- 1 quart honey
- 3 quarts distilled water
- 1⁄2 cup lemon juice
- 1 sliced lemon
- 1 half-teaspoon nutmeg
- Pinch of salt
Boil five minutes and then cool and bottle immediately. Keep in the fridge to avoid fermentation, and enjoy.
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When you pour out sacred drink, what do you pour it into?
If you're Wiccan, probably a chalice.
If you're heathen, probably a horn.
Now, I've got nothing against horns. (Some of my best friends wear them.) Nor, for that matter, chalices, although it's a matter of history that they derive their current stemmed shape from Christian liturgical necessity: not that there's anything wrong with that.
But when it comes to sacred drinking, as for me, I like to stick with ancestral precedent. Make mine a drinking bowl, please.
Drinking bowls tend to be smaller than bowls that you eat from, but that's the main difference, really. Whether richly carved or elegantly plain, drinking bowls read as “archaic,” ancestral, dating from a time when one single, undifferentiated vessel served all functions. It's interesting to note that while “bowl” is an indigenously Germanic word, “cup” was originally a Latin import.
My friend Kelly Meyer reminded me of the Lorsch Bee Blessing today. The 9th century Old High German charm captures the importance of bees in the medieval world, something we're beginning to realise anew as we discover just how perilous life is when they're endangered. As I've written about before, the importance of mead, the alcoholic drink made from honey, cannot be overstated in the Germanic world.
In Old High German, the charm goes like this:
...One of the aspects of archaeology that continues to amaze me is our ability to dissolve tiny bits of residue out of ancient containers and figure out exactly what those containers held thousands of years ago. With this technique, we’ve been able to determine what the ancient Minoans ate and drank and even what kinds of cosmetics they used.
Most people picture the people of the ancient world drinking wine, and they certainly did that, but the Minoans also drank mead. You might think of this alcoholic beverage, brewed from honey rather than grapes, in connection with the Norse and the fabulous feasts at Valhalla, but mead was actually a popular drink all over the ancient world.
...For those of you unfamiliar, July has become a festival month of sorts for Loki. Sirius, the dog star, is known as Lokabrenna - Loki's torch or brand. Late July/August is when Sirius rises, and so many of us celebrate Himself in the dog days of summer.
Today I'm making Him this:
...