Blood Bone and Soil

Blood, bone, and soil is a curious amalgamation of folklore, myth, superstition, and ritual tradition. While its exact origins are unknown, in modern Avalon it is held as the centerpiece of the annual Harvest Celebration held every September on the Autumnal Equinox.

Summary

The cycle of life and death is ever-present in the Midwest, but never more so than at the harvest.

Late in September, on the first full day of autumn, the prize pig, chicken, sheep, and cow are all slaughtered as a part of this intense and ancient fertility ritual. They are butchered and prepared with aromatic wood and herbs. The villagers feast on the meat, and then the bones and organs are laid upon a pyre and consumed into ash. The ash is mixed with the blood from the slaughter and the ground mash from the first apple pressings. This is then used as fertilizer on the fields and orchards.

Legend says that doing so honors the spirits that inhabit the land and forest, the air, the water. Legend says that generosity toward these guardians is rewarded with bountiful crops and healthy livestock. Legend says that honoring the cycles of nature, of sowing and reaping, of life and death, will bring prosperity to the inhabitants of the land.

Legend also says that failure to do so would be interpreted as lack of gratitude by the spirits that inhabit the land and forest, the air, the water. Legend says that such poor manners would be met in kind with failed crops through blight, drought, and flood. Legend says that the people responsible for such unkindness to the land would be visited by three times three manifestations of their wickedness: nine goblins with eyes the color of summer leaves.

In Art

Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote about these goblins, or goblins akin to them, in his poem "The Nine Little Goblins."

And then the whole of the Goblin band
Rocked on the fence-top to and fro,
And clung, in a long row, hand in hand,
Singing the songs that they used to know--
Singing the songs that their grandsires sung
In the goo-goo days of the Goblin-tongue.

— James Whitcomb Riley, excerpt from "The Nine Little Goblins," 1885