Indiscriminate Blessings

Pagans love to bless things. Whether or not they are sincere about it is immaterial. No matter whether you met just that moment or have known and despised one another for a decade, still
the proprieties must be observed, and observed with a treacly smile and a chirpy "Blessed be!" (This may or may not be accompanied by a Creepy Hug, which is a topic we'll address at a later time.) The process will be repeated upon departure, making "blessed be" the same sort of multipurpose greeting as "aloha."

The even perkier variant, "Bright Blessings!" is almost invariably used in a passive-aggressive manner. It is most effective as a sign-off to an offensive email or message board post. Nothing gets the message across faster than six paragraphs of poorly-spelled and poorly-reasoned flamebait capped off with "Bright Blessings!!!" (Superfluous punctuation is also de rigeur.) The general rule is, the level of the poster's sincerity is in inverse proportion to the size of the font and the number of exclamation points. "Bright Blessings," in paganspeak, is roughly analgous to "die in a fire."

The other most commonly used all-purpose blessing is "namaste." This is a Sanskrit compound word, from namas (to bow) and te (to you), and is a culturally-specific salutation common in India and Nepal which has since been widely disseminated thanks to Eastern disciplines of yoga and meditation becoming popular in the West. Most pagans don't know or care about the etymology of the word, because it sounds cool and lends an air of multicultural exoticism to their communications. (Speaking foreign languages where there are perfectly good English words available is a method of one-upmanship which we will also tackle in a later post.)

(Note also that the very word "bless" appears to derive from the Old English blodsian, meaning "to make sacred or holy by marking with blood." No doubt many of the pagans brightly blessing their coreligionists with chirpy words and creepy hugs would prefer to be marking them with blood, but that being frowned upon by the larger culture and often prohibited by law, they make do with what they have. Blessed be, readers!