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If you build the candy cottage, the children will come.

If you build a temple, people will come and, being pagans, they will, of course, bring offerings.

Offerings belong to the god, which makes them (by definition) sacred. So what do you do with them when they begin to pile up?

With consumables, that's one thing. Libations are poured out onto the ground. Token amounts of food are placed onto the earth (but never directly; they should always be placed on a layer of something biodegradable: leaves, grass, sticks). Food offerings in quantity traditionally revert to the temple staff; part of the god's responsibility to his people is to see that they're fed. (Richard Reidy calls this “reversion of offerings.”)

But the non-consumable offerings, what of them?

Offerings

When I collect anything from the wild I do like to leave an offering of some sort.  If I am in the woods or fields I don’t often have anything to hand so I give the plant or tree a blessing and a thank you. 

If I had to characterize Kirk S. Thomas' Sacred Gifts: Reciprocity and the Gods in only two words, it would be: “accessibly profound.”

Don't be put off—as I initially was—by his bantering tone, hyper-colloquial diction, or home-spun analogies. This book speaks as an incisive work of contemporary pagan scholarship and philosophy, and (best of all) points the way forward for future pagan thought.

There can be no relationship without communication. How, then, do we communicate with the gods?

In Sacred Gifts, Thomas answers this question elegantly and authoritatively by beginning with a careful examination of ancestral precedent. From these specifics, he deduces the general principles of the divine economy.

Do ut des means “I give so that you may give.” It is one of the defining points of Roman polytheism, and it is the most important. It is in these 3 Latin words that we can lay out how the Romans viewed their Gods. It is in these 3 Latin words that we can lay out a different approach than what we likely grew up with in regard to relationships with the Gods and society as a whole.

Ask someone in the Pagan community about Roman polytheism and you will regularly hear that it was contractual to the point of lifelessness. Actually, ask a lot of Roman polytheists the same, and they will repeat that statement as well, preferring to take the outdated tone of early scholars of the Roman religion, who regularly were Christian and carrying on a long tradition of upholding their perceived superiority through biased writing and opinion.

Yikes! Pagan Spirit Gathering 2015 canceled in mid-run due to flooding and rainstorms past and predicted.

What's a pagan response? On the immemorial principle of do ut des, a gift for a gift, perhaps we need to begin our outdoor gatherings with an offering to the god concerned.

Well, you know gods. The answer may still be “no.”

But it never hurts to ask.

There are two things I really love about the New Vesta tradition.  The first is the way it bridges the distance between the ancient world and the modern world.  The second is the way it helps strengthen family solidarity.  And one of the simplest ways it does these things is through mealtime offerings or libations.

Even in antiquity, Vesta – goddess of the home and hearth, and symbolized by a flame – was a bloodless religion.  Instead of making a living animal sacrifice, ancient Roman families sprinkled mealtime offerings of loose salted flour or wafers (called mola salsa) into her sacred flame that burned in their household hearth.  Libations of wine or olive oil could also be made into her flame.

One of the things that I have added to my practice over the last several years is to give offerings to the spirits, the Ancestors, and the Gods who inhabit my world and who I work with .Before I left for Kaleidoscope gathering in Canada this year, I ‘put my working altar to bed’. I tidied and dusted it,  put the skulls away and requested that the spirits rest but be watchfull while I was away and in turn promised to bring them back gifts if they would do so.  I did not want my house sitter to feel uncomfortable while she was staying but I also wanted my house to be proteted.  Apparently I was so successful at this that my cat, who it could be said, is also a spirit, also spend the entire month in the hall cupboard and only came out when my lovely house sitter was asleep or out of the house.. but I digress