Editor’s note:This column contains description of butchering an animal.
When we became brothers, I brought honey, heavy cream, oats, and cider. We had gone apple picking – I brought some of those as well, spread out in the circle they had woven into the pasture they keep on their land. Thousands of miles from my house, these were the offerings I could cobble together, the kinds of gifts that I am used to giving in my own practice. A ritual this important could have, perhaps, benefited from a stronger liquor – but binding us together and binding myself to the land was the culmination of years of work from both of us, and I figured that work would count. Besides, they were bringing the real power to the ritual. They brought the rabbit.
The hutches form a line along the fence, hand-built wooden structures with their rotating cast of mammals. When I’m visiting, they’re my chore – food and water and mucking out the inevitable pile of pellets that somehow manages to accumulate in the corner of the mesh floor. It’s interesting, taking care of a mammal. I know them well enough to know their personalities and to have my favorites. I’ve held the babies an hour after they arrived, snuffling in the hollow of my palm, and I’ve helped to bury the ones that didn’t make it. They are not my rabbits, but I’ve involved myself in their lives – knowing all the time that they are livestock, from the same line as the dumplings my brother feeds me for supper.
That day was the first time my brother involved me in the last part of the process. They had let the most recent litter grow bigger than they might have; even with all of the space in the biggest hutch the kids were starting to crowd their mama. We took one of the largest out, my brother using practiced hands to dodge the sharp claws as he kicked and struggled. It wasn’t fear – he’d been handled and petted since he was a kit – but surprise that quieted as soon as we got him over to the butchering rig.
“So we have a quick way to do it,” my brother explained, petting the rabbit as he nibbled the grass, pleased to be on the ground. “We’ll break the neck, then string him up here,” they demonstrated, showing me how the pulley and rope could be tied off above the bucket, “and bleed him out. That means he’ll already be hanging, which is the easiest way to butcher. And that’s it, honestly. We’ll put him on the grill and eat him, and freeze the rest to process later. I guess it’s not a ritual, really, not the way you do yours. We’d be butchering him anyway, next week.”
I looked over the tools – a knife, a large stick, a bucket, a bowl. “Will you show me how to do it?”
A butcher’s diagram of a pig. [public domain]
I was raised with livestock. Growing up, fall meant butchering season for the chickens we had received as chicks that spring. Those days are some of the strongest memories I have of my childhood – the weight of the bird, the smell of scalded feathers, the grit of cleaning off the butchering surfaces while my dad packed the freezer with food for the winter. They are not always pleasant memories, but I credit them with some of my attitude towards animals. I am not sure whether someone who has not raised and slaughtered an animal that they will depend on for food can understand the fond, respectful distance I hold for everything but the dearest pets. I have always known that animals are individuals, living and opinionated and worthy of care. Most of the animals I have known have also, with no conflict or contradiction, been food.
This is the context I brought to my first Heathen blot, an indoor ritual at a long table in an upscale suburb. “I try to do things traditionally,” the host said as we settled into the ritual. “Which means I should have two pigs heads on spikes in the yard, and this-” he held up the bowl of water in his hands – “should be blood. But I think the neighbors would object.”
I frowned, confused. It was my first ritual, after all. “The neighbors wouldn’t have to see,” I said, trying to be helpful. “It’s dark. And any butcher shop will be able to get you a pig head. Or blood. Blood’s cheap. Sometimes they don’t even charge.”
The host’s eyes slid over me. “We’ll use this to cleanse each of you,” he continued, holding up the bowl, and I settled back into my chair, confused. On one hand, I was glad I wouldn’t have to get bloodstains out of my t-shirt. On the other – why talk about wanting to be entirely traditional if he wasn’t willing to do it? More importantly – what would the “missing” elements have added to the ritual? I knew that several of the people at the table with me were vegan, and would have had stronger reactions than any neighbors to being spritzed with pig’s blood.
Besides, the blood from the store was usually… unpleasant, after being refrigerated. I thought about the host loading up his fir sprig and accidentally flicking a clot at someone and gagged unobtrusively. No, you’d have to warm up the blood to get it to work. Honestly, it would make more sense if the body was fresh…
Once I realized that, the entire idea refocused. If the texts he was pulling this information from were about a major ritual, then of course the best offering would be livestock. The time and care of raising an animal, the dedication of a major source of food – that was a sacrifice that seemed more meaningful than the energetic release of a life already destined for slaughter. Plus, I knew enough to know that butchering down a large mammal would be messy. Asperging the assembled with blood would mean something very different if they had been helping and were already red to the elbows. Setting aside the heads would mean setting aside food, but food that took a lot more work to render down than the bulk of the body. I knew that excavations of holy sites were more likely to find skulls than any other part of the body, which made sense, if the main parts were eaten, or taken home to process and store.
The host flicked the water in my face at an angle, so that it was less likely to hit the statue of the god with the horned helmet behind me. I winced, and compared the image in my head – a community making their gods a part of their annual work of survival – with an imagined world where thirty dollars and a trip to the store ended with blood on my face. It wasn’t the same act. It carried none of the same weight. Even if my host had bought a pig, learned to slaughter it, invited us all to the ritual – it would be a breaking of taboo, an investment of time and effort, but it would not be a real harvest. We would not have helped to birth the piglets, raised and fed them, faced the real danger of a fully grown pig at bay.
There was, I realized, no way for this metropolitan group to do anything like what I imagined as a ‘traditional’ blot. Better to use the water as a simple symbol of cleansing and clarity.
Afterwards the host came up to me.“It’s just too complicated,” he explained, drinking store-bought mead from a cow’s horn. “Finding a butcher’s shop, explaining why I want a pig’s head. And I need to maintain a good relationship with my neighbors.”
I held my own horn, and pulled my cloak around myself, and nodded. I swallowed my suggestions, my theories, my understanding of the ritual itself. “I get it,” I said, and realized for the first time that we were not talking about the same thing.
Barent Fabritius (1624–1673), “The Slaughtered Pig,” 1656 [public domain
In practice, it is not complicated at all. My brother puts the stick across the back of the rabbit’s neck and steps down, pinning it to the ground. I take its back legs and yank upward, fast and hard enough that the neck snaps instantly. “Good job,” they say, and show me how to thread a hook into the strong back legs, how to open it up. I remark on how clear each muscle is, how the cuts practically suggest themselves, and they laugh. “Rabbits are made to eat,” they agree, and butcher down half before handing me the blade. I gather up the offal, the inedible bits, in a bowl. The rest we bag, or put right onto the grill and from there into our mouths, hot and good in a way that very few things match.
By the time we’re done, there are smears of grease and charcoal on our hands, and I realize I still have a dry patch of blood around my knuckles. I dust it off, and think of the offerings I’d bought or brought from home. They are valuable, truly given – but different. In that moment, they seem extraneous, icing on a cake so rich it is already dripping.
My brother looks at me cautiously. “If you want to do the ritual now?” they offer from across the fire, and I think about it before I shake my head, probing with the intuition I use for my magic.
“It’s done,” I say. “Anything else – I mean, it’s nice, but it’s extra. You know?”
They grin, and nod. “I agree,” they say. “We’re brothers. This is your home now.”
I stretch, satisfied. “Great,” I agree. “We should get to work, get things cleaned up. You said you wanted sausage this winter? I’ll set up the grinder.”
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