How You Got Here: Blog Updates and Stats

You may have noticed that my blog looks different now. I’ve moved the tag cloud to the bottom of the page and have switched from my custom theme to one Blogger provides, primarily because I may want to turn some of my posts for beginners into Pages with the new feature. People might find stuff more easily that way. I chose the background because it reminds me of ornithomancy, or the divination of birds, practiced in Ancient Greece.

2011 was a good year for this blog. All in all, I had 3422 unique visitors, including some from countries that engage in heavy Internet censorship, so I’m obviously doing something right.

	Keyword	Visits
	kallisti	501
	hellenic polytheism	255
	asklepios, hellenismos	89
	hera poem	63
	(not provided)	54
	kallisti apple in pandemonium	44
	poem about hera	33
	poems about hera	27
	pandemonium apple	25
	diasia festival	20
	giant rocks	17
	polytheists pagans	17
	pandemonium apple blog	16
	an apple in pandemonium	15
	pagan erinyes blog	15
	writingkaye	14
	hera poems	13
	kallisti blog	11
	a poem about hera	10
	apple in pandemonium	10
	poem of hera	10
	giant rock	9
	kallisti apple	8

I wonder what “not provided” means. Maybe the Annunaki cowboys whipping Nibiru into the inner solar system are just coasting along to death metal chatting about my site with their Reptilian buddies. (And now I’m going to get more New Age landing keywords. You just can’t win, can you?)

The page people visit most is the one I wrote about Sacred Source and the statues. For some reason, people love that thing to death. The originality of their keywords never ceases to amaze me. It’s a bit disappointing that so many people get here searching for sex when that’s not generally what I write about. I know that giving you some of the really interesting ones is going to only make more people just trying to find some goat sex sad. Still, here are some of my favorites:

ancient archeology sex exhibit man and goat
ancient gods sex with aliens
sex mad goat
taliban sex with goat
sex art of pompie

How did someone get to my blog when s/he can’t even spell Pompeii properly?

Of course, sometimes people ask questions in their searches. I don’t know that they find answers, but I’d like to give one of them a try:

Where’s the temple of the Erinyes?

The Erinyes had cult centers in Keryneia, Megalopolis, Athens, Haliartos, Myonia, and Rome, among other places. In Athens, they had a sanctuary as the Semnai Theai near the Areopagos (Hill of Ares), the murder court of Athens. Phyla and Myrrhinos, also in Attika, also had altars for the Erinyes as the Semnai Theai. You can find most of the information you need on Theoi.com’s page about the Erinyes: http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Erinyes6.html

Lines from Pindar

τελεῖ δὲ θεῶν δύναμις καὶ τὰν παρ᾽ ὅρκον καὶ παρὰ ἐλπίδα κούφαν κτίσιν.
The power of the gods accomplishes as a light achievement what is contrary to oaths and expectations.

Olympian XIII: For Xenophon of Corinth, Pindar. (Greek) (English)

I love this section from Pindar because it reminds me of exertion, Aesop, and achievement. Exertion because it was written for an athlete; Aesop because it reminds me of the fable about the shipwreck survivor who wanted Athene to save him without actually trying to stay afloat by himself; and achievement because it shows just how insignificant our whims and goals are next to the way the gods move us.

Apollon, Arete, and the New (Secular) Year

The resolutions I have made for the new secular year all involve becoming a healthier person in different ways, both physically and spiritually. Sometimes, I feel like my religious devotion peaked before Kyklos Apollon shifted from every Sunday at dawn in Delphi, Greece, to the seventh of the lunar month. The infrequency does not sit well with me. The list and Facebook group have quieted down a lot since.

On the third of January, I performed a ritual purification to Apollon for the first time in many months, reciting hymns and making multiple offerings. I mentioned a lot about things that had been burning in my chest — a really good image, as most of the issues I raised involved a great deal of anger, and anger is an emotion that’s very difficult to clean up after. (Akhilleus’s anger fuels the entire Iliad, remember?) Apollon brought me to Hellenism and helped the cards fall into place that would guide me to do the Kyklos ritual and honor him appropriately. I feel nothing but gratitude for him, and I feel like the purification helped me convey that. Our relationship is probably fairly typical of Apollon and his devotees.

It helps to make the offerings in the traditional ritual style, another place where I have made shortcuts since graduate school started last year. Building rapport with the gods in a ritual (at least for me) requires having that structure to create the appropriate resonance and ensure that the sacrifices of incense and pure water are accepted.

Along with setting the goal of doing the ritual for Apollon at least three times each month, I’m also reviving my first Twitter account, where I post extemporaneous poetry that I sometimes write during or just after ritual. You can follow me at @annyikha if interested. I get caught on imagery a lot. While reading through older poems, I found that I spent a few months completely fixated on the idea of vines choking people and bursting through their skin like in some kind of SyFy original film.

Of course, my health has also wavered ever since the middle of December, so I came down with a fever and sore throat a few hours after completing the ritual. This brings me to my less explicitly religious resolutions. My health has a lot to do with how I eat, and the lifestyle choices I have made for the past few months have not been good choices: piles of refined white grains, too much meat, not enough fermented products, and too little time spent at the gym. I want to take a cycling class and/or yoga from the university this semester and cut down my consumption of meat to what it was this past summer, and I want a lot of that meat to again be in the form of anchovies, sardines, and other small fish. It’s all about committing to cultivating arete, and I don’t know that I can keep my mind fresh and my spirituality healthy without strengthening my body.

Image credit: Urban [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.