Burnt Offerings

Yesterday I was standing in my yard and found an empty Marlboro cigarette pack that looked like it had been chewed in half. It’s not really uncommon to find random trash in my yard but I can usually figure up a possible origin of said trash. I smoke but, I don’t smoke Marlboro. My nearest neighbor doesn’t smoke, and my next nearest neighbors are a couple of hundred feet away. It wouldn’t be outside of the range of possibilities for one of my cats to chew it in half. One of them, in particular, I’m sure would have hunted it, he’s Just creative like that.
What it reminded me of was a time when I was a child that I went outside to play, I was five I think, and as I played in the yard I started to find headless kittens and their heads as well. Quite gruesome I guess for a five year old. I went to tell my mother and she cleaned them up. She told me later that someone had done it to revile her because they thought she was a witch. 
I’ve heard of things where in medieval times people would burn cats in a basket and every time a cat screamed it would cut the devil.  The sacrificing of animals is probably one of the oldest religious rites in existence. People still do it as a matter of fact whether as part of a religious rite or whatever excuse they can come up with.  In Abraham’s day as well as Noah’s, the smell of a burnt offering was pleasing to the Lord, so pleasing that it could buy forgiveness for almost anything. In the days of Moses' it always seemed more to me to be a kosher thing, the cleansing of meat of all its parts deemed unhealthy for consumption. In these days animal sacrifice is performed by misguided deviants. In the eighties sacrificing German Shepard’s in the name of Satan was pretty common. 
I’ve read a lot of things on the subject and never have I came across anything about chopping the heads off kittens and throwing them in a witches yard but, I don’t need to read anything to know that cutting the heads off kittens out of fear is a heiness act that would indeed put someone beneath any witch.

Salutation Pending 
Johnny R Draper 

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