KALLISTI: An Apple in Pandemonium

Happy Dionysos Days

2009-12-25T00:37:00.000-05:00

As part of an initiative to branch out and try new things, I have made a super special executive decision to observe the Twelve Days of Dionysos, which Kallimachus goes into great detail about on Hellenic Gods. While I do not have an Orphic altar, it seems that using my main shrine is all right as long as I have some kind of divine images. Thanks to the god-sticks and the million printouts of ancient red-figure vase paintings on my shrine (or piled beneath it ...), I am totally covered.

Having just finished the first ritual to Hestia and Hephaistos, I can say that Orphic ritual as portrayed on Kallimachus’s site is a mild departure from the Hellenic structure I know and love. However, it has some good bits. The placement of the hymns in the Orphic style makes a lot of sense when combined with modern bloodless offerings.

Making offerings in honor of the birth of something—Helios, the New Year, Mithras—makes sense on a deep human level at this time of year. The divine child is more than Christian or Gentile, although I must confess that I believe the Gentile versions did not preemptively copycat the story of Jesus. These stories of divine children born among a pantheon provide more holistic and viable images of the world because they take place not in one location, but many;—the narratives exist in the present tense at all times because mythological time is best understood as situational rather than concrete. This is why I can accept the birth of Dionysos or of Mithras, Asklepios or Herakles.

Now, though, I need to get some rest before I piece together which deities must receive honors tomorrow. One ritual down, eleven more opportunities to get things right!

Happy holidays.

Google Alerts and Hanukkah

2009-12-11T23:37:00.002-05:00

It is now the holiday season, which means that my inbox is flooded with Greek Gods alerts associated with Hanukkah.

I had little idea before now just how many Jewish bloggers think that Antiochus IV is indicative of what Hellenic Polytheists of any era might feel/have felt about Judaism. Right now, I would like to take the opportunity to provide you with one Hellenic view of the situation: Antiochus IV was a d****e and/or an idiot. Quite frankly, other Greek leaders of the same period confronted the monotheistic religion with much more tolerance, even though monotheism was something many of them did not understand. Antiochus IV was also a d****e to other Hellenes, if it makes any difference.

Please, as you look forward to your sacred festival, remember that not all Hellenists want you to memorize Homer or offer Zeus a hecatomb of white bulls. To close, I would like to provide the following quotation from Julian, the last Emperor of Rome to observe the primary religion* of his ancestors, during his famed essay against Christianity:

I am one of those who avoid keeping their festivals with the Jews; but nevertheless I revere always the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; who being themselves Chaldaeans, of a sacred race, skilled in theurgy, had learned the practice of circumcision while they sojourned as strangers with the Egyptians. And they revered a God who was ever gracious to me and to those who worshipped him as Abraham did, for he is a very great and powerful God, but he has nothing to do with you [Christians]. For you do not imitate Abraham by erecting altars to him, or building altars of sacrifice and worshipping him as Abraham did, with sacrificial offerings. For Abraham used to sacrifice even as we Hellenes do, always and continually. And he used the method of divination from shooting stars. Probably this also is an Hellenic custom. But for higher things he augured from the flight of birds.

Happy Hanukkah.

* “Primary religion” is a term coined by Jan Assmann in Religion and Cultural Memory. It essentially refers to faiths that are based on cult (evolving worship) rather than a specific sacred text. Assmann argues that religions that are book-based generally have a strong rupture with a previous cult-based tradition.

A Shrine for the Charites and Eumenides

2009-12-08T18:35:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I made a post about creating a small shrine to the Charites and the Eumenides. This is my first shrine that exists separately from my main one (which is in major need of organization — too many images). I wanted something very simple and clean for this shrine.

I laid a board over the top of a new shelf for the shrine to maximize the amount of space I have — shelf space is very important to me, and I blame the lack of it for most of my organizational problems. (This is actually true. Since acquiring more shelf space, my messiness has cut down about 70%.) The shrine contains images of the Charites from a wall mural and the only image of all three Eumenides that I could find, a painting by Franz von Stuck completed six years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I also have an empty wine glass with a very beautiful logo design that contains several fake flowers.

I have prayed at the shrine just once since its creation, but I am taking things slowly because I want to gradually incorporate their worship into my spiritual practice. Right now, it feels more comfortable to offer the Charites and Erinyes traditional things (the Orphic Hymns, for example) than to use modern offerings (i.e., substituting pure maple syrup mixed with water for honey mixed with water because my region produces more maple syrup than honey).

There is no incense burner on this shrine, but I am planning on finding a saucer for offerings. The Eumenides do not often receive incense offerings because they are Chthonic deities according to some sources that I’m working through, but they do receive incense offerings according to the Orphic Hymns as the Eumenides and as the Erinyes. The sources I have read so far indicate that the Eumenides receive no alcoholic libations, but I won’t say more on this now.

So far, I have prayed to the Eumenides and the Charites using the Orphic Hymns. I may incorporate other texts later.

Eros in China

2009-12-01T18:31:00.001-05:00

A Chinese news source, Xinhua Net, has reported that the subject of two small statuettes discovered in the 1980s are probably representations of Eros. These two bronze figures feature a boy whose wings lift upward at the tips, a feature rare among images of Chinese gods. The statues date to about 500 C.E.

This wouldn’t be the first incursion of Hellenic gods into the region. Xinhua Net reports that “British archaeologist Aurel Stein proved in 1907 that several winged angels in the mural paintings in a monastery in west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region were drawings of Eros at around 200 A.D.” [source]

Apparently, tracing the route of the ancient Silk Road from Greece to Ancient China is commonly done using similar archaeological findings. If the statuettes’ common identity is true, this means that images of the Gods were traveling along the Silk Road well after Christians took control of the Roman Empire and began their persecution of traditional religion.

Of course, the article didn’t come with images of the statuettes or of the mural painting in Western China. After about half an hour of Google-fu, I believe that the previous murals came from the Mogao Grottoes, which Stein helped save from looting in 1907. A tourist’s account of the region (“Jeremy's Silk Road Journey: Episode 11”) describes his surprise:

[In the grottoes] there is a written copy of the Diamond Sutra, believed to be one of the world’s oldest printed books. There are even some depictions of Greek/Roman deities, such as the goddess Athena and the god Eros. [source]

Stein may also have found Silk Road trade items in surrounding areas. If you have located images of any of these deities or know where I can find them, please post something in the comments.

Women Writers: Nossis’s Epigrams

2009-11-24T20:37:00.000-05:00

Women writers from Ancient Greece survive in fragments. Ancient women were Pythagorean philosophers, lyricists, sexual treatise writers, and poets. The destruction of libraries during wartime, Christian imperialism, and the selective recopying of the Dark Ages monks all contributed to their loss.

I keep hoping that someone will uncover a non-Christian version of the Nag Hammadi library. If polytheists buried sacred statues instead of submitting them to Christian inquisitors, how do we know they didn’t bury texts as well? How do we know that someone didn’t save Sappho or Hypatia?

I'm reading Nossis’s epigrams right now. If you haven’t seen her beautiful poetry, you can find all twelve of her epigrams online. Here’s a taste:

Holy Hera, you who often descend from the heavens
visit your Lacinian sanctuary sweet-scented with incense,
accept the byssus cloak which Teofilis, daughter of Kleochas,
wove for you with Nossis, her noble daughter.

No? What about this:

Nothing is sweeter than Love; and every other joy
is second to it: even the honey I spit out of my mouth.
Thus Nossis says: and who didn't love Kypris,
doesn't know what sort of roses her flowers are.

Women’s poetry is so tasteful and modest, isn’t it?

4,000 Hecatombs, Animal Rights Activists, and a Certain Hindu Goddess

2009-11-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

Other blogs (The Wild Hunt, A Heathen’s Day) have already commented on this, but as I figure that few in the English-speaking world take a pro-sacrifice stance, I thought I’d add my voice.

If you haven’t heard, a HUGE sacrifice is happening in Nepal. Between 200,000 and 400,000 animals will be sacrificed to the Goddess of Power, or a projected 2,000 to 4,000 hecatombs. That is a lot of meat.

The demand for the festival has actually gone up in recent years because some adjacent Hindu states have banned animal sacrifice. Conformity to Western (Christian) notions of propriety and animal cruelty have dealt a significant blow to some religious devotees in the region. Binaj Gurubacharya at The Huffington Post comments that “[p]articipants believe that animal sacrifices for the Hindu goddess Gadhimai will end evil and bring prosperity. Many join the festival from the state of Bihar in India, where animal sacrifices have been banned in some areas.”

I don’t support laws against animal sacrifice. Whether it’s because of the current issues with Santería in the United States or because it makes me think of anti-Pagan edicts of the Christian Roman Empire is up for debate.

Animals sacrificed to a deity aren’t, as many Americans seem to think, tortured on an altar for several hours and mutilated in strange ways. They are killed quickly and almost always consumed by ritual participants or sold by sacrificial meat vendors (an exception in pre-Reconstructed Hellenismos would be those animals sacrificed to ancestors/heroes or Chthonic deities because you don’t share meals with those in the Underworld). The situation in Nepal seems to conform to this:

[The festival] begins with the sacrifice of two wild rats, a rooster, a pig, a goat and a lamb before the temple's statue of Gadhimai.

Devotees can then bring their animals into the temple for ritual purification before taking them into the grounds where they will have their throats slit. The meat is distributed and eaten. (“Animal activists protest sacrifice festival,” The Daily Telegraph)

In fact, animal sacrifice in polytheism is more like Kosher slaughtering or the sacrifices done in Eastern Orthodox ceremonies around Easter.*

Animal rights activists need to stop projecting Christian notions of acceptability onto other cultures. Perhaps their great success in curbing commercial slaughterhouse atrocities has made them move on to the next target. Obviously, everyone in the West has already transitioned to a vegetarian diet, and all of us belong to PETA.

Certainly, people within religions that offer animal sacrifice sometimes have moral issues with it. Pythagoras believed that consuming any animal meant cannibalizing one’s spiritual kin, as souls transition among various species on the planet. Orpheus, according to Linda Johnsen’s Lost Masters, substituted wine and bread for the old blood sacrifice. You may recognize this. Christians incorporated some Orphic symbolism into their fictionalizations of Jesus’s life in order to attract converts and Hellenize their teachings. In Nepal, a young man named Ram Bahadur Bamjan has joined the animal rights activists in a crusade against blood sacrifice.

I will stand up for animal sacrifice because I believe in the traditions of my spiritual ancestors and I support the freedom of other religions to kill animals in sacred ritual. Because honestly, if you had to choose, would you pick a slaughterhouse that delights in terror or a shrine that makes the victim sacred?

*Greek-American Assemblyman Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), you are in my thoughts as I make this statement. I was disgusted by your condemnation of Daniel Halloran's comments about animal sacrifice, but maybe you don’t actually know the history of your own faith. Please note that I am a member of the Democratic party and a strong Socialist.

Captivated by Fury

2009-11-20T11:32:00.000-05:00

I’m working through Kerényi’s Gods of the Greeks right now during my daily commute. The powerful narrative is an amazing window into the connections among our Theoi. The trinities of goddesses Kerényi illuminates are amazing, and a perfect research opportunity for me to work these powerful divinities into my worship.

More specifically, I’m thinking of developing a small shrine to the Eumenides and the Charites due to the following passage:

In the region where [the tale of Orestes] was told, in the neighbourhood of Megalopolis in Arcadia, sacrifices were made to the Eumenides and the Charites simultaneously. The other name of the Erinyes, the Eumenides, means “the Benevolent”—whether it was that they really became benevolent, or simply that people wished they would do so. (The Gods of the Greeks, 47)

Something about these vengeful goddesses has always enticed me. Perhaps it began when I read the Oresteia and read the beautiful, fury-charged verse Aeschylus made them speak. Some say that Persephone is their mother, and others that they, like the Charties, are the daughters of Eurynome. I have a weakness for goddesses who stand apart from Zeus as a sort of counterbalance to my weakness for the scions of the Thunder-Pouring Theos.

In the coming weeks, I may write more about this project. Very soon, I am moving into another room to accommodate a sister who is moving in. My entire shrine will be relocated, and this will provide an excellent opportunity to create something for them.

The “Gods” and Google Alerts: Turn Up the Signal, Wipe Out the Noise

2009-11-13T16:34:00.001-05:00

Quotation marks had solved my problem for good. No longer did I have posts by Christians decrying stuff that had nothing to do with polytheism. No longer did I have very many insipid news articles by people reviewing diets or praising sports heroes. The dialogue on Google Alerts these past few weeks has been enlightening. Here’s what I learned:

Christians and atheists discuss our Gods more often than polytheists of any stripe. Perhaps this is because both parties outnumber us (at least in the English-speaking world). Christians generally talk about the Greek gods when they want to back up Paul’s policy of preaching to and converting Gentiles. Atheists mention the Greek gods when they compare the barbarous, illogical Hellenic myths to the genocide-promoting, illogical Christian Bible, or Jesus’s demigod colleagues in the menagerie of Mediterranean beliefs, or (mostly) when they are trying to prove that religion is meaningless now that we know how things happen with the power of super science.

Samples from this category:

“Dual interpretation of Netziv Melach, from Ovid” — This writer has decided that Ovid’s Philemon and Baucis tale comments on the Biblical narrative of the destruction of Sodom. I don’t think so, but at least people are reading Ovid.

A Post from the Christian Forums — Someone decides they don’t know anything about the “Pagan Faith” and decides that the Christian Forums are the best venue to learn about them. From Pagans.

“Back to the Good Ol’ Days of Paganism?” — “Oh, yes. Let’s imagine a world without the Judeo-Christian command to love one’s neighbor. Let’s imagine a world in which every individual is not made in the image and likeness of God. Let’s imagine a world in which the gods can be even more capricious and wicked than their own worshipers. Let’s imagine a world in which wars were neither just nor unjust, but instead just a fact of life.” Yet another Christian mistakenly believes that, without Biblical guidance, the world will sink into an evil cesspool of moral relativism. The post they linked to, “Unhappy Thoughts on Religon,” was kind of awesome because the writer wished everyone a happy Thesmophoria.

Hype surrounding the Percy Jackson film will make your semi-daily Google Alerts E-mail explode with mostly-irrelevant information. I’m not going to go into this movie, mostly because I saw the trailer and facepalmed about fifteen times. This film will probably create an influx of preteens who insist that they’re Artemis’s daughter because they saw a deer and it didn’t try to run away. I am also dreading it because it looks like a superhero flick and I actually really dislike it when people turn our deities into superheroes. I would rather see the film industry create short films of the Homeric Hymns or invest money in a Rome-esque television drama. (Twenty-four books is at least enough for two seasons, not to mention all of the satellite stories.)

Information on the Gods takes a back seat to explanations of the Gods’ myths, really creative plays, and art exhibition announcements. However, at least people are motivated by the Gods to create things of beauty and to transmit their myths to the wayward souls of the Internet.

Seriously, check it out:

“Apollo and Hyacinthus” — This is both an explanation of the myth and a collection of images from various historical periods. The writer, the Pandorian, has also included a video of Mozart’s version of their story.

“Review: This Dionysus has rock-star flair” — Euripides meets modern rock and roll.

Overall, I’m pleased with how the search change worked out and the amount of information I can glimpse at without needing to sift through all of the news articles about anti-polytheism laws in Islam (shirk) and Christians talking about YHVH. Most of what exists on the Internet, however, is not very favorable to Hellenic Polytheism. People treat it as primitive. They emphasize how wayward the Ancient Greeks were before they found Jesus, or how grateful they are to have Biblical morality because Biblical morality is somehow better than the polytheistic equivalent.

The gems, though, are things Google Alerts gives me that focus on polytheism and my Gods without tiptoeing around: archeology, theater, art, mythology, and polytheistic commentary. It doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but this way I actually recognize it as precious, deriving more meaning from it even though the noise threatens to drown out the signal.

The “Gods” and Google Alerts: Significant Quotation Marks

2009-11-12T16:33:00.001-05:00

Many months ago (all right, more like a year ago), I signed up for Google Alerts on several topics so I could feature interesting things here without having to use Google News and/or Google Search every time I felt like making a post. Quite honestly, news breaks most often when one is not working on their blog, and the service promised to keep me up to date on current events.

I chose two keywords when I began, “hellenic polytheism” and “greek gods.” “Hellenic polytheism” seldom gives me anything, and frequently it pings me with materials from my blog or the Hellenic blogs I am subscribed to. “Greek gods,” on the other hand, began a long ordeal over meaning.

Sometimes, news search materials with “greek gods” return stories about fitness (“everyone can look like a Greek god on x diet”), Christianity/Islam (“the sin of polytheism and whoring after false gods made the Greeks and Romans do x, y, or z”), or information about Greek Gods yogurt. Mostly, though, I got things that had nothing to do with the Gods of Hellas, but everything to do with Greek Orthodoxy.

My ire rose steadily month after month as I tried fruitlessly to make Google Alerts give me what I wanted: discourse from people on news sites and blogs about the real Greek Gods—not yogurt, not Christianity, and certainly not hubristic comparisons between dieters/athletes and actual Greek Gods (hubristic mostly because I doubt most of the people on those diets have an understanding of arete or piety). Finally, I attempted one last thing: adding quotation marks around “gods” to see if Google would recognize that the quotation marks meant I didn’t want singulars.

So, yes. If you write “Greek ‘gods’” with “gods” in quotation marks, everything relevant comes up. While nice, this doesn’t feel right for several reasons:

It means that Google, as opposed to knowing that I want the plural form of the word, thinks that singular and plurals are indistinguishable—or, in terms of my actual Alerts query, that the difference between God and Gods doesn’t matter. (Addendum: the most troubling thing, however, is that searches don’t differentiate “God’s” from “Gods” — this means that Google expects that people won’t know the difference between possessive and plural. I find this TERRIFYING.)
Quotation marks make the Gods seem less genuine. As many know, quotation marks are commonly used in English to denote irony, falsehood, or imprecision. This is why, when we are sarcastically commenting on someone’s insincerity or doublespeak, we sometimes make quotation mark gestures with our hands. Since finding The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, I have tried to be very careful about my usage.

Both of these points have counterarguments: if I type “cats” into a search engine, I do want it to ping for the word “cat”; quotation marks, according to some, don’t matter as much now because usage has changed. (I disagree—just click on that link to the blog. It sends me into fits of hysterical laughter every time I read it.) These things matter in more subtle ways, like subliminal messages.

I am not about to stop using the tool because I dislike the message it gives me, though—listening in on the dialogue surrounding our Gods is more important. The change meant creating new filters and typing new keywords into my mail, but the content remained the same—or did it? To learn more, you’ll have to wait for Part Two.

Religious Freedom and Theocracy

2009-11-05T08:35:00.000-05:00

Check out this great post on freedom and Hellenic theology over at Evritos’s ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ. Here's an enticing excerpt:

For us, Creation (THESIS) and Nature (PHYSIS), two of many primeval forces/deities (PROTOGENOI) present at the beginning of the KOSMOS in (one version of) our creation myth, are themselves expressions of the highest spiritual imperative. For us, this means that everything in the KOSMOS is inherently sacred, which of course includes all of humanity. Logical consistency demands, then, that there are no exceptions to this idea.

I think it expresses the frustrations about theocracy and religious extremism quite well. Religious intolerance and the conversion mentality do not only aggravate community violence in countries like India*, but they also make war on thought. Choice becomes heresy. Hypothesis becomes thoughtcrime. Diversity becomes the enemy.

If any of the terminology Evritos uses mystifies you, download this English translation of Hellenic theological terms. Make sure you have Adobe Reader or an equivalent program installed.

* Christians desecrate sacred statues and call worldview-foreign gods “demons” (or whatever the new buzzword is). Children are sucked into the religion without their parents’ consent and are taught religious intolerance for the “infidels,” creating divides within families. Practitioners of traditional Hindu religions get fed up with this and retaliate. The cycle of violence continues. Here’s a Christian’s account of the issue, if needed.

Marriage Equality (AKA Kayleigh's Fury of Political Righteousness)

2009-11-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

At some point, I may have commented that I would voice my thoughts on homosexuality and marriage in a more public place than I have used in the past, and now seems an appropriate time. Maine has just voted against extending marriage to same-sex couples, and while I am not a citizen of Maine, I despise seeing others force religious teachings into laws.

A Brief Detour

YSEE and the Societas Hellenica Antiquariorum (organizations in Greece) both have policies against homosexuality. The Societas Hellenica Antiquariorum prohibits people of alternative sexualities from being religious officials and marriage ceremonies because homosexuality is a “physical defect.” YSEE doesn’t support marriage equality because, back in the good old days of arranged Athenian marriages, it just wasn’t done. I am unsure whether YSEE is publicly coming out against marriage equality because they feel politically intimidated by the Orthodox Church or if they sincerely think marriage equality will destroy Hellenic tradition as we know it.

People debated those organizations’ stances several months ago. I don’t want to focus on them, mostly because I don’t want the comments to turn into a flamefest. (Consider this a moratorium.) Rather, I will focus on the United States.

Polytheism and Marriage Equality

Polytheists who don’t support marriage equality have very little to base it on. In the ancient world, arranged marriages generally prevented people from making any choice at all. Only in the modern Western world do we see the emphasis on love as a necessary factor. In Disney movies, weddings always happen, no matter what the social differences between the two may be: Cinderella and Prince Charming, Aladdin and Jasmine, Shrek and Fiona. Arranged marriages, the common Western wisdom says, only happen in third-world countries where women are treated like chattel.

“Arguments” Against

If love is now necessary in the West for community approval of a marriage, how is love between two men or two women any different from love between a man and a woman? Of course children cannot be produced in the same way, but how many married straight couples use adoption? How many don’t have children at all? With a population exceeding humanity’s carrying capacity (see: third world starvation), we cannot afford to believe that fertility is most important in a marriage. Indeed, overpopulation is killing humanity!

The immorality argument about homosexuality, along with the belief that civil marriage is against religious freedom, are both false. Think about all of the faiths that do have liturgy for same-sex unions. Unitarian Universalism. Wicca. Evangelical Lutheranism. United Church of Christ. What about their religious freedom to perform same-sex unions? What about atheists, who have no religious prohibitions against any behavior at all? In the West, the immorality argument comes from Judeo-Christian thought and the Book of Leviticus. (Christians who take Leviticus literally, when is the last time you had a mold-infested garment looked at by your priest?)

What about marrying cows or young children? How is “gay marriage” any different? These things cannot happen because marriage is restricted to sentient adults (and some teenagers with their parents’ permission). A cow cannot offer consent. A four-year-old girl cannot offer consent. A human of any age with a severe mental disability cannot, in most cases, offer consent. Spock’s father could. Chewbacca (oh, mental images!) could.

Reality Reloaded

Legislation against marriage equality is invalid, even if backed by popular vote, because the arguments against it are religious. Religion does not belong in American legislation, no matter how much the closet Dominionists want it to. Anti-equality laws are no more constitutional than those declaring one state or another Christian (one of which was passed in Missouri, where I lived for two-thirds of my childhood). The slope between legislation like this and legislation requiring [an equally unconstitutional] religious litmus test for public office is slippery (or even between this and religious indoctrination in public schools). Incidentally—and yes, slightly off-topic—religious favoritism is also why creationism or intelligent design should NEVER be taught in science classrooms.

The Place of Hellenic Polytheism

So, with that said, what do I think about marriage equality and Hellenic Polytheism? I think that religious ceremonies should exist for those in places where marriage equality is allowed, simply because this covers all bases.

What about tradition? I’m not talking about changing the marriage ritual for heterosexual couples, or even making same-sex couples use it. I’m talking about supplementing what exists now with something done in the Hellenic spirit, or at least admitting that such a thing is possible. We have done this before. Heliogenna, a Hellenic Winter Solstice celebration, is a response to Christmas and Yule. Dedicated people translated the spirit of the season into Hellenic terms and ended up with something meaningful.

There is a difference between reconstruction as a cage and reconstruction as a road. The road takes you places, some scary, some comforting. A cage leads nowhere but death.

Image credit: “Athena god statue” by mpalis on iStockPhoto.

The Dionysian Experience

2009-10-31T21:07:00.001-04:00

This is an essay I wrote during the Classical Mythology class my senior year of college. It does have some flaws, but I am quite satisfied with how well it turned out. As I made a commitment to put it up sometime this month, and there are only several more hours left in October, it should be put here tonight.

Professor Bradbury, who taught the class, provided us with a very rich array of essay topics. I chose this one, partially because I decided I needed to meditate on Dionysos, but also because I was swamped with work beforehand. Writing about it inspired this post in 2008.

* * *

In Euripides’s Bacchae, Dionysos offers a clear choice to Thebes: the city may either accept his divinity or face the wrath of the god. While one clearly sees that the majority of Thebes denies Dionysos’s divinity, it remains for us to analyze precisely what accepting this deity means and whether or not the forces this god presides over can be easily controlled by mortals. I argue that to accept Dionysos, one must accept both the freedom of the individual and the transcendence of self—an inherent paradox. Mortals cannot control the gifts from this god because self-transcendence requires sacrificing one’s ego and, therefore, one’s control over situations. We will analyze the Bacchae’s chorus to see what they have accepted with the deity, followed by exploring the fire imagery associated with the god and the freedom associated with accepting Dionysos.

The chorus provides a unique lens for scrutinizing what Dionysos offers humanity because the chorus exists primarily outside the action. Unlike Agave, Pentheus, or even Teiresias, the chorus does not have motivation beyond glorifying the god Dionysos. Through their hymns of praise, we begin to see what the deity promises his worshipers in return for their devotion: “Blessèd is he who hallows his life in the worship of god, / he whom the spirit of god possesseth, who is one / with those who belong to the holy body of god” (Bacchae, 72-4). Here we see that Dionysos possesses even those who accept him, and that this possession becomes a blessing when voluntary. (However, this has a darker side: “possession” was used against Thebes when Dionysos possessed their women, giving them no choice but to follow him.) The transition in this passage from mysteries of god, worship of god, dance of god, body of god, wand of god, to the final cry of “[b]lessèd, blessèd are they: Dionysos is their god!” (Bacchae, 70-82) The effect is twofold: at the beginning, the language of our translation separates the god from his worshipers. They use and do things that belong to god, and the primary emphasis rests on what these individuals must do to gain his praise. However, the ending statement brings the god into the realm of mortals—he belongs to those who surrender to him. This means that humans have causal control over the dynamics of their relationship with Dionysos once they have surrendered themselves to him. Dionysos acts as an intermediary between these fortunate ones, their senses, and the real world. In short, one must relinquish one’s own control over the self and situations, transcending pride and the ego, to achieve freedom through Dionysos.

A second set of phrases spoken by the chorus has quite similar language in our translation to the section of the play discussed above. They differ in that they begin to resemble maxims, giving more precise advice about behavior outside of cultic acts:

Blessèd is he who escapes a storm at sea,
who comes home to his harbor.
Blessèd is he who emerges from under affliction.
In various ways one man outraces another in the
race for wealth and power.
Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes.
A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry.
But he who garners day by day the good of life,
he is happiest. Blessèd is he. (Bacchae, 902-11)

The affliction refers to Pentheus’s refusal to give Dionysos the respect that a deity deserves, slighting the god. While one can certainly understand that a ruler may not want his city to honor a deity whom he knows nothing about, Dionysos has already proven his divinity to Pentheus’s blind eyes. Dionysos, who has chosen to embark on mystic religion, desires also to make his mysteries universal: “Did the god declare / that just the young or just the old should dance? / No, he desires his honor from all mankind. / He wants no one excluded from his worship” (Bacchae, 206-9). The chorus’s phrasing indicates that it views Pentheus’s denial of Dionysos’s divinity as a denial of the self, or a refusal of the god’s hospitality.

To understand more completely what Dionysos, the god who presides over wine and ecstasy, gives to his worshipers, we must understand an additional dimension. In some sections of the play, Euripides refers to wine as a drink that makes mortals forget their afflictions, describing it similarly to the waters of Lethe that in the underworld (Buxton, 208-9). Dionysos’s gift to humanity, according to Teiresias, follows this mode: “For fulfilled with that good gift, / suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it / comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles / of the day. There is no other medicine / for misery” (Bacchae, 279-83). When we compare this to statements from the Dionysian/Orphic mysteries that warn people not to drink from the river Lethe, but from Mnemosyne after they have died, the link between wine and the “oblivion of troubles” indicates that Dionysos privileges a psychological respite from suffering in the mortal world (Graf, 5). Teiresias also views the deity as an intermediary god, which Euripides also emphasizes through the intense interaction with mortals.

However, what Dionysian worshipers accept from the god does not submit to mortal control easily. We have already seen how the “blessèd” statements show that one must relinquish power to gain the benefits of a relationship with Dionysos—it requires a transcendence of the self. To explore this uncontrollable aspect of the Dionysian experience further, we can examine the imagery associated with the god—in particular, those sections in which Euripides links the god to fire. The description of Dionysos’s first birth reveals that Semele “bore him once / in labor bitter; lightning-struck, / forced by fire that flared from Zeus” (Bacchae, 88-90). The child, born of light, was midwifed by the divine fire that incinerated his mother. Pentheus also connects Dionysian worship to the uncontrollable aspect of fire, saying “[l]ike a blazing fire / this Bacchic violence spreads” (Bacchae, 777-8).

Fire links Dionysos to Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire to humanity in a fennel stalk (Works and Days, 25). If fire can represent the power of civilization, then Dionysos’s power arose concurrently with civilization because the creation of wine, while it does relax inhibitions, is a civilized, deliberate action. Unlike Prometheus, who takes humanity’s side, Dionysos does not refrain from punishing individual human beings and cities in pursuit of his divine regency—and he does not refrain from using fire as a tool to accomplish his desires. In this play, he punishes Thebes because it has dishonored him and forsaken his divinity, and the god will induce Pentheus to set fire to his own home. The god uses fire as a weapon elsewhere: when the chorus describes him, they say that “[f]lames float out from his trailing wand / as he runs, as he dances, / kindling the stragglers, / spurring with cries, / and his long curls stream to the wind!” (Bacchae, 144-150). The uncontrollability is shown in the way Dionysos carries the fire and in the way he carries himself—the god with the unbound hair invites a relaxation of inhibition.

The benefits of worship that the chorus praises, in requiring the individual to relinquish control to the deity, become curses when the individual does not respect Dionysos’s power. Those who defy god invite the darker side of his passions, so the god retains control of the relationship. Pentheus believes that he retains control in the play, whereas the god manipulates even Pentheus’s perceptions. The altered state of consciousness that willing (and unwilling) Dionysian worshipers find themselves in defies human control because Dionysos exists parallel to, yet not within, civilization. Those active Bacchantes of Dionysos find themselves liberated when bound by civilization’s laws, symbolized in the tragedy by the prison guards’ inability to keep the Bacchantes imprisoned: “The chains on their legs snapped apart / by themselves. Untouched by any human hand, / the doors swung wide, opening of their own accord” (Bacchae, 447-9). According to Dionysos’s will, they leave their prison—the miracle of the god uses them as ammunition in the destruction of Pentheus.

Dionysos directly controls the Bacchantes when he prompts them to take vengeance on Pentheus, who witnesses their rites as an outsider to the god’s mysteries. When the Bacchantes “[know] his cry / the clear command of god,” the messenger who went with Pentheus and Dionysos to the Bacchantes says that the worshipers’ feet are “maddened / by the breath of god” (Bacchae, 1088-94). The gifts and miracles that Dionysos had given them turn on the individual who defies god. Transcendence of the individual makes them all behave as a collective, and the Dionysian power overwhelms their senses enough to supplant the traditional ties between a mother and her child, forcing Agave to do in the fit of Dionysian frenzy to do what no sensible Greek woman could have done.

To conclude, those who accept the god Dionysos receive some measure of protection from the deity, providing that they follow the god’s customs and honor him in the appropriate way. An individual’s acceptance of Dionysos does not necessarily mean that she can control what the god gives her, as the nature of wine and the primal, ecstatic experience sometimes venture outside the bounds of conventional society. Like fire, the god Dionysos requires that an individual approach him with caution and respect to prevent ruin.

Bibliography
Euripides. The Bacchae. Euripides V. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.
Hesiod. Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. Trans. Daryl Hine. Chicago: University of Chiago Press, 2005.
Buxton, Richard. Complete World of Greek Mythology. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Graf, Fritz, and Sarah Iles Johnston. Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets. New York: Routeledge, 2007.

Current Offerings and Religious Observances: A Brief Look

2009-10-26T22:01:00.000-04:00

Currently, I have several routine offerings going on. The first ten days of the lunar month brings the cyclical offerings to Selene, the Agathos Daemon, Athene, Hermes, Eros, Aphrodite, Herakles, Artemis, Apollon, and Poseidon.

I also worship Apollon every weekend (Saturday/Sunday) during the Kyklos Apollon ritual, which is a great regular ritual. Hermes receives offerings on days I work in thanks for helping me find employment; I bought a huge box of chrysanthemum incense for this very purpose, and I have about two weeks left of these offerings. At some point, I need to find myrrh incense so I can offer Rhea two sticks (because I prayed to her as well near the end of my unemployment).

This weekend will also be busy. I will make a khoe (a drink libation that leaves nothing for the worshipper --- you don't share libations with the dead) to my ancestors, especially my maternal grandfather, who passed away this past January. I will also make offerings to the Chthonic Gods (Hades, Hermes Psychopompos, Persephone, etc.) in honor of the holiday.

Pompaia begins Tuesday evening and runs until sunset on Wednesday. I will make an offering to Zeus on Wednesday, probably a libation.

For libations and other rituals, I either just make the offering or follow a loose version of something posted at sponde.us.

When Offerings Don't Happen

2009-10-22T22:08:00.001-04:00

One small confession: offerings to the Gods don't actually happen precisely when they should in my household, especially now that the morning light is actually morning darkness. Winter exhausts me.

Incense takes about 40 minutes to burn, and I prefer to perform morning offerings after I shower and dress. Sometimes I wake up with enough time. Sometimes, I don't. As a day rolls on, the likelihood of an offering decreases. I try to remain mindful of when these offerings need to take place because it helps me budget time. Offerings motivate me to stumble zombie-like downstairs as my excited cat tries to trip me.

I don't leave incense burning when it has more than four or five centimeters left (I have a large offering bowl) because I am worried about it falling or the cat upsetting it, and I try to make sure it is completely finished before I rush to the bus stop. Ritual devotions, which encompass both the lunar month's holy days and my personal offering schedule, frequently, but not always, happen beforehand. Depending on how long I work, I may not get back home before the Hellenic day ends at sunset.

Sometimes, as with votive offerings, I resolve the issue by making an extra offering the following morning. With temporally-sensitive offerings (offerings tied to specific days of the lunar month), I don't make offerings the following day and instead try to do something else --- keep aspects of the Gods in my mind on their sacred days, change my behavior in honor of them. Altering a habit, even temporarily, is often more difficult than striking a match and reciting hymns for ten minutes.

Does it bother me that I sometimes fail to carve out special time for the Gods in my schedule? Yes. Devotional time relaxes me. I enjoy lighting candles, burning incense, and making libation as much as (I hope) the Gods enjoy receiving them. Lacking the time to make offerings also means that I have failed on another sensitive topic --- keeping myself productive.

However, I think I once nearly missed the Kyklos Apollon ritual due to a fresh burst of creative writing, so perhaps keeping myself on task isn't the issue.

How do you deal with working ritual and devotion into your life?

Image credit: stock.xchng.

Some Rough Responses to THE GOD DELUSION

2009-10-16T19:30:00.000-04:00

I am reading The God Delusion out of obligation, as one of my mother’s love interests found out that I am a theist and thus gave me the book. While I believe in accepting gifts from others so as not to insult them, I am as much put off by someone giving me a book Witnessing for atheism as I am receiving a book that attempts to prompt a conversion to Christianity, Islam, or Mormonism. Richard Dawkins, whom I personally think is a bit of an ass due to what I have heard about him (and a bizarre mental connection of unknown origin that points to Ayn Rand), makes some very good points about religion. However, he also makes some assumptions about religion that I feel do not actually apply to my faith.

Keep in mind that my notes here are rough. I am only on the second chapter of The God Delusion, but I have enough to say at this point that I find it necessary to comment. Much of this comes from my point of view as a Hellenist, and some comes from an a posteriori philosophy that I have developed in response to prevailing thoughts in science, religion, and everything in between.

Dawkins equates monotheism and polytheism, thinking that using the term “God” as a placeholder for all of them (while devoting most examples to Christianity, the religion he is most familiar with) is a simple way of refuting all. The time he does devote to polytheism is spent discussing its primitivism, something that shows that he is way too influenced by anti-polytheistic Christian propaganda.

The argument Dawkins makes against theism—that one must necessarily believe in a supernatural god who created the universe—doesn’t necessarily work in a polytheistic context, as our mythological texts are inspired by the divine, not dictated by it. They take place in “mythological time,” a place where anything can happen. Hesiod attributes no god as creator of the universe. He begins with Chaos forming and proceeds from there. The relationships the poets create among the gods serves more to explain their relationship to one another than to actually explain a literal family tree. Some myths clarify divine relationships or principles. Some are ways of thinking about cyclical natural events.

I believe in the existence of the Gods. Whether the Gods are really just ideal Forms, mathematical expressions, the Laws of Physics/Nature, or impressive spiritual beings really doesn’t matter, because in the end it still means that we are anthropomorphizing something inhuman in order to symbolically conceptualize it. (Of course, I say this as someone who hasn't committed to any specific Hellenic philosophical tradition.) As Sallustius says, the rituals we perform for them don’t actually benefit the Gods (although the Homeric idea of a deity delighting in the smell of the sacrifice is a pleasing poetic image), but ourselves. Ritual action is universal across all societies and religions. It provides us a framework for looking at the world. Personally, performing a ritual fills me with a sense of gratitude towards the Gods and the universe. It makes me feel connected to a concrete past, and it gives me a sense of real physical community. Unverified personal gnosis could pose a problem depending on what the Gods actually are, but I’m more concerned about whether or not it has a net positive impact (i.e., change of destructive to construtive behavior).

Hellenic Polytheism encompasses such a wide variety of philosophical beliefs that ritual is our primary unifying factor. Stoicism, Cynicism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, Orphicism, and other philosophical schools all differ on things—the nature of the soul, the afterlife, the Gods—but all still fall under the same religion. While the debates can get heated, accusing someone of not being a “Real Hellenist” because s/he practices different philosophy is dishonest and, in most cases, wrong, and polytheistic philosophy thrives on dissent and variety. Assuming that everyone believes that the Gods are a specific something only shows a lack of sensitivity to these differing opinions, but it’s an easy mistake to make for someone not conditioned to think from a certain worldview.

Monotheistic faiths, by contrast, believe that there is One True Way. Heresy occurs when one deviates from the accepted ways of thinking about their “One True God.” Au contraire, the Gods of Hellenic Polytheism delight (if one can say that a God is capable of such an emotion) in having worshipers who will actually think for themselves, write their society’s own frakkin’ laws, and govern themselves without needing a cosmic babysitter. The Maxims of Delphi advise us to pray for things that are possible because, unlike Jareth from Labyrinth, the Gods will probably not re-order time, turn the world upside-down, and do it all for us.

Christianity makes blanket assumptions about uniting the Gentiles and Jews under a new religion that will encompass everyone (because the Gentiles were obviously just waiting around for Yahweh to admit them to his super secret happy paradise club—go read Paul’s epistles if you want some serious lols). New Atheism makes the blanket assumption that Christianity is the de facto placeholder for all forms of religious cosmology, and its philosophy seems to me like a reaction to Abrahamic beliefs. I find this somewhat amusing.

To Dawkins’ credit, I do think he reasons through many arguments quite well, and he has illuminated several topics that I previously found obscure. I really enjoy the reference to pantheism as “sexed-up atheism,” although as a Hellenist I don’t quite see why he separates pantheism (which I would consider a philosophical position) from religion—one could quite easily be a Hellenic Polytheist who believes in pantheism as long as s/he performed rituals and adhered to a Hellenic ethical framework. Perhaps pantheism would work less in a secondary religious framework.

Of course, these opinions may change. If I am motivated to provide more commentary on how I read this as a polytheist, I will as soon as I finish it—hopefully soon, as I have barred myself from acquiring new books until I complete the ones that have waited patiently on my shelf for months, and I want to sink my teeth into Iamblichus.

Brief Thoughts on Cultural Destruction

2009-10-14T20:49:00.001-04:00

We have an obligation to the Muses, who preside over history, poetry, epics, science, and many other forms of human knowledge, to refrain from base destruction of cultural relics. Polytheists, Christians, Muslims, and others have all destroyed sacred artifacts and all forms of literature housed in sacred and secular places.

I was moved to speak not because it's Banned Books Week (um ... that was two weeks ago) or Cultural Genocide Awareness Month (I wish), but because I picked up A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Báez from the library. Parts of it are somewhat dry, but in it Fernando Báez discusses the reasons why people destroy books and why such destruction continues to present a real problem to the preservation and continuation of diverse types of human knowledge.

Reading the book made me more anti-war than I already am. I support intervention in genocides to protect those harmed by the psychotic and powerful, and I support assisting countries in determining their own destinies. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books gave me a concrete way of articulating my objections to invasion and violence.

As a child, I remember learning about World War II and thinking that the Nazis and Allies would never have bombed libraries or museums because they both would have understood what a terrible crime against history the destruction of cultural artifacts is.

The world doesn't work that way. Libraries and museums are destroyed. The people who initiate wars may do so on purpose to humiliate the defending nation or people, or they may do so because destroying the past and the written word makes appropriating the conquered so much easier. Still more nations are so indifferent to the cultural centers that the soldiers do not protect them from looters.

I think that many Hellenic Polytheists can relate to the destruction of knowledge and culture that accompanies a warlike attitude. This warfare extends to ideology, such as the pressure Christianity placed on non-Christians to convert during the past seventeen hundred years and the devaluation placed on people who believe polytheism works. It is the pressure currently being applied to those who practice traditional Sanatana Dharma, Shinto, and other primary religions.

Think about it. Sacred statues broken. Books conflicting with official Christian doctrine destroyed. Prominent polytheists murdered in cold blood. Our intellectual heritage --- Plato, Aristotle, Iamblichus, and others --- Christianized or encouraged to be forgotten. Conversion and missionary work are forms of warfare that destroys or perverts everything it touches.

Is one culture really so superior that all others must be forgotten? Shouldn't we speak out louder against a continuation of hatred? Shouldn't we condemn ideologies that perpetuate the destruction of others' gods, artifacts, books, and ideas?

Those who advocate for cultures that have been victimized by forms of cultural genocide have an obligation to speak out against current things that degrade people. You may disagree with me, but this is why I support the Kalashi fight against those who want them to convert to Islam. This is why I support Native American tribes' fight for their spirituality in the face of plastic shamans.

War, no matter how carefully we may do it, destroys just as many positive as negative cultural traits, and it frequently allows the more negative traits more organic expression. Diplomacy is the slow blade that can penetrate the shield. This is why, in most cases, at least, I prefer to leave Ares bound at the city gate and rely on Hermes's quick wit.

AGORA: December 18, 2009

2009-10-05T23:45:00.002-04:00

Agora now has a bigger, better trailer:

Enjoy.

Giant Rocks and God-PWNing

2009-10-03T23:12:00.006-04:00

When I was a little girl, my parents did not read to me from Aesop. My mother, who cares deeply about Native American rights, read me Native stories*. They were from an amalgamation of tribes, and a lot of the stories were somewhat more frightening than Nightmare Before Christmas, which my mom never let me watch because it was “too scary.” I mean, in one of the stories, a hunter and his seven dogs are out and the dogs volunteer to die to save the master from a monster during a huge suspenseful chase. That is thriller-quality material.

But that's not the one I want to talk about. I want to talk about Coyote, Iktomi, and the Rock. (OH MY GOD IT'S A GIANT ROCK!) I promise that mentioning this story has something to do with Hellenic Polytheism, but for now, let's go through the Pillars of Herakles, cross the Atlantic, and make our way to Lakota Territory.

Coyote and Iktomi are walking around, and they walk by this rock called Iya. Coyote is like, "HOLY CRAP GIANT ROCK! O_O I MUST MAKE AN OFFERING." He gives Iya the blanket around his shoulders for the cold winds because it's a rather nice day out.

Unfortunately, the weather decides to pull an England as they're walking on. Clouds. Rain. Dreariness. ~~People in long black coats running into Tube stations.~~ And then the weather decides which specific English month it wants to imitate and starts chucking hail everywhere.

Iktomi has a blanket. He's right as rain. Coyote, though, is miserable, cold, and wet. Coyote says, "Hey, I want my blanket back from the impressive giant rock, which shouldn't care because it's just a rock and rocks don't actually need things like blankets."

Iktomi and Coyote walk back to the rock. (There's this brief thing about Iktomi and Iya, but you can read the full story --- or a version of it --- here. I'm just providing an abridged version.) Coyote decides he wants the blanket.

"Dude, Iya, give me the freaking blanket."

"Dude, Coyote, like, no. You freaking gave me this rad blanket, and I likes me some blanket action."

Coyote takes the blanket back anyway.

So Iktomi and Coyote start walking again, and all of a sudden they hear the weirdest noise ever. Do you remember the movie Labyrinth with the giant beast who can summon huge boulders that totally PWN the goblins so the main character can get her baby brother back from David Bowie in tights? Yeah. You guessed it. The rock is rolling down behind them.

Iktomi, at this point, goes, "Lolnoway. Imma gonna, like, get lost." Iktomi now turns into a spider and gets the hell out of the rock's way.

Coyote runs from the rock. The rock runs over Coyote enough that Coyote gets flattened like a pancake, and the rock grabs the blanket. And then this hunter comes along and decides to use Coyote as a floor rug.

Pretend now that the Iya is an Olympian God with several temples. If Coyote offers the blanket at one, it belongs to Iya.

We have records --- Julian's famous "Oration upon the Mother of the Gods" among them --- that prove sacred objects were transferred between temples. The location doesn't matter in these stories as much as the sanctity of the object and its status as an image or a divine offering.

So long as something we give remains in a place where it can be valued as a sacred object --- an online temenos, a household shrine, or perhaps a blog --- it doesn't matter much where it is, or how many times it moves from one location to the other. It must be placed, however, somewhere sacred to the Gods after its voyage through the in-between.

Coyote may move his blanket to another temple if something happens to Temple A that makes it unsuitable for his blanket. Removing the blanket from a sacred space permanently and reusing it as a common household item --- think of everything that happens on and beneath common blankets! --- is bad form. If not resulting in smashed Coyote, it would most likely bring some amount of ill fortune from his impiety.

The story of Coyote, Iktomi, and Iya the Rock came into my head suddenly as I pondered why something made me so uncomfortable earlier this week. I believe that the moral of that childhood story hidden in memory was powerful enough to influence my reaction. (Luckily, my mother was available to answer my question when I asked about "that one Native American myth in which someone takes something and gets PWNed.")

While I thought primarily about things others had done (correction: could possibly do) at first, I realized that I am somewhat guilty of not placing a divine offering someplace sacred. I suppose that means I am impious by my own definition.

The first semester of my senior year, I took a class called Classical Mythology from Scott Bradbury** and wrote an essay on Dionysos. I wrote that primarily as a congenial offering to Dionysos, and I received a 96/100 on the essay. (That's the best I have done on an essay outside of French class.) It might be time to post it here on KALLISTI so others can also enjoy the offering. I want to go over the writing first, but it should be posted sometime later this month, unless any readers think it would be better to post something on the day of a Dionysian festival.

As a last note, I have always wanted to say "God-PWN." (ThankyouHermesyouareawesome<3.)

* I read my own Greek mythology, and my first book of myths is now bound with duct tape. Also, I was in love with Urania when I was a toddler.

** Scott Bradbury confused me. I am pretty sure he is either an atheist or a monotheist, because I know that most Classicists are. However, he also spoke energetically about the numinous qualities of Delphi before quickly changing the subject. That. Was. Just. Weird. I would tip the scales in favor of atheism, though, because we compared myths to the Bible in that class. I don't think that a monotheist would necessarily be comfortable with that. Also, from what I have seen of his scholarship, he doesn't have an explicit monotheistic slant.

Image credit: stock.xchng.

Online Temple of Rhea-Kybele

2009-09-27T21:29:00.002-04:00

The Temple of Rhea-Kybele has existed for a while, but I have finally fiddled with the CSS enough to make the E-temenos interesting.

I decided to use lions in the main banner theme because Rhea-Kybele is strongly associated with lions. The background is a stock photo image of incense sticks burning, and I tried to go for natural colors that reflect Rhea-Kybele's nature.

Unfortunately, the sanctuary image needs to be replaced. Very few decent images of Rhea-Kybele exist online, so I am creating my own.

Happy Pyanepsia, Everyone!

2009-09-26T11:46:00.005-04:00

On this day, we celebrate Theseus's return from Crete with an offering to Apollon. Upon arriving back in Athens, Theseus boiled all remaining stores in a pot—mostly beans—in thanks for his safety.

While I won't be offering a bean stew to the god due to a wedding I am attending today, I will offer him (raw) beans and/or some kind of grain, depending on what we have in the storage cabinets. This festival has a “give what you have” feel to it, so I won't dwell too much on the difference.

For those with the time, here's a recipe for Greek bean stew from the Austerity Kitchen. Enjoy.

Image credit: stock.xchng

News Just In: The Taliban Suck, Look Forward to Extended Tartarian Stay

2009-09-26T09:54:00.006-04:00

People in the blogosphere have gone a great job so far of highlighting a terrible occurrence in the world of the Kalash: Professor Athanasion Larounis, a Greek aid worker assisting them, has been kidnapped by the Taliban. The Taliban are asking the Kalash to pay them a huge ransom—half to two-thirds of the $2.5 million Professor Larounis has raised to assist the Kalash—and return three arrested Taliban leaders.

Alternatively, according to someone on Hellenic_Recons who has asked around in Greece, the Kalash can all convert to Islam and the Taliban will drop the ransom and return the professor unscathed.

If true, this is an outrage to polytheists and indigenous tribes all around the world. For those who don't know, the Kalash are one of the last polytheistic holdouts in the Muslim world. They worship an Indo-European pantheon with divine names similar to Greek and Hindu deities, and they claim that they descended from Alexander the Great's soldiers.

The Taliban, in pressuring the Kalash to change their faith and/or give the Taliban funding, have proven that they're not afraid of sinking to new depths of slime and pollution to fuel their agenda of hate.

If the Kalash pay the ransom and negotiate with the Taliban—yup, that's their brilliant plan right now—they are providing money to a terrorist organization that will be used to buy more bombs and weapons to hurt people. Paying up will also show the Taliban that they can count on abducting aid workers to the Kalash to raise their much-desired funds. THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA!

We need to be a lot louder about this, guys, if there's any hope of an alternative solution to securing Professor Larounis. If you haven't blogged about this yet, please say something.

To learn more:

Taliban targets descendants of Alexander the Great - Telegraph (UK)
Kalasha Peoples Call For Cultural Survival - Kalash

Image Credit: Kalashapeople.org - This comes from one of their recent protest images, showcasing the beautiful cultural dress of Kalasha women.

It's Not Just Sappho

2009-09-25T22:24:00.004-04:00

The love god with his golden curls
puts a bright ball into my hand,
shows a girl in her fancy shoes,
and suggests that I take her.

Not that girl—she's the other kind,
one from Lesbos. Disdainfully,
nose turned up at my silver hair,
she makes eyes at the ladies.

— Anácreon of Teos, trans. Richmond Lattimore

Don't Look Back

2009-09-20T15:49:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Autostraddle for pointing to this game in their latest post. “Don't Look Back” follows Orpheus's journey into the Underworld after the death of Eurydice. In the myth, Orpheus makes his way to the Spartan Gates and sings his wishes to Persephone and Hades:

Great god and goddess, appointed to govern in Hades,
into which every living creature relapses,
if it is rightful for me, if I am permitted
to shun all evasions, speaking the truth to you plainly,
know that I have not come down here to your kingdom
just for the view, or to chain up the three-headed Cerberus,
that monstrous child of Medusa, bristling with serpents;
my wife is the cause of my journey: she stepped on an adder
whose venom cut her life short as it spread through her body.
I won't deny that I wished to—and tried to—endure it,
but Love overcame me. Above, this god is quite famous;
whether he has the same status down here, I'm not certain,
but even so, I would think him to be as well known,
for unless that tale of long-ago rape was invented,
the selfsame deity joined the pair of you, also!
If that's the case, then I, by all of these frightening places,
by mighty Chaos and by this realm of the silent, I beg you
to weave once again Eurydice's fate, done too swiftly.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, ln. 26 - 43.

The King and Queen of the Dead are moved. The Furies weep. Orpheus receives Eurydice on one condition: he cannot look back at her until they have safely reached the world of the living.

“Don't Look Back” covers Orpheus's journey to the Underworld from Eurydice's grave. On the way, you fight hooded snakes and tentacled monsters that drop down from ceilings. There are also flying things (bats?) that will kill you and make you redo a scene. It looks fairly awesome, and as my gaming skills are somewhat below geek standard, someone else should get to the end so I can find out whether it ends exactly like the myth or not. I'm hoping that any scene between Orpheus and the rulers of the Underworld involves keypad-based Lute Hero.

The game was developed by Terry Cavanagh and is available through Kongregate.

From the Apollon Groupie With Love

2009-09-19T22:31:00.008-04:00

In less than an hour, I will be outside in the balmy 46°F (8°C) weather hoping that my hands don't freeze as I try to light a charcoal burner and say a few prayers to Apollon.

Apollon and I have a special relationship in the sense that, if he were a rock star, I would be considered one of the groupies who has never missed a concert and has only once or twice missed downloading a new album the second it appeared on a digital music store for the sole purpose of listening before the express-ordered CD arrived at the house the following morning. Not everyone wants a dedicated relationship like that, and it would detract from the chill prime time drama quality that the current English-speaking Hellenic Polytheist community has.

Some may consider that relationship with Apollon a bit unorthodox. Devoting oneself to a specific God or Goddess requires careful consideration to make sure other Gods are given appropriate cultus. For the unorthodox bits, I find a lot of support in looking beyond the Hellenic community to podcasts such as Speaking of Faith.

The episode called “The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi” initially drew me in because the page has an amazing work of photoart. I had not heard of Rumi before, but he was an Islamic mystic and poet from the 13th century. Islamic poets like Rumi who express the divine so beautifully provide such a stark contrast with the exclusivist monotheism at the core of the Islamic tradition that it's a wonder the religions are the same.

In the program, Krista Tippett introduces concepts surrounding Rumi, saying that

Rumi imprinted that movement with a vividly sensual and poetic practice of spirituality that has been provocative and controversial across the ages. He crafted some of his most religious ideas in the form of erotically toned love poetry, which seems at once addressed to Allah or God and to an earthly beloved. Rumi inspired the practice of the whirling dervishes by spinning around a column as he recited his poems.

As a woman profoundly motivated by the experience of poetry and words—something that goes along with a devotion to Apollon—it makes sense to mingle erotic language with descriptions of the divine experience. Everyone can experience the bliss of knowing the Gods with the proper concentration and ritualistic trappings. We frame bliss in erotic language because it arouses similar feelings that sometimes confuse the body into physical desire.

I love reading spiritual love poetry. Good poets invoke those blissful states through physical and emotional sensations.

My poetry for Apollon sometimes aims at this, but I leave some of the more ecstatic pieces unposted/unpublished because I'm not sure of how they would be received. A poem about finding Apollon in literature for the first time is written as a night in his bedchamber. A poem exploring his role in plague becomes an examination of fever and exploitation.

Bliss isn't pretty. It sometimes doesn't take us where we want to go. Sometimes, we prepare for it and it doesn't show up at all.

Poetry can be a vehicle of bliss because it codes emotions and experience. It's one of Apollon's links to something that many may not consider rational—something that seems to fly in the face of what the God stands for.

However, Apollon also said that we must exercise moderation in all things. Maybe reason is one of them.

Image from stock.xchng.

Important update

2009-09-18T12:30:00.005-04:00

As part of a movement towards professionalism, I have changed the URL for KALLISTI.

The URL was http://pandemoniumapple.blogspot.com.
It is now http://kallisti.writingkaye.com.

If you can't get to it, don't despair! Google will start redirecting you in a few days.

However, none of the boxes I have set up --- Charity: Water, AdSense, etc. --- will work. (Also, if you haven't done so already, head to my new URL and click on the Charity: Water button in the right column. Clickers have provided 320ish gallons of clean water for people who don't have it so far if I am reading the dial properly.)

My service is still based on Blogger. I will probably not switch to Wordpress.