Never Could Walk the Line
Driving home with a load of hay, listening to Johnny Cash, wondering what I could burn as a sacrifice to Hecate, I start thinking that probably not many women on this road, driving truckloads of hay, and listening to Cash, are also contemplating witchcraft. Does this make me necessarily more interesting? Or is it automatically less interesting, because “being interesting” is a motive force for me? Not the only motive force, but maybe it taints everything it touches, so there’s a certain embarrassingly meta quality about all my love, or curiosity, or revenge.
Meta or not, the desire to burn something as a sacrificial offering is real. Thinking about burning is real. I have a truck full of a combustible material, and my truck is driven by combustion. I’m rumbling along on the cusp of a flame.
The internal combustion engine is insufficient for the goddess, however, and I have no intention of burning the hay. The questions about burnt offerings become pragmatic. Like, where to do it? If I start a fire in the back yard the kids will all come gathering around, asking if they can roast marshmallows. But I can’t just go wandering off into the neighbor’s field and start burning things (or can I?).
Then there’s the question of what to burn. Something I value, or something I hate? Which would Hecate prefer?
If I get the answers wrong, who knows, some solid citizen might call and have them send the firetrucks after me, and then it’s pretty awkward if I’d opted to burn, say, the testicles of some Nazi dudes who just happened to be scampering across my backyard at the right time. When I just happened to have my scythe handy. Oops. Now I have this whole conflagration of testicles to explain.
Even if it’s what Hecate wants, the fact is, when you’re castrating Nazis and burning their balls as an offering to ancient Greek goddesses, people tend not to be very understanding. They’re all “oh, the incivility!” Or “this is why Trump keeps winning.”
Now I’m worried that I went too far there, talking about castrating Nazis. Now I’m worried that I’m not interesting or edgy, but instead the kind of person from whom you instinctively back away. We’re allowed to hurt Nazis only in black and white movies, after all, and preferably if we’re men, not witches. One can even be a racist sort of man, hunting Nazis not to save the Jews or the gypsies, but because Nazi racism is just so damn un-American, all that marching around listening to Wagner.
Hecate deserves better than Nazi testicles, anyway. It’s November and most of the fruit has been picked already, but maybe I could find her one apple, one perfect apple, like the kind princesses ask for in story-books. Like the kind you eat when you think “fuck it, that snake had a point, I’d like to have knowledge like a God, for a change.”
Johnny Cash is singing about walking a line, but I think I stepped over mine long ago.
[headline photo credit: Michael Reed]