In reflection of the tradition of physical sacrifice, I
fertilize all the plants within the canopy of the shrine with blood meal.
But why is this practice important to me? The ongoing
conversation of “asking” the denizens of the invisible universe for things makes
me want to talk about this. Back to that in a moment.
I engage in devotional activities to beautify and enliven my
world. To create a link between myself and divinity. To fill in the abyssal
hole left by my previous partnership. To help make sense out of a world where I
feel not just a little bit lost. There is a strong sense that this place is my
cloister.
So, let me say something may upset some people. As members
of a profoundly materialistic and secular culture, we may not actually know what
it is to have a relationship with the divine. In particular, I have a hunch
that we don’t know how to have a relationship that would be recognizable to the
ancients or a writer of a grimoire. Our world is not the same, our thinking
absolutely different, and our expectations unrecognizable to our magical
ancestors. Our familial ones, too, of course, but that is a larger question.
Before rational thinking became the only “approved” way of interacting with the world, before the Enlightenment, before the Scientific Revolution, before WSIWYG… people were surrounded by religious activities. It wasn’t just magical practitioners and the otherwise unhinged that maintained household shrines. Instead of seeing lightning as a plasma formed by clouds at different electrical potentials, we saw forces with names. Entities we could interact with, placate, and plead to. It’s impossible for us to imagine what that was like but let me urge you briefly to try.
And then, recognize that we’ve only been trying to think
like this for a couple of hundred or so years, out of all of human history. We’re globally not
good at it yet. This fact can be gleaned even from a newspaper. So-called
“critical thinking” is almost impossible for most people, and for those of us
who do it in our day jobs, it’s largely a game. A game with a purpose, to be
sure, but it’s not our native language.
And we miss the fullness of a divinely inspired world, we long
for the presence of the gods, their company. We feel alone. We feel powerless.
We ache. We’re left in the Matrix’s “desert of the real.”
And so, we, as confused polytheistic seekers, try to put this god-driven reality back together, except we have no pre-existing community to help us with it. Imagine having an entire culture that recognized the gods at its core (not that there aren’t issues with this, as history teaches), imagine a more completely enlivened world and realize that human beings basically evolved within this earlier paradigm. In some senses, and not exclusively, we’re programmed for this religio-magical thinking.
This gets to my thoughts about “asking” the spirits and gods
for things, for comfort, for help, and the words we use to do that. The way we “ask”
for things is no longer informed by an existing cultus and community, so we
fall back on other paradigms: our relationship with our parents and whatever
our relationship to the gods of our fathers. Or worse, it’s a kind of
mechanical “push button, get banana” thinking. It’s not bad framing so much as
using a secular gloss to address religious ideas. It’s trying to use material
skills for a mystical purpose.
This is bound to make us look like kids at a vending
machine, trying to buy a Snickers bar. We didn’t previously have to install the
vending machine or maintain it. We get mad when the candy gets hung up on the
way to the delivery chute and have a complete meltdown when we don’t get what
we “paid” for. If we get the wrong thing? An outrage.
In some ways, this whole system is mechanically based in cause
and effect. We must have the right currency to operate the machine, we must
know how to ask it for the Snickers and not the Twix. We must know when it no
longer contains the things we want. In short, we have to know how to “ask” the
machine for the product.
Returning to the previous description of magical thinking,
though, besides needing to understand how to work the vending machine, there
are some metaphysical realities. We need to know it’s there. We need to
recognize that someone other than us is taking care of it, refilling it,
collecting the money, keeping the area around it clean and safe. The vending
machine – the gods and spirits – is an environment. As religious/magical
people, we need to recognize our role in making the system work.
The mechanical analogy, though, dies wheezing because the
gods and spirits are not machines, they are entities. They’re not your parents
either. They are only anthropomorphic because they are easier to imagine and
have a relationship with that way. This winds itself back into my description
of shrine work because devotional work is the establishment of that relationship.
A recognition that I don’t really know who or what they are, but that I need
them for my life to feel complete.
One last musing: I do ask the gods and spirits to do things for me. I can track through my journals the fact that my requests are more often granted since I started keeping the shrine. Is this transactional? I don’t think so. We can probably map this onto simple human emotion. When a person cares deeply for another person, they express their love by giving. This is what makes them a lover, not what they get in return. When we serve the gods, we hope they take care of us, but it’s the care we bring to the table that starts the engine. It’s the thing that makes the rest of our practices possible.
Blessed be thou.
