KALLISTI: An Apple in Pandemonium

How You Got Here: Blog Updates and Stats

2012-01-08T13:44:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-07T01:17:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-05T18:20:00.000-05:00

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.

Delicious Hellenism

2011-12-31T20:15:00.001-05:00

I have gotten somewhat bad about finding and adding new blogs. When I started blogging about Hellenism a few years ago, I think I had more fingers than there were blogs. Sannion was still on LJ and there was very little Hellenic web presence outside of the closed Yahoo! Groups. Now, we have a Facebook group, tons of bloggers, and a fairly sizable, albeit small, community.

I’ve created a Delicious Stack:

http://delicious.com/stacks/view/Imc7kJ

To submit a link to the Stack, please save your blog to Delicious with the tag “hellenicblogs,” plus a few more tags describing your subject matter (i.e., Dionysos, generalhellenism, prayers, quotations), along with a description. I will pick it up and add it to the Stack in a few days. Please be patient, though, as I am a graduate student and may not check every day. If you don’t have or want a Delicious account, you can always comment here with the information you want added.

Also, if you like the idea of such a resource, please share it.

Beyond the Grave

2011-12-31T18:09:00.000-05:00

The other day, I was doing research about Buddhism for a writing project, and I stumbled across something on Tricycle’s blog that looked interesting. The guest post, “Dying with Confidence,” discusses how we can prepare for the ultimate end of our mortality — especially when it comes to those we have left behind:

Third, we should work on developing a good relationship not only with a qualified spiritual teacher but also with a group of what Rinpoche calls Entrusted Dharma Friends. These are people who we have practiced with, ideally for many years, who will know what to do at the time of death. They, along with our spiritual friend, will be able to support us as we die, helping us to do our final practices as well as assure our loved ones that they need not worry about our spiritual well-being.

The suggestions in the blog (and in the book it advertises for) seem very compelling to others belonging to minority religions in the United States. Like many in Tricycle’s demographic, most Hellenists in the USA and abroad are converts, and all of us have family members who really don’t want to research how to appropriately manage our funerals when they are in the middle of bereavement.

I know that I haven’t spoken about my final wishes or about the people my parents and family should contact in the event of my untimely demise. (The most I ever broached to my mother ended with a sarcastic comment from her about a coin for Kharon.) Hopefully, at this place in my life, the Fates will see fit to give me many, many years during which I can cultivate these kinds of relationships and engage in other life passage ceremonies that will solidify ritual-based relationships with other Hellenes before I need to rely on someone else to say and do all of the appropriate postmortem actions. It worries me sometimes that people won’t respect my wishes for cremation or take the time to honor my remains with periodic tokens of affection. Then again, we can only do our best to plan for when we’re not here.

Of course, we may have more to look forward to:

Δοξαν μη λειπε (Do Not Abandon Your Reputation)

2011-12-06T23:45:00.001-05:00

From Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon:

δόξα, n.
[....]
II. 1. the opinion which others have of one, estimation, reputation, credit, honour, glory, Lat.existimation, Solon., Aesch., etc.; δόξαν ἔχειν Thuc., etc.; τινός for a thing, Eur.:—rarely of ill repute, Dem. 2. the estimate popularly formed of a thing, id=Dem.

After reading about this article on the Wild Hunt, I tried to be offended by the caricature, but failed miserably.

I’m mostly confused about what that mass of woodlike stuff is because the perspective seems a bit off. Did caricature-Halloran sacrifice an animal using a tumbleweed instead of a knife? How is that even possible?

Dan Halloran is a bit of a sticky subject for me. He’s a conservative Heathen, while I am a progressive Hellenist. I think the article captured some of the difficulties in reconstructionist communities and in politics, where so many Type A personalities interact that it sometimes becomes difficult to discern when someone actually disagrees with you or if you have just offended their vastly superior intellect:

“He always thinks he’s the smartest man in the room,” says one of his former followers. “Sometimes he is. But his thinking that can get in the way.” [source]

Get two people like that together and you have something popcorn-worthy.

But honestly, I wish that commentary about politicians’ doublespeak and incongruencies happened more often, no matter how disappointed I feel because pagan and polytheistic candidates receive this treatment more often than the Dominionists. I wonder how much of Halloran’s seemingly difficult personality comes from the stress of justifying oneself to a political environment (on the right and on the left) hostile to minority religions and how much is just his personality. Polytheistic politicians, if we take his case as setting the trend for future developments, will face hostility from coreligionists for “passing” as Christian and pressure from their political allies for not assimilating enough.

It raises hard questions about how we balance our personal beliefs and a political position without betraying our sense of ethics. Having good business acumen and relying on positive ancient role models, probably effective politicians, is easier said than done in the modern era because everyone seems so focused on scandal and publicity generation. You don’t make headlines by appearing sane, and no one appreciates someone who won’t abandon their sense of honor or worsen their personal brand when it comes to making tomorrow’s headline.

Again, here’s the article at the Village Voice.

Under Pressure

2011-11-27T19:48:00.001-05:00

“Mom, do you think your husband’s mother will try to invoke Jesus again at Thanksgiving?”

It was an honest question. My mom said, “She didn’t last year.”

“Yes, she did. Didn’t she?”

One of my sisters nodded in assent. My mother didn’t care one way or the other about my step-grandmother ringing Jesus at the beginning of our meal, but she didn’t want a prayer or invocation from one of us. My sister told me later, “It’s because our mom is a closet Christian. She thinks she’s Wiccan, but really she should just go back to the Church if she’s going to be all Biblical.”

We finally agreed that she should read the Native American story (I think Iroquois?) at the beginning of the meal in place of an invocation.

That is generally how holidays go in my family. We passive-aggressively skirt around the real issues: How do you have an interfaith Thanksgiving without pushing anyone’s comfort zones? How do you negotiate between a first-generation Wiccan and her children—one Hellenist, one Satanist, and one ambiguously ex-Christian vegan—a vaguely Christian husband, and one deeply evangelical mother-in-law? Should a household with only one vaguely Christian person celebrate Christmas at all?

First, let me say a few words about being out as a polytheist: I used to be a lot more out as a polytheist than I am now.

Firstly, when I was a preteen, the decision to disclose it was made for me by the girl next door who wanted to be more popular, not by me. I used to dream about the idyllic coastal areas where people wouldn’t care about my religious background, but found that unrealistic after I discovered people judging me during undergrad.

Most people in my graduate program don’t know I’m a Hellenist. No one has asked, and I think most people assume I am an atheist because I have mentioned on multiple occasions how being one of the only non-Christian kids in my conservative Midwestern town was the closest thing to Hell I have ever experienced.

I never talk about it because I want to do science librarianship and understand that the hiring committees for the kinds of jobs I want include scientists, many of whom feel uncomfortable about Christianity, let alone anything “weird.” I’m only in my mid-twenties and don’t want my personal life to detract from their evaluation of my portfolio. On the other hand, if they really want to know it, I try not to maintain a bifurcated existence and believe that anyone who truly wants to dig deserves some compensation for their queries. It just probably won’t show up on the first few pages of search results, and most people don’t read beyond the first one.

In my personal life, though, I do want to be open, and navigating this remains a bit tricky. I despise the idea of celebrating Christmas. I want to eventually end up in a relationship with a pagan and am crossing my fingers that she will not be Wiccan. And right now, I really don’t have any face-to-face contact with other pagans.

Growing up, I was very involved (for a teenager) in the Hannibal, MO, pagan community. I wrote horrendously bad articles for the e-newsletter. I co-chaired my undergraduate group for two years minus my abroad semester. And now ... not much of anything. True, I’m in grad school, and yes, I don’t know where I will be after graduation, but it is surprisingly hard to break into the community when you don’t have a car (and the Pagan Pride Day event is not public transportation-accessible) and don’t present as “pagan.” The campus group headed by Mary Hudson (I found her blog and she has really put a lot of energy into her chaplaincy) caters to helping students establish a foundational Wiccan practice.

All I really want to do is go out to a bar with educated pagans in their mid-twenties and have meaningful conversations, rather like the ones I had my last year of undergrad with C. and L. that once or twice ended with us going outside to make spontaneous libations in a decrepit, snow-covered garden.

So that says a lot about me and what I define as “outness” in my life. Now back to holidays.

The best way to make for a nice, interfaith Thanksgiving is to have a grace or prayer that does not mention any gods or multiple prayers that represent everyone. Someone everyone likes needs to stand up and steer that part of the celebration so someone with an explicit agenda can’t take over, and people need to be open and honest with family members about their religious beliefs unless one knows physical or psychological harm will come from the disclosure.

The questions I ask myself are far trickier than the ones I imagine my mom asking herself. Many people in my generation don’t put down roots. How do we keep deeply spiritual friendships with others when we don’t know where we will end up next year or the year after that? For those of us who have been on the Internet for the majority of our lives, how do we balance our Internet personae to capture who we are when we just want to be doctors, lawyers, librarians, schoolteachers, programmers, machinists, or hairstylists? How do we relate to pagans who didn’t grow up in the religion (or spend much of their childhood in it) without judging their thought processes? How can anyone say that we are “passing” when we’re just not bringing up irrelevant information?

The day after Thanksgiving, I enlisted one of my sisters (the Satanist) in the long-standing battle with my mother to stop celebrating Christmas so we could have a feast on the Solstice instead. It didn’t work.

My sister, again, attributed it to my mom being a “closet Christian.” I don’t. I think she probably has a lot of sentimental attachment to the holiday, possibly from her childhood. She was with our grandfather on Christmas while he was dying, too.

If my siblings and I have families in five years, maybe we can conveniently only have time to celebrate four days early.

Thoughts on Johnston's Restless Dead

2011-11-18T22:30:00.001-05:00

Just over a week ago, I checked Sarah Iles Johnston’s Restless Dead out from my university’s library. Tonight, after reading the first two chapters, I wish I owned a copy so I could start marking it up like a coloring book.

I have many objectives for reading this book:

I want to know more about purification and dead people.
I want to know more about appropriate etiquette surrounding dead people, and I figure that a book like this would be good for that.
There is an entire section devoted to the Erinyes.
A creative project of mine requires some fact-checking before I get too far into writing it so I can accurately determine which aspects need to be creative extrapolations and inventions and how much I can draw from credible sources.

So far, the text has proved very dense, and I need to stop reading for a short while to digest some of the information in it. Some of it has altered my preconceptions a bit (read: Hekate is way more important when it comes to restless ghosts than I previously realized), and I discovered an interesting passage about the Deipnon in which Johnston questions whether it was done by everyone at every dark moon or if only those who needed to avert ghosts at the crossroads participated at that time (pp. 61). It just proves that, for every thing a modern Hellenist does, there is probably at least one other piece of literature advocating contrary behavior.

Another particularly striking element is the following, in which Johnston responds to some scholars’ efforts to separate miracles (done by a god) from magic (done by a mortal or demon):

This presumed dichotomy between miracle and magic was rejected several decades ago by subsequent historians of religion after further research showed that it was inapplicable to almost any religious system other than Christianity and perhaps Judaism; those who continue to apply it to systems other than these reveal a completely inappropriate (and probably unconscious) Christianocentric bias. It must be emphasized that until very late times, there is nothing in our sources that suggests that the ordinary Greek made any such division or rejected the mortal use of miraculous powers as “unethical” or “demonic” [emphasis mine] (pp. 33).

I find this interesting because it goes along with something I said earlier this year about working to formulate a more Hellenic ethical response to some issues. What I said focused primarily on thoughts I had regarding my search process from the Wicca-derived Neopaganism I was raised in, along with some (unspoken) thoughts about how it sometimes feels like everyone in the mainstream polytheistic and pagan community assumes that one’s moral framework is derived from the Wiccan Rede.

I do wonder, however, how much the part I bolded from that passage in Restless Dead mirrors what the philosophers or modern adherents of traditions such as Neoplatonism and Pythagoreanism would say. Obviously, the petitioning of ghosts or underworld gods to do harm to others would probably seem at least ethically gray, and if we want to move towards virtue and the good, asking that a person receive what is due him or her would probably be more effective than explicitly wishing for harm to befall another.

Maybe it all comes down to κρινε δικαια and εττω υπο δικαιου — make just judgments and be overcome by justice. There is a time and a place for every action.

Olympiás vs. Myrtis

2011-11-12T00:05:00.001-05:00

For everyone who didn't notice me freaking out on Google+ or Twitter exactly two weeks ago, the motherboard on my laptop died. The computer was just out of warranty and several years old, so fixing it would not have been cost-effective in the long run given the advancement of computer technology. Motherboards are freakishly expensive.

Anyway.

I ordered a new laptop because, as a future First World Professional with First World Problems, I need it. The labs at my university don't have some of the specialized software I need to do my homework and my desktop from 2003 has hardware so out-of-date that it spazzes out like a spider with vertigo when I open more than 2 Firefox or 3 Chrome tabs. It doesn't meet the minimum memory requirement for workflow software.

Right now, I have a habit of naming my devices after ancient women writers, preferably Greek ones. It's just a thing.

I'm deciding between Olympiás and Myrtis. Olympiás (from Thebes) wrote women's health texts in the 1st century BCE, which might be lucky for a laptop name because I am planning on science librarianship as a profession. However, I also write poetry, and naming the new laptop after Myrtis may be good because people in antiquity grouped her with the nine female poets. She allegedly taught Pindar. Both of these names have a good feel about them, and I am not sure how to decide between them.

This may not seem religiously significant, but it is for me, and I'm not sure that I realized how much until shortly before my laptop died. My Monday night class had technical issues that week, so we adjourned early and I went to the pagan group meeting at Syracuse University because in-person contact with pagans or polytheists of any stripe has been sorely lacking in my life for the past two years. (You might remember Syracuse's pagan group. They have the first pagan chaplain or something like that.) I learned two things: (1) pagan still == Wiccan in the non-digital community and (2) undergrads are so young. They started talking about technology and the possibility of being filmed by a student doing a project. Someone said, "Are you sure a video camera would even still work in circle?"

-___-

I have used just about every kind of technology imaginable in a ritual. Kindles are amazing. You can read hymns and they won't blow away. Digital music players are really good for establishing moods, and I often keep mine on my person. Even the Evangelical Christians have realized how powerfully technology can support and maintain ecstatic moods in their church attendees. However, the use of technology has to be focused and intentional.

But what if it is just being filmed by an outsider? Images have gone up all over the Internet of many different worship practices without the devices malfunctioning. In fact, the transmission of images provides a clear snapshot of what happened and connects people beyond the ritual practitioners to the beauty of practice. For mysteries, yes, this could be a bad thing, but most things just aren't that intense.

Religion creeps into other things I do with technology. Whether it's doing Hello Hermes instead of Hello World (the traditional first program one writes in a language just prints the statement "hello world" in the terminal or command line prompt, so I just make it print the first few lines of Homeric Hymn #4 or any other prayer), using digital puzzles as a way of contemplating agalmata, or practicing coin divination using the Random Coin Flipper, I have found ways to integrate little actions into my daily life.

Similarly, using the names of ancient women writers is a way of honoring them. Every time I open a command prompt, connect a peripheral device, or what have you, I am reminded of the contributions they made and the impermanence of my own intellectual products.

They Who Spread Their Arms, Alive With Tangled Snakes

2011-10-23T22:55:00.000-04:00

The Erinyes and I first met during a time sort of like now.

When I get creative, my head sort of spins about and it’s really difficult to think about anything besides stories. These episodes have tended over time to start in October and they last until the early part of the new year, coming in fits and bursts. It sort of feels like someone has fired an electric charge into my head and gets worse when I am under a lot of stress.

I wrote a story about a city on a planet called Irene, which I tried to publish (but it got rejected everywhere; it is super embarrassing to write something and then run out of places that would take something like this). The Erinyes came into my life in middle of the story — vengeful ghosts that swirled in the prairie’s ashes — although I didn’t outright say what they were. Wherever I turned, I found them: in the Oresteia, one of the most numinous pieces of writing about Apollôn that I own (and I fully believe that words when brought into the right order can be just as numinous as Delphi); in the words of God Is Red; and finally within myself.

“It’s funny. You don't know what’s going to be in your room until you see it. And then you realize it could never have been anything else.”
– Lucy Hayward, “The God Complex,” Doctor Who Series 6

A god loves someone who resembles him or her, no matter how deeply we hide the connection. Every god who seeks our attention sees a little bit of themselves within us that they latch onto in sympathy — a sort of resonance that, with devotion, becomes amplified until it’s difficult to see the fuzzy difference between the human and divine, a profaned sacredness and a sanctified profaneness.

It’s easy to go after the Ouranic gods and see if they turn and look you in the eye — the penultimate one being, I think, the Far-Shooter because he keeps his distance and everyone loves a challenge.

I have prayed to the Erinyes every night for the past few weeks and have had a lot of time to think about the strange, impulsive decision I made to worship them — a decision I have no memory of making, just as I remember not using chopsticks as a toddler and suddenly using them at seven or eight with no recollection of how I got from Point A to Point B.

They make me remember all of the things about myself that have made me uneasy forever, and they have teased out a lot of anger. It’s not easy to have that kind of passion again (which I think I repressed a lot while growing up because I lived in such a toxic environment), but part of worship is coming to gods on their own terms and bringing oneself into resonance. It’s easier to explain this way:

When we worship and pray to gods,
we make spaces for them to slip in,
smooth as eels, persistent as water
dripping from caverns and the heat
pulsating invisible in the universe.
Neurons crystallize into agalmata,
and the consonants on our tongues
ring like the cymbals and drums
bringing Rhea out of the mountains.

With the Erinyes, this means accepting the snakes, the venom, and a sense of pompous righteousness that sort of reminds me of King Kong. (Does anyone else who worships the Erinyes know a better way to say that last part?)

And did I mention the snakes?

At once the ominous Tisiphone
selected a torch that had been steeped in blood,
put on a robe reddened with dripping gore,
and a belt of live snakes. And so appareled,
set out from her home accompanied by Grief,
with Fear and Terror and convulsive Madness.

They say the doorposts shuddered when she stood
on the threshold of the house of Aeolus;
the polished oaken doors lost all their luster,
and the Sun went in. Ino and Athamas
were blocked, when, terrified, they tried to flee
the ill-omened Fury there before them,
who spreads her arms, alive with tangled snakes,
and shakes her locks out: stunned, more serpents fall,
some to her shoulders, others to her breast,
hissing and vomitig their deadly silver.
– Ovid, Metamorphoses Book IV,
ln. 660 - 675, trans. Charles Martin

Worshipping them has also helped me get over my fear of honoring the local spirits. I live where the Iroquois were massacred just after the Revolutionary War, which colors my assumptions about what is proper and good when relating to local spirits. I don’t know if other European Americans who practice traditional European religions feel the same way, but the land in some parts of the country is still rightfully angry. I have made so many offerings to these goddesses that I started worshipping some of the local potamoi and nymphai, who seem to have grudgingly accepted my offerings, earlier this year.

I think that some of the next steps in my devotion to the Erinyes involve learning more about purification rituals and the restless dead in Hellenic practice. I want to acquire and read Sarah Iles Johnston’s Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece sometime during the next year and maybe even rewrite and finish that story about the vengeful ghosts swirling in the prairie ash.

Image: Gustave Moreau’s Orestes and the Erinyes, available on the Wikimedia Commons.

Trash!

2011-10-07T16:39:00.002-04:00

There is a song from Sesame Street’s Don’t Eat the Pictures in which Oscar finds himself in a room of Greek and Roman art. As we know, some of the statues from this period were intentionally ruined by Christians because they depict our gods; most were damaged by other means. Oscar is amazed that the museum stocks something he’s interested in: a room full of beautiful “trash.”

I was reading up on the argument between Star Foster and Andrew Bowen (who is totally not appropriating Wicca, um, right ... >_>) and eventually clicked around to Erik’s Sightless Among Miracles. There, I discovered something way more productive than fighting the hateful actions of the New Apostolic Reformation or updating myself on various arguments/controversies in other pagan/polytheistic online communities.

It’s all about trash. Well, that and an Egyptian city called Oxyrhynchus:

[....] At first, the site did not look promising for extracting papyri. Then they began to excavate various mounds around the city, which turned out to be the ancient garbage dumps. [....] The flow of papyri began. Within a few years not only Thucydides and Plato were delicately pulled from the sand, but also Greek lyric poetry that had not been seen or read in about 1000 years. Further, the private documents of this vanished city were collected en masse: private letters, accounts, wills, marriage certificates, land leases, etc. Ancient garbage became a modern treasure. [all emphasis added]
[link]

We can talk until our faces turn blue about the legacy of Constantine and the systemic destruction of Western polytheistic cultures. Technology, though, is giving us the potential to do something about it. We might not have time machines that we can use to save things and learn about our spiritual predecessors firsthand, but a new project called Ancient Lives is now using crowdsourcing to help transcribe the characters into a more readable format. Why? So we can get more awesome fragments!

Quite honestly, this is the kind of stuff that shows technology’s better side. Social platforms and the Internet have such potential to bring out the best in all of us, but often only expose the worst pieces.

If you want to get your hands on some ancient rubbish and maybe help scholars discover new/awesome things about the past, head on over. If you create an account, I’m on there as therini.

It’s also really, really hard. ;__;

At Sunset, the Snake-Haired Maidens Come Out to Play ...

2011-09-30T23:29:00.000-04:00

At sunset on October 2nd, the fifth day of the lunar month begins: the day sacred to Erinyes and to Horkos. With the midnight hour, the DC 40 prayer initiative begins an attack on religious liberty and freedom of choice in the United States.

Stay off the fifth, which is difficult, terrible, dreary, and painful,
For on the fifth they say the Furies attended the birth of
Oath, who was borne by Discord to make all perjurers suffer.
Hesiod, Works and Days, ln. 789 - 791.

My thinking up until this week went something like this: To act against them means acknowledging their prayers are dangerous — in reality, I only consider them dangerous for how their fanatic devotion to YHVH provokes them to burn bridges when they interact with any people whose brains have not been set on fire by the exact same devotional tendencies. Besides, I have homework.

I have updated this a little.

They mean to do harm against other people with those prayers.

Apollôn knows that I have engaged in malefic prayer exactly once, so I’m not exactly one to talk. Starting to worship the Erinyes loosened some of the Wiccan conditioning (a holdover from childhood) enough that I don't actually have a problem with the concept as long as it gives the other party a way out (for instance, if the behavior stops) and is never used as a first option. Throwing shit at other people doesn’t actually tell them why you did it, and it will not likely ameliorate whatever it is they’re doing.

The above probably sounds like the logic someone participating in DC 40 would give for what they’re doing. These people have addressed us repeatedly to encourage us to turn from our sinful ways and be born again as part of the body of Christ. (At least, I think that’s how they’d word it. Sounds like a Borg thing.) We have not responded how they want, so they have decided to use prayer grapeshot.

Of course, this assumes that the deity they worship will actually listen to and fulfill their prayers or even exists at all. I like to think that a bunch of confused Middle Eastern storm gods woke up naked and joined at the hip in the noncorporeal equivalent of a padded room with no memories of how they got there.

When I saw that this began on the Erinyes’ sacred day, I decided to perform some card divination to see if I should pray to them. The divination was mostly favorable, and I am making it better by including Aphroditê. When translated, the cards essentially meant this:

The freshly-tilled ground gives
beneath my feet in this morning light.
Grass sticks to my heels,
and all is clear now:
the movement of the heavens,
red dust on the riverbanks,
and ash in my pockets.
Stretched out behind me, I see
echoes hissing in the dawn-shadows.

I once hung by a thread over the abyss
and wove my own hair into it
strand by strand until it became strong
and guided me to solid ground.
A new world bloomed at my feet
The flowers soothed my aching hands.
Like a child, I ran through the fields
over fences and under barbed wire,
creating and generating a new path
in the weed-choked places between.

But the echoes still catch up.
Like whispers heard through thin
apartment walls, they threaten
to swallow the small hours of morning.
If I had cut the thread and kept my hair,
I would have fallen here, too,
but they would never have found me
lying among the flowers and dancing
in the groves, and we would be forever
a ghost in their mirror or a shadow
cast by stigmata nails on a man's hands.

Both the Erinyes and Aphroditê have a birth story involving the castration of Ouranos. I chose to include her because the drawn solution involved petitioning a god who knew how to woo rather than pursue, and she matched the card’s persona more than Erôs.

Regardless of whether or not the malefic prayer the DC 40 people are doing actually matters, it brings to mind a lot of the past crimes Christians committed against others in order to spread their faith — be they the microaggressive comments murmured in modern New England or the far more horrifying loss of life in 6th-century Heliopolis.

I, for one, would rather pray to the Erinyes and Aphroditê to make our community stronger by accepting and reconciling with our own shadows, acknowledging what we have lost, and helping members of our community be excellent to each other.

Looking Back at 9/11

2011-09-11T15:39:00.000-04:00

Star Foster made a thought-provoking post over at Patheos’s Pagan Portal about her take on 9/11. I could talk about her arguments all day, but the real piece that I want to talk about here is this: “Grappling with why our Gods allowed 9/11 to happen, allow any tragedy to happen, is key to our understanding of the event.”

Everyone has different experiences, and at 10 years ago, I doubt that my memories (or anyone else’s) will accurately capture our emotions on that day. However, my experiences have taught me that gods really don’t let things happen.

We live in a complicated world system. Many of the current weather conditions have been caused by our own inaction — as the world gets hotter, storms will get worse — but that’s not exactly popular with people in the middle of strong grief. Everything, including our mobility and comfort, comes with a price tag. A god may attempt to alleviate some or most of this if asked, but cannot change that we have brought on much of the pain ourselves.

9/11 was different because people with totalitarian ideologies made it happen. Now, it’s no secret that I don’t like the religious system of Islam — apparently my polytheism is a bigger sin than murder, and that’s no way to be friendly with neighbors — but I don’t think it’s any more harmful than Christianity. We could have taken more out of this experience by moving towards a more pluralistic society that recognizes our own darker tendencies, but instead a lot of people chose to demonize anyone who looked ethnically Middle Eastern and a lot of innocent Muslims were harrassed. Oh. And those of us who have French last names.

I don’t remember if I made any religious rationalizations on 11 September 2001.

My head and heart were in a completely different place back then. I was in 9th grade. We had been in school for nearly a month. The weather was still hot and sticky, and our rural Misourri school had no air conditioning.

9/11 happened after two years of brutal teasing that had spiraled me into a black hole of depression. Neither my home nor school environments offered any protection: my parents, who should have divorced years earlier, were still committed to staying together (probably for the children); at school, the teachers turned a blind eye to religiously-motivated harassment because no one really understood the host of risks associated with bullying and half of the teachers probably hoped the students would peer pressure me out of eternal damnation. And it wasn’t even my fault that our family had been outed — one of the girls next door had done it.

On the morning of 9/11 at 8:00 AM CST, I wandered downstairs and checked myself in my parents’ bedroom mirror. I was chubby and quite unattractive (and the shirt I wore made it worse), so I picked up the more slimming black shirt I owned showing the New York City skyline. It was still slightly damp from line drying indoors, but I didn’t really care.

I didn’t actually believe anything had happened until third period. Between first and second period, one of the assholes in my school said New York didn’t exist anymore because it had been blown up. I told him to get lost because I rarely swore as a child, and he was the sort of asshole who I wouldn’t have believed about anything. The beginning of third period (chorus) left me in a haze of confusion. We were going down to the library to watch television, but I didn’t know why it was important and the sub (who was the mother of the girl who had outed my family’s paganism to everyone at school) told us that yes, New York was gone. I still didn’t understand because New York is a pretty big state (and I am from Upstate) and that sounded impossible. Finally, she said, “Those two towers on your shirt don’t exist anymore.” I said, “Oh, you mean New York City.”

I didn’t even know what they were called. My mom hated New York City and spent a lot of time complaining about how stuck-up Downstaters were — they made crass jokes about us having no plumbing or all being hicks, and she generally found them offensive/annoying. She also wanted them to secede from the state because some of the legislators from Downstate do not seem to understand that Upstate NY relies on agriculture as the base of its economy. To this day, I have never visited it.

Most of the people I knew didn’t want to talk about it at lunch, but I did. I was appalled by the toxins billowing into the air. It never occurred to me that they hadn’t evacuated everyone.

My fellow students in high school called me unpatriotic at first, but soon I was also harassed. Because France was singled out following 9/11 and I am of French ancestry, I was actually called a fair number of ethnic slurs leading up to the invasion [of Iraq] in 2003, adding to the already toxic environment in my school caused by my not worshipping Jesus. The word “French” was replaced by “Freedom” on the official school menu, and liquor stores stopped carrying French wines (and anything they suspected of being French). This tapered off afterward, but I was still called slurs every so often until I graduated.

I tend towards the idea that the gods show less visible activity on a macrocosmic scale than in our individual relationships with each of them — we can’t really see their complete reach or where their attention points at any given time.

Furthermore, the gods probably don’t care about politics. They tend to gravitate towards specific types of people and influence their behavior (for good or ill) — and we don’t really know whether or not a god motivated the people who crashed in Pennsylvania to take their plane down or if a series of convenient delays kept the death toll at the Twin Towers from rising higher than it did.

We will probably never know, but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s a lot more complicated to untangle different pieces of cause and effect than it seems at first glance, and even more so to stop the dropping ball after it is already in motion.

Greco-Roman Superheroes!

2011-09-08T12:15:00.001-04:00

Today, I made an amazing discovery via On Being.

There are a lot of superheroes who describe themselves as wholly or partially members of “Greco-Roman classical religion.” Whatever that actually is, as Greek and Roman religious traditions are actually quite different — just compare anything we do over in the Hellenic Polytheism blogosphere to everything expressed at M. Horatius Piscinus’s Religio et Pietas.

However, as we probably all know and realize, the general public doesn’t care about these distinctions.

Here are our 100% Greco-Roman superheroes:

Wonder Woman
Wonder Girl/Troia/Darkstar/Wonder Woman IV
Wonder Woman (WWII-era)
Magma
Hercules*
Hercules/Champion*
Venus*
Ares*
Power Princess
Aphrodite
Aegis
Sun Woman
Tenth Muse
Eve
Anysia
Phalanx
Olympian
Caduceus
Fury
Fury (#2)
Glory
Mega-Mann
The 10th Muse
Diana the Huntress*
Kapitan Kidlat
Helios*
Hermes*
Poseidon*
Hades*
Apollo*
Dr. Zeus
Comet the Super-Horse
Lilith/Omen
Winged Victory

* As far as I can tell, these are also actually deities

And then we have the people who mix and match:

Captain Marvel
Sub-Mariner
Aquaman
Namorita
Namora
Namora (#2)
Andromeda
Orka
Aquagirl
Mera
Shark
Subbie
Aqualad/Tempest
Mary Marvel

And the bad guys:

Tyrannus (and I mean, you can’t really get any more explicitly evil than having a name like this)
The Black Queen

I don’t read very many comic books, but rather appreciate that we have some non-covert presence in American popular culture — and when I say non-covert, I mean in comparison with stuff like Rick Riordan’s books in which piety and religion are downplayed so Christian readers are not made uncomfortable:

The Lightning Thief explores Greek mythology in a modern setting, but it does so as a humorous work of fantasy, and makes no attempt to subvert or contradict Judeo-Christian teachings. Early in the book, the character Chiron draws a clear distinction between God, capital-G, the creator of the universe, and the Greek gods (lower-case g). Chiron says he does not wish to delve into the metaphysical issue of God, but he has no qualms about discussing the Olympians because they are a “much smaller matter.”

But it’s nice that comic books seem much less frustrating and much more religiously tolerant than the current book industry.

Pausing to reflect ...

2011-08-28T12:54:00.000-04:00

This past week has been a blur: moving; discovering one roommate’s room is infested with some kind of insect; bringing my cat to my mom’s house during the fumigation/my mom’s handfasting; and dealing with said handfasting and the accompanying blur of guests. I have been sleeping on a mattress in my rather sizeable closet and have done tons and tons of my mother’s dishes.

Of course, I also watched this awesome video about Dionysos (via T. Thorn Coyle on G+ and Sannion on his blog!), which offered some incredible grounding during the entire experience.

I prayed to Apollôn last night. Even though Kyklos Apollon has officially moved the ritual to the seventh day of the lunar month (with the first day of the lunar month beginning the day after the dark/new moon), I still maintain the weekly cultus, but sometimes don’t actually pray on Saturday night if I am too tired to string prayers together sensibly.

Yesterday evening, I lit cinnamon-frankincense incense and ran through my abbreviated hymn to Apollôn using the prayer beads that I have had for the past few years and went to bed. I prayed again this morning after showering and read from sections of the Iliad.

Prayer is ultimately about giving to the MAKARES, but it can also be about grounding oneself in things that are important: rising incense, sacred stories, and the brightness of candle flames. It is such a relief sometimes to move from drowning in masses of people and spending six hours cleaning a kitchen/putting away leftover wedding food while everyone else mows through beer and wine — the shrine, by comparison, is small and intimate like a quiet conversation over coffee with a good friend.

Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, somewhere to pray

2011-08-22T15:17:00.000-04:00

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.

Nymphai and other land spirits

2011-08-11T21:59:00.000-04:00

The Finger Lakes are numinous, and I have spent the past week making offerings to the spirits of the land before I make my way back up to Syracuse. A conversation I had last year with someone into New Age actually makes a lot of sense: Ithaca still has its numinous heart, whereas the land around Syracuse just lacks something. She said that the pollution going into Onondaga Lake had tainted the energy of the entire region. I don’t disbelieve her, but I would probably phrase it a bit differently.

The topography of the two different places probably contributes to the differing sense of sacredness, and I knew that I wanted to make offerings when I arrived here. On my first evening back, I took out my old mountain bike that had fallen into disuse. I reset the brake lines, oiled the rusty chain, and aired up the tires.

I rode down a trail to Dryden Lake. The sunlight hit the trees so beautifully that I knew I had to leave offerings there the next time I went, but I forgot. Cue the freak thunderstorm with torrential downpour that lasted about fifteen minutes and left me standing beside my bike soaked to the bone, praying to Zeus. Lesson learned: next time I went, I offered a nectarine to the nymphai, and the time after that I brought sweet hemp milk in a Tupperware container.

The numinous quality of this entire area has made me bitter about the entire fracking situation, along with the following:

If this place is sacred, desecrating it will unleash the wrath of the Erinyes if the land divinities are so inclined. See this post for details.
In twenty years, fresh water will be a valuable commodity. Fracking damages water quality. It is not in Upstate New York’s economic interest to harvest natural gas in that way.
Hydrofracking has been linked to all kinds of problems with farming, and we live in the part of New York where most of the economy relies on wine, natural tourism, and agriculture. Fracking is completely incompatible with this.

But Ithaca is gorges, as they say. The town spills over the hills, broken by gorges, and brushes up against the lake. This, for example, is behind the public library and downtown bus stop.

About two years ago, I told the main gorge in Ithaca that I would offer milk the next time I found it. That didn’t happen due to an unplanned gorge excursion last summer (I offered coins instead), but I fulfilled my obligation several days ago with an offering of milk.

The waterfall is actually much higher than it looks from this distance. Most of the stones in the foreground are quite large.

I took a flat stone back with me because I collect stones from places I love, only I may actually use this one while offering things to some divinities, depending on any precedent I find in sources. It will certainly be a comfort once the winter makes everything impassable.

Powerful images and vengeful gods

2011-08-07T01:04:00.001-04:00

On the National Mall in 2008, I had a conversation with a Hare Krishna that went something like this:

Me: I already have gods.
Woman: Oh, who do you worship?
Me: I'm a devotee of Apollôn.
Woman: Oh. Well, if you look at the Bhagavad Gita, we have a Sun God, too. My son really loves Greek Mythology. The sun god is one of his favorites.
Me: That's nice, but Apollôn isn’t really a god of the sun. He’s the god of plagues and of healing and oracles and music.
Woman: Oh.

There’s a reason why plagues came first to my mind. The image of Apollôn from the Iliad is one of the earliest written depictions of my god, and in most of my devotion, the image of him as the force that pours arrows from the sky comes first to mind.

There’s a term that I thought up when reading something about Dionysos, the dagger in the ivy, to describe the darker parts of that god — the part after he has entwined you in his ecstatic being before the kid gloves come off and your entire self’s identity is naked before god.

When Apollôn and I first developed our relationship, I listened to a lot of classical music. Especially when hearing Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, I was overcome by mild synesthesia (for lack of a better term): the notes the violin made were sharp like daggers and they glittered in the hard winter light. Apollôn — just like all of the other gods — has a cutting edge. His aspects Hekatos (Shooter from Afar) and the Archer most resonate with me after his aspect as Sôter (Savior) and as Alexikakos (Averter of Harm).

The Arrow-Pourer defends those who follow him and those who make sacrifice to him. While re-reading Fritz Graf’s Apollo, a passage in his description of Homeric Apollôn completely drove this home. The initial role of Apollôn as the bringer of plagues on behalf of his wronged priest “reflects Apollo’s prominence throughout the Iliad” (Graf, 2009, pp. 10). Graf continues, describing how Apollôn protects the Trojan fighters and the city to the best of his ability (“ability” here meaning that, like the other gods, Apollôn is bound by the laws of the Moirai who shape all mortals’ destinies).

We can call Apollôn our protector and our savior, but there is always something he is saving us from — and to the other side, Apollôn is a force to be reckoned with.

Rick Perry’s prayer rally brought this aspect of Apollôn to mind because of the way the clips I have seen discuss the Christian god. I hear so much talk of him as a “personal god” that people have to accept into their hearts, along with the sacrifice of his only son, but these people understand very little about gods. Those of us who reject monotheism understand that the divine is multiple and that many deities can have intimate relationships with their devotees. Closing oneself off to the expressivity and multiplicity of the divine forces in our world throws the Christians’ eggs all in one basket, so to speak.

The most troubling thing about the Response is a clip from Mike Bickle, during which he provides an ugly, albeit typically Christian statement:

In the name of tolerance, even in the name of love, we are redefining love that's not on god’s terms. Jesus is god. There is no other god besides Jesus: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! All the world religions — they can say what they say. There is no other god besides Jesus. There is no other standard of truth. Jesus alone is the standard of truth. He defines morality. He defines marriage. He defines life. He defines righteousness. And in our allegiance to him, we say what he said: It’s time to come out in the open. It’s time to go public. Regardless of what it costs us, we love you, Jesus! The only god!

A lot of the violent rhetoric and devotion they use made me feel fortunate to follow a god who does not demand, as in the case of monotheistic religions, that all other gods be wiped from the face of the planet. As Jordan D. Paper writes in The Deities are Many, from the Christian and Islamic perspectives,

polytheists are not considered immoral and dangerous so much as inferior human beings, replaced in the evolution of humans by superior Christian Caucasians, similar to the replacement in Europe of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens. In summary, to admit that one is a polytheist is to damn oneself in the eyes of other members of Western cultures” (Paper, 2005, Kindle edition).

We are used to this kind of rhetoric. But just because we’re used to it doesn’t make it right. Our gods exist, arguably moreso than the strange agglomeration of deities the Christians call their god, and we shouldn’t be ashamed to say that having many gods has arguably been more culturally normative throughout written history than having only one. As an aside, I would also like to note that we also have our moral codes, such as the Delphic Maxims for us Hellenists, that were written in stone long before their myths.

The Makares have always existed, along with the spirits of the land, sea, and sky. Apollôn will still shoot his arrows and protect his devotees long after this world and our sun have dissipated into the interstellar medium, leaving behind only a small white dwarf as testament to the great species that once lived here. YHVH is too tied down to one place — one holy world, one holy city, one holy people — and this, if he even does exist, makes him just as destructible as the other spirits of our world that will disappear. It is granted that there are gods, but the rest of us are as impermanent as smoke.

Athênê: Advice for new people

2011-07-24T20:43:00.001-04:00

I have seen that 30 Days meme. Something in me just despises the Gregorian calendar, but I liked some of the post ideas and made up some of my own based on the lunar calendar — more specifically, I took various sacred days and thought about the kinds of posts I would make on them.

The 30 Days meme is still going on in at least 2 blogs I follow, so I don’t think anyone will mind if I just pop in and pop out with random stuff that is slightly inspired by it. There will be 29 of these, but I won’t show you the order until they have all been posted.

This post contains a lot of advice, so before I begin, here’s a short prayer to Athênê:

Tritogeneia, daughter of Zeus most high,
you who grasps the ash-spear in her hands,
look out from your temples into the streets:
here, girls line up for you holding fabric;
there, sacrificial animals raise their heads
towards Olympos, where you sit in splendor.
O goddess, we give you the highest honors.
We let drops of virgin oil fall to the ground.
Hear me, Sôteira, and accept these words.

I decided to talk about this during a time sacred to Athênê because giving advice is really just about communicating strategy.

1. Don’t let anyone tell you what to think or believe.

I’ve never seen a source credited for this, but it is reported by many that Hypatia once said, “Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.”

Along with this, go as close to the source material as possible on your own. Then, try to read it without any of the biases others have given you. Last month, I posted about the “commandments” of Solon and how people tend to present these as a numbered list of ten things when they are in fact called “counsel” and no numbering exists in the source text. These are the kinds of subtle things I am talking about.

Everyone — you, me, the creepy guy next door — has an agenda. We have this blessing from the Theoi called the Internet, which contains the Perseus Digital Library (among other things). Use it.

2. Surround yourself with people who will support and help you progress in your understanding of Hellenism and the Makares and whom you would feel comfortable supporting in times of trouble.

If you learn more about the Delphic Maxims, you will come across these:

Φιλοις βοηθει – Help your friends
Φιλιαν αγαπα – Love friendship
Θιλοις ευνοει – Be kind to friends
Φιλιαν φυλαττε – Guard friendship

And Solon said, “Do not be rash to make friends and, when once they are made, do not drop them.”

Your religious friends, just like ones who do not belong to a Hellenic religion, will fuck up — sometimes splendidly. It may involve you and you will probably feel like screaming and punching things. More likely, they will end up being singled out by a special snowflake or drama llama. This happens in relationships. Even though most arguments and accusations have small grains of truth, stand by your friend. In the end, you will be glad that you did.

3. Be good to those who have taught you, but remember that even Plato was human.

I have mentioned this previously about Plato someplace, but I don’t remember where. On the one hand, showing proper respect in dealings with people to whom you owe a great deal of your spiritual development is a good thing. But ... they’re not Authorities. They’re just people who consistently have good ideas.

4. Burn some incense.

Okay, libations are fine, too. You’re just not going to make an informed decision about whether or not this religion is a good fit for you until you actually start to do small things.

Hunting for Agalmata

2011-07-23T22:31:00.000-04:00

Whenever I walk into a museum, I instantly find myself comparing the Ancient World galleries to the Greek and Roman galleries at the British Museum.

This is a bad idea. I am always incredibly disappointed. I don’t think I could find better exhibits outside of traditionally Greek areas of the Mediterranean. Despite this, I found myself standing in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) trying to figure out how to reach the Ancient World galleries from the little room filled with musical instruments using only a map to navigate through the rooms that are in serious need of proper signage.*

I found them. I always do.

Those of you who have followed this blog for a while may recall that one of my favorite things to do is go searching for the Makares in museums. Having recently read Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, I am also now constantly reminded of this passage, which comes from the dead Penelope reflecting on her puzzlement with modern culture:

[The groom] obtained wealth through the marriage — gold cups, silver bowls, horses, robes, weapons, all that trash they used to value that much back when I was alive. His family was expected to hand over a lot of this trash as well.

I can say trash because I know where most of it ended up. It mouldered away in the ground or it sank to the bottom of the sea, or it got broken or melted down. Some of it made its way to enormous palaces that have — strangely — no kings or queens in them. Endless processions of people in graceless clothing file through these palaces, staring at the gold cups and the silver bowls, which are not even used anymore. Then they go to a sort of market inside the palace and buy pictures of these things, or miniature versions of them that are not real silver and gold. That is why I say trash.

It kind of puts things into perspective. Most of the images of the Theoi in the museum were not from dedicated sacred objects. They were mirror handles or pieces of tables or household decorations. It takes a bit more to wring divinity out of a block of marble than to just carve the damn thing. That’s possibly why the rooms in the MFA have a different feel to them. Any sacredness in the pieces has been sucked out. And some of the statues are lined up in completely lifeless, narrow corridors that just don’t look entirely clean.

Of course, the MFA also focuses on Egypt. They have a lot of mummies and statues of royal couples, but the most impressive Egypt galleries I have seen are in Chicago’s Field Museum. You may remember my short piece that briefly detailed the shrine to Bast and how the moronic museum people didn’t seem to realize that having a donation box beneath the statue would have prevented people from slipping coins through the cracks between the faux stone and the glass case right beneath it.

The images in the slide show above are the best I took from the galleries.

So I stumbled out into the bright sunlight and headed back up towards Cambridge. Because it’s my last real weekend in the area before I tetris my life back into two suitcases and a backpack, I decided to head to Central Square and found an Indian grocery store.

It was well-stocked. I think I recognized maybe 30% of the things in the store. For the first few moments, it was awesome, but that quickly turned to mild culture shock/panic at the lack of descriptions on anything. I ended up finding some things that I recognized.

But I’m not just talking about anardana powder. Alexander the Great snaked his way into my head, so I picked up a small thing of Mukhwas. It’s a kind of sweet thing typically eaten after meals, although it is quite delicious. The particular kind I found contained sugar-coated fennel seeds, coconut, sugar, and anise seeds. I offered some of it to him after I got back. Sometimes it’s the little things that help you initiate contact with a divinity — I have never honored Alexander in my memory, but we connected among the racks of lentils and spices and he followed me home.

* This is probably one of the most librarian-y things I have said on this blog to date.

Professional Patrons

2011-07-19T18:48:00.000-04:00

Apollon and I have a personal-professional relationship. The development of his cult through the centuries has made him fairly significant to poets, as discussed in Graf’s Apollo.

While I want to write prose, most of it has ended up on editors’ slush piles. Mousêgetês has bestowed on me more poetic merit, and I thank him heartily for this kindness. Poetry has always felt easier under his guidance. Writing poems is like capturing fragments of truth and packaging them in images and metaphors, and it is both a dance and a profoundly musical medium.

On the side, I studied French in college and learned more about French history and literature than I ever thought possible. While studying French medieval poetry, I saw and heard actual proof that poems had originally been set to music (which is quite different from knowing this conceptually). Nowadays, though, most poems are mute. Outside of slam poetry venues, recitations, and the late-night library cubicles where students murmur lines of Milton and Chaucer, the process of poetry has become more about directly evoking imagery and sensations in one’s mind using components mapped out by select words and phrases.

I wish I could say that I felt entirely in control while writing poetry. Growing up, I imagined poets moving meticulously over every line — and then I learned about Byron, who did no such thing and whose work did not seem to suffer from it. While some amount of forming and shaping is necessary, the best poems I have written maintain some of the original flavor of the words gushing out of my head.

My relationship with Mousêgetês is much deeper than a professional one. He is generally the one I turn to in times of distress, and he has asked me to follow him from the beginning.

However, there is also his brother.

Hermes and I have a relationship that’s “strictly business” — that is, the kind of professional friendship that in the real world would equate to having a boss who insists on taking you out for drinks and getting to know you. The computer chip necklace I often wear is an expression of this relationship. Hermes is with me from the beginning of my mornings when I pray that the bus is running just a few minutes late until I stop working in the late evenings and decompress with writing or entertainment.

To me, Hermes has become the patron of information professions (like the librarianship track I am working towards) because, quite frankly, it makes the most sense and he has always felt more present than Athênê or even Apollon. As Messenger of the Gods and Master of Languages, Hermes controls the medium of expression of information. As a future information professional, my job is not to philosophize or interpret packets of information for a user. My job is to facilitate their own journey — to identify needs through reference interviews and to connect people to things they need to make that possible. Athênê and Apollon may come in later, but they will almost always come in on the patron’s side, not on mine.

Information science is a lot like the postal service, in other words.

Additionally, Hermes is the patron of astronomy, which just essentially means what I said above with a different emphasis. If you know the sky well, it just becomes another piece of paper used to record stories — Andromeda and the sea monster, perhaps, or the story of Herakles — and only when one adds the extra layer of scientific inquiry and natural philosophy (also astrology, if that sort of thing moves you) does Apollon have anything to do with it.

Sometimes, I think about the myth where Hermes steals the cattle of Apollon and the eventual friendship that comes out of it. It makes me happy that the Fates have thrown me in with two deities who have such complementary personalities.

Breath of the Sun

2011-07-10T21:28:00.001-04:00

“It is not unlikely, too, that the rejection of god is a kind of punishment: we may well believe that those who knew the Gods and neglected them in one life may in another life be deprived of the knowledge of them altogether.”

At the close of my nineteenth year, I had some experiences that taught me about our mortality and vulnerability. The urgency increased when my junior year started up that fall.

Sallustius fell into my hands almost by accident. I was dissatisfied with my life and where things had gone; I seemed to have a lot of inertia I didn’t want, and while the Theoi had nudged at me since I was a teenager, standing at the outskirts for so long had left me a bit numb inside.

One of the first actions after my conversion was joining Kyklos Apollon.

For the first time, I also attempted a fast from sunset to sunset. It’s one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life because I start to go funny without food for an extended period of time. As accounts of Julian Augustus state, he tried everything he could to forget the Christian baptism. Likewise, the idea of having submitted to a baptism as an infant made me feel profoundly unclean; in the context of reincarnation, the weight of the atrocities committed by the Christian Roman Empire in its various incarnations made me wonder if any of us could truly be considered clean of ancestral wrongdoing.

One of the reasons I have been drawn so much to the Erinyes probably has something to do with my own leftover rage and sense of powerlessness when faced with the weight of so much; I think that I became devoted to Apollon out of a desire for transcendent, intellectual ecstasy. As my Classical Mythology professor (Scott Bradbury at Smith) said during a discussion of Odysseus and Athene, a god is attracted to a human being because they are like them, and in the dance of attraction and devotion, the likeness becomes more substantial over time.

But my relationship with Apollon didn’t start with the crisis of faith that happened just before my twentieth birthday or in the soul-searching that fall. It started with an image from Nathalie Hertz's Vampire Tarot Deck:

Now, Apollon isn’t Helios, but we can’t really influence how imagery influences us when we are ignorant of everything, and as soon as that kind of connection is jump-started, none of us can exactly get rid of it. My relationship with Apollon in those early years had always been somewhat ecstatic — stepping outside of oneself without really moving, leaving while remaining rooted to the ground. One of the struggles I have had for at least the past year is reconciling this ecstatic experience with expectations of what our individual relationships with one of the MAKARES must look like, replacing the irrational with rationalism and philosophy.

Quite frankly, I don’t think you can make contact with divinity while remaining entirely rational.

Why? Because none of them is even remotely human. Reaching for one of them should alter our perceptions of the real and the unreal. It should throw the universe on its back, displaying in crystal clarity all of the quarks and radials and vibrating strings and curled-up dimensions, and make us feel the weight of our insignificance. Rejecting a god doesn’t just mean refusing worship or acknowledgment; it means shrinking away from our fragments of understanding about their nature.

Pagan Values Month: The Human Touch

2011-06-30T21:36:00.000-04:00

The posts that have come out of the Pagan Values Event this year are all good, and I recommend you go here and read through the ones that catch your interest.

One of the undercurrents I have read about elsewhere is “whose” values these are, most notably from the Witch Kitty:

Have I adopted different values as a result of being Pagan? Not really. Instead, Paganism held me to solidify and understand my values and how those values fit into the context of my community – both Pagan and secular.

Granted, Kitty and I most likely have very different spiritual paths — I am a Hellenist and she seems like more of a generic Witch/Pagan. Ideas like this exist elsewhere, though, and it’s something that goes with the entire philosophy that I am working to adopt (which is already starting to lower my stress levels). Over the course of the month, others have also questioned whether we are all just reaching for pagan and polytheistic texts that affirm, but never challenge, our preconceived notions about human conduct and divine interactions.

All of us posting during the Pagan Values Event come from very unique places, and most of us have spent the month writing from an authoritative standpoint about ideas we think that all of us should share. David Salisbury wrote about animal rights from an activist vegan perspective, saying

I believe that Pagans can be some of the best stewards for the Earth. Our connection with our environment (both seen and unseen) is a uniqueness rivaled by few other paths. Because of this, we have a responsibility to ourselves and our surroundings to be the best guardians of the planet and the creatures within that we can be. Because of our access to information and our blessed array of choices, we have the chance to truly practice compassion for all.

On the Hellenic Polytheistic Community Facebook group, we had a discussion about how valuing the Earth fits in with our religious perspectives, with the founder of Kyklos Apollon, Todd Jackson, arguing that Hellenism is not Earth-based because worshipping the physical vehicle for the goddess Gê/Gaia means that we get lost in the representation of her instead of looking right at her — even if we worship the nymphai, the potamoi, and other divinities, it's about them, not the planet.

Like it or not, having somewhat similar outlooks on religion does not mean that two people have to share political or social ideologies as well. That stinks of One True Wayism, the idea that the specific ideologies adopted by a particular group are the only way to approach an issue. Values that seem common sense to me — marriage equality, women’s reproductive freedom, or even environmentalism — are still foreign to some people in our communities. Likewise, deeply-held convictions regarding the President’s “socialism” or whatever leave me completely baffled and wondering if the other person is even speaking the same language.

For example, Salisbury mentioned giving up eating animals. Animals have consciousnesses. They feel emotions, and while I can’t vouch for mental complexity, many species probably plan actions and are capable of some (albeit nonhuman) reasoning. On the other hand, everything on this world — every blade of grass, deep-sea worm, or stately maple — comes from the same genetic stock that we do. Since then, life has sectioned itself off into a variety of different roles. It’s only easy to kill plants for food because we branched off from them so early on. It’s harder for us to feel compassion for them than for a species that shares more physical features in common with us, such as a cow or turkey. I respect his opinion, and I definitely agree that raising animals for slaughter in the quantities we do is insane, but the other arguments do not really resonate with me as an audience due to my different worldview. If I ever were to adopt vegetarianism or veganism, I would do so because I joined up with the Orphic or Pythagorean Hellenists, but for now I’ll stick to buying my meat from the local farmer’s market.

The same goes for what Todd mentioned. I do regard the physical world as sacred. It doesn't matter whether it's an image of Gê or Gê herself. I wouldn’t profane an image in a temple, and the planet isn’t any different. Philosophically speaking, I believe that connecting with physical images and symbols can actually bring people into a sort of resonance with the divinities connected to them.

It all comes down to everyone developing opinions and testing them against the world. We are all seeing shadows reflected on the cave wall, and living according to our values helps us refine and change them to meet the outcomes of our observations. We need to spend some time every once in a while at the white board communicating ourselves to the rest of the group so our values are heard.

But living them and thinking about them goes way beyond Pagan Values Month. It goes beyond associating with a homogeneous ideological group. We need to experience different people and stretch our comfort zones. We need to apply our values to new situations.

The values and ethics communicated in the ancient Greek and Roman texts are so basic and so human. I have tried to give a sense of that over Pagan Values Month this year. In an era when every voice wants us to devote ourselves wholeheartedly to one ideology or another, reading, reflecting, and acting according to what we find in the ancients grounds us in our commonalities. This, in turn, will help us move away from our differences and refocus on the core of our practice: the Blessed Ones, the Makares — the Gods.

Cremation

2011-06-11T23:55:00.000-04:00

While writing the last post, it occurred to me that providing more information about death in Hellenism might contextualize things for people. I have already shared one web site that depicts Ancient Greek thoughts about death and another about some uncertainties concerning the afterlife.

Our lives are so small and insignificant when taken as part of the cosmic whole that envisioning something that caters to our own interests seems almost narcissistic. Rather, whatever happens to our minds must benefit the cosmos as a whole, and I am just not sure what that is despite spending considerable time contemplating it.

But I digress.

Here’s a 2006 post from the blog Tropaion, which posts scholarly information relevant to modern Hellenic Polytheists and people who like Ancient Greek religion, “Purgatory: The Hellenic Acherontas.” Unlike the link I posted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s resource about death in the Ancient Greek worldview, which emphasizes the burial of a physical body, this blog post emphasizes cremation:

From the early Bronze era the most respectful burial custom was the cremation of the dead. We meet that custom in the Homeric epics and, throughout, the ancient Greek history we have examples that when a katharsis was needed, cremation was used. [...] The reason for cremation’s use is not, only, the environmental and hygienic efficiency and economy but a matter of metaphysical importance.

Nikolaos Markoulakis makes a very interesting case for cremation, complete with sources, over the remainder of the post. Cremation is something that many modern Hellenists and Ethnikoi Hellenes tend to value above burying an intact body. It’s definitely something to think about.

Returning to the shrine ...

2011-06-11T23:38:00.002-04:00

Today, I made a quick ritual purification offering to the Erinyes and to Apollon. I am in Eastern Massachusetts until the end of July and did not think to pack any of the ritual items that are strictly for Chthonic use, as I believe in segregating the two. Thus, I had to improvise a bit with what I had.

The death of my uncle came as a shock, and while we are not related by blood, I did go to his funeral to support my bereaved aunt.

Her situation concerns me because a deep traditionalist mindset has made it difficult for her to come to terms with his death — moreso than many other women who have lost their husbands. She also remained with him for more than 40 years. My mom has told stories about how my aunt believed that the man was the appropriate head of the family and that the woman should let him lead on everything (and she passed these opinions on to my mother in the early years of my mom’s marriage). Being alone and truly in control of oneself must be incredibly frightening after a lifetime of valuing another’s desires and opinions over one’s own.

Due to miasma, I did not participate in any rituals to the Athanatoi or touch the few ritual items I brought with me between learning of my uncle’s death last Wednesday and today. I made an offering to the Far-Shooter and the scent of incense was heavenly.

Not permitting myself to worship at my usual place made me realize just how much I value moments of worship at the shrine. I missed the aroma of frankincense and the flickering candle flame. I missed the prayers and tossed barley. Following protocol surrounding miasma sometimes frustrates me, but deep down, I know that I am just not in the appropriate mental space to properly perform cultus to one of the Theoi when my mind races with too many mortal concerns.

Follow-Up: Bad Things

2011-06-05T17:16:00.001-04:00

There’s a reason why I looked a lot at the natural world in my last post to this blog.

Three tornadoes hit the Springfield, MA, area this past Wednesday. I remember reading my aunt’s Facebook status from earlier on Wednesday. It sounded so relaxed, as though the thunderstorms coming in would not be a big deal.

I wrote something on her Facebook wall after hearing that a tornado (which was later increased to two tornadoes and then to three) touched down. The Facebook wall message wished her and her husband well, and I wanted to hear from her. The power was out in Springfield, so I figured that I should wait to call.

About half an hour after I wrote that, I received a call from one of my sisters. My aunt’s husband died of a heart attack during the tornado watch/warnings. It didn’t happen during a tornado, but the stress of the storm probably contributed to the suddenness of the attack. So I called my aunt at 11 PM. She was in a deep place of grief. Additionally, they had no power. How would they after this?

You never think when you hear about fatalities that any of them are people you know, and it’s statistically unlikely that they are. But it happens sometimes.

One of the hardest things about consoling a family member who has lost someone is not sharing a belief system. I can’t genuinely say that her husband has gone to a Heaven.

Some of the things I learned in a class on modern cosmology during college have stuck with me over the years. Among them is the idea that life is the universe becoming conscious and aware of its own existence, that we are woven into it and cannot be separated from it. The fact that observers exists makes something in flux resolve into a recognizable pattern. We are the ones ultimately endowed with choice.

I believe that people continue in some form, and on good days I take comfort in the Hellenic texts describing reincarnation and the Orphic mysteries, but I am unsure whether that would provide any comfort to people unfamiliar with what they mean. Death is still death, and no matter what happens to our consciousnesses, they will never be in the same body environment that they have lost.

Values: Bad Things

2011-06-05T16:47:00.000-04:00

A lot of the translations of Solon's tenets or commandments that appear on the Internet do not really satisfy me. Firstly, I had no idea what context they were taken from; secondly, I decided that seeing them as they originally appeared in the text they were taken from could do a lot for learning about the ethical statements and values he thought we needed to follow.

Solon's tenets aren't actually described as tenets in the original text, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers. In fact, Diogenes calls Solon’s commandments “counsel”:

His counsel to men in general is stated by Apollodorus in his work on the Philosophic Sects as follows: Put more trust in nobility of character than in an oath. Never tell a lie. Pursue worthy aims. Do not be rash to make friends and, when once they are made, do not drop them. Learn to obey before you command. In giving advice seek to help, not to please, your friend. Be led by reason. Shun evil company. Honour the gods, reverence parents.

τοῖς τε ἀνθρώποις συνεβούλευσεν, ὥς φησιν Ἀπολλόδωρος ἐν τῷ Περὶ τῶν φιλοσόφων αἱρέσεων, τάδε: καλοκἀγαθίαν ὅρκου πιστοτέραν ἔχε. μὴ ψεύδου. τὰ σπουδαῖα μελέτα. φίλους μὴ ταχὺ κτῶ: οὓς δ᾽ ἂν κτήσῃ μὴ ἀποδοκίμαζε. ἄρχε πρῶτον μαθὼν ἄρχεσθαι. συμβούλευε μὴ τὰ ἥδιστα, ἀλλὰ τὰ ἄριστα. νοῦν ἡγεμόνα ποιοῦ. μὴ κακοῖς ὁμίλει. θεοὺς τίμα, γονέας αἰδοῦ.

Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1.60. (English) (Greek)

Groping with the Greek version of the text on Perseus to see what some of the original words mean brings it a step further — the original word for “counsel” seems to be a verb (not a noun) that generally describes advice. I don’t actually know Ancient Greek, so checking things is a bit uncomfortable for me, but I believe that I have pulled most of the appropriate section.

Already, the presentation in the English version of the text varies from the blocked-out ten statements we see all over the Internet as evidence for a better alternative to the Christian commandments. Through twists and turns, Christianity’s privileged place in society makes even things that came before it require placement in relation to that religion’s narrative. They must be constructed as numbered lists instead of freely in paragraphs.

One of the things I found most interesting about groping around in the Greek was the word κακοῖς, a form of κακός. YSEE’s Lexicon translates the concept of KAKON as more than just “bad.” KAKON relates to the asymmetry and disharmony. People who express this (which the lexicon refers to as a KAKOS or KAKIA, depending on gender) degrade themselves by expressing this principle, submitting to a less human way of dealing with the world. Thus, shunning people who behave wrongly isn’t just about avoiding guilt by association — it’s about making sure that one is in an environment conducive to growth, one that promotes things that are fundamentally good.

Yet KAKON is a part of the universe, the shadow and inverse of the Good. It makes me uneasy to think about how crucial adversity and bad things are to the universe and how subjective our distinctions between good and bad people and actions really are. Tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mass movements, and floods are not the result of a cruel universe; they’re just the price we pay for life on an amazing planet where moisture precipitates from the atmosphere and where the mantle miles and miles below remains supple and elastic despite the billions of years that have passed since the molten world we live on coalesced from the blackness. The things that make this world so precious are also what makes it so unbelievably dangerous to live here.

Image: Millennium simulation

The Theoi are fundamentally good, but they still exist within the universe or the multiverse or what have you because nothing — no man sitting in a cloud and definitely no invisible pink unicorn — can exist outside of it. Their goodness means that there must be something unaligned with it — something bad —— it means that they must cast a shadow.

It’s probably best to stay as far from the shadows as possible. That is why Solon advises to stay out of bad company. Bad people have a habit of pulling us down and placing us in situations that take us out of alignment with the Gods and the Cosmos.

People Are Strange (It Seems So to Me ...)

2011-06-01T21:25:00.000-04:00

When any person harms you, or speaks badly of you, remember that he acts or speaks from a supposition of its being his duty. Now, it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but what appears so to himself. Therefore, if he judges from a wrong appearance, he is the person hurt, since he too is the person deceived. For if anyone should suppose a true proposition to be false, the proposition is not hurt, but he who is deceived about it. Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear a person who reviles you, for you will say upon every occasion, ‘It seemed so to him.’
The Enchiridion, 42.

I want to kick off Pagan Values Month not by talking about Zeus et al., but by talking about human beings. The quotation from Epictetus above comes from the Enchiridion, a very practical outline describing how we need to approach life with if we ever want happiness.

This quotation describes something very fundamental to the mortal experience: being fallible and human. As human beings — not even as polytheists or pagans ~~or pastafarians~~ — we will come across times when we make mistakes, and we will bump up against people who either make incorrect actions or hold incorrect opinions (and sometimes even a combination of both).

People behaving incorrectly might be doing it intentionally or because they don't know any better. We are vulnerable to both. After all, there is a proven biological response to perceived transgressions of social norms, and the way we interpret language sometimes leaves us vulnerable in an age when inflection cannot be determined by the words on a page. (How do you know I’m not shouting?) People who have bad ideas/opinions — at least, according to our own limited understanding of ourselves and the world around us — may frustrate us because they don't “get it.”

If we disagree with someone — if we are reviled or things go poorly, or even if we manage to agree to disagree — Epictetus rightly assumes that this difference arises out of having different perspectives. This has nothing to do with moral relativism or reality. Rather, it goes back to the figures on the cave wall. Neither of us has a perfect image, and while one of us may be slightly more informed, it doesn’t mean that what the other person says or does lacks any value. People need to learn about right and wrong on their own.

Of course, sometimes this fails. We are not only intellectual animals, but ones with strong emotions and ingrained instincts that react to challenges in our environment. I do it. You do it. The old woman down the street does it. By Herakles, as a kid I was a fucking nightmare.

The ideas expressed in the Enchiridion do not want to turn anyone into a dispassionate automaton, but make us aware of our limitations. Mindfulness isn’t just a Buddhist concept; it’s very clear from Epictetus that remaining aware and in the moment is something that even ancient Western people thought about. Philosophical thinking and mindfulness are two non-innate tools that can teach us to reflect on our experiences. Philosophy breaks open our skulls and teaches us about the uncertainty of the ground beneath our feet. Mindfulness puts certainty back in and teaches us about other people. This is how one goes from being an asshole to a well-rounded individual.

It’s the learning how to value other people part that I want to stress here — that, of course, and using what we learn to enrich our experiences with one another.

The Frankest Discussion of My Personal Religious Background I Have Written Ever

2011-05-29T22:19:00.002-04:00

Context: This post is written on a very personal level. I might actually pull from some of these things for Pagan Values Month.

One of the things I keep meaning to do on KALLISTI is a more complete synopsis of my religious and spiritual history, mostly to contextualize where I'm coming from when I write about things concerning Christianity or the broader pagan community.

I think I was baptised in the United Church of Christ. I have a baptismal cross somewhere. My aunt thinks I should frame the certificate. Shortly after I turned seven in June 1994, my family packed up all of our belongings and left our small town in rural Upstate New York for the middle of nowhere in Missouri. I don't remember much about the church we attended there, but my youth group gave me a children's Bible with pictures and pull-out lessons and everything. The other children in the youth group may have signed it, but I don't remember who any of them were or what happened to that religious text.

We didn't fit into any of the churches in the rural Midwest. My mom, who would later confess that she used to send feminist letters-to-the-editor, couldn't find a denomination she felt comfortable raising daughters in. We went from the Christian Church to the Methodist Church over the first two years. It was at the Methodist Church in our Sunday religious education classes that I learned about the Old Testament. I couldn't wrap my head around the genocide of Egyptian children. It didn't seem like a moral act, and I kept asking uncomfortable questions. As a child, I never learned the word apostate, but I became one.

I had several books about Ancient Egypt. One of my favorites, a picture book on mummification, also had images of Bast and several of the other deities. I decided that I wanted to worship Bast instead of Jesus because I liked cats and she was cool. Replacing the word God with her name in my head took many hours of hard work. I didn't actually know anything about Egyptian worship, and the horrible state of American public education in areas that don't provide much tax revenue (i.e., outside of city suburbs) meant that I had no exposure to real research until I started taking college classes at sixteen. Ergo, my devotional activities were not very extensive.

Something happened with my mom during the Christmas play at the Methodist Church. She never explained things to me as a child, though, so I didn't find out about this until I had reached adulthood. One of my younger sisters wanted to play a shepherd. The church wouldn't allow it because only boys could play that role. Women either had to play Mary or … animals or angels or something. My sister logically thought that hacking off all of her hair in the bathroom would transform her into a boy and make playing that role possible. My mother was horrified.

So, that fall we moved to the Unitarian Church, which I remain nominally connected to. My first year there, we had a really great RE program. The instructors set up a pathway in the basement, and we reenacted that story about going back in time and stepping on a butterfly. I loved the way they thought. I loved everything about the programming. Two Neopagans in the area made announcements periodically about observances in the Hannibal, MO, community, so my mom and I eventually started going to those. My father often came in the beginning, but as their marriage fractured, he came less and less.

Unfortunately, the people who ran the RE program fell victim to church backstabbing and left. The following year, it was taken over by a woman who decided that the wanton humanism in the RE program had deprived us of having a Christian education. We needed Biblical literacy to do anything in society.

My response was simple: Fuck. This. Shit.

I was horrible to this woman. She pushed all of my buttons. She spoke in that condescending tone reserved for children and wouldn't take me seriously. She wanted me to actively participate in something that I had already rejected. We had to learn about the plagues of Egypt again. So I did a lot of embarrassing things. I acted out. My mom dreaded those times when the RE teacher approached her after our class ended. I got grounded … a lot.

Eventually, I started excusing myself to go to the bathroom and spent twenty minutes at a time in there. The RE teacher found out.

On the other hand, I was a perfect (albeit sometimes hyper) participant in the local pagan scene, with the exception of a three-month period in sixth grade when I decided to become a Jedi. My father bought me Silver RavenWolf's Teen Witch when I was twelve. While the book possibly screwed me up because it taught me to expect hostility from other people and to hide things from my parents (which makes no sense, considering my parents were pretty much on board with anything), it prompted a voracious appetite. I read every book in the house on modern paganism. Green Witchcraft was one of my favorites. I preferred the religious material to spellwork, and I often felt like I wasn't pagan enough because I didn't cast enough of them.

By the time I turned sixteen, I was a fairly serious Neopagan. I worshipped the Goddess and Her Consort, meditated all the time, and drummed/chanted post-ritual. (The drumming and chanting is actually the part of generic paganism that I miss.) In 2003, a relatively new woman to the local community started a newsletter called the Heathen Herald that had nothing to do with Heathens or heralds. I did, however, contribute as often as I could because they wanted the perspective of a younger pagan.

The RE teacher who hated me passed the reins to someone new eventually, a woman who had been active in the Chicago UU community. I behaved a bit better around her and was relieved to discover that Unitarianism had its own sets of doctrines and beliefs (almost) completely divorced at this point from the Old and New Testaments. She was succeeded by a college student named Alexis. Alexis … had probably been warned about me by the previous RE instructors, but to her credit, I loved everything about her. Especially her handwriting. We discussed philosophy for my entire final year. I loved what she had given us from Thomas Paine so much that I spent hard-earned money from my summer job on procuring a copy of The Age of Reason. I couldn't believe that someone so integral to American history had produced such a reasonable rebuttal to Christian doctrine and the Bible.

At the same time — well, beginning in 2004-ish when I was still sixteen — I corresponded via E-mail with someone from the Columbia, MO, Pagan community. I won't say much about this, but after learning about philosophy in RE, a lot of what he said sounded less realistic and we eventually fell out of contact. I have remained fascinated by conspiracy theories to this day. He is the one who dissuaded me from trying out Hellenism when I came across Sannion's Sanctuary because Hellenism is a spiritual dead end. (Yeah, I know.)

I went to Smith College. Leaving behind the Hannibal, MO, pagan community was hard, but enough changes had happened in the demographic with people moving in and leaving that I didn't want to see what would happen to it in the future. At Smith, I participated in the Association of Smith Pagans.

And then I learned about the volatility of the pagan community.

We had drama.

This is the version of the story I heard. It might not be entirely accurate. One of the co-chairs decided that the other co-chair hadn't shown up or done anything in weeks/months (or something like that), so she wrestled power from the other one and demanded that the kicked-out member give back all of the materials sequestered in her room. I think that getting the materials back took … a while. A long while. People left. Egos were bruised. Poppets were stabbed. (Maybe.) As usual, I remained completely oblivious and didn't learn about any of this until I discovered that I was going to be a co-chair the following fall. Go me.

My fellow co-chair that year, a senior, was a very grounding person, and I think she was good for the group. I, however, had started exploring Hellenism. Sallust … just kind of clicked. That spring, I left to study abroad and someone else took my place as co-chair for the remainder of the year. I formally converted to Hellenism at that point.

The pagan group on campus was suffering.

No one wanted to run for co-chair.

I didn't want to. I had converted to a new faith and had learned that associating with Neopagans was liable to get me flamed past the heliopause.

However, I was asked to become a co-chair anyway. The other co-chair and I didn't work well together. She was too busy, and we sucked at communicating with each other. My best friend was really helpful, though. I tried to do the best I could, but the drama had completely wrecked the group's cohesiveness and I would never in a million years consider myself a good long-term group leader in this situation. Possibly anywhere.

Additionally, I had to deal with all of the stress from the online Hellenic community's ongoing war at the time about who deserved to be called a Hellenist. Every time I helped plan out a ritual, I kept thinking about what would happen if people found out. I know so many people who have been ripped to shreds online by a small group of people, and the possibility of finding myself comment-flamed and dragged out into the mire — especially after seeing what it did and still does to other people — prevented me from having my head in the game.

I tried to have events to make the group happy and fulfill some of our charter's goals about public education, including a panel discussion about paganism organized with the chapel. Andras Corban Arthen was on it, along with several other possibly important people. I think I made a bad impression. Scratch that. I know I made a bad impression. Five people showed up to the event, and we had planned for … a lot more. It was really embarrassing. I think my co-chair didn't even come, although my memory might not be completely accurate. And the worst part is that we had advertised everywhere for this.

Spring semester, a friend gave me a ride to this great thing called Drum and Dance in Western Massachusetts. It is a profoundly satisfying pan-pagan thing that happens every month during the year. Drumming. Dancing. More drumming. And it was something I could actively participate in without feeling uncomfortable. I actually left the sci-fi club's senior banquet thing early to go to the last one of the year, which made some friends a bit upset.

And then I graduated. I became active in the Ithaca Unitarian Church's social justice group and discovered that I am actually a fairly good public speaker. I continued to maintain this blog and connect with Hellenists. Drama kept happening. Most of it was caused by a specific group of people. I stopped talking to them.

Right now, I consider myself a Hellenic Polytheist with strong panentheistic and naturalistic leanings and a dash of Stoicism and Orphism thrown in for good measure. I'm actually quite happy here. I'm studying the Delphic Maxims with some people and I've connected with the Erinyes and Apollon. I participate in Kyklos Apollon. I semi-regularly contribute to the Hellenistai Media Reviews Blog. I frequently do Pagan Values Month postings.

Sometimes, though, I do miss real-world community … but my experiences leading that pagan group my last year of undergrad have really made me anxious about engaging with people face-to-face and reluctant to assume a leadership position anywhere in the future.

However, I want to end this on a positive note. All of us in the online Hellenic polytheistic community have very different backgrounds. Some, like me, have spent the majority of our lives in polytheism or generic paganism. Some of us started out in Christianity or atheism and have never even touched an athame. That amount of diversity is good, but it means that we all have very different ideas about who we should associate with and where we should go from here. This is often the root of our drama problems, and I think things could get better if we started living our values and more vocally describing the diversity of our religious and spiritual histories.

The Word “Pagan” and Abrahamic Privilege

2011-05-28T23:44:00.002-04:00

Pagan.

It's a loaded term. People have many different opinions about it. I’d like to contribute mine.

According to the YSEE (Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes) FAQ,

The term “Pagan,” which in the original Latin is derived from Paganus (peasant), is yet another insult used by the victorious Christians since the 4th Century, to belittle what remained of the Native Religions.

They used this to label all those remaining loyal to their Ethnic Traditions, to imply that they were uneducated and uncouth villagers. The term was used for centuries in most European languages to refer to the Ethnikoi. In the 20th Century, it was reintroduced with the suffix neo (viz. Neopaganism), by various Christian-inspired devotees of Esotericism and the New Age. “Neopaganism” doesn't concern us. It may even be a manufactured ploy to detract from the current world rule of the so-called “Monotheists.”

One has to question some aspects of this — mostly the conspiracy-driven rhetoric in the last three sentences — but the other parts make complete sense. “Pagan” as applied to religious practices has a long history as a slur used by Christians, and it is tied to a system of Abrahamic privilege that has gripped the West since the days of Constantine (who strongly supported Christians and spent most of his life as an unbaptised convert).

Now, the definition I am using for privilege is the one provided by Google Dictionary. Privilege is a special status, set of rights, or immunity given to a particular group and taken for granted by that group. In this definition, privilege is not something that is earned, but something that socioeconomic, political, and social mores set as an ideal — such as heterosexuality, gender matching physical sex, lighter skin, or male behavior. Feminists use this term a lot to describe how American culture prioritizes traditionally masculine jobs, stories, and sexuality at the expense of women. The LGBTQAI community uses this to describe severe anti-LGBTQAI bias in addition to the microaggressive actions of allies and even other people in the LGBTQAI community that undermine equality.

The word pagan becomes problematic from this perspective because the term originates from a privilege system, and our continued acceptance of it means the continued acceptance of Christianity’s supremacy. We should all be allowed to define ourselves based on our OWN terminology and our OWN religious systems, using words that more appropriately describe our relationship with the Gods.

The Abrahamic privilege system is the same one that accepts the concept of Christian scholars commenting on their own religion, but not polytheistic or Wiccan individuals doing the same to their own; that makes journalists seek anti-pagan quotes on pieces about Pagan Pride Day; that negatively skews or ignores important aspects of both Western polytheism and traditions such as Hinduism, Shintō, and Santería; and that has taken children away from loving parents during child custody cases. We need to be vocal about dismantling this system. We need to make sure that people do not assume we come from Christian backgrounds or that our children will receive a Christian baptism, and we sure as Horkos can’t let them define ethics and morality for us.

For this reason, I tend to call myself a Hellenist or a polytheist. When explaining my religion to outsiders, their lack of familiarity means that I can describe the religion I practice without facing any of the fluffbunny baggage or assumptions of Wiccan practice that clouds pagan. When I am in a situation where applying the word makes more sense, I will do so, but it should only be applied sparingly, like salt or truffle seasoning.

I still want to engage with other polytheists, and sometimes the only way to do that is to grudgingly accept that we need to unite under a giant umbrella to make connections. It bothers me, though, that by entering into the broader pagan community, I am losing my religious identity.

My primary form of contact with Wheel-of-the-Year pagans is through the blogosphere. Our blogosphere is very integrated. Heathens, Celtic recons, Wiccans, Feri, Hellenists, and many other different faiths interact in the same broader bubble. However, my experiences in real-world communities have not been the same. Few people have exposure to reconstructionist methodologies, many are suspicious of academia, and my scientific disposition and vocal criticism of conspiracy theories make it difficult to deal with some people. Additionally, we may even have different ideas of what being religious means. One conflict I had while co-chairing an undergraduate pagan group involved a disagreement over whether or not aromatherapy and psychic tests were religious.

I'm worried that all of these things will make me feel alienated and that, if I try to compromise, I will have to pretend to be someone I am not and do things in public rituals that I would never, ever do alone. On the other hand, I have found some amazing Wiccans, Witches, Heathens, and other people who, while not coreligionists, make excellent people to share a meal or intense discussion with.

So these are my thoughts on the word. They are a bit political and subversive, but I hope that some of these ideas enrich the discussion.

UPDATE: Many others have weighed in on this discussion. You can find an incomplete list at Patheos.

Food and the Sacred in Hellenism

2011-05-17T22:32:00.004-04:00

I want to talk about food.

More specifically, I would like to respond to a post made at No Unsacred Place by Howling Hill about the food choices and restrictions we have, and possibly contribute one Hellenist’s perspective on diet.

In my life, I endeavor to eat tolerably well with the resources I have, and I prefer ethically-sourced meat and eggs. I am a graduate student. This means that meat, a Western staple, is a luxury item. When I buy it, I try to stretch it as far as humanly possible by cutting out small portions and freezing what I do not use immediately.

I cook most of my food from scratch, and my pantry contains cooking ingredients, not junk food. My grocery purchases generally consist of fresh vegetables, a few fruits, cheese, and whichever staple items (i.e., rice) have disappeared from my pantry. I plan my meals for the week to maximize my use of leftovers and to prevent any bundles of unused vegetables from rotting before I get to them, unlike most Americans. The average American eats 3754 calories per day. I eat between 1800 and 2000 and document my intake because I struggle with obtaining the recommended values of calcium and iron.

My interpretation of the Hellenic view on diet is very much in line with Michael Pollan’s famous statement: “EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS.”

Eating real food is harder than it looks, but it means a lot. An appropriate diet can help someone more closely approach ARÊTE, the Hellenic ideal that YSEE’s Standard Lexicon translates as “virtue.” The virtue that is ARÊTE arises from reason and logical processes and is a way to attain harmony and a mostly-objective goodness.

Our brains receive constant feedback from the rest of our bodies (and maybe even the gut bacteria inside them), so if we don’t take care of ourselves on this fundamental level, understanding appropriate courses of action and making virtuous decisions will not come easily.

It doesn’t matter as much that the food is organic. Many small farms use organic techniques, yet cannot afford the costs associated with vetting themselves. Local ... may matter, especially since it can make the festivals in our lunar calendar more meaningful and tie us more to the world of the nymphai and potamoi and all of those other beings who animate everything. On the other hand, it is very difficult to eat local food during the colder months in a place with a short growing season.

Above all, though, moderation is important. As shown by that 3754/day average calorie intake, it can be difficult for everyone. Our brains did not evolve to pass opportunities to consume more calories. They evolved to enjoy quick, dirty fixes: fat, meat, and sugar. It requires a lot of discipline to wean oneself off of processed foods, which generally exploit the triggers people have, and people who make junk food actually want you to consume more and increase their bottom line.

Furthermore, the world around us is advertisement-saturated. Even though I avoid purchasing processed foods, ads I see on Hulu and around the Internet do sometimes make me want the products. It’s inevitable, and unlike recovering alcoholics, people who do not want their food buttons pushed cannot expect the rest of the world to concede.

This is why moderation is so important. There are many unprocessed foods that also satisfy cravings, yet contribute less to long-term health problems. Fatty foods such as avocado and delicious coconut and olive oils, plus butter, will help food feel more filling. AND your body needs good fats for cell membranes. There are also ways to get a cocoa kick without submitting to Snickers or sugary drinks. Many of them involve puréed bananas and unsweetened cocoa powder.

The “mostly plants” part of Pollan’s advice is a bit dicier. Quite honestly, people have different needs. Mark Grant wrote in his intro to Roman Cookery that the expense of fish and meat meant that most people did not eat it every day, and some book that escapes me mentioned that many Mediterranean cultures thought non-sacrificial meat was dangerous. Therefore, as most people do not sacrifice their own cows, sheep, or chickens, adopting a (mostly) plant-based diet and sourcing animal flesh from someplace ethical if necessary is probably the wiser choice.

It seems like people in the broader pagan community justify various ethical platforms with the desire to attain Oneness with nature or the Great Mother. That goal sometimes seems like a cop-out because the various European/Mediterranean religious revivals and their syncretic offshoots generally have more concrete elements in support of these ideas. More practical ideas can resonate with people who do not crave ecstatic or rational union with God.

Pagan Coming Out Day: Be Swimmy the Fish

2011-05-03T00:20:00.000-04:00

My first year at Smith College, I rode the bus to the mall/Target to pick up a few things. M., one of the older students in my house, sat a few seats away with another student. She started ripping into modern pagans — especially Wiccans — with a venom that I found slightly disturbing. As someone who had grown up in a UU Pagan family, leaving Missouri for the more liberal New England had let my guard drop because I associated the region with more progressive values.

The two of us never became friends. M. learned that I considered myself pagan a few weeks later, and while I don't know if she remembered making herself look like a complete asshole on that bus, it significantly impacted our interactions in the two or three years we both lived in the same house community. Even in progressive areas, anti-pagan bias can work against you.

I approve of Pagan Coming Out Day because increased visibility of paganism and various Western polytheisms matters. It puts a face to the Other. Regardless of how much I may distance myself from Neopaganism on a daily basis, I think that standing in the Pagan Coming Out Day crowd alongside people of very different non-Abrahamic faiths shows the diversity of pagan and polytheistic religions in society. It also makes us look bigger.

It's like Leo Leonni's Swimmy.

We want to be just like Swimmy and his new school of fish.

Today, I chose not to really comment about my religion. Half of the people in my program may think I am an atheist, some know about my religious background, but the majority probably assume that I am a Christian. As a general rule, I only disclose religion when people ask because — even on Pagan Coming Out Day — it doesn't really flow well into any of the conversations I have on a typical day. And do I really want to share my religion with people I don’t know well?

The closest I came to making a general statement about religion on Pagan Coming Out Day? I thanked Hermes on Facebook after finishing my databases project.

Which, by the way, I credit Hermes with. After a semester of dealing with the finicky rules of databases and the strange things my Access frontend tried to do, I have definitely noticed some similarities between how they work and the logic the King of Tricksters seems to follow.

A Late Happy Mounikhia

2011-04-24T00:45:00.000-04:00

This Mounikhia didn’t happen the way Mounikhias have tended to happen. The first time, I stuck candles in store-bought pancakes and stuck birthday candles in them. Every celebration since has involved birthday candles and baked goods as well, but this year was the first year I actually made anything.

Except I didn’t manage to celebrate Mounikhia on the actual day this year.

I made an executive decision based on the amount of stress from school I was under. To quote something I said elsewhere:

Mounikhia actually started last night and ended at sunset today, but I am celebrating on Friday instead because being miasma-free is really important when it comes to Artemis. I mean, I haven't showered, I feel gross, and I have been so centered on schoolwork that I actually thought I had missed Mounikhia over the weekend because I forgot which day of the lunar month it was.

And then I checked my Yahoo! mail account for the first time in ages and discovered that Mounikhia was actually several days later than I thought it was. For some reason, I thought that the full moon had occurred on the weekend and that the holiday was celebrated slightly closer to it or on it. Don’t ask me why.

I consulted briefly with Random.org’s coin tosser and decided that I was celebrating on Friday instead. (The coin tosser said no to Thursday. Thursday ... was not good anyway. I was spontaneously abducted and brought to a trivia game.)

For Mounikhia, I used a single-serving cupcake/muffin recipe and formed the dough in a half-moon shape, put it in the microwave for two minutes, and spread a chocolate-coconut thing over the top. It had candles and it was beautiful:

The sacrifice went entirely to Artemis.

So happy belated Mounikhia!

A Recommendation and Some Thoughts on Coercive Conversion

2011-04-18T00:11:00.001-04:00

In the interest of pointing out amazing resources for our community, Sannion has recently started a blog of quotations called Eklogai: Polytheist Extractions. I highly recommend reading through some of the beautiful excerpts he has gathered about the Theoi (and some Egyptian/Hellenistic Egypt gods, if you also worship them).

Some of the most interesting ones involve Christian statements against the Hellenes:

Thus this disturbance having been terminated, the governor of Alexandria, and the commander-in-chief of the troops in Egypt, assisted Theophilus in demolishing the heathen temples. These were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian church; for the emperor had instructed Theophilus to distribute them for the relief of the poor. All the images were accordingly broken to pieces, except one statue of the god before mentioned, which Theophilus preserved and set up in a public place; ‘ Lest,’ said he, ‘at a future time the heathens should deny that they had ever worshiped such gods.’ [source]

and this entire one about polytheistic resistance to Christian conversion.

I have always struggled with accounts I read about the rationalization of murder in the name of God or conversion. As you may well know, I left Christianity at the young age of nine because the way the youth education leaders defended Biblical genocides (specifically the deaths of the firstborn of Egypt) was repulsive.

The absence of respect for other world views in the core Christian doctrine and how people fought life-or-death battles over obscure ideological elements — indeed, that they felt it was worth fighting to change others’ internalized opinions —has always baffled me. I understand that many devout Christians act out of compassion to “cure” (ahem ... dominate) people with “false beliefs” (and when the other party does not accept, give license to murder and/or do other deceitful things to reach their goal).

Many modern Christians have quietly given up this ideology without endeavoring to come to terms with their collective guilt over all of the religious wars and atrocities committed in the name of their religion. Ironically, their decision to disown the ones who still do missionary coercion and other indecent behavior (“They’re not Christian!”) is a less bloody version of the same thing.

In modern Hellenism, we often find ourselves entrapped in arguments concerning appropriate practice and doctrine. However, unlike the Christians, we do not have any Gods-given mandate to weed out heretical beliefs and disown other practitioners. It makes me happy when those of us who disagree can still speak with one another civilly and as proper co-religionists — “as brothers,” Agora-Hypatia would probably say — and it pains me to see those who have still not accepted that cultural shift from the instinct to dominate others’ ideas to the instinct to find common ground with them.

Aphrodite Fox Trot

2011-04-01T12:35:00.000-04:00

I found a fox trot from a musical in an audio archive, “Aphrodite Fox Trot,” and tried to learn more about it. (The music, incidentally, has been digitized from an Edison cylinder.) Anselm Goetzl (1878 - 1923) composed the piece for a musical either called Aphrodite or Alexandria.

Its name is actually Aphrodite, and it is short for Aphrodite: A Romance of Ancient Egypt. The text is available in Google Books. It has beautiful illustrations, and H.B. Mullen at the New York Herald called it “[a] riot of pagan beauty. It is beyond any doubt the most artistically beautiful offering ever — yes, ever — made in a theatre in this city. A heathen dream of haunting loveliness” (Section 19).

That’s good enough for me!

The story actually seems to center on some sculptor named Demetrios who made a really awesome sculpture of Aphrodite for the Grove of Love at the Temple of Aphrodite.

I wonder if there are even more plays and musicals like this just waiting to be rediscovered.

For Libya

2011-03-18T01:06:00.000-04:00

One must apply a gentle hand to tend a sore wound: it is easy even for weak men to shake a city to its foundations, but to set it in its place again is indeed a difficult struggle, unless a god suddenly comes to guide its rulers.
— Pindar, Pythian 4: For Arcesilas of Cyrene Chariot Race 462 B.C.E., ln. 271-274.

May Athene protect the people of Benghazi and all of the others whom the current conflict in Libya has endangered.

Happy Elaphebolia

2011-03-10T22:20:00.000-05:00

I sing of Artemis, whose shafts are of gold, who cheers on the hounds, the pure maiden, shooter of stags, who delights in archery, own sister to Apollo with the golden sword. Over the shadowy hills and windy peaks [5] she draws her golden bow, rejoicing in the chase, and sends out grievous shafts. The tops of the high mountains tremble and the tangled wood echoes awesomely with the outcry of beasts: earth quakes and the sea also where fishes shoal. But the goddess with a bold heart [10] turns every way destroying the race of wild beasts: and when she is satisfied and has cheered her heart, this huntress who delights in arrows slackens her supple bow and goes to the great house of her dear brother Phoebus Apollo, to the rich land of Delphi, [15] there to order the lovely dance of the Muses and Graces. There she hangs up her curved bow and her arrows, and heads and leads the dances, gracefully arrayed, while all they utter their heavenly voice, singing how neat-ankled Leto bare children [20] supreme among the immortals both in thought and in deed.
Hail to you, children of Zeus and rich-haired Leto! And now I will remember you and another song also.
– Homeric Hymn #27: To Artemis trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White

Today, Artemis, the hunter of deer, is honored. While many of us who live in towns remain only marginally connected to the natural world (unless we make the effort to buy locally and whatnot), hunting is something that impacts each and every one of us.

Having destroyed almost all natural predators of deer, hunting has become a service to the community, and deer provide an important food source in some parts of the country. Hunting also prevents the natural population of deer from becoming too overabundant (leading to the “population bottleneck,” a state characterized by widespread disease, malnutrition, and mortality that may crash population — see the current human population crisis for disturbing visuals). In my own area, deer overpopulation is a severe issue responsible for a fair number of car accidents and property destruction.

This evening, I made a stag head-shaped ricotta cake and sprinkled it with sesame seeds and honey, in accordance with the scant information available about the holiday. One of the raisin eyes displaced when the cake rose in the oven.

I pray to Artemis who presides over hunting that, as we move deeper into the new century, humanity gains the wisdom to adequately control the deer population under her guidance.

The Birth of the Erinyes

2011-03-02T21:38:00.000-05:00

THE BIRTH OF THE ERINYES

First, a cry —
a slash in the night —
a whisper — and hissing snakes
spat venom across the sky.
This is how the Eumenides were born:
where Nyx is blackest
in the void between the stars.

First, a cry —
a stab in the dark —
a sigh — and then silence
dripping like rain onto the Earth.
This is how the Eumenides were born:
from a scythe of cold iron.

First, a cry —
a hole among the violets —
a scream — and a marriage.
This is how the Eumenides were born:
in a bed beyond the sun, where
roots meet liquid iron
and pomegranate trees sway.

First, a cry —
teeth gnashing in the dark —
a growl — and then blood money
denied to a family in grief.
This is how the Eumenides were born:
slighted Poinê bore them in retribution.

The Eumenides have four overall stories describing their birth. The first story calls them daughters of Nyx. In the second story, Gê gives birth to them from the blood of Ouranos’s severed penis. This account comes from Hesiod, whose stories provide the foundation for many popular culture-oriented stories. The fourth story — yes, more on the third in a second — has been traced primarily to accounts from the Roman era.

The third story is my favorite: Here Persephone gives birth to them. It integrates quite well with the Orphic mysteries, as I have mentioned elsewhere, and it lets the Eumenides partake of the rich imagery associated with that body of mythology.

CREDIT: “Proserpina with Pomegranate,”

Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Public Domain Image from the Wikimedia Commons

Persephone wove a tapestry of the world in a dark cave, and Zeus impregnated her with Zagreus. The Titans ripped the baby apart and roasted him on spits; when Zeus discovered their feast, he hurled lightning bolts at them. From the heart — the only part of Zagreus left intact — he made a potion, which Semele drank. She bore Dionysos from the essence of divine Zagreus.* In effect, this makes the Eumenides the half-sisters of the Lord of Vines (... and even his daughters if you take this several steps further: Dionysos = Chthonic Zeus = Hades, at least to Kerényi).

CREDIT: NOAA, Wikimedia Commons

To me, Dionysos remains one of the most frightening deities among the Olympioi. He’s like a vine that cuts — no apologies, no salve —— the kind of deity who pushes people and/or drives them insane. It’s easy to see how he and the Eumenides can have their important Chthonic festivals in the same month. In pursuit of their major antagonists — Pentheus and Orestes respectively — both Dionysos and the Eumenides drive their prey to madness before the final confrontation. The exception is that Dionysos, being a softer god, manipulates Pentheus into following him — a far cry from the flight of Orestes that littered Greece with sanctuaries.

* Of course, Semele then gets incinerated and Zeus decides that he will forgo using a womb on attempt #3. Probably a good decision.

Happy Diasia

2011-02-27T15:00:00.002-05:00

From A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology:

(*Meili/xios), i. e. the god that can be propitiated, or the gracious, is used as a surname of several divinities. 1. Of Zeus, as the protector of those who honoured him with propitiatory sacrifices. At Athens cakes were offered to him every year at the festival of the Diasia. (Thuc. 1.126; Xenoph. Anab. 7.7.4.) Altars were erected to Zeus Meilichius on the Cephissus (Paus. 1.37.3), at Sicyon (2.9.6), and at Argos (2.20.1; Plut. De cohib. Ir. 9). 2. Of Dionysus in the island of Naxos. (Athen. 3.78.) 3. Of Tyche or Fortune. (Orph. Hymn. 71. 2.) The plural θεοὶ μειλίχιοι is also applied to certain divinities whom mortals used to propitiate with sacrifices at night, that they might avert all evil, as e. g. at Myonia in the country of the Ozolian Locrians. (Paus. 10.38.4; comp. Orph. E. 30.)

Today is sacred to gentle Zeus. Last year, I started enriching some segments of Sallustius’ On the Gods and the World with public images from the Wikimedia Commons, and I dedicated that effort to Zeus because Diasia was the first formal holiday I celebrated in honor of a deity from the pantheon, and reading Sallustius completed my conversion experience.

We can argue forever about what a God is, but the universe is undoubtedly filled to the brim with Theoi. They protect and guide the entire Kosmos. They are curled up in the extra dimensions of string theory and present in the core of gravitational equilibrium-challenged stars on the brim of their death. They exist in the emptiness between the honeycomb edges our galaxies have fallen into, where the nothingness is cold and stars may never come into being. They are fundamentally good, and they hold all of us beneath their protective aegis.

Happy Diasia.

Egypt and the New Library of Alexandria

2011-02-24T21:50:00.000-05:00

We discuss and mythologize the Library of Alexandria as one of the most awesome things to come out of the Hellenistic Era, but here’s a little something about the modern library:

While it’s not the ancient library, the current Library of Alexandria aims to present a model of what a 21st-century library should be. It integrates print and digital collections, cultural archives, and a suite of science support projects.

In the library science program I am in, we keep discussing how libraries can become more like community centers in the 21st century — facilities dedicated not only to connecting people with information and tools to evaluate/access the information, but to connect people with each other in support of collaboration and mutual understanding.

This is really odd, because for me that’s exactly what the ancient Library of Alexandria was about — not creating the best collection of sacred and secular literature in the world, but about connecting people (then researchers) with each other so they could multiply the intellectual output of Hellenistic Egypt a thousandfold. Under the guidance of the Gods, they made amazing advances in philosophy, science, and technology.

In America, librarians facilitate this through reference services (in which someone with a master’s degree is paid to answer your research/materials questions — you should go check it out, especially since most librarians have training in information evaluation and are thus more reliable than Google), by providing the service community with materials in digital and paper formats, and through granting access to its facilities for book groups and other community events.

Hounds of Wrath

2011-02-21T18:37:00.000-05:00

By now, I probably sound like a bit of a Eumenides-pusher, but these goddesses are cool. As in, if they showed up in a modern urban fantasy story about Greek deities making it in the real world, they would be death metal/cyberpunk rock stars with a huge cult following. Death and vengeance have inspired some really catchy tunes.

Anthesterion is kind of a 29-day-long chthonic party.

Anthesteria happens on the 11th through the 13th of the month (trans.: February 14th at sunset to February 17th at sunset). The Lesser Mysteries, which according to Wikipedia/Thomas Taylor

occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in subjection to the body, so those of the Greater obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual [spiritual] vision.’ And that according to Plato, ‘the ultimate design of the Mysteries … was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, … a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.’

happen from the 24th until March 2nd. During the Lesser Mysteries comes Diasia (26/27 February), which includes the chanting of hymns for and sacrificial placation of Zeus Meilikhios, a chthonic aspect of Zeus.

And last but not least, the Eumenideia! 27 Anthesterion, or the evening of the second day of March. The Eumenides are fantastically powerful and amazing goddesses. They are a comfort to the dead and a bane to less careful members of the living. The Eumenides detest blood pollution, but they reek of the pollution and horrors that drive them to the kill. They are Meilikhioi, Praxidikai, Aei Parthenous, Kynes Enkotoi — soothing, exacters of justice, eternal virgins, and the hounds of wrath.

Hounds of Wrath, incidentally, would be the name of their death metal/cyberpunk band.

So, if you’re up for it, think about taking a few minutes to offer milk, honey, and many-humped cakes. Click on this link for a version of the ritual, complete with an embarrassing typographic error in the italicized part from Bell’s New Pantheon.

Also, if you want to read more about how awesome the Eumenides are, check out the tag archive.

Anthesteria 2011: Recap

2011-02-19T00:31:00.000-05:00

Sannion has provided a really nice roundup of Anthesteria posts written by people from all over, which I recommend reading.

Anthesteria in my apartment played out almost exactly as expected.

Pithoigia

As you may recall from the YouTube video I posted about my plans for Anthesteria, the first night involved an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party and tons of schoolwork. I arrived home at about 5 PM, fed the cat, and immediately prepped for ritual. This meant creating a new playlist with Dionysian music because my last playlist backup refused to load into iTunes. It contained:

"The Cult of Dionysus" from The Orion Experience, Cosmicandy
"Appeal of Dionysos" from the Bacchae, Petros Tabouris Ensemble
"Dionysos Avenger" from the Bacchae, Petros Tabouris Ensemble
"Hymn to Dionysos" from The Frogs
"Hymn to Dionysos" from the Bacchae, Petros Tabouris Ensemble
"Hymn to Dionysos (Reprise)" from The Frogs
"Hymn to Bacchus" from Daemonia Nymphe, Daemonia Nymphe
"Building a Mystery" from Surfacing, Sarah McLachlan

My offerings mostly consisted of white ice wine and incense, primarily frankincense. I don't usually scatter barley during regular prayers, and it was definitely nice to step it up for the ritual. The fake flowers came out of hiding, too.

During the ritual, I read one of the Orphic poems for Dionysos. Highway to Hades over at Hellenistai has forced me to think more and more about the story of Orpheus. Strangely enough, connecting to Dionysos through references to the Orphic mysteries and/or the death of Orpheus is very effective, and the sinister aspects seemed appropriate for the festival. The connection we made during the prayers and offerings was fleeting, though, because I had to clean the apartment and make crispy kale.

Someone brought several bottles of Tisdale Sweet Red to the party, which I found didn't need much watering down at all. (Does wine only taste good during Dionysian festivals?) We played lots of party games and a few strategic ones, and everything went well.

Khoes

I read some of the Oresteia on the bus to work. I relate to Khoes most in the treatment of Orestes running from the Erinyes. Otherwise, I dressed in black and some people asked if I had a job interview. I ... didn't.

Many people do things on Khoes involving swinging and ribbons, but I have never done these things. For one thing, plows don't exactly do parks, and I wouldn't feel safe walking alone in the neighborhood alone after dark. My apartment building lacks any conveniently-placed trees.

Khutroi

For the ancestors, I made a mixture of lentils, barley, and spices, and I buried it in one of the snow banks out back. Once back indoors, I made incense offerings of frankincense for the Eumenides and violet for Persephone and Hades (along with a cinnamon stick for other underworld gods).

A Kypris Documentary

2011-02-18T01:39:00.002-05:00

Someone on my Facebook posted about an in-progress documentary about Aphrodite Kypria and the revival of sacred frame drum practices. I thought I would share it here with some comments I have.

The documentary reminds me of many current feminist endeavors to recapture the sacred feminine.* Especially in a society that wages a covert war against women and femininity (see Bitch Magazine, Feministing, or any other feminist analysis of modern culture), it is important to see female goddesses* as something more than childbearing chattel who are only defined by their relationships to men. Kypris, Athene, Artemis, Hera, Persephone, Demeter, Hestia, and the other goddesses have distinct personalities and independent agency both in the myths and in worship.

The imagery in the clip is very powerful, and I hope the documentary appears in a fuller form soon.

The short introduction includes some Orthodox imagery. It provides evidence of syncretism between Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary. Even though the Greek Orthodox Church is more socially acceptable in Hellas right now than forms of pre-Christian practice, hiding Aphrodite within the Virgin Mary is devilishly subversive.

For all that others have mentioned about Christianity’s focus on wiping out forms of indigenous spirituality and the “whitewashing” (Christwashing?) of the many massacres &c. it carried out in the name of conversion and coercion/“bringing people to God,” I think its ideology impacts women the most because

Women learn, based on Genesis, that their gender caused the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden, a fantastical place where men were real men, women were real women, and little green men from Mars were real little green men from Mars.
Paul declared in the New Testament that “the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (I Corinthians 11:3). Also: “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (I Corinthians 11:8-9).
“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church” (I Corinthians 14:34-35).

However, one may argue that Hellenic treatment of women was also as restrictive in the time period described in the Old and New Testaments. One may also argue from the significant amount of scholarship done on the early Church that women had far more agency in Christianity before it became normalized. One book I have, Sapphistries, cites scholarship that indicates early Christians were far more permissive about same-sex relationships than greater Roman society.

Remember it was Plato who said that women could be equal to men if taught the same things (Republic, Book V) and that women — especially in the Pythagorean tradition — actually wrote. Exceptions exist in most early societies, especially on the fringes.

Of course, I don’t generally comment about Christianity on this blog because others discuss it well enough. Additionally, as a non-Christian, I honestly have no idea how women within the religion approach the lesser female figures offered to them or how they reconcile the inclusion of figures such as Aphrodite with the restrictive commandments of their main religion.

Overall, it is more empowering for me to work from within the framework of a religion that contains mysteries and cosmogonies that more closely reflect the way nature actually works: opposites coming together and breaking apart, the one separating into many and the many resolving into one. There is space to call one aspect masculine and another feminine if we really want to. The methods of approaching the divine that evolved along with the human species, complete with sacred stories and hymns and methodologies, seem like a better bet than a transplant religion that continuously rejects exterminates its connection to the world it came from.

* I know that at least one person on the Internet thinks that I’m a covert lesbian-feminist operative devoted to destroying Hellenism from the inside out. This is wrong. The deities I have the closest relationships with are, for the most part, male. Also, I have better things to do. Seriously.

Highway to Hades: Orfeo ed Euridice

2011-02-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

Have you seen the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice? Wondering if it might suit your tastes? Well, I watched the film version ... and then had to review it for Hellenistai to look at the characterization of the Underworld and its denizens, mortal and immortal. It comes with a million pictures because this opera is a highly visual[ly hilarious] experience.

Orfeo ed Euridice is an opera composed by Christoph Gluck. The original text was written by Ranieri De’ Calzabigi. This film, done during the 1982 Glyndebourne Opera Festival, stars Janet Baker as Orpheus, Elisabeth Speiser as Euridice, and Elizabeth Gale as Amore (Love). Because it tells the story of Orpheus, it provides an interesting case study for the portrayal and landscape of the underworld. Truthfully, I found its portrayal of the Gods and some of the characters … interesting … and I have made several screen caps because pictures are worth a thousand words. [READ MORE]

I actually enjoy opera, which might not be apparent after reading this. I just think Orfeo ed Euridice is horrible.

Highway to Hades: Wait for Me

2011-02-13T11:03:00.000-05:00

The final installment of my Highway to Hades look at the rock opera Hadestown is now up on the Hellenistai Media Blog. It looks at some aspects of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as it appears in ancient texts versus how Anaïs Mitchell (the mind behind Hadestown) portrayed it.

One of the most complex rock operas of the decade is Hadestown, conceptualized by musician Anaïs Mitchell and performed as a collaborative work with many artists and musicians. The rock opera has an apocalyptic, post-industrial Great Depression feel. In the words of Anaïs Mitchell, the work is meant to be a question about the limits of human compassion and cruelty:
Take global warming to its terrifying logical conclusion and imagine part of the world becomes uninhabitable and there are masses of hungry poor people looking for higher ground. [T]hen imagine you are lucky enough to live in relative wealth and security, though maybe you’ve sacrificed some freedoms to live that way. When the hordes are at the door, who among us would not be behind a big fence? These conditions exist already, but most of us don’t have to acknowledge them in a real way. (Themes of Hadestown, “History”)
The rock opera Hadestown uses the realm of Hades and its denizens in several ways. Firstly, it uses the landscape to highlight disparities of wealth and power among communities. Secondly, the connections it makes between characters — Hades and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice, and the restless dead — emphasize these connections and provide raw human emotions to fuel the changes that happen in the story. Finally, the mythological landscape utilizes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in very unique ways, and we will explore all of these things here. This is the last of three posts. You can read the first and second ones here. [READ MORE]

Enjoy.

Looking forward to Anthesteria ...

2011-02-12T13:58:00.000-05:00

One thing I noticed in this video, other than my bad pronunciation of Greek, is that I probably use the word “so” more than any other human being in the world.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everyone. So ... last year I wanted to make a short video about Anthesteria. I kind of made these videos — really, I actually did — it's just that I looked like too much of a dork in them because I hadn't actually planned out what I was saying in advance. So, this year I did that, and hopefully I won't ramble as much as in those videos that you are never, ever going to see. So, Anthesteria is one of my favorite holidays.

So ... for Pithoigia, it's going to be a little bit different this year, actually. For one thing, it falls on Valentine's Day, and my apartment is having an "Anti-Valentine's Day" party with mochi and board games and all of these other really fun and amazing things. So, I'm probably going to open some wine for the household gods, Dionysos, et cetera, earlier in the evening — probably right after sunset — so I can have a nice, short time with the Gods before I have to run around like a headless chicken and get everything ready for the party.

So, there is that.

And then one of the other things is that I am a grad student, so on the following day — on Khoes — I am probably not actually going to actually get to drink with Orestes this year, which is really, really, really, really sad because Orestes is part of the founding, you know, myths of most of the Erinyes' and Eumenides' sanctuaries, so I am probably just going to be reading from the Oresteia a lot. I am going to be at work doing coding and content analysis and all of those things grad students have to do ... and additionally I have a meeting in the early afternoon. So ... that's really sad. But never fear! I will do things!

But on the third day, I do not think I have class or anything, so the bean offering for Hermes Chthonios is definitely on! Yay offerings for the dead! Yay underworld deities! I am probably also going to be making offerings to Zeus Chthonios/Hades, Persephone, and the Eumenides and maybe a few other underworld deities because, you know, it's a festival of the dead and you have to have fun with the dead. In non-creepy ways. Um ... so, anyway.

Happy Anthesteria. I hope that your holiday goes really, really well. One thing you should note is that if you follow the Hellenistai Media Reviews blog, I am actually doing a post for Valentine's Day even though we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day because I felt that it would be "super ironic" to talk about Orpheus and Eurydice, um ... because it's the greatest love story ever told. So there's going to be a new update there ... so you should all go there and check that out and, you know, be thinking about the underworld and everything like that. I totally started rambling, but I am probably going to post this anyway because it's about five times better than the stuff I tried to make last year.

So ... um ... have a nice Anthesteria and good-bye!

Word Frequency in the Delphic Maxims

2011-02-06T00:41:00.000-05:00

The Delphic Maxims (as listed here, but with Mano’s edit for #139) in Wordle form. This shows the relative frequencies of the words used in English translations of the Maxims. As expected, the following words appear very frequently:

Praise
Give
Honor
Control
Respect
Praise
Act

Less expectedly, some other words appear frequently according to Wordle:

One
Without
Pursue
Shun
Everyone
Despise

I think it’s an interesting look at what the Maxims say as a whole in a way that completely divorces us from evaluating them individually. While the latter is a good exercise, sometimes it helps to put things into perspective. I think that a good judge of an ethical framework when its statements teach us how to approach the world without becoming judgmental. This is the context for the word despise:

Maxim 41: Despise insolence (Υβριν μισει)
Maxim 63: Despise a slanderer (Διαβολην μισει)
Maxim 80: Despise strife (Εριν μισει)
Maxim 119: Despise evil (Κακιαν μισει)

Even negative words can be used for good ends.

Remembering the Dead

2011-01-07T11:51:00.001-05:00

While locating sources for my post about seven essential web resources for new Hellenists, I thought I would include a category about views on death. The Hellenic views on death are manifold, ranging from a belief in reincarnation to nothingness, and no source seemed to capture in plain language the intricacies of each perspective.

One of the more popular (and less Mystery-oriented) beliefs — and one widely popularized by monotheists seeking converts due to its bleakness — is the idea of the dead found in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. In Homeric thought, the living must remember the dead and the amount of renown one goes to Hades with plays an important role. To regain a shadow of who they were, the dead must also receive sacrifice.

The above image comes from a resource that discusses these beliefs, along with aspects of ritual cult to the dead, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The resource of images even outlines the process of an ancient funeral:

Relatives of the deceased, primarily women, conducted the elaborate burial rituals that were customarily of three parts: the prothesis (laying out of the body (54.11.5), the ekphora (funeral procession), and the interment of the body or cremated remains of the deceased. After being washed and anointed with oil, the body was dressed (75.2.11) and placed on a high bed within the house. During the prothesis, relatives and friends came to mourn and pay their respects. Lamentation of the dead is featured in early Greek art at least as early as the Geometric period, when vases were decorated with scenes portraying the deceased surrounded by mourners. Following the prothesis, the deceased was brought to the cemetery in a procession, the ekphora, which usually took place just before dawn. [source]

So if you haven’t already looked at this collection of images, I recommend it. They also have a collection of images about the Hellenic Gods.

Image Source: Death, Burial, and the Afterlife in Ancient Greece | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hellenism: Seven Essential Web Resources (2010 Edition)

2011-01-01T20:36:00.005-05:00

“I can’t find any good introductory information about Hellenic Polytheism” is often the first thing out of someone’s mouth when they stumble across a Yahoo! Group, public forum, or other place where Hellenists meet and discuss our religion.

If you’re one of these brave seekers, chances are that lists of twenty-seven essential books compiling the works of Plato, Julian Augustus, and every other member of the ancient Hellenic intelligentsia is not what you’re looking for.

Most down-to-Earth people want to research what we are getting into before we become a member of the Julian Society or order a $400 copy of Drew Campbell’s guide to Hellenism as it stood at the beginning of the 21st century. As a beginner, you will most likely either use the library or the Internet ... and a librarian for both if you’re sensible.*

I have called this the 2010 edition because I’m fairly sure that as online resources mature, some of them will be replaced (and I have called it the 2010 edition because I’m looking at the year that just closed and not the one that’s beginning). They have been divided into spheres of influence.

General Information: Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, and Nature Divinities

Title: Theoi Greek Mythology: Exploring Mythology in Classical Literature & Art
Author: Aaron J. Atsma
Link: http://www.theoi.com

Theoi Greek Mythology is like a multi-tool for Hellenic Polytheists. It contains information about most deities, popular or obscure, along with excerpts from major Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman texts in the deity descriptions. Because many Hellenic prayers often involve a litany of divine epithets, this site is also useful for familiarizing yourself with some of the more popular ones (i.e., Apollon Noumenios for Apollon of the Noumenia). When Theoi Greek Mythology went down about a year ago, it sent about 40% of the people I know into a state of panic.

Household Religion

Title: Hellenic Household Worship
Author(s): Christos Pandion Panopoulos (ed. & tr.: Lesley & Rathamanthys Madytinos)
Link: http://labrys.gr/index.php?l=householdworship

Hellenic Household Worship discusses the deities of the household and their function within the household cultus (worship). The guide provides extensive images and notes. Christos Pandion Panopoulos is associated with Labrys, one of several Hellenic (Greek) organizations committed to the restoration of the Greek Gods.

Hymns and Other Primary Texts

Title: Perseus Digital Library 4.0
Responsible Party: Department of Classics, Tufts University
Link: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

Perseus describes itself as an ongoing practical experiment in digital collection development. They have a large number of Classical texts, retrievable using the Search tool, and a tutorial for new users. Texts include the Homeric Hymns and most of the other primary texts (works written by ancient writers, not modern commentary) Hellenic Polytheists will recommend to you.

Keeping Time

Title: HMEPA (Hellenic Month Established Per Athens)
Link: http://www.eyesfortheuniverse.com/hmepa/

HMEPA provides Athenian festival information and the coinciding Gregorian calendar dates. While Athenian festivals are most popularly observed in the modern Hellenic Polytheistic community, many individuals have created their own festivals or modified the Athenian ones to give the religion some local color. Others have completely abandoned the Attic calendar in favor of reconstructing those of other ancient city-states.

Libations and Other Rituals

Title: Greek Rituals, Temenos Theon
Author: Kyrene Ariadne
Link: http://kyrene.4t.com/rituals.html

Temenos Theon outlines many ritual practices, such as prayer and celebratory ritual, along with some guidelines for properly conducting a ritual without offending anything important. Kyrene Ariadne, this guide’s creator, is a long-standing member of the American Hellenic Polytheistic community.

Title: Liturgical Resources, Sponde!
Link: http://sites.google.com/site/spondelibation/home/reconstruction-of-hellenic-polytheistic-practices/liturgical-resources

Sponde! provides essential, down-to-Earth information about offerings, prayer, and libations — including how to differentiate between a sponde and a khoe. I have linked to the liturgical resources, which contain the bulk of Sponde!'s ritual information.

Morality

Title: Delphic Maxims
Author: Seven Sages (attributed)
Link: http://mirrorpalace.wordpress.com/delphic-maxims/

The text of the Delphic Maxims consists of 147 guidelines for human behavior. While some other guidelines exist (such as the Commandments of Solon), this is by far the most popular. While I personally find Maxim 95 a bit sexist, most of the list provides a holistic look at how to approach life, death, and everything in between. The version here is provided by Laria, a member of the community, and is well-formatted when compared to other freely available versions.

* Most librarians have a professional master’s degree in librarianship. Not only does this degree give them project planning skills, but it generally involves learning how to evaluate information for correctness and authoritativeness. Reference librarians are being paid to sit behind a desk and wait for you to ask questions. If you are not affiliated with a university and must use a public library, this means you (the taxpayer) are paying them to sit behind a desk and answer your questions (and if you are at university/in college, your tuition is paying the reference librarian). How awesome is that?

All Things Shining or, I Knew That Greek Gods Google Alert Was For Something Other Than Yogurt

2010-12-31T19:41:00.002-05:00

A new book is coming out on 4 January 2011 (which incidentally is also Hekate’s Deipnon, so you should leave out leeks or something) called All Things Shining. Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly at Harvard are both professional philosophers, which makes them either very qualified to talk about the Ancient Greeks or not qualified at all. This is what the Amazon product description says:

In medieval Europe, God’s calling was a grounding force. In ancient Greece, a whole pantheon of shining gods stood ready to draw an appropriate action out of you. Like an athlete in “the zone,” you were called to a harmonious attunement with the world, so absorbed in it that you couldn’t make a “wrong” choice. If our culture no longer takes for granted a belief in God, can we nevertheless get in touch with the Homeric moods of wonder and gratitude, and be guided by the meanings they reveal? All Things Shining says we can.

The review that clued me into this book’s existence, written by Eric Ormsbry at the Wall Street Journal, focuses primarily on the strangeness of the valuation of polytheism. (He also thinks Hera is the goddess of the hearth for some reason, which is pretty sloppy journalism that makes me wonder if anything else in his review is wrong.)

“It has long been customary to dismiss these gods as mere stage presences, as convenient explanations for random catastrophes or as fall guys for human motives,” Ormsbry writes, followed by some nice prosaic buildup about Aphrodite and Helen. The writers, Ormsbry thinks, “view the ancient Homeric gods as hidden presences still susceptible of invocation” — which I think is an exaggeration made by the reviewer to sell copies/piss off the Religious Right because I have seen neither Dreyfus nor Kelly at our Dionysian orgies (and most academics are on the atheist or believer side of the Christian paradigm). But whatever ... it’s not like I have actually read a fragment of this book yet.

I probably will look at it sometime after the book comes out (likely this summer), but thought I should give people who aren’t in graduate school a heads up in case they wanted to jump in earlier.

Update: I have since looked at some of the comments on this review, so I would definitely say that this book has offended some Christians. Apparently we’ve forgotten that Christianity already provides all of the solutions to emptiness &c. the authors suggest the Gods satisfy. There’s even an annoying person who quotes relevant Biblical verses.

Happy Heliogenna!

2010-12-21T22:13:00.001-05:00

Phoebus sat
in robes of purple high upon a throne
that glittered brilliantly with emeralds;
and in attendance on his left and right
stood Day and Month and Year and Century,
and all the Hours, evenly divided;
fresh Spring was there, adorned with floral crown,
and Summer, naked, bearing ripened grain,
and Autumn, stained from treading out her grapes,
and Winter with his grey and frosty locks.
– Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II.29-38

Hope everyone is having a happy Heliogenna!

The evening ritual went really well, and I think I know why. The solstice actually occurred at 6:38 PM, or three to four minutes after I started the ritual. Due to the number of deities involved, the aroma of frankincense left me a bit buzzed.

Barring any unforeseen alarm issues, I will be up tomorrow morning at 7:32 AM to greet Helios, light some incense, promptly fall back to sleep again until nine or ten, do some work/in-town errands, and watch the last half of Hogfather (a solstice/Christmas film based on a Pratchett novel that I highly recommend).

That Devotee

2010-12-21T00:11:00.002-05:00

Sannion just wrote an interesting post from the perspective of someone who performs oracular services in which he provides guidelines and information about how not to be that devotee. (Side note: I love reading his stuff because it is almost always thought-provoking. Good job, Sannion.) So obviously, while brushing my teeth this evening, I thought a few more times about something he wrote:

But on the other hand, don’t keep asking the same question over and over again hoping for a different result and don’t expect your situation to change if you’re not willing to act in a manner which they indicated will have a favorable outcome. Sometimes, a lot of the time actually, you’ve got to put in the work first before things will make sense to you.

And it’s like ... oh my Gods I do that — not to oracles, mind you, but in smaller ways. No one among us is a perfect being, and there are always character flaws we can work on (or let slide, as the case may be).

I have this compulsive perfectionism about really important school assignments and other things. I feel anxious if I submit the item until I have gone on the Random coin toss (and I always choose the Bactrian coins). The anxiety lessens if I feel like I am placing the worth of whatever it is in someone else’s hands, like how when you’re five you sometimes really want to have an adult around just in case something bad happens. On another level, I suppose it is about reaching out towards someone or something I trust.

My reaction to very important things involves using the 3-coin setting. If fewer than 2 out of 3 come back heads, I will go back to the writing and painstakingly analyze my thesis statement, closing paragraph, dialogue, or prepositional phrases for errors before asking again about ten minutes later. And this goes on. And on. And on. And on. Finally, it becomes done enough ... and this compulsion has worked well so far. I mean, I did excellently on my term paper about metadata practices in astronomy.

Which leads me to this narcissistic indulgence:

Athene: What are you doing, bros?
Hermes: We're watching Kayleigh agonize over coin tosses again. It's really hilarious. She does this every time before a pap —
Apollon: Shhhh! She's about to go to the site again!
Hermes: — paper or writing submission because she's too insecure about its intellectual and/or creative content to just submit it.
Athene: And ... you guys watch this?
Apollon: Yeah, it's really funny.
Hermes: My favorite thing is watching the dismayed expression on her face whenever I tell her NOOOOOO. It's like eating shrimp in front of a kitten, let me tell you.
Athene: ... isn't that a little, well, cruel?
Apollon: I make him stop before she gets depressed. Besides, it helps her run that last lap.
Athene: And you watch her every time?
Hermes: No, only for final papers. I make the daimones take care of it otherwise.
Apollon: She usually gives us a lot of incense when it's over, so it's worth it.
Athene: She doesn't give me incense.
Apollon: That's because it's been a while since she had a real exam. You should inspire her professors a bit more.

Ah, the joys of thinking while getting ready for bed and holiday madness.

Death and Beyond

2010-12-15T16:08:00.000-05:00

The Warden of the Larvae (Shades) [lord Hades] and the third heir of the world, after the lot’s unkind apportioning, leapt down from his chariot and grew pale, for he was come to Tartarus and heaven was lost for ever.
Statius, Thebaid 11. 444 ff

I have had an unsettling fascination with death ever since I was seven and learned during bedtime reading that the sun would expand and obliterate everything I knew in roughly 4.5 billion years. It’s very unsettling to learn that death extends beyond individuals to entire star systems and (in the case of supernovae) larger regions of space — especially when one has never come face-to-face with a dead animal (um ... in non-butchered form) or human corpse. Every adult I knew responded, “We won’t be here to see it, so don’t worry about it too much.”

The death of our solar system, barring human colonization of other planets, is also troubling from a Hellenic perspective. Some of our holidays, such as Anthesteria, have time set aside for honoring the departed. Ancestors’ memory must be kept alive to create a connection with the past. In religious stories like the Odyssey, the dead hunger for sacrifice and need it to regain some semblance of who they were while alive:

‘Oh Tiresias,’
I replied as the prophet finished, ‘surely the gods
have spun this out as fate, the gods themselves.
But tell me one thing more, and tell me clearly.
I see the ghost of my long-lost mother here before me.
Dead, crouching close to the blood in silence,
she cannot bear to look me in the eyes —
her own son — or speak a word to me. How,
lord, can I make her know me for the man I am?’

‘One rule there is,’ the famous seer explained,
‘and simple for me to say and you to learn.
Any one of the ghosts you let approach the blood
will speak the truth to you. Anyone you refuse
will turn and fade away.’
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles. Book 11: 157 - 169

Of course, the Orphic and Platonic traditions tell slightly different versions of this. In Plato (and forgive me, but I am visiting my mom and my Plato did not fit in my luggage, so this paraphrase may be weak), the dead are reincarnated after drinking from Lethe. Some of the dead must purify themselves of poor behavior in life, some have a good rest in the afterlife, and the select (or good-plus) have a really awesome time in the afterlife. In the Orphic stories, those who have received initiation learn how to retain one’s memory after death. The Bacchic tablets discuss a white cypress tree, certain words for the guard of Lake Mnemosyne, and a blessed existence with Queen Persephone. The mysteries of Demeter and Persephone provide a good afterlife experience to the initiates.

Life is most likely ubiquitous in the cosmos. Self-aware beings with critical thinking skills and highly developed brains (or whatever strange alien equivalent could exist) might be less common. As much as we think we know about ourselves and the world beyond, limitless other options exist that challenge our opinions of life. Moreover, the death of the solar system makes me wonder what will happen once Earth ceases to exist and whether anyone elsewhere in the cosmos will care about the rich traditions swallowed by the bulging (and eventually nova-ing) Sun. It makes me wonder how any resultant life incorporating the rocks and dust from our spent world will honor those of us who came before in cosmic time, or if it will even gain the curiosity to learn and care. Moreover, if our “souls” return to bodies in the end, where will they go when there’s no Earth to hold them?

This is the reason why “we won’t be there” never worked for me as a child. I have always liked the idea of reincarnation, even before I knew the word. And, as polytheism comes back in the West, I think we need to find our own answers to these questions. We could always appropriate ideas from Hinduism or any of the other world faiths Hellenism resembles, but that won’t make it resonate with the way we view the cosmos and the gods within it. In the end, as with every revolution, ideas must come from within.

We must be doing something right ...

2010-12-15T14:47:00.000-05:00

... because Apollonius is appearing in the iPhone’s autocorrect. And guess what? He’s the new w00t.

Because We Have and They Have Not

2010-12-09T21:46:00.000-05:00

New post up at the Hellenistai Media Blog.

This post is part of my “Highway to Hades” series about depictions of the Underworld in film, literature, music, and theater. As those who read my blog often know, the following things frustrate me to no end:

Hades as the Ultimate Evil. See Disney’s Hercules, the movie version of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, and other items of pop culture interest for details.
The Underworld = Christian Hell. Excuse me, but our afterlife has more alcohol.

The series is a way to mediate these many feelings of anger and rage that have built up in my system. I am currently talking about Hadestown (and will be for yet another post), but will move to a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice on Valentine’s Day because I have a sick sense of humor.

Giving Thanks

2010-11-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks to Dionysos & Demeter and all of the other gods of agriculture who made the harvest so good in Upstate NY. The entire region had a wonderful squash harvest this year, and my mom still has sage in her garden. As far as I know, my million basil plants are still alive. And thanks to the Twelve Olympioi for such a dynamic, agreeable, and caring Hellenic polytheistic community.

As a belligerent advocate of polytheism, I only blurted out something inappropriate once after my mom’s fiancé’s mother insisted on saying an invocation to the Lord Almighty at the beginning of dinner ... which was “Praise Dionysos!” Thank Hermes that I had enough time to realize that I should keep my mouth slightly more shut during the ensuing awkward silence. I blame having a fever.

Image credit: Me at the age of five. This seems like the only non-floral shirt I owned at that age. I looked like a perpetual field of flowers. Who knew I’d use it eighteen years later as an offering shot?

Holidays and sugar

2010-11-21T23:18:00.001-05:00

As far as my religious calendar is concerned, nothing much will happen until the Lesser Dionysia on December 15/16th, and I also plan on celebrating the Twelve Days of Dionysos just like last year (with the addition of Heliogenna). The solstice season is deceptively joyous because it reminds me of the coming Anthesteria (just like last year), when I plan on opening a bottle of good ice wine that I received on my birthday. Anthesteria doesn't begin until February 14/15th.

I find it strange that, while I worship Apollon most closely outside of the calendar, the rituals I really look forward to all involve either Dionysos or Zeus — mostly because I have good memories of past celebrations of all of them. Religious celebrations during the dark half of the year have a certain atmosphere that most of the ones in the hot months cannot duplicate. The festivals for Apollon, for example, always occur while I'm traveling or engaging in special family events that make rituals beyond prayer and incense impossible to perform. Actually having the time to prepare for them as thoroughly as I prepare for the winter ones would help.

Additionally, I would like to make sacrifices for the maple season this year. While I don’t farm maples myself, I live in New York's maple and grape country. Imagining life before maple cream (um ... it’s like maple syrup only spreadable and the consistency of peanut butter) seems impossible, and I don't know what I did for the years I was trapped in the Midwest. If anyone has any ideas about which deities would be most appropriate — Demeter or Dionysos? Nymphs? Chthonic deities? — please let me know in the comments. It would be cool if other people living in maple-producing areas joined in.

A Stone for Hermes II

2010-11-06T17:31:00.001-04:00

Remember the blog post I made about the slightly unusual offering to Hermes I committed to while searching for an apartment? A tree nook has hidden in plain sight since I began my studies in August — and it’s right in front of the School of Information Studies. The place was perfect. I placed the stone in the nook on Friday, and it feels so good knowing that the commitment has been fulfilled.

What Happens in the Agora

2010-11-05T15:54:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of my nearest Netflix shipping facility, I have now seen Agora. The film was lovely, and it made me cry more than the end of The Return of the King. Some have remarked on the lack of historical accuracy of the film. As we don’t actually know a lot about Hypatia — a fact tragically common with ancient figures of note due to the Christian destruction of almost every heretical/pagan text they could find — I treated the film more like historical fiction.

Agora is a symbol of all of the knowledge lost due to ideological decisions from Alexandria to Central America and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It slips into fiction because it plays with history to present a concrete Event that people will watch, captivated by the train wreck Western culture had all those centuries ago. It is meant to evoke horror and anger because the destruction of books and persecution of scientists who refuse to defer to ideology happens for similar ideological reasons today. (See the burning of the Beatles’ albums in much of the United States because of a comment about Jesus one of them made.) The unhealthy One True Wayist ideology that plagues Christianity, Islam, and some religions and sects influenced by them may stand in for any totalitarian ideology.

One of my roommates actually had to stop watching Agora due to the amount of violence against books. I can also see why some modern Christians — many of whom remain ignorant about their religion’s stances on intellectual freedom and inquiry — may take issue with the content. This film should make them uncomfortable that murderers and leaders of mobs have such high status even after their deaths. It reveals the hypocrisy of Christian claims that their way provides the only solid moral framework for a human life and shows a wider audience just how long many of them have ignored their own guidelines of behavior. It breaks down the argument “s/he isn’t a real Christian” because these immoral figures from its early days have been enthusiastically incorporated into the greater narrative of Christianity’s path to dominance.

Of course, there are decent Christians out there. However, just as in the film, they are often defamed and humiliated by their more radical brethren until the radicals’ power base removes them or turns them into puppets of a totalitarian machine. It must be a horrible way to go.

The fake motivational poster uses an image from the Wikimedia Commons. To view the original and associated permissions, please click here.

QR Codes and Hellenism

2010-10-25T16:22:00.000-04:00

Libraries and librarians are currently talking a lot about QR codes and their applicability to the library setting. As phones and mobile devices become more advanced — and people have more ready access to phones than other kinds of devices — QR codes can be used to enhance users’ library experience.

A QR code is essentially a hyperlink that can be placed on any surface as long as it remains distinguishable from the background. You can read it using a mobile application (say, on an iTouch, iPhone, and most phones with cameras that are not the LG Touch). And while this limits them, their applicability still fits a large portion of the population.

So how cool would it be to see a QR code for Hellenion that immediately takes you to information about joining, or a QR code pasted on a stone at the shrine you made in a public park so people could learn more about what you're doing? Or, once we establish public worship areas, a QR code that takes you to the text of a hymn when you visit a shrine if you want something more robust than what you came with. It could look something like this (which links to the Perseus text of the Hymn to Apollon):

Or this, which goes to the Temple of Hermes Online:

Just as Hellenists have mobilized on the Internet in ways previously impossible outside of Greece, I think that much can be said for using this technology and others to greater facilitate our connection with one another. Additionally, because QR codes are accessible, they increase access to our resources in the greater population. While this could mean bad things for us — “YOU MEAN THIS CONFIGURATION OF STONES IS A SHRINE TO SATAN?!” — for the most part, it would increase transparency so people would actually know what we were about. Considering that most individuals will like you more when they view you as a human being rather than an abstract evil, I don’t think it would be a bad thing.

Image credits: [1], [2]

Connecting through food

2010-10-16T20:29:00.000-04:00

One of the ways I love connecting with the Theoi and the Mediterranean past is through cooking. What we eat has a powerful impact on ourselves and our world views. For me, finding and using recipes based on things the ancients ate is a way of making history tactile and living through the flavors and sensations people once experienced.

Last night, I made chicken with squash and peaches (a recipe in The Philosopher’s Kitchen). It used cumin and caraway seeds, which seemed dubious to me because they’re not a member of my staple: thyme, garlic, oregano, basil, parsley, or sage. I was shocked at how palatable it turned out. My roommates loved it. The squash and peaches made it so sweet, and while I goofed up and bought boneless thighs instead of bone-in due to misunderstanding the packaging, it was one of the best chicken dishes I have had to date. Unfortunately, my mind was not in the right place and I didn’t think to take out my camera until I took my first bite.

Weekends are generally safe times to have a baking frenzy. Today, I made Etruscan focaccia from the same cookbook, which is much like the modern Italian focaccia dish except based on precedent set by the archaeological finds at Pompeii. It started out a bit dubious — the yeast didn’t like the apartment’s temperature — but it looks so tasty and yummy. The recipe seemed a bit salty when I took a corner, though, so I think I will keep that in mind for future renditions.

One of my roommates started cooking dinner at about the time I formed the dough into sheets, and that really helped make it rise.

Most of the ancient adaptations I have cooked are so simple and inexpensive. While I know that some of the ingredients may have been luxury items 2500 to 1500 years ago, the majority that don’t use fish on the red list (due to overfishing) go quite far.

Highway to Hades: River of Cinderbricks

2010-10-11T12:14:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, I'm writing a series about depictions of the underworld and its denizens over at the Hellenistai Media Blog called Highway to Hades. The current post, “River of Cinderbricks,” is the first of three planned posts about issues in Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown. I encourage you to read and comment over there, but also to check out the great reviews the other writers have put out about various Hellenic-themed media.

I'm Not A Witch, But My Mom Is

2010-10-09T22:02:00.000-04:00

I made this short video (1:17) in solidarity with the Wiccans &c. who are offended by the advertisement Christine O’Donnell’s campaign recently ran in Delaware. While I don’t commonly get into politics on this blog (okay, aside from the rampant environmentalism), making a statement is important. Firstly, while our religion doesn’t share very much in terms of theology or ritual practice with Wiccans, we are both minority faiths in America and will probably be grouped together by everyone else anyway. Secondly, I feel insulted on behalf of my UUPagan mother and the Hannibal, MO, pagan community (which provided me with most of the only good memories I have about my entrapment in Missouri for 11 years of childhood/adolescence).

The unfortunate end result of this is that you will all probably be able to recognize me in passing even though my webcam isn’t particularly good. That’s not particularly horrible, but a stranger on campus asked this Friday how I was enjoying my freshman year of college. Ouch. Need more frumpy graduate student clothing.

Asian Grocery Store

2010-10-08T19:03:00.000-04:00

And they said it was discontinued!

Bacchus-D: giving your maenads the energy to rip apart ungrateful bastards since 1963.

Loving This Incense

2010-09-22T22:58:00.000-04:00

This month, I purchased to an incense assortment from Shoyeido, the Japanese company I have used to buy religious incense for the past several years. I actually budget worship-related materials into my monthly finances, such as incense, replacement candles, and anything else that comes up.

The Xiang Do incense assortment is, in one word, divine.

I made the first offering from it to Kore, choosing the violet because violets make me think of the moment she stood with that flower in her hands before the Lord of the Undergloom took her away. I whispered words from a song I know. The incense was so perfect and luxurious, and I was astounded by its complexity. Unlike cored incense, Japanese incense doesn’t have that hidden burnt smell from wood; it’s just pure fragrance — in my imagination, the closest one can get to burning granules on charcoal indoors without risking poisoning from the fumes. The smell of charcoal always gets in my throat.

The second offering I made using the assortment was to Hermes. I chose the citrus because I have always associated him with the warmth of oranges and lemons for no good reason. The smell was just as good without the bitterness of citrus oil.

We make offerings to the Theoi not because we have to, but because it is the correct thing to do. The action of sacred wastefulness creates an ephemeral path between the immortal and mortal. Each offering brings us into resonance with them. While the classics will always work — small barley cakes, frankincense, myrrh, cracking bones among the charcoal — we have a responsibility to create new bridges using what we know about each God’s spheres of influence and what came before.

Of course, it’s hard to get better than frankincense. That stuff lights your brain up in magical ways and may be effective against cancer. And there’s a Xiang Do for that.

Thoughts on the Unknown

2010-09-19T13:02:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I went with other people on my graduate program to the town I just moved out of because we had an entire day of library tours and other stuff. It was really, really cool.

We stopped on the way back at Phoenix Books, a great used bookstore out on Route 13 in Upstate NY. There, Classical philosophers are shelved not with philosophy, but with other ancient literature, and mythology is shelved immediately after the human sexuality/erotica section, which is not a huge stretch of the imagination if your only exposure to mythology involves Zeus.

I found Plato’s Phaedrus there, the Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff translation. Unlike other Plato translations, which make very effective bedtime reading, this one is actually engaging. Like the Symposium, this one discusses aspects of love motivated by divine erōs, but more specifically the wisdom in choosing “lovers” who are in love versus people who are not in that state. The Symposium deals more with what the god or divine power actually is based on inference.

The Phaedrus is a really interesting dialogue to read, especially when looking at the langauge in Hellenic texts such as the Delphic Maxims or the ideas about the soul and the Hellenic “enlightenment” that some people in the community talk about at length. Because really, being a Hellenist is very much about discovering how the Theoi impact you without ever actually seeing them, just as we know neutrinos are a huge deal in the life-giving Sun even if we cannot detect them unless we dig giant holes in the ground and wait for a really long time. (Like ... they pass through the Earth. There are neutrinos going through you right now.) Although ... we do know what neutrinos are, and I sometimes wish I could say the same about the Theoi.

And we really can only know them through inferrence, no matter how scary that may sound — even those of us who have had experiences where our brains light up in certain ways. The incense may fill us up from the bottom with peace and the statues and images and divine names may seem like embodiments of divinity, but behind them is something deeply intelligent and alien beyond our wildest dreams, and we can only scratch the surface.

Images (bottom to top): Hubble Ultra Deep Field, First Neutrino Observation, Antennae Galaxies

A Stone for Hermes

2010-09-05T14:33:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I use an innovative approach to offerings — mostly because the standard “I’ll give you incense!” promise doesn’t seem like the most creative thing on the planet. One of the things I enjoy thinking about are the votive offerings, images of the Gods that were dedicated in temples for everyone to look at and admire.

While searching for an apartment and scrambling together everything I needed for graduate school, I prayed to Hermes and asked that things go smoothly. In return, I promised that I would carve his name into a rock and put it in a tree nook someplace. Now I have a rock, but no tree nooks have pointed themselves out to me. To do this, I will likely have to go someplace older where the trees have had enough time to mature — and Syracuse isn’t really the place for that, so maybe next time I see a state park.

Everyone Has First Amendment Rights, So Let's Actually Do Something Productive

2010-08-30T12:11:00.001-04:00

Short note: I moved into an apartment on August 15th to start graduate studies, hence not posting since August 10th. The apartment is awesome, although the living room’s smoke alarm is really sensitive, and I am somewhat anxious about lighting incense because I don’t know how excitable the alarm in my bedroom will be. That’s it from me. Now on to business as usual.

Hrafnkell made a post on PAGAN+politics called “Islamophobia and an American Heathen,” which I highly recommend you read. While my blog should not deviate too far from its focus on Hellenism, the post — and comments — are very important to the polytheistic movement as a whole.

We all know that the core texts of Islam and Christianity contain elements that portray polytheism as something hostile and demonic. To Muslims, polytheism is shirk, the most heinous and unforgivable crime in their religion because it denies the One True God. Other things, including liking the Beatles too much, we can also consider as shirk, so it’s not like we’re special anymore to them. Christianity believes that the only way to attain salvation is through the One True God and Yeshua, the Jewish Rabbi whose break with tradition resulted in the religion we know today.

No one who believes in the Bill of Rights can say that we should deny them the right to assemble as they please in a location they have bought, no matter how much anxiety we feel about how much each individual adherent believes in their divisive sacred texts. As Epictetus says in his Enchiridion:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

If we think about this quotation, we can clearly see that reacting to what people do — say, building a religious center — as if we controlled their actions will only create frustration and divide us into camps that really shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Because we can control our responses, we should instead look beyond situations and see the larger picture.

If our goal as an alliance of polytheistic faiths is to reduce stigmatization of our faiths and to counter anti-polytheistic propaganda, we need to concentrate on these campaigns, not just tearing down the people who we know oppose us. A lot of people have started initiatives, but they probably wouldn’t mind having our help.

If you aren’t already helping and would like to, join an interfaith group. Share information about the World Congress of Ethnic Religions on Facebook, Twitter, and in person. Let people know about indigenous Americans’ struggles for basic protections/respect and support them as people with somewhat similar goals who might be awesome to work with in the future. Support Pagan Pride Day. If people ask why you don’t discuss Easter plans, give them a real reason. Interact with mainstream blogs and counter Abrahamic arguments with our own. Even people in dangerous locations can interact with Internet-based advocacy groups, and everyone can demand to know politicians’ stands on First Amendment rights for religious minorities such as Hindus, Buddhists, and polytheists.

As Aias from the Hellenistai Forums said, our ancestors were completely unprepared to deal with One True Wayist Monotheism. However, we live with people who believe in that stuff, so we are in a much better position. We know the good and bad of each of them. Can’t we learn from our ancestors’ mistakes and actually start addressing the problems?

Making Room for Hêphaistos

2010-08-10T21:32:00.000-04:00

Until several hours ago, Hêphaistos had no online temple (that I could find in a Google search) where devotees could write their prayers and praise the God. I think that online temples are great ways to honor the Theoi because the Guestbook prayers remind me of written prayers and affirmations in antiquity.

Why I Was Looking

I’m finally taking the test for a driving permit sometime this week, most likely Thursday, and I wanted to pray to him for success on my exam.* Hêphaistos seems like the most appropriate deity for this kind of prayer because of his position among the Gods as the master craftsman, inventor, and tinkerer. He has always seemed very awesome to me for having androids/automatons in his workshop, and I connect him to most mechanical items in my life.

What I Did

So, because I had nowhere to pray but my lonesome shrine, I spent an hour creating a rudimentary online temple for Hêphaistos using Google Sites.

You can find it here: http://sites.google.com/site/templehephaistos/

I am especially excited about the image I chose because I had never seen it before and it seemed like the best celebration of Hêphaistos. It depicts him celebrating his marriage to Aphrodite.

If you are a devotee of Hêphaistos and would like editing privileges, please let me know.

* There are many reasons why I’m in my twenties without one (mostly related to anxiety and a lack of time), but I really need to correct this and want to do well on the test and on the road.

Happy Panathenaia!

2010-08-05T21:53:00.000-04:00

Outside of time, in the depths of myth, Athene competed with Poseidon for the new city that would become the main seat of her cultus for generations. Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, brought white muscled horses that flowed like the foam of the sea’s great waves. They gleamed and glowed in the fresh sunlight, and the people wished to make him their patron because they loved the way the strong beasts took grain from their hands.

Athene struck the Earth with her palm in anger at his great gift. From it came a tree that gave liquid gold — the best oil they had tasted, fresh and sweet on their skin and in the fires that hissed with their dinners. Poseidon’s gift was good to them, but they needed more than horses to fill their bellies and the award went to the one who holds the aegis, the great daughter of Zeus.

Happy Panathenaia. Today, I made my offerings to Athene, including a blue crocheted swath of fabric to drape over her statue. I dripped olive oil onto the agalma’s head* and traced it down across the statue with my fingertips so it glistened. Afterward, I secured the fabric across her shoulders using some scraps from its creation.

In addition to the crocheted garment for the small statue on my general shrine, I offered her flowers, blueberries, and honey-scented incense, along with a closing libation of wine. In the background, I ran through a YouTube playlist to Athene compiled from various devotional videos other devotees have made, mostly in Greek, and stumbled through the Orphic Hymn to Athene in Greek without actually speaking (one of the YouTube videos in the list is just a recitation of the hymn).

And so I leave you with these words from the Iliad, from when Odysseus and Diomêdês raid the Trojans’ camp at night. Odysseus prays:

O child of Zeus who bears the stormcloud, hear me. In hard hours ever at my side, you follow every move I make: tonight befriend me most, Athêna. Before we two retire on the ships let us bring off some feat to gall the Trojans. (Fitzgerald translation, X.308-312-ish)

Hellenistai Project: The Wiki and the Media Reviews Site

2010-08-02T18:52:00.000-04:00

Ruadhan of Hellenistai has lots of good ideas for ways to get involved in our community. Right now, the Hellenistai Wiki is accepting submissions for its Mouseia Agon. The poetry from it will be used to dedicate the Wiki project, so the subject matter should involve Hermes and/or the Mousai. The deadline is 20 August 2010, and winners will be announced on 27 August 2010. Learn more here.

He has also started a media review site on the main Hellenistai page. According to the site, it will provide media reviews/commentary

of relevance to the Hellenic polytheist community (recon or otherwise). There are a lot of books out there of varying quality and sometimes people just don’t know where to start — there are also lots of other media items, including (but not limited to) films, music, and games, that may be of interest to the Hellenic community, also of varying quality, and you may want to read a review first before picking them up or checking them out for yourself.

If you would like to contribute regularly, please follow the directions in this post. Otherwise, there are already a few regular writers: Aingeal Oreiad and Ruadhan, along with Kyrene (who will contribute seasonally). If you don’t want to contribute, I recommend adding it to your blogroll.

Full disclosure now: I am also writing as a seasonal person on the site. My focus, which came to me yesterday while listening to Hadestown, will be called Highway to Hades — a section that discusses modern interpretations of the Underworld, its denizens, and the Gods who rule it. Wherever you turn, Hades is a politically-charged realm. Struggles to reach Hades become struggles against political apathy or commentaries about the economy. And when they don’t, the stories get personal. The title comes from a line I thought up while in the UK a few years ago. (One of my friends ran with it and wrote a really awesome song that she performed on guitar in a pub.) The first post, “Rivers of Frogs,” focuses on the musical adaptation of The Frogs. I will wait a few entries before tackling Hadestown because every song is packed with tons of symbolism and awesomeness. Thank Gods I still have my literary criticism book on hand.

COSMOS, the Library of Alexandria, and Hypatia

2010-07-28T21:54:00.002-04:00

I’m now watching COSMOS, the series by Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a visionary astronomer. The first episode includes a giant Ode to the Library of Alexandria in which Sagan talks about the amazing achievement of actually sponsoring and encouraging scientific research. Right now, he is standing on a set with a million scrolls behind him searching for Aristarchus’s heliocentric document. If only he really did have a time machine.

If I could travel back in time, this is the place I would visit: the Library of Alexandria 2000 years ago. In here began the intellectual adventure that has led us into space. All the knowledge of the ancient world was once within these marble walls.
– Carl SaganI thought that some of the statements he makes — which I have taken down while watching, so please forgive any small errors — are relevant to our community, especially now that the film Agora has a tenuous existence in the United States. The destruction of the library is arguably one of the most important events in Western history. It propelled us from bright-eyed people standing up and staring at the heavens into people who wouldn't even look up because we felt so much shame about our “sinful” natures.

One of the reasons why I enjoy Hellenism so much is that our religion respects what is profoundly human — reason, intellectual inquiry, and the struggle for understanding. Gods know that some of the philosophers believed strange things about the universe, but we have always had the choice to just say no. This library was a citadel of human consciousness, a beacon on our journey to the stars.
– Also Carl SaganThis is why I wrote that post about recognizing the fallibility of philosophers and why I think it is so important for us approach the sciences in a spirit of fraternity. The universe is a manifestation of the Gods, a fountain that pulls up hydrogen and helium to create stars and planets bubbling with life only to fall back upon itself.

Astronomy and the other physical sciences bring this home for me. As spiritual inquiry connects us to the Gods, science connects us to the universe around us. It provides for us as winners of an evolutionary agon (along with every other animal and plant currently extant) and as direct descendants of the starry sky (everything around us, with the exception of all hydrogen and some helium, is stellar debris).

The “martyrdom” of Hypatia of Alexandria belongs to both traditional polytheists and scientists. She represents the nexus of two systems of thought that are complementary in nature and their position against unreasonable people whose doctrines are dogmatic and fueled by ideological intolerance.Among these great men was also a great woman, Hypatia. She was a mathematician and an astronomer, the last light of the ancient world, whose death is bound up in [the library’s] destruction 700 years after it was founded.
– Carl Sagan III Hypatia “established herself as a philosopher in what is now known as the Neoplatonic school, a belief system in which everything emanates from the One. (Her student Synesius would become a bishop in the Christian church and incorporate Neoplatonic principles into the doctrine of the Trinity.) Her public lectures were popular and drew crowds” (Smithsonean Magazine). People who stand in the way of freedom of inquiry have every right to fear mention of the sharp shells that skinned her because it exposes them for what they are.

I may not worship Serapis like the Neo-Alexandrian Polytheists, but I deeply appreciate and share Carl Sagan’s enthusiasm for Alexandria’s way of doing and supporting science. It’s a policy that our modern world, with its special/religious interests undermining it at every turn, could learn from.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA pulled from Wikimedia Commons. Galaxies are awesome.

Happy Kronia!

2010-07-24T13:06:00.000-04:00

I would like to wish you all a very happy Kronia.

Today, I celebrated the holiday with offerings of wine, quinoa, amaranth, sea berries, and incense. The first offerings always go to Hestia, but I offered all of the Gods of the holiday — Kronos, Rhea, Zeus, Hera, and the Horai (with the addition of Tykhê) — portions of everything.

The hymns I read were all Orphic because the Orphic hymns provide the broadest variety of praise I could find. I love reciting them, and I have half-memorized the ones to Hera and Zeus. I also read portions of Hesiod’s Theogony related to the succession story of Zeus, along with the section from Works and Days detailing Kronos’s post-retirement job ruling over heroes in the Isles of the Blessed:

Zeus the son of Kronos made yet another, the fourth [race of men], upon the fruitful earth, which was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth. Grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them, some in the land of Kadmos at seven-gated Thebe when they fought for the flocks of Oidipous, and some, when it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helene's sake : there death's end enshrouded a part of them. But to the others father Zeus the son of Kronos gave a living and an abode apart from men, and made them dwell at the ends of earth. And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Okeanos, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods, and Kronos rules over them; for the father of men and gods released him from his bonds. And these last equally have honour and glory. [Theoi.com]

I emphasized the new year and its blessings in the ritual, which explains my inclusion of Tykhê into the rituals. I have propitiated her a lot recently and currently owe her several hymns and associated offerings, so including her along with the Horai seemed like a wonderful way to say that I haven’t forgotten her.

Historically, this celebration included some topsy-turvy aspects similar to the Romans’ Saturnalia, but that is not as much of a possibility when going solo as it is with a ritual group. So Hail Kronos and Happy Attic New Year!

The Eumenides and Apollon

2010-07-22T22:45:00.000-04:00

The name Eumenides, furthermore, is [Pan-Hellenic] and was equated with the local, Athenian name of Semnai Theai only in the course of the fifth century. The goddesses had links to the dead; any initiate who was about to come into contact with that other world was well advised to enlist their benevolence. If we can trust Plato, the Bacchic, “Orphic” mysteries were much more concerned with the ghost world than were the Eleusinian ones: this might argue for such a preliminary sacrifice before the Bacchic initiation.
– Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts For the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets

The Eumenides are amazing. There is something about strong deities represented as women with poisonous snakes and extreme problems with evildoers that makes me wish I liked non-vampire comics because any depiction of them fighting the forces of evil/injustice would be Awesome. Unlike Rick Riordan, who portrayed them as thugs with no real personalities, I think the Eumenides have a lot of personality. Otherwise, who would want to enlist their benevolence before coming into contact with the world of the dead?

Even the very halls, the innermost depths of Death, and the Eumenides with bluish snakes entwined in their hair were entranced [by the songs of Orpheus].
– Thomas G. Palaima, Anthology Of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation

I worship the Eumenides along with the Kharites, or Graces, because my research has led me to believe that they go hand in hand. On the fifth day of the month, I make offerings to both. I clean my shrine to both of them and I read the Orphic hymns in their honor because the Orphic hymns alone have come down to us.

Worshipping the Eumenides so seriously and being a devotee of Apollon provides much food for thought. For one, the depiction of Apollon in Aeschylus’s Eumenides shows the hostility between them. Apollon calls them vile things when he sees them in his temple, and he continuously degrades them for continuing to follow someone in whom he has taken special interest.

Apollon presides over purification and the evolution of the soul towards reason and away from base passions and snap judgments. The Eumenides are the judgment. They are the madness that sweeps over the mind when one becomes aware of all of the wrong actions one has committed and the release that appeasement brings. They delight in nothing more than bringing people to that dark place in the soul where we have no illusions about the good and bad in our past. They show no mercy. Apollon’s purification destroys the miasmic taint of wrongdoing, but it cannot destroy the memory of misbehavior. These deities need to be approached together to really do good to people suffering from their consciences.

Furthermore, in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the narrator reveals that the human conscience is “a disease which works [people’s] ruin, whenever they realize that they have done wrong.” Orestes provides the full mythological image for that. He imagines that the Eumenides follow him wherever he goes. The impulse to kill his mother, while a reasonable one in the world of intergenerational feuds and power struggles, leads to nothing but more madness and bloodshed. Only through Orestes’s actions and acquittal (which involves the worst ancient reproductive science ever widely believed) does the system of trial emerge in which the human conscience can be directed through a reasonable (well ... at least in principle) progress.

The Eumenides raise our emotions and churn our consciences because they want us to find ways to make the madness and hate in the world stop, most of all the stuff we cause. We must appease the deep voice inside of us as we move towards a more logical and — I know, horrible typecasting — Apollonian way of viewing the world. We need the power of reason. We need ethical codes such as the Maxims of Delphi to form appropriate channels for our desire to do good.

Brief Thoughts on Sex and Relationships in Pythagoras

2010-07-19T22:54:00.000-04:00

It was in the same assembly that Pythagoras is said to have made the celebrated suggestion that, after a woman has had connexion with her husband, it is holy for her to perform sacred rites on the same day, which would be inadmissible, had the connection been with any man other than her husband.

I am reading through Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras right now, which has been quite eye-opening. For one, I enjoy the concision. Each chapter is so loaded with interesting words and phrases that I am in danger of highlighting everything, and many of the statements are more reasonable and down-to-Earth than Plotinus. (Thank Apollon.)

In previous posts, there has been some discussion of divine sexuality, and I believe I have also spoken about women and religious purity. The passage above comes from Iamblichus’s chapter in which Pythagoras addresses the women of the Crotonan region. The statement about sex and the performance of sacred rites is really quite astonishing, all things considering. Even in modern Hellenism, the more conservative members of the religion advocate a waiting period of 24 hours and/or a shower before performing religious rituals after sex in all cases.*

This could be Iamblichus’s bias, but it seems that Pythagoras really wished to stress loyalty between couples. If marital unions echo the perfect union of the Gods with each other, it seems logical that Pythagoras would make this admission.

He further besought [the men] to avoid connexion with any but their wives; lest, angered by their husbands’ neglect and vice, these should not get even by adulterating the race. They should also consider that they received their wives from the Vestal hearth with libations, and brought them home in the presence of the Gods themselves as suppliants would have done. Also that by orderly conduct and temperance they should become model not only for their family, but also for their community.

The essence of passages like this one remains the same, even though divorce and unmarried and/or open relationships don’t have the same stigma now that they once did. The recognition that every bond of love between people is sacred means that it should be advocated for. Infidelity breeds infidelity, and we have no one to blame but ourselves for cultivating an environment in which it becomes more attractive to cheat than to maintain a committed relationship. I am not sure how Pythagoras would have responded to modern society and its excesses — chances are he’d have hated most of it — so this extrapolation is a bit of a leap, but at least it is a sincere one.

* If someone does prefer Pythagorean ritual purity, I would still recommend deferring to the policies that individual Hellenic groups have put in place for religious worship.

Thoughts about Apollon

2010-07-19T22:04:00.000-04:00

Saturday night, I made my customary offerings to Apollon. The wax from Hestia’s candle dripped into the form of a bow as the flickering flame flowed with the fan’s breeze.

It delights me when I notice things in ritual that bring me back to the deity being worshipped. Apollon drew me to the Hellenic pantheon, so reminders of him are especially wonderful. When I think about him, my thoughts fly in every direction at once, and I am overcome with many complex emotions.

From all of the literature I have read about Apollon, he is most associated with boys. Iamblichus writes in his Life of Pythagoras that “the most philanthropic of the Gods, Apollo[n] and [Eros], are, in pictures, universally represented as having the ages of boys. It is similarly recognized that some of the games in which conquerors are crowned were instituted for the behoof of boys; the Pythian, in consequence of the serpent Python having been slain by a boy, and the Nemean and Istimian, because of the death of Archemerus and Nelicerta.” Fritz Graf’s Apollo also shows the God’s strong connection to masculine life cycles.

Apollon is also connected to men such as Socrates and Pythagoras, both of them important philosophers who influenced and continue to influence many individuals attempting to make sense of the world around them. It bothers me that the only connections I can find for women — the Pythia and several nymphai — are either extremely old or quite young. There seems to be no middle ground with regards to women who are not in the Ancient Greek priesthood.

Alexandra at Helleneste kai Grammateus brought up something about Gods and trust, and I kept thinking about it after she wrote it because it bothered me a lot. It never occurred to me before that there were deities I could trust and deities I couldn’t. I am one of those people who enjoys being caught up in the plot until everything comes together at the end. I dislike seeing how the strings are actually moving because it scares me. To some degree, I fear that I will end up being cast out with no place to go as I get older because I have never resonated with more gender-appropriate deities. That gets in the way of trust.

It’s something I struggle with, and yet Apollon saved my mind. I don’t think he would ever steer me someplace without helping me home in the end, and for that he deserves my gratitude and my trust. From UPG, I have also gathered that he’s not the kind of deity who would turn someone away for not being the correct age or gender.

On Saturday night, I also found my prayer beads of the Homeric Hymn to Apollon, which I had packed for DC. It had somehow ended up with my earrings and hairpieces in a no-peek case. The irony of something that celebrates Apollon hiding within something so feminine was not lost on me. It’s like the story of Akhilleus going into hiding to avoid fighting at Troy. And then there are the $5.00 flowers I splurged on at the Farmers’ Market.

I don’t know what all of this means. Much of the literature about Hellenism generally focuses on men, so perhaps it’s about time for me to start looking into women-specific literature, such as Portrait of a Priestess, instead of the heavy philosophical texts I’ve been reading. Maybe there are more women’s cults for Apollon hiding in the depths of antiquity. If so, I may have to find a TARDIS.

Towards a meaningful online community

2010-07-16T22:49:00.000-04:00

The Hellenic polytheistic community thrives on drama. People take issue with others’ personal histories, life circumstances, or modes of worship. We have argued about everything from marriage equality to whether or not people who pray to other Gods on the side should be allowed to call themselves Hellenic Polytheists. Many of you know my views on these things. Some people don’t, and that’s okay.

One of the reasons why the Internet causes so much drama involves how people approach it. To some, the person commenting on a blog or posting to a forum is separated from their physical identity. We constantly berate one another for sensitivity to scathing comments others make instead of acknowledging that we should treat others with respect. For an example of this negativity, think about someone who claims in a blog comment (like io9) that every person who believes in a higher power should be sterilized and/or removed from the population — an obvious trigger for anyone whose relatives or friends were victims of any genocide between the 19th century and today, let alone someone who actually suffered through that — or someone who trivializes sexual abuse by relating it to some other behavior or condition of one’s childhood/adult life that will probably not create psychological maladjustments that for some cost thousands of dollars’ worth of medications, therapy, and other treatments (not to mention the stress associated with victim-blaming).

Having an argument should not mean that people need to dig for offensive points to disarm and weaken the other party’s constitution. In fact, one will get more out of heated discussions of a topic when remaining on the topic at hand and relating to the person holding the seemingly outlandish opinion with compassion and dignity. We are all strangers to one another in that we do not know the past experiences that have led someone to take a divergent path. Many of the Delphic Maxims ask us to evaluate situations and act towards one another only when we “know” something, and to me that speaks more of developing a good idea of another’s true character than the shell we see on the Internet.

Harvard Business Review writer Alexandra Samuel has created guidelines for cultivating honesty in one's online presence. She mostly focuses on the “guilt” that comes with failing to understand that the 21st-century life involves heavy computer use in industrialized nations and the liberation that comes with being open about your identity, but the true gem lies in her comments about how to approach the virtual world:

When you commit to being your real self online, you discover parts of yourself you never dared to share offline.
When you visualize the real person you're about to e-mail or tweet, you bring human qualities of attention and empathy to your online communications.
When you take the idea of online presence literally, you can experience your online disembodiment as a journey into your mind rather than out of your body.
When you treat your Facebook connections as real friends instead of “friends”, you stop worrying about how many you have and focus on how well you treat them.
When you take your Flickr photos, YouTube videos and blog posts seriously as real art, you reclaim creative expression as your birthright.
When you focus on creating real meaning with your time online, your online footprint makes a deeper impression.
When you treat your online attention as a real resource, you invest your attention in the sites that reflect your values, helping those sites grow.
When you spend your online time on what really matters to you, you experience your time online as an authentic reflection of your values.
When you embrace online conversations as real, you imbue them with the power to change how you and others think and feel.
When you talk honestly about the real joys and frustrations of the Internet, you can stop apologizing for your life online.

Obviously, guidelines like this are not going to make a happy utopia of Hellenic Polytheists singing songs to Eros and Philotes. However, they — like the Delphic Maxims — stress the importance of embracing one’s humanity and accepting that you cannot always own everything, but that you can and should govern what you can. How does this apply to Hellenic Polytheism? The movement towards embracing our spiritual ancestors’ religion will doubtless move in ways none of us can foresee, and sometimes waves of change are greater than the contributions of any one individual.

I understand the need to feel vindicated. There are some people in the movement who make me want to pull my hair out or take up curse tablets because I see their ideas as reactionary and isolationist, kind of like US foreign policy before we jumped into World War II. There are others in the movement whom I idolize, always desiring to gain another precious glimpse of their experiences and always in partial denial of their mortality and imperfections. I’m sure everyone has had similar experiences, and I am sure many of us have met some people we thought were good who turned out to be the craziest person we had ever had the privilege to meet. But we’re all in this together.

Power tripping to the point of lunacy is to no one’s benefit. We can change our dialogue for the better by always noting from the start that a topic may be controversial, not because we believe we are right and everyone who disagrees is committing some kind of intellectual sin that we must save them from, but because we need to genuinely shift towards asking hard questions and arguing down to the equally tough answers. No matter how set our opinions, we must allow for change. Citing rituals performed by the Ancient Greeks and/or the philosophy of Plato or Iamblichus will only take us so far.

Fact is, everyone who lived back when Hellenism was the most awesome thing in the West is dead. We will have to pick up where they left off and make changes based on our needs and our lives, which account for so much more than most people could have imagined.

Now go read that article!

(PS: If you notice drama in the community, please notify me with a note to the source. Some of you may know that I create comic relief sketches during particularly nasty bouts of it, but I cannot always be counted on to scour every forum for evidence of grapeshot, artillery bombardments, or pots of petunias.)

Source for Lakshmi Statue and Greco-Roman Art

2010-07-14T20:12:00.002-04:00

Source for Lakshmi statue

Just in case anyone was actually paying attention to my post in response to the recent Sacred Source controversy, I have located a source for the naked statues of Lakshmi that is not some vague memory of the Bactrian exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. If you check out Secrets of Pompeii from your local library, one such statue of her is on page 43 accompanied by the following text:

This ivory statue, found in a house on Via dell'Abbondanza, represents Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of beauty and fertility, and attests to the direct and indirect trade relations that existed with India.

Now, I do not know how this statue was used, and I understand that many people will not have access to Secrets of Pompeii, so I have located a random web site that provided the image you see to your left and will leave readers to decide if it was cult-ready or not. Enjoy.

Stuff that's actually Hellenism-related

The artists who created the images of sacred stories (or even deities’ cult images) contained in Secrets of Pompeii had fabulous technique. If you do find this book, check out the polychrome mosaic pavement on page 174 and the Villa of the Mysteries in the section beginning on 51 (which anyone interested in Orphism and the mysteries of Dionysos will enjoy). On 46, there is an uncanny face of Apollon that makes chills run down my spine. It is one thing to see the statue gazing into the distance and quite another to have the image’s eyes locked on you. If Sacred Source is looking for a new statue of Apollon, I would recommend using this one.

I also can’t believe people forgot how to do perspective during the Middle Ages. Oh wait ... most of the talented artists probably never converted to Christianity. No wonder.

Happy Attic New Year!

2010-07-13T17:07:00.001-04:00

To all of you who go by the Attic calendar, have a wonderful 2nd year of the 697th Olympiad. This year will be the Best Year Ever for several reasons:

The Spanish totally paid cult to the Hellenic Gods Poseidon and Kybele. No wonder they won the World Cup.
This XKCD comic. Burning books makes baby Hermes cry.
Daemonia Nymphe released a DVD recently, so we can totally chill with their awesome Hellenic music in ways hitherto unknown. Bad news? It's probably Region II.
The film Agora is finally in the United States. Will review it as soon as I find a way to get it legally.
The Hellenistai Wiki will go live this August unless we don’t have 500 articles. (Do you WANT to disappoint the Mousai? No? Sign up and start writing stubs!)
This song. (Contains one bleeped instance of profanity, FYI.) Its appearance totally means that Iris is back in the game.

Okay, so maybe some of those things above don’t have anything to do with Hellenism, but who said being frivolous and bubbly on the new year was a bad thing?

Kala Noumenia: Flowering Athene

2010-07-13T16:37:00.000-04:00

This Noumenia, I noticed two things about my shrine:

Clear, dried wax has induced my god sticks for the Mousai and for Mnemosyne to stick together. I wonder if squeeing is appropriate.
My shrine contains a large number of agalmata (sacred depictions of goddesses and gods).

I observed the Noumenia ritual today instead of last night because last night involved me working on a story idea I had after reading some books on Orphic mythology and global warming. Besides, the fresh moon rose at roughly 8 AM this morning and won’t set until a bit after sunset. (That’s what I always tell myself when I’m running late. I hope Selene doesn’t hate me.) However, I took some pictures today. Hope you like them.

This is the tree beneath which I leave most of my offerings. Before I do the Noumenia ritual, I generally spend some time cleaning my shrine and emptying my Zeus Ktesios jar. Unfortunately, my cell phone’s camera cannot capture the beauty of this baby, and I do not know what kind of tree she is.

We have a lot of flowers in our back yard, so I clipped some of them and sprinkled them randomly across my shrine during the Noumenia ritual as offerings. It made me incredibly happy to see how the entire ensemble came together. I hope the Gods are happy with it.

I also made the customary offerings to Apollon Noumenios, Selene, &c., along with a statement about my new Zeus Ktesios jar. I have had more success keeping grains and dry goods in the ZK jar, so this month I included the contents of a pomegranate green tea bag, salted sunflower seeds, coconut, amaranth, barley, quinoa, rice, and several drops of extra virgin olive oil. The pomegranate green tea smelled like heaven while putting it together. The glass jar probably won't photograph very well, so I am including a photo of burning incense from today’s ritual instead:

What shrine would be complete without flowering up one of the agalmata? I own one statue among the many depictions of the Gods — the statue of Athene I dedicated to her in honor of the completion of my undergraduate studies. I think the flower adds to her warrior’s ensemble. Enjoy, and Kala Noumenia!

Sex in Religious Statuary

2010-07-10T13:57:00.001-04:00

I check The Wild Hunt almost every day. Because it focuses on general issues in the pagan/polytheistic community, I can usually read it without feeling frustrated that non-Wiccan voices aren’t being heard.

Today, Jason posted something about a recent controversy in the Hindu community that has the potential to draw in pagans and polytheists, creating a giant rift among our communities as people separate themselves into different moral categories based on their opinions of nude and/or sexual divine statuary. The reason? The web site in question, Sacred Source, sells statues of deities from every culture imaginable, including ones that would be considered risqué by many Americans. They have a commitment to Fair Trade Organizations.

Here is the accusation levied by one source, the Forum for Hindu Awakening:

A Company in [the] USA named 'Sacred Source' is denigrating Hindu Deities through the statues for sale on their website. Many statues of deities are posed in very offensive manner. For example, Statue of Deity Shiva is in sexual position with a naked woman. This has hurt sentiments of billions of Hindus worldwide and all Hindus should protest lawfully against 'Sacred Source', so that they should remove such offensive [material] from their website and sales stock and also the company should apologise Hindus for hurting their religious sentiments.

Among the statues listed, they have one with a shirtless Ganesha reading. Many of the other ones include moderate nudity and cuddling, but several do actually show deities in sexual positions.

Now, I am obviously not a Hindu. I may have a weakness for Santoshi Maa because she is Freaking Awesome, but my first and foremost loyalty is to Apollon and the other Hellenic Gods. Sannion’s post for Pagan Values Month about the reverence of sexuality and sex acts in Hellenic Polytheism, Kemetism, and ancient fusion religions is an excellent primer about the religious sentiments surrounding divine nudity and sex.

Our Gods are frequently portrayed in the nude. Over a year ago, I attended a lecture for a Classical Mythology course that discussed the Gods’ bodies and the perfection of the nude statues/physical space in religious settings. In my opinion, nudity in Hellenism is elegant and strong. It shows the self-awareness of the divine beings who animate the Kosmos, and it removes barriers between the worshipper and the God being worshipped.

Our Gods’ myths frequently contain sexual elements. They are depicted in temple ruins and museums artifacts in various stages of copulation. While some people like Plato may have lamented some of the stories, Pompeii’s ruins are filled with artifacts showing various types of sexual congress. We may have ritual purity laws that regulate sexual activity — for example, washing before prayer if you have had sex in the past day — but that has no bearing on whether or not we find religious materials offensive. Satyrs have erections. Pan has sex with goats. Deal with it. I mean, should we protest every company that sells stuff like this?

To bring this back to the issue at hand, I went to an exhibit on Bactria while interning in DC two years ago. While the gallery did not allow pictures, it provided a beautiful example of cultural exchange, fusion, and translation. Several of the most beautiful pieces in the exhibit depicted one of the Hindu Goddesses (I think Laximi) showing a fair amount of skin. I definitely know I’ve seen sacred statuary of her with well-defined primary sex characteristics in historical galleries on many occasions.

Celebrating the divine is about more than dressing them up in pretty clothes and offering incense at shrines. It is about respecting and acknowledging their relationships with one another. Sometimes, those relationships are sexual. Sometimes, the Gods will be depicted (nearly) nude with other deities or with (gasp) books.

Maybe this position shows a lack of religious refinement on the part of Hellenism or myself. We can’t all be Apollonius of Tyana, for crying out loud. But in all honesty, when I hear people talk about grave denigration of deities, I do not think about commercial religious statuary. I think about people being raped in temples or having sex on the altar of Athene or the Christians hacking the Gods’ statues to bits or the Victorians snapping off statues’ penises because they were total prudes. And these ARE issues that should be addressed.

I am very happy that my religious search led me to a faith that is fairly sex- and body-positive.


	Keyword	Visits
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	hellenic polytheism	255
	asklepios, hellenismos	89
	hera poem	63
	(not provided)	54
	kallisti apple in pandemonium	44
	poem about hera	33
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	pandemonium apple blog	16
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	pagan erinyes blog	15
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	a poem about hera	10
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	poem of hera	10
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