#vegetation god

[dvoeverie-stitches]

Chase away, Saint George, evil powers from our doors.

Honoring both Svaty Jíři (Saint George) and Jarilo

[pagansquare]

Who Is God of Furniture?

Do an image-search for “Green Man Chair.” Go ahead. You'll be amazed at what you find.

Read more...

[worldofcelts]

King of the Woods

“In his character of the founder of the sacred grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one after the other, to a violent end. It is natural, therefore, to conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same relation in which Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not only have worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife.” 

- The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer

[dvoeverie-stitches]

Celebrating St. George’s Eve (Czech Date) with Pork

I tend to use pork in my ritual and celebratory meals—especially when dealing with resurrection. Maybe because of Sæhrímnir, or maybe it’s just my love of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather!

I used my resurrection salt (my tongue in cheek description of the salt I consecrated at the creek on Easter) to celebrate/coax/aid and abet my resurrected god of choice, Jarilo, in our St. George’s Eve dinner.

Besides řízek, I made houbová omáčka, because that’s my number one side dish with řízek, but also for the mushroom symbolism of life emerging from darkness—and you know, penis stuff because fertility god!

I also made potatoes because that’s my number two side dish with řízek, but also because of @msgraveyarddirt . Because of her I will always associate potatoes with Svaty Jíři.

[dvoeverie-stitches]

3.20.19

My Jarilo pieces for the Spring Equinox.

[petitepointplace]

Dying/Resurrected Vegetation God.

Jarilo

Jarilo was a son of the supreme Slavic god of thunder, Perun, his lost, missing, tenth son, born on the last night of February, the festival of Velja Noć (Great Night), the pagan Slavic celebration of the New Year. On the same night, however, Jarilo was stolen from his father and taken to the world of the dead, where he was adopted and raised by Veles, Perun's enemy, Slavic god of the underworld and cattle. The Slavs believed the underworld to be an ever-green world of eternal spring and wet, grassy plains, where Jarilo grew up guarding the cattle of his stepfather. In the mythical geography of ancient Slavs, the land of the dead was assumed to lie across the sea, where migrating birds would fly every winter.

With the advent of spring, Jarilo returned from the underworld, that is, bringing spring and fertility to the land. Spring festivals of Jurjevo/Jarilo that survived in later folklore celebrated his return. Katičić identified a key phrase of ancient mythical texts which described this sacred return of vegetation and fertility as a rhyme hoditi/roditi [2] (to walk/to give birth to), which survived in folk songs:

...Gdje Jura/Jare/Jarilo hodit, tam vam polje rodit...

"...Where Jura/Jare/Jarilo walks, there your field gives birth..."

The first of the gods to notice Jarilo's return to the living world was Morana, a goddess of death and nature, and also a daughter of Perun and Jarilo's twin-sister. The two of them would fall in love and court each other through a series of traditional, established rituals, imitated in various Slavic courting or wedding customs. The divine wedding between brother and sister, two children of the supreme god, was celebrated in a festival of summer solstice, today variously known as Ivanje or Ivan Kupala in the various Slavic countries. This sacred union of Jarilo and Morana, deities of vegetation and of nature, assured abundance, fertility and blessing to the earth, and also brought temporary peace between two major Slavic gods, Perun and Veles, signifying heaven and underworld. Thus, all mythical prerequisites were met for a bountiful and blessed harvest that would come in late summer.

However, since Jarilo's life was ultimately tied to the vegetative cycle of the cereals, after the harvest (which was ritually seen as a murder of crops), Jarilo also met his death. The myth explained this by the fact that he was unfaithful to his wife, and so she (or her father Perun, or his other nine sons, her brothers) kills him in retribution. This rather gruesome death is in fact a ritual sacrifice, and Morana uses parts of Jarilo's body to build herself a new house. This is a mythical metaphor which alludes to rejuvenation of the entire cosmos, a concept fairly similar to that of Scandinavian myth of Ymir, a giant from whose body the gods created the world.

Without her husband, however, Morana turns into a frustrated old hag, a terrible and dangerous goddess of death, frost and upcoming winter, and eventually dies by the end of the year. At the beginning of the next year, both she and Jarilo are born again, and the entire myth starts anew.

Wikipedia

[petitepointplace]

In Babylonia, the month Tammuz was established in honor of the eponymous god Tammuz, who originated as a Sumerian shepherd-god, Dumuzid or Dumuzi, the consort of Inanna and, in his Akkadian form, the parallel consort of Ishtar. The Levantine Adonis ("lord"), who was drawn into the Greek pantheon, was considered by Joseph Campbell among others to be another counterpart of Tammuz,[1] son and consort. The Aramaic name "Tammuz" seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid.[citation needed] The later standard Sumerian form, Dumu-zid, in turn became Dumuzi in Akkadian. Tamuzi also is Dumuzid or Dumuzi.

Beginning with the summer solstice came a time of mourning in the Ancient Near East, as in the Aegean: the Babylonians marked the decline in daylight hours and the onset of killing summer heat and drought with a six-day "funeral" for the god. Recent discoveries reconfirm him as an annual life-death-rebirth deity: tablets discovered in 1963 show that Dumuzi was in fact consigned to the Underworld himself, in order to secure Inanna's release,[2] though the recovered final line reveals that he is to revive for six months of each year

[petitepointplace]

Attis /ˈætɪs/ (Greek: Ἄττις or Ἄττης) was the consort of Cybele in Phrygian and Greek mythology.[1] His priests were eunuchs, the Galli, as explained by origin myths pertaining to Attis and castration. Attis was also a Phrygian god of vegetation, and in his self-mutilation, death, and resurrection he represents the fruits of the earth, which die in winter only to rise again in the spring.[2]