Pagan ritual

What was it with beans in the ancient world? From Ovid's Fasti:

 This day they call the Feralia because they bear (ferunt)
Offerings to the dead: the last day to propitiate the shades.

See, an old woman sitting amongst the girls performs the rites
Of Tacita, the Silent (though she herself is not silent),
With three fingers, she sets three lumps of incense
Under the sill, where the little mouse makes its secret path:

Then she fastens enchanted threads together with dark lead,
And turns seven black beans over and over in her mouth,
And bakes the head of a sprat in the fire, mouth sewn up
With pitch, pierced right through with a bronze needle.

She drops wine on it too, and she or her friends
Drink the wine that’s left, though she gets most.

On leaving she says: ‘We have sealed up hostile mouths
And unfriendly tongues’: and the old woman exits drunk. 

(I wonder if by Ovid's time anybody remembered the "why" for any part of that ritual.)

Pythagoras had odd beliefs about fava beans. Romans had an odd anti-ghost ritual that involved black beans:

When midnight comes, lending silence to sleep,
And all the dogs and hedgerow birds are quiet,
He who remembers ancient rites, and fears the gods,
Rises (no fetters binding his two feet)
And makes the sign with thumb and closed fingers,
Lest an insubstantial shade meets him in the silence.

After cleansing his hands in spring water,
He turns and first taking some black beans,
Throws them with averted face: saying, while throwing:
‘With these beans I throw I redeem me and mine.’
He says this nine times without looking back: the shade
Is thought to gather the beans, and follow behind, unseen.
Again he touches water, and sounds the Temesan bronze,

And asks the spirit to leave his house.
When nine times he’s cried: ‘Ancestral spirit, depart,’
He looks back, and believes the sacred rite’s fulfilled.
Why the day’s so called, and the origin of the name,
Escapes me: that’s for some god to discover.

Compare and contrast neo-pagan ritual.

I think Wright spotted a couple of contradictions in neopagan thought:

Two major paradoxes loomed in their worship. The first was that real pagans honored and obeyed their fathers, and revered the household gods, and worshipped the gods of the city and the marketplace, and respected their ancestors and founders. The poor neopagans were the children of evangelicals, so the gods of city and agora were Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the ancestors and founders of THIS nation were monotheists, all stout Christians with an odd Deist, Jew, or Freemason thrown in for flavor.

This places the diligent neopagan in the odd position of being obligated by ritual and tradition to offer due reverence and worship to the altars of his fathers and the temples of his gods, but those altars are Christian, and those temples are cathedrals.

Related to this was the problem of the Asatru — the True Men — who were allegedly worshippers of Odin and Thor, but only one of them volunteered for service in the military, which, alas, he survived intact. Those not falling in battle were doomed to the “straw death” and an afterlife in Folkvangr rather than Valhalla, hence not to stand with the gods at the Last Battle.

The second paradox was that the Old Gods were actually quite strict about sexual morality. A Vestal Virgin caught coupling with a man was buried alive. To the North, the adulterers were sent to Nastrond at death, not Valhalla.

Lewis did a fine takedown of ignorant admirers of the pagan. "You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune)."