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When you raise a standing stone, or build an important structure like a house or a temple, you'd do well to begin by making a foundation offering first. That's the pagan way.

What archaeologists call the “foundation deposit” is prayer made permanent. It embodies, in an ongoing way, the builder's intentions for the new structure, constituting the foundation beneath the foundation.

Among the Copper Age cultures of what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas called Old Europe—as in Minoan Crete, Old Europe's final flourishing—it was not uncommon, when building a house, to bury beneath it first a small, clay model of a house: action made articulate. The intention could hardly be clearer.

So when, at Beltane, we raise the Bull Stone at Sweetwood Sanctuary in southwestern Witchconsin's Driftless Area, you can be sure that, before the raising of the Stone itself, we'll first be laying our intentions in Earth.

The Bull Stone marks the marriage point of Earth with Sun, of People with Land. The Stone itself makes the Great Marriage with the Land both in microcosm—at the shrine itself—and in macrocosm, lining up with the notch on the horizon where two ridges meet that marks the place where the Sun sets on the shortest day of the year.

In the Earth beneath the Bull Stone we will lay three carefully-chosen offerings:

At Beltane, we raise the Bull Stone.

How, you ask, did we manage to get a ton of local limestone from the wall of the coulee (ravine), across the bed of the coulee itself, and all the way up the hill to where it now lies?

Not difficult.

The Witch sat at the top of the slope and Sang the Stone up.

Really. She Sang, and the Stone just—as it were—floated up the hill. Call it levitation.

I, Steven of Prodea, tell you this, and I know it to be true because I was there, and saw it happen myself.

Why did the standing stone climb the hill?

Well, I think we know.

Before the Bull Stone began its two-year journey from its natal rock-bed, across the coulee floor, and up-slope to its new shrine, I asked:

Will you come? Will you chance this adventure? Will you receive this adoration?

For these are the questions that must be asked.

And the Stone said: Even so.

Two years, much sweat, and the work of four days later, the Bull Stone now lies, gazing at the sky through autumn's yellow canopy, on the shoulder of Sweetwood Ridge. In spring, we will raise him and, if we do our work well, he will stand in consummation long after we are gone.

And all the while the priestess, the clan-mother, sat at the crown of the slope, singing the song of Calling.

Why did the standing stone climb the hill?

Go between the two standing stones into the woods.

Follow the path down to the Great Circle.

When you get to Aphrodite, turn left.

Then head down the hill through the trees.

That's how you get to the Bull Stone.

The offering bears the prayer.

The ancestors thought long and hard about their foundation offerings.

In their choices, we see their intent, their wit and (like enough) their humor.

When the New Stone and Copper Age ancestors of Old Europe built a new house, they buried beneath its floor a little model of a house, lovingly rendered in ceramic detail.

No one needs to tell you what that means.

To the ancestors, it was obvious that when you built something important like a house or a temple, you first laid an offering in the ground to bear the embodied prayers of the builders.

We too have thought long and hard about what offerings to lay beneath the Bull Stone, when we raise it to mark the Marriage Point of Earth with Sky, of Land with People.

There will be three.

So, I'm going to take a little time to brag on my brother warlocks. In traditional language, this is known as a vaunt.

I'm just now back from a weekend with the warlocks at Sweetwood sanctuary, among the incomparable autumn vistas of the hills and misty hollows of Witch Country's Driftless area.

The weather was miserable, cold and damp. It rained torrentially most of the time.

I haven't had so much fun in months.

I don't know how you go about moving standing stones where you live.

Here's what we do around here.

In these things, of course, it's always best to start in a sacred way.

Before the day's work begins, we gather around the stone. We lay out the eventual foundation offerings on the foot of the longstone. Then we pass around a horn of beer, and everyone takes a sip.

The rest of the beer we pour out over the stone.

Then we pack up the foundation offerings, and the day's work begins.