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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in eggs

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Black Egg

Behold: black eggs.

Bright black.

To some, this might seem strange.

To us, it makes perfect sense.

Black is fertile. Black is rich. Black holds everything.

Other priesthoods wear white.

Not so ours.

Black as Mother Earth, who bears the red rye and white barley.

(See her likeness on the goose's egg?)

Black as Mother Night, with her great sky of stars.

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A Public Service Announcement from the Paganistani Ministry of Culture

It's time to start saving onion-skins.

Seriously.

We're nearing the end of the Imbolc thirtnight. Here in Paganistan we're in Bridey's Spring: what cowans call the “February thaw.”

Look up and you'll see the buds on the trees standing out from their branches. Light lingers well after sunset. Male cardinals are beginning to sing their breeding-territory songs.

So start saving those onion-skins now.

It's a month and some to evenday, when we'll stoke up the dye-pots and boil eggs along with all the onion-skins we've saved.

Eggs that will emerge from those dye-pots robed royally in the colors of Dawn herself: yellow, saffron, gold, orange, deep Minoan red.

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Pagan News Beagle: Earthy Thursday, March 24

It wasn't intentional but very nearly all of our stories today involve food. Read about the revolution of "cutting meat," the development of the modern Japanese diet, and more in today's Earthy Thursday, our weekly segment on science and Earth-related news! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

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The Grateful Witch: A Tale of the Slovenian Roma

While eating lunch one day a girl noticed that, having shelled their hard-boiled eggs, her parents crumpled up the shells before throwing them away. She asked why they did this.

“If you don't, the witches use them for boats,” they explained. At one time this belief was quite widespread throughout Central Europe.

“Witches need boats, just like anyone else,” she replied, and threw her eggshell, uncrumpled, over her left shoulder. A whirlwind caught the shell and whisked it away.

One day the girl was fishing from an island in the middle of a river. Suddenly, due to a heavy downpour upstream, the water began to rise. Before she knew it, her boat was swept away, and soon the rapids were in danger of covering the entire island.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Milk Pails and Prayer Books

The thing about superstitions is, you just never know.

One of my favorites comes from southern Germany. If you want to find out who the witches in your parish are, when you go to church on Good Friday, slip an Easter egg into your pocket. You'll recognize the witches by three things: 

  1. Instead of hats, they'll be wearing milk pails on their heads.

  2. Instead of prayer books, they'll be carrying slabs of pork. (!)

  3. They'll be standing with their backs to the altar.

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Egg-Dyeing Secrets of the Elders of Paganistan

There are lots of edible, natural dyestocks that can be used to color eggs. Listed below are those with which we've had the most luck over the years.

The results will vary from batch to batch and from year to year, depending on amount of dyestock used, length of cooking time, and various other imponderables, possibly including (who knows?) the phase of the Moon. The colors you get may not be predictable, but they'll certainly be beautiful.

Most natural dyes are heat-applied; realistically, this means that you add the dyestocks while you hard-boil the eggs. Dyeing eggs is, of course, a controlled chemical reaction in which loose radicals in the dyestocks bond with the calcium molecules of the eggshells, and heat facilitates this bonding. As always in the pagan world, it all comes down to relationship.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Eggs for Ashtart

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd say that it's probably a Long Memory. Since I don't, I can only say that I don't know.

She's old, and something is wrong, badly wrong. That's why the old country woman has come to the city, and is standing here nervously in the crowded street, looking up to the high temple, golden in the morning sunlight, that crowns the top of the hill. She has come to see the Lady, because she needs a favor, and she needs it badly. On her hip she bears her gift: you don't come empty-handed to the Lady, especially when you have a favor to ask. It's a poor woman's offering, a basket of eggs, but she has lovingly painted each one with the brightest colors she can find, to make them beautiful for the goddess.

That's it: as it were, a snapshot from the past. No before, no after. It's a memory, or rather an image, that I've had in my head since early childhood at least, one still frame from a vanished movie.

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