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.