Page 93 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“So everyone keeps telling me.”
“—you know exactly why you’re saying a Mass. You know who the Mass is remembering, you know what it’s remembering. The why is present in every facet of it; there’s no separating the myth from the ritual.”
“And this is a ritual without myth, is that what you’re saying?” Becket asks.
“It’s a ritual without meaning,” Saint clarifies. “I’m sorry to always be the one protesting, but I just—” He breaks off, looking frustrated. “If we can’t assign meaning to what we’re doing, then how will we know if we’re doing it right?”
Delphine makes a tired little noise. “Why can’t it just be a game? A bit of fun? Why is that so bad? We talked about Imbolc like it was a game too before we did it, and it ended up being magic. Why can’t we do the same now?”
Rebecca nods in agreement, as does Becket, but Saint sighs. “Isn’t that a little disrespectful?” he asks. “To the people who made these myths?”
That sends a blanket of quiet over the room for a moment.
“I think they’d be honored,” Auden says. “If we’re remembering them and the things that are important to them. If we’re doing this in the same spirit as they were.”
“Which was?” Saint asks.
Auden raises his eyes to the thick trees outside the window, his stare thoughtful. “I think they were afraid. They knew famine and disease and violence and cold. They needed to negotiate with that fear. But I also think they wanted to celebrate the things worth celebrating. Life, good crops, babies, all of that. Maybe we don’t see the world as sentient, unknowable chaos like they did, but aren’t we driven still by fear? By the need to mark the good things in the midst of the bad? That, I think they would understand, and they would see that we’re cherishing the tools they left us, even if we use them differently.”
From Auden, who’s normally the most skeptical of us, this is surprisingly heartening.
I beam at him. “I like you.”
He glances down at me, mouth tipped into an almost-smile. “Oh, do you?”
“Okay then,” Saint says. “I buy it. We make our own meaning and we do the stag-hunt our way. So what exactly is that going to be like again?”
“I’ll grab some paper so we can take notes,” volunteers Becket.
I’m already moving pictures around and Delphine’s stuck her head out the library door to call for Abby and Prosecco.
“The Record says we’re praying to Mary and not St. Brigid,” Rebecca says at the same time Becket says, “I’m still worried about the gendering of the Great Rite.”
“I have an idea about that!” I say excitedly. “The Great Rite, I mean, not St. Brigid.”
Delphine comes back. “Do you think we’ll need ring lights?”
“Ring lights?” Saint asks.
She sniffs at his ignorance. “For pictures, Saint. For pictures.”
“I’m comfortable praying to the Virgin Mary,” Rebecca continues, “but if there’s going to be sex, isn’t that strange? Why would they have a sex festival and pray to a virgin?”
“Is that a serious question?” I ask, and earn a Domme glare for it.
“My guess is that she represents an aspect of the goddess,” Becket interrupts in his favorite know-it-all tone. “May is the month Catholics celebrate Mary, and some of our devotions to her are very nature and spring driven—crowning her with flowers, et cetera. Additionally, the Mary-Jesus dyad makes a lot of sense in light of some of the more ancient beliefs, where the consort of the goddess is actually her son.”
“Her consort was her son . . . ?” Delphine asks, looking around at us to see if anyone else is confused. When she sees the scandalized looks on our faces, she catches on. “Oh. Ewwww.”
Becket ducks when she throws an archival glove at him. “It’s not like I traveled back in time and invented it!”
“But you did lob an incest bomb into the conversation,” Saint points out.
“Incest is a social construct!” Becket protests, and then more archival gloves are thrown in his direction.
Auden clears his throat, and just like that, our racket dies down. We turn to look at him, but he’s not looking at us. His eyes are on the pictures of the young men and their antler headdresses.
“I think,” he says quietly, “that I want to be the stag king.”
