Hello everyone.
Welcome back to another post, Art and Meaning, where creator Scott K Smith discusses the creation and meaning behind the art he is presenting.
I’m inspired to explain each piece I have created, explain the ins and outs of the work while leaving a little mystery, and suggest ways you might integrate the art into your home, magickal space, or office. Each piece is unique, and they all have a story to tell, and mysteries to reveal because I make magickal art, these aren’t just images scrawled on a pad and printed on a shop simply for pleasure, they come seeded with energy to wed to your intentions and create a happy magickal marriage of your desire and manifestation through art.
Lammas Figure – Sacrifice
The Wheel of the Year is a constructed, modern neo-pagan wheel of occult mystery. When we follow the path of the wheel, celebrate each of the eight rituals, we open the gate to a deeper path of understanding our world. Although the mythic representations on the wheel may not match our current environmental experiences, they touch upon the nature cycle, which is within us, and about us. Mythic truths aren’t literal truths, they are folkloric keys to understanding certain mysteries thread and overlap our own, and which we are a part of.
Lammas, or Loaf Mass, or Lughnassadh is the Funeral Feast of Lugh, and according to the practice I observe in the Temple of Witchcraft, is the first of our “harvest rituals. It speaks to the myth of sacrificial kings, and what we must give in order to continue, often especially for the community. It can be a time of considering the consequence of actions, and rulership, as the sign of the season is Leo, and I like to observe prideful attachments (myself).
The image I created titled, “Sacrifice – Lammas ” is an inspired piece, created in ritual trance, to draw forth the mystery, allowing my creative self and the unconscious to translate what I practice, and the resonate images in current culture from music, religion, and the time and tides we live. This piece, therefore, is for now, and represents the question this Lammas, what are we willing to put to the thresher, what golden corn will come out of that sacrifice of the whole, for the parts, that will contribute to the future of the whole again.
The figure in the center is wrapped in corn husk, crowned in a kernel-like hat turned pales blue by the influence of the big sky, threads of the corn silk wispy, tangled, and wild create the frame of his ripeness for harvest. A little thread of green, representing the green life, still threads through the open husk, which has become black, referencing the dark tide of waning light. The read threads represent the blood, the sacrifice, and the life. The Golden Sun of Leo frames the figure, and the hint of a cross, suggesting both the the wheel mysteries, and the blood and body mysteries from Christianity, is colored blue like the sky. He is wrapped in red thread, as we build our corn dollies, as effigies of what we will let go.
While creating this piece the song “A Forest” by The Cure, repeated. I think that both the dark base, and sense of wandering brought about by a willow the wisp like experience, was inspiring.
How to use
I’ve given some ideas on how to integrate my work into whatever it is you do, be it simple adornment, or something more ritual. Magick, once manifest, does its thing on its own so just presenting the art somewhere is magick enough.
I was taken by the following pieces when I set and edited this piece on redbubble.com
Acrylic blocks
Art Board Prints
I also have a few other suggestions on the previous post,
To learn more about this particular mystery of the Wheel of the Year and where I put a lot of my ritual effort and magick, please check this post out by author and teacher, founder of the Temple of Witchcraft, Christopher Penczak, from Witches & Pagans.
For more of my art you can visit my personal site:
More art and Images for Lammas here:
https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Lammas-Figure-by-StarStoneLLC/149014202.EJUG5
I hope you enjoyed.
Scott K Smith
Founder, Artist, Writer, Witch
Star Stone Education LLC
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