In India, when you go to temple, you generally take along a tray of offerings: food, flowers, an oil lamp, incense, some cash. (Only a neo-pagan would go to see a god empty-handed.) You take this tray to the temple, and give it to the priest.
The priest offers it to the god, removes the god's portion—generally the incense and the money—and returns the rest to you. It's now become something sacred, something that the god shares with you.
These holy leftovers are called prasadam: literally, “grace.”
This, of course, is how the Pagan Economy, both human and divine, works: a gift for a gift. You give to the god, the god gives back to you. But of course, what you've given to the god is originally the gift of the god anyway—“thine own of thine own we offer to thee”—and so it goes, one giant Wheel a-turning.
I don't often have the privilege of worshiping in a temple, but in the contemporary pagan world there are still plenty of “holy overs”: things over from the ritual or the feast last night, things over from the festival. I generally partake of them with the sense that's there's value added here. The holy overs give us the opportunity to participate at a distance of time or place.
We need a good word in Pagan English for prasadam. “Holy leftovers” won't do: as a poet, let me tell you that joke names are always a mistake. “Grace” doesn't cut it, and prasadam is someone else's word. For so basic a concept, we need a name of our own.
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I love this. -
Sorry, I don't know enough old English or Proto-Indo-European to be of any help here. You might try the Oxford English dictionary
