Blotmonaþ – Month of Sacrifices

1st Waxing Crescent (still counts as a New Moon!) ♏️

One November morning……

“Blotmonaþ….. the month of sacrifices…. The cattle were to be slaughtered were consecrated to their gods.” Bede, The Reckoning of Time.

The wheel has turned and we now find our selves in the month of November, the month where autumn truly gives way to winter: the nights are drawing in long and dark, there is mist in the morning and evening, rich golden sunrises and sunsets, leaves blowing off the trees in the wind, and the first stars coming out just before the sky is taken by the black of night.

If Haleg-Monath saw the celebrations of the summer and autumnal harvest, then Blod-Monath saw the preparations of a different kind of harvest altogether: the ritual slaughter of livestock.

In Anglo-Saxon times, and indeed up until the Industrial Age, cattle were killed in order to provide more food for surviving through the winter. This also would have depended on the success of the harvest too. If the harvest was plentiful, then there was assurance you could feed both Man and beast, then cattle was killed at a manageable level in order for its meat to be salted and provide sustenance to see people through. Also allowing for enough cattle for the following year. If the harvest was poor, you’d have to work out how much grain you could share between people and live stock, anything over that would have been for the slaughter. Or if the harvest was a particularly bad one due to foul weather, disease, or even pests, then hard choices regarding one’s livestock had to be made. And this could have consequences on whether or not there would be any livestock left for the new year once winter had ebbed.

It is this responsibility of what to choose to be sacrificed (in the most practical sense of the word) that brings to my mind the rune poem for Nyð “Need”:

Nyð is hard on the heart, and yet for men’s sons, it often becomes help and healing if they heed it before.

-Stephen Pollington translation.

Knowing the harvest would be poor meant having to kill more livestock, then having to procure more in the winter months. But this is assuming you would be close to either another farmer or there was a market that would take place nearby. If not….. choices were grim indeed.

And for the times it wasn’t grim? A celebratory feast took place and bonfires were lit. It also seems this sacrifice of the cattle was performed as a rite for the gods. In certain temples and sites, such as those in Yeavering, East Anglia and in the south east of England, ox skulls had been found buried, it is thought they were either a gift to the gods or were seen as some source of magic.

Blotmonaþ takes its name from the word blot, meaning ‘sacrifice’, although some sources give it as ‘Blodmonaþ’ from blod, meaning ‘blood’. Both are relevant as they both come from the proto-Germanic bloþą. From what is understood of the Scandinavian pre-Christian rites, blood was used in offerings to the gods and was also used to spatter onto buildings and people in attendance with sticks being dipped into the blood and it being ceremonially flung out as a blessing.

We don’t have any evidence if the Anglo- Saxons did this in their own pagan ceremonies, as Bede glazes over this with:

‘Thanks be to you, Good Jesu, who has turned us away from such vanities and granted us to offer you the sacrifice of praise.‘

Indeed, the Christians were unable to stop the sacrifices and bonfires but did succeed in changing the focus of the worship of the gods into the Sacrifice of praise to the Christian God, sacrificing the cattle as a means to survive the winter and giving thanks to God for his bounty as well as his blessing they would survive the winter.

The sacrifices later became part of the Martinmas celebrations, this festival taking its name from the feast of St Martin that takes place on the 11th November. This feast had more of a merry influence from what was reported by Bede and celebrated the cooking and eating of meat that was to be enjoyed rather than that which was salted.

Strangely enough, the word bless actually comes from Anglo-Saxon origin! The term blotan “To Sacrifice” was no longer used by the time Early English transitioned into Middle English. Perhaps the Anglo-Saxon church saw the word as loaded with its pagan past and so sought another word to be their version of the Latin benedicere ‘speaking well’ and found this in the verb bletsian ‘to consecrate with blood’. The church came to use this as bletsung ‘blessing’ and praise of God, until it became the word bless as we know it today.

Now in present day England, we don’t slaughter our cattle as sacrifices to deities, Pagan or Christian, but we do burn bonfires especially on the fifth of November, traditionally celebrating the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Which in turn, has become more of a fireworks display. And who knew that ‘bless’ came from the bloody rites of the past?

Whatever the month of November means to you, may your home be warm and dry and may your winter be kind.

Be well!

Locksley /|\