Lent: The Burning Ground of Love

We rise again from ashes,

From the good we’ve failed to do

We rise again from ashes

To create the world anew

If all our world is ashes

Then must our lives be true

An offering of ashes

And offering to you

 from A Wiki of Ice and Fire

This Ash Wednesday song is the most beautiful I know. It reminds me of the Hindu devotee who sings to the Dark One, “My Lord, since you love the burning ground, I have made my heart a dancer on the burning ground.”

We offer you our failures

We offer you attempts

The gifts not fully given

The dreams not fully dreamt

We have offered the best of what we had, best intentions, best education, best foot forward and it has led to very little. After the fatted calf is slain, and after the incense is burned what is left is these ashes, and the very ashes are our offering, the failure and half done things, the half baked things we bring to God because this is all we have. This doneness, the deadness, the something pasts its use and past all hope is, oddly enough, the magical ingredient to make the sacrifice whole and effective.

  

The links between Lent and a time where those who practice magic offer sacrifice is as old as the libel that druids practice human sacrifice on Ash Wednesday. There is a now famous slightly tin foil hat theory about the The Season of Sacrifice, a time between the end of March ending on May Day when dark magicians engineer war and bloodshed around the around the world. And though this may be largely false, note that I am putting a heavy caveat on my denial of this. Note also that, in many cultures, this actually is a time of sacrifice. The Christian Easter and Jewish Passover are both holidays centered around a renewing and redeeming sacrifice that ends one type of old life and begins a new one. Behind and alongside these more known sacrifices are the story of Damuzi’s sacrifice to bring Ishtar back to the other world and the return of Persephone the woman of spring who descended to the dead in winter. There is no mention of the price paid for her return to the earth, but one should note that she is linked to Adonis, Adonai the Lord, and Adonis is another form of Damuzi. In the story of Ishtar and Damuzi, the goddess of love, war and desires, descends to the realm of her sister the Queen of the Dead. She cannot leave that realm until Damuzi takes her place and becomes death’s king. In the tale of Adonis, the Queen of the Dead, Persephone, fights over Adonis with Aphrodite the Goddess of Love and desire. The characters are transplanted from the east to Greece and from serious ritual contemplation to a semi comic story, but there is much about death, life and exchange in this story as in the biblical story of Absalom, forerunner of Christ who hung between earth and heaven, caught in a tree by his hair and was murdered by his own kin when three javelins were driven into him.

And these are not the only tales of sacrifice. From the north we have Baldur slain by mistletoe and Odin offering himself to himself on Yggdrasil and these are just the European tales. Whether we are talking about a Passover lamb, a crucified Jesus or Damuzi snatched to the underworld, the story has a few factors in common. The change of season in the earth mirrors a deeper change within us and within the soul of the land—for it is not that the ancients were concerned with the earth and not with spirit, but rather that they knew the earth was spiritual. Also that, simple blood, simple killing is not adequate. Lambs blood, wine and bread, fasting, are all signs of the sacrifice of the soul needed to renew the soul, the offering to the Gods meant to sustain the God within, reconnect heaven to earth by reconnecting the heaven and earth in ourselves. This Season of Sacrifice, what will your offerings be?

POSTSCRIPT: AN ANNIVERSARY

"Because You love the Burning -ground, I have made a Burning-ground of my heart - That You, Dark One, hunter of the Burning-ground, May dance Your eternal dance."
~ Bengali Hymn~

Today is the conclusion or perhaps fulfillment of one offering in particular. This is the one year anniversary of Lapwing and Hound, also called Sickle and the Axe or Young Tradition. The name has changed, but the journal which focuses on my practice of the Mystery Tradition of 1734 has not. I wanted to make it to a year. I never promised how often I would post or looked for readers. This was my working out of my way, and I hoped that somewhere along that way it would be helpful to others. What will come in the next year I cannot say. There will probably be amendments and deeper dives into what we’ve already done, but there we are, and for the moment there is certainly enough for me or any reader to make he beginning stabs at following the path of the Young Tradition or making a younger one still.