Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Eggs for Spring

are very cross-cultural. There's very little Gaelic context for keeping the Equinoxes,while there do seem to be some British Isles egg customs, and our local Grove undertook a cultural excursion and worked our Equinox rite in a Slavic style. For us that means studying the myths and ways of Slavic peoples and employing the Gods and customs that fit well in our customary ritual order. This is the very first time that Stone Creed has worked Slavic, (no, the second time, recalling an early experiment at summer solstice in... 1993?...) and our choices are tentative, but we have a number of members of Slavic descent (this being greater Cleveland) and the feel of the rite was really quite good. We blessed eggs of our own (much simpler eggs), sacrificed to Morena and Dazhbog and had blinis (the potato type) for blessing with our mead.
Slavic customs make a great deal out of painting eggs, and we used as much of that symbolism as we could. The omen for the rite was taken using a set of 21 symbols that our Chris J found, called znaky, that are the core vocabulary of the egg decorating art, called pysanky. She made the symbols on nice wooden lots, and we drew a very nice omen.
This fellow, which turned up in an odd corner of the Daily Kos while I searched, is another matter. Perhaps he symbolizes the world of the Great Old Ones waiting to be born, a cockoo's egg among the fuzzy conies of the season, the power of spring bringing the rising tide of a more purple and ebon sort of life, squeezing squamous from the cracked cosmos egg of your pitiful reality! ia! Azathoth!
sorry...
Anyway, a Blessed Spring to us all, from shoot to blossom!

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