judge someone trained in this work who has inherited a religious or cultural legacy of doing so. If I grew up with animal sacrifice as part of my faith or if it were endemic to the culture from which I am close to and tied to, I would probably do it.  But I'm not. For me, trying to re-embrace ritual animal sacrifice as part of "what the Druids did at one time" or "what the Slavic indigenous would have done" would be inauthentic. I'm too far removed from those people and those practices. I don't even know if that would be accurate to them. My Sabbats and public rituals have never required blood to be effective, transformative experiences, but if I or someone I loved had a cancer-stricken child or other dire situation and we had reason to believe killing a goat would cure them, guess what? The goat would get it. 

But the one thread that consistently came up was that no matter whether someone felt the ritual slaughter of animals was equivalent or more compassionate than factory-farming, the consensus is that the mechanical, impersonal killing of animals for mass-marketed food products is the worst of the worst.  And it's in Worst Place from which my own experiences with sacrifice/sacred slaughter/creature-killing stem.

If you attend one of my Circles, you will not see animals harmed. But you might be offered a roasted slice of a recently slaughtered bird. Why would I kill a chicken for my community?  While the gift of the chicken is to Hekate, the spiritual lesson for the community is about about owning responsibility for actions. If I were not already a regular meat-eater, chicken would not be my offering. It's a dual working. My community exists in a country where people are distant from their food source and animals are commodities--not beings. Once a year, I look into the eyes of a being I am about to eat and acknowledge that a living creature dies for the sole purpose of me eating it. Sometimes, my Coveners join me, co-pray and help me prepare the chicken. I watch them struggle as I do with the witness of life to death at our hands. They handle a recently-beating heart. They season wings that flapped only a short-time before. Some cry. Some eat less meat afterward. I have had some people plan to join me only to text me a little before arriving saying, "I can't do it." They often embrace vegetarian lifestyles for a time, or permanently. Death hits home. Our role as death-bringers (excuse the pun) becomes alive.

Witches, whose spiritual beliefs are rooted in balance with the Earth and minimizing harm to others, must own their choices. If we are to take life, we must be rooted deeply enough in that choice to be able to look it in the eyes before we take it. If we cannot be responsible enough to own our actions in the taking of lives for our food source, we cannot take those lives--even for our food source.

My community will be served the flesh of an animal that died because I chose death for her. They will know the gender and the color of her feathers (this year, a black and white hen). They will know when she died and where. Her heart, liver, and gizzard will be preserved for a future healing spell. Her bones will become a broth used for a soup that is unusually good at healing colds and flu. It is my hope that people walk away from our ritual feast remembering that the life they eat is a life taken and that meat doesn't originate in a lifeless, unconscious plastic-wrapped form. It is too easy to depersonalize and commodify, just as we do to our planet.

Maybe things will change and I'll be able to live without meat and at that time, I can do away with the practice. For now, it is better that I own up to this thing that I do called "eating meat" and give others in my community the chance to do the same. When we are aware of the harm we do, we are more likely to do less of it. Ignorance isn't bliss--it's dangerous. This one chicken is one single step that may just touch a thousand feet, walking softer on the earth afterward.

b2ap3_thumbnail_hen.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Courtney Weber is a Priestess, writer, Tarot Advisor, performer and activist originally from Portland, OR living in New York City. Her writings on Witchcraft have been published in numerous publications, including Spiral Nature and the Huffington Post. She is the author of "Brigid: History, Mystery, and Magick of the Celtic Goddess" and "Tarot for One: The Art of Reading For Yourself", both through Weiser Books. She is the producer and designer of "Tarot of the Boroughs" a contemporary Tarot deck composed of original photography set in NYC. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and cats.

Comments

  • Anne Newkirk Niven
    Anne Newkirk Niven Friday, 07 November 2014

    Thanks Courtney, for a well-written, compassionate, and even-handed post on a subject that often sends people off the deep end one way or another.

  • Courtney Weber
    Courtney Weber Saturday, 08 November 2014

    Thank you, Anne! I appreciate it. :)

  • Jim
    Jim Friday, 07 November 2014

    I like the way the Iroquois (translation - the Humans) approached having to kill other living beings whether plant, or animal (including human). They considered everything holy, everything part of the creator's composite being. Therefore every life they took had to be not only honored, but that you had to enter into a life-long honoring of the actual individual whose life had now become part of your own because his/her body was now part of yours. We are omnivores and being an omnivore doesn't mean you can eat anything. It means that you MUST eat a bit of everything or suffer malnutrition. From a philosophical point of view is it really any better to eat a fistfull of nuts which are the embryos of a forest than to kill and eat a fish? There is death to make life no matter what we eat except fruit. Fruit is deliberately made by plants to get us to eat it, swallow the seeds which are designed to survive that pH2.0 of hydrochloric acid in our stomachs only to be dropped to the ground in a pile of fertilizer somewhere far from the original tree or bush. That's it and no we can't live on fruit. It is the awareness of and honoring of and incorporating of the lives that end to make our bodies that make the difference between us being part of the cycle of life or just murderers.

  • Courtney Weber
    Courtney Weber Saturday, 08 November 2014

    Thank you, Jim! I didn't know that about fruit--very interesting. I appreciate your kind comment!

  • Karen Wheeler
    Karen Wheeler Saturday, 08 November 2014

    This is a good and honest article. You did a good job of looking into the heart of things. I agree with Jim's relation of how it works. The most modern approach to the masses on this issue was in the movie Avatar. It is an ethical balance and a reverence for all life that matters. Ceridwen and other aspects of the Gods paint this picture as well as those on the red path and others. Balance helps keep all the animals in a healthy place. Populations rise and fall according to supply. even the huge fires renew the planets resources. It is a dance of respect and love. If we don't dance the dance the balance is off. we all suffer for it.

  • Courtney Weber
    Courtney Weber Saturday, 08 November 2014

    Thanks so much, Karen! I appreciate your thoughts!

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