The issue of sacrifices and ritual offerings to the gods is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently from a pagan perspective.  Partly this is due to wanting to have a better theological understanding of my own practice.  However, I may also be somewhat self-interested, in that I've found it really hard to develop a regular and meaningful method of making offerings, and thus I'm motivated to develop an understanding that makes this less of a concern.

The expectation of making offerings to the gods seems to be near-universal among modern pagans.  For traditional reconstructionists--people who attempt to follow the ritual practices of an ancient polytheistic religion as closely as possible--this is natural enough, since the traditions they are reconstructing generally heavily involved animal sacrifice.  From their point of view, the question is really how to substitute for the fact that animal sacrifices are not really possible today for the vast majority of pagans.

However, non-reconstructionist modern pagan practices still seem to have a heavy focus on offerings.  I suspect that this is due to two things: the fact that historically, most non-Abrahamic religions have required sacrifices, and the fact that Christianity and modern Judaism--the cultural contexts in which most modern pagans were raised--do not, and have often attacked them as "idolatry."

I definitely feel a pressure to make food offerings, both from Hellenic reconstructionists (my favorite Hellenic recon blogger regularly points out that worship without burnt offerings is meaningless in the Hellenic tradition) and from the pagan community in general.  For the most part, I don't actually do so, though, both due to what I call the "offering disposal problem"--since I can't burn them or easily bury them, how do I dispose of offerings appropriately?--and due to the fact that I just don't have the time, energy, or executive function to maintain a daily practice that involves the complications of food offerings.

The few times I've made food offerings that have felt very meaningful and "effective" (to me at least; I hope the gods approved of them) have been in the context of group meals, where I've eaten with other pagans and we've set aside a portion for the gods.  I first did this in grad school with aliothsan on a couple of occasions: we cooked meals together and afterward ritually deposited the gods' portion on the ground outside.  More recently, the ritual sharing of a small amount of food, with a portion for the gods deposited under a tree, has been part of the Imbolc and Spring Equinox rituals I participated in this year with the pagan-Jewish family I'm friends with locally.

There is a practical reality that disposing of food offerings outside is reasonable for an occasional group ritual, but not as part of regular daily practice (it would attract rats), but I think the real significance of the food here was as a shared meal.  The idea that the gods need offerings for sustenance, or that receiving food is a primary reason they concern themselves with humans, strikes me as somewhat blasphemous, honestly. 

On the other hand, the sharing of food and hospitality is a significant way of creating closeness, especially in traditional cultures where food was more valuable than it is today.  It's certainly something that I feel helps me feel closer to my friends, and I think that in this symbolic context, food offerings as a way to make a connection to the gods make a lot of sense.

A related theological issue was--unintentionally and ironically--raised by a fundamentalist Christian acquaintance from high school, who for a while had an AOL Instant Messenger status that read "I will not offer to God that which costs me nothing."  As much as I distrusted the source, this made a certain sense to me: if the gods are self-sufficient, the purpose of sacrificial offerings must be the sacrifice--what it costs the sacrificer--and a sacrifice has to be something of value to mean anything.  Food satisfied this requirement in the past, when it was regularly scarce, but for most modern Americans, myself included, it really doesn't today.

The conclusion I've come to is probably partly influenced by what I've heard ashnistrike and my partner Jan say about the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, in its more liberal understanding as completing creation by improving the world.  Learning more about Jewish theology in this context probably makes a lot of sense, since ritual sacrifice has a very important role in Jewish scriptures, but modern Jewish practice lacks it and Reform and (I think) Conservative Judaism teach that these sacrifices will not be reestablished even when the Messiah comes.

Since I generally understand the gods as related to, and patrons of, particular aspects of the world and human endeavor, it makes sense that the most useful sacrifice I can offer them--both in terms of benefit to them, and in terms of it costing me something--is devoting my time and energy to causes that I believe to be important to them.

Since I worship Athena as a patron of cities and of learning, my efforts to write and teach people about urban planning and transit issues, and to push for improvements in these issues are an appropriate offering to her.   Since I have come to understand Artemis as a patron of mental health issues, effort I put into helping my friends with their mental health issues, and hopefully helping people in general with them, are an appropriate offering to her.  Since Hestia is a goddess of the hearth, I serve her by cooking for others, and organizing gatherings that help people build social ties.  (Not that I have been putting as much effort into that as I should be, admittedly.)

I have no place to speak on the issue of whether the gods find this interpretation of things acceptable, and these sort of offerings sufficient, but I hope that they do, and that if I can feel less guilty about not making burnt offerings, or regular food offerings in general, I'll be able to form a healthier relationship with them and be able to serve them better.

I really didn't intend this Dreamwidth account to be quite so high-traffic, especially given how few people are reading it. That said, I seem to be coming up with a lot to say at the moment. And to be finding it an effective way to distract myself from a lot of other things I should be working on.

While discussing Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker last night with the friend who originally recommended I read it, I realized that, in a sense, Stapledon and HP Lovecraft were opposites. They were contemporaries, albeit on different sides of the Atlantic, and they both approached the same topic--the place of humanity in the vast universe that science had revealed--from essentially reversed points of view.

As I discussed in my previous post, Stapledon acknowledges the vastness of time and the universe, and the unimportance of humanity, but still creates a universe nearly vibrating with purpose. Intelligence is assumed to be the most important thing in the universe, and intelligences largely differ from each other by their place on an absolute moral scale of perfection.

The entire history of the cosmos is shown as the story of the moral advancement and psychic unity of all intelligences, and a "supreme moment" in which they make contact with their Creator. If Stapledon's "Star Maker" judges Its creations as inadequate and goes on to new creation, this only emphasizes the meaningfulness of our existence as an attempt to be worthy in the Star Maker's judgement.

The underlying theology of Stapledon's universe seems to be a natural extension of Enlightenment Deism and its Christian forebearers into the universe of Darwin, Einstein, and perhaps Marx. In his universe, there is a natural, self-evident path towards spiritual enlightenment and universal brotherhood for humanity to follow.

If it is our fate to perish on Neptune a billion years hence, in the premature death of the sun, we can at least take comfort in the fact that the march of progress toward the "supreme moment of the cosmos" goes on. And if, in that moment, our universe will be found wanting, we can at least take comfort that the Star Maker will learn from our universe and improve on it in Its next creation.

The sense of purpose that pervades Stapledon's universe is completely foreign to Lovecraft's. Lovecraft's writing faces the same huge cosmos and insignificance of human scales as Stapledon's. But, while Stapledon's writing responds to this by proposing that moral advancement and progress to higher levels of civilization can overcome the vastness of time and space, Lovecraft's writing emphasizes human smallness.

Lovecraft's universe, like Stapledon's, is populated by powerful, almost godlike beings capable of bridging the gulfs of interstellar space and geological time. However, Lovecraft's powerful beings did not come upon their power by climbing a ladder of moral enlightenment to universal consciousness: instead, they simply are. They have their own agendas, incomprehensible to humans, and they don't care or notice how their actions affect us.

This is a universe without purpose, or an inherent moral order for humanity to aspire to. There is no question of us--or of the universe and its life as a whole--being judged inadequate by Azathoth, because the concept of the "blind idiot God" judging us is incoherent.

The fundamental meaninglessness of existence is, as far as I can tell, the foundation of Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror. And yet, it seems, it is also what makes his view of the universe more appealing to me. I can't bring myself to accept the Deism of Stapledon's "Star Maker" any more than I can accept the Ontological Proof. But a universe whose sole meaning is its own existence, that is something that feels true to me.