Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, somewhere to pray

On Saturday, I moved into my new apartment. It is absolutely gorgeous: walking distance from campus; a neighborhood where it is probably safe to walk after dark in a group of three or more people and maybe alone during the day (a step up from last year); a phenomenal kitchen; and one of the best views of the city I have seen (if you overlook the somewhat sketchy roofs on some of the apartments below).

I didn’t take out my shrine immediately — and this is probably a good thing. In such a hectic environment, it is probably not a good idea to start setting up until the basics are down.

The first order of business in the apartment was making it livable, or getting together the bed stuff and unpacking the kitchen so I could make pasta with zucchini and canned fish. I didn’t unpack my shrines until today — and it’s a good thing, too, because I had to shuffle the room around a lot to make sure that they were not right below the smoke alarm. (Why do all apartments in Syracuse put one in every room?)

My main shrine looks somewhat OK, but I have misplaced some of my agalmata and have no idea whether they are being stored at my mom’s house or have disappeared — everything of mine from storage has been unpacked. Among these is the one to Apollôn, which I confess I wasn’t very enthusiastic about. I think I could do much better with agalmata and would probably replace it if I knew how to dispose and/or store old images with respect.

I’m going to try something new with my main shrine this year: strategic storage of divine images. I have sorted them on a shelf, and I will only hang one or place it on the main shrine when the deity involved is being worshipped. The two exceptions will be Athênê and Apollôn. Athênê has a statue, and as I am attending a master’s degree program, I will probably pray to her a lot. Apollôn, of course, receives a lot of worship from me, so it really should remain out for simplicity’s sake. After setting up what I could, I made an offering to the household gods.

One of the most exciting things about moving things out of storage and organizing my apartment is that I once again have someplace to worship the Eumenides. All summer, I didn’t really worship them because the tiny sublet I had barely had enough room for a small incense burner to worship non-Chthonic deities, and I would rather not worship these powerful goddesses at a shrine where I also honor Ouranic gods (as before). After setting up a shrine to both them and the Kharites, I offered incense.

For the curious who don’t want to read my older blog entry, making a shrine to both the Eumenides and the Kharites comes from a passage in Kerényi: in Megalopolis in Arcadia, sacrifices were made to both simultaneously. Megalopolis has many, many different cultic associations for the Eumenides, many of which involve the flight of Orestes. If you want a more primary source for this, Pausanias recounts the custom of sacrificing to the Kharites along with the Eumenides (Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.34.1).

The incense I use is Shoyeido. In my last shipment, I purchased a small pouch of white ash because I prefer to burn down the entire core-free stick than to have little ends hanging around. That’s what is currently in the bowl, along with darker ash from burned incense.

Before I go off to roast this chicken, I will leave you with this poem to the Erinyes.