In part one I discuss altars and what we are doing when we seek to make the world animate in our thinking and actions.
Offerings
In case the news of our continued occulting, worship and deification had not reached you, allow me a small pre-amble for this section. We make offerings every day.
An offering is a gesture of intention toward an end, given to some extra-physical body, made at an altar. It is a broad definition due to the fact that the secularised mind is prone to retro-active cynicism regarding any kind of prayer mat occupation, if you will. That stuff is for the confused, ill mannered and primitive, right?
Let us root this concept in the garden. Now, in the garden there as many altars as there are square feet of dirt, as there are plants, birds, bugs and mammals. To each we may bend a knee, or two, rally our hearts and give. Making an offering is as easy as tossing seed, discarding sandwiches, urinating on the citrus. For should one indeed urinate on the citrus, making an offering of one’s bodily fluids, one will be rewarded with bountiful fruit.
A perhaps more sinister metaphor is that of work. David Graeber speaks to the amount of jobs that are, in fact, bullshit. To give you a speedy summary of his book, Bullshit Jobs, it’s most of them. We are engaged, during these bullshit hours, in an animistic relationship with Capitalism. We are making an offering of our time through the ceremony of work to the altar of Capitalism, which is our place of employment, for the desired outcome of dollar dollar bills. And maybe also desiring some prestige.
I mentioned in the beginning that these practices are anti-establishment, and yet I am saying they are as fundamental to the establishment as cutting corners to lower costs. Well since you can’t escape it, the act of making offerings at altars, why not harness it? You are going to worship, you are going to make offerings, and so, to whom would you like to do so? Do you feed the system your time and outside of it, make offerings to an alternative? As Gordon White puts it, ‘fund the rescue mission, with the salvage mission.’
So what are offerings? Offerings are praise. They are gifts. They are smoke. They are colours. They are words. They are your presence. They indicate that you know your extra-physical body, you know what they want and how they like to receive it. Offerings are bound to ceremony, the entire ceremony is an offering and the offering is only given in ceremony. Knowing what they want and how to give it to them, is like knowing your friend and on their birthday giving them what they will appreciate.
It is no accident that those that know how to make offerings, at the right time, of the right material, to the right force/deity/extra-physical body, have bountiful lives. Just as in Chess there are rules to follow, in response to the target, toward an intended end of winning, that grants one greater success, the same is true of making offerings. This is called ceremony, making these offerings the right way, regularly.
The final component of this is the regularity. We are building relationships here and they take time and commitment to grow.
Offerings are the shape, colour, smell and texture of our love for these beings.
Ryan Dickinson