So, the last time I posted before Iliouyenna, I had come to the realization that I had erred in my approach to Apollo. Now, I am still not sure, not 100%, of why my approach is bad but it is, and the God has made his displeasure known. That I have been moving in too book nerdy a way that seeks to understand this God through the epithets laid upon him by the Ancient Greeks is clear, but I have always used this approach to understand the Gods. I have always used this as a means to move deeper into how they affect me, but maybe where I have gone wrong here is in misunderstanding the way this God is more akin to Dionysos that I thought.
What do I mean by this?
Well, Dionysos is a God of extremes, and as a result he is a God who hits us through our emotions, and because it is Dionysos, we expect it. But with Apollo I think I have always seen him as a God that was more "of the head" or more intellectual. Yet intellect, in the end, is just another one of our natural processes, and thought, like emotion, is very spontaneous, even mysterious in its origins and purposes sometimes.
If Dionysos is the God of the rampant emotions like various forms of lust and emotional discord, then Apollo is a God whose power lies, in so far as we go, in the ultimate control of one rampant and chaotic process reining in another in our minds. Yet that control can also come at a price, and that price can be the loss of connection between our minds and our emotions.
How do we understand love if we force ourselves to control the base emotion at the core of love? How do we come to an understanding of fear if we try so hard to understand it that we fail to feel it properly and in its proper context? How do we understand the Gods themselves if we cannot let go and feel them in the raw?
So Apollo, a God who is often presented as lusty himself in the mythos, must never be understood as a God of control, but rather as a god of moderation. One may imagine this as being basically the same thing, but there is a subtle difference, and understanding Apollo means understanding that.
Now the question remains, do I really understand that distinction? And if I do, am I capable of putting that into practice in my life in such a way that I learn the lesson the God is seeking to teach me?
Friday, December 28, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Taking a break...
I am taking a little break to celebrate Heliogenna this year. For me it is a solitary experiment this year, though I did get a few non-pagans interested in the concept of a Winter commemoration and celebration, and they did seem like they might give some of it a try.
I'll be back, as our favorite Austrian politician was once fond of saying.
Happy Holidays, whatever holidays you may be celebrating at the moment.
I'll be back, as our favorite Austrian politician was once fond of saying.
Happy Holidays, whatever holidays you may be celebrating at the moment.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
I have erred...
In taking on this project, I decided that part o the reason for it was to open myself up to the Gods themselves so that they guide me while at the same time I explore how I have come to interpret the Gods.
But I have erred horribly with Apollo, and I am paying for it.
Let me explain. I asked the God to teach me, to help me, to guide me, and in so doing I had couple of dreams, nightmares, and other moments of extreme imagination that prevented me from sleeping. But I have lost myself in trying to understand Apollo through his epithets and lost my way, and I think Apollo has punished me. I have become very ill in the last couple of weeks. First it was a little shortness of breath, then a horrible allergic reaction to my boyfriend's cats (I helped him move and the dust kicked up by all the moving and the cats caused a horrible allergic reaction in spite of allergy meds) which triggered an asthma attack which caused a build up of fluids in my lungs that almost became a pneumonia.
So, O.K., am I scared yet? Absolutely. But other things have happened in the last couple of months. I met a man I am falling in love with. Whether he feels the same is something that may or may not happen in time, but for now we are exploring each other and the feelings we have. I have come to a better understanding of how to manage my current illness, something I have never been good at. And just this week, my best friend in all the world, who I have not seen in almost three years, has moved back into town and left a message for me.
Apollo struck at me hard with a poison arrow, and in doing so is forcing me to look at the things in my life that have true value to me, like friends who care, friends I have allowed to fall out of my life who I should never have allowed to do so. Love and how it affects me, and he is forcing me to face the frailty of my mortality by smacking me down.
I have always had a bit of an overly bright view of the Gods. Usually seeing them in their lighter aspects far more than in their darker, harsher aspects, and Apollo, the God of light, civility, and art is teaching me that I need to be careful with doing that because it is causing me to overlook important lessons the Gods may send my way through adversity.
But I have erred horribly with Apollo, and I am paying for it.
Let me explain. I asked the God to teach me, to help me, to guide me, and in so doing I had couple of dreams, nightmares, and other moments of extreme imagination that prevented me from sleeping. But I have lost myself in trying to understand Apollo through his epithets and lost my way, and I think Apollo has punished me. I have become very ill in the last couple of weeks. First it was a little shortness of breath, then a horrible allergic reaction to my boyfriend's cats (I helped him move and the dust kicked up by all the moving and the cats caused a horrible allergic reaction in spite of allergy meds) which triggered an asthma attack which caused a build up of fluids in my lungs that almost became a pneumonia.
So, O.K., am I scared yet? Absolutely. But other things have happened in the last couple of months. I met a man I am falling in love with. Whether he feels the same is something that may or may not happen in time, but for now we are exploring each other and the feelings we have. I have come to a better understanding of how to manage my current illness, something I have never been good at. And just this week, my best friend in all the world, who I have not seen in almost three years, has moved back into town and left a message for me.
Apollo struck at me hard with a poison arrow, and in doing so is forcing me to look at the things in my life that have true value to me, like friends who care, friends I have allowed to fall out of my life who I should never have allowed to do so. Love and how it affects me, and he is forcing me to face the frailty of my mortality by smacking me down.
I have always had a bit of an overly bright view of the Gods. Usually seeing them in their lighter aspects far more than in their darker, harsher aspects, and Apollo, the God of light, civility, and art is teaching me that I need to be careful with doing that because it is causing me to overlook important lessons the Gods may send my way through adversity.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
And so...
We come to an aspect of Apollon that I have never quite gotten.
On an intellectual level I get it. All Gods, at lest in the mythos, hold within them their own opposition. They are both light and dark, good and bad (not in the evil sense), masculine and feminine, etc. Apollo, as the great hunter God, is also the wolf God. He is both hunter and prey. In this sense, Apollo is very familiar to me in this sense because he is very much all the other Gods.
It is the specific aspect of Lykeios, the Wolf-Slayer, that I am often at odds with because while the title implies a hunter, which Apollo clearly is, the association with the wolf is not simply secondary, but also primary. In many ways, Apollo is the wolf as much as he is the hunter that slays the wolf.
In modern times we may see this aspect of Apollo in fuzzy eco-friendly ways. Protecting the wolf, for example, would seem to fall as part of the potential activities to participate in in honor of Apollo. But in ancient times, the wolf could be a very real threat to man kind. Much higher population of wolves and a much smaller population of human beings and you can see the potential problem. Add to this that in order to become civilized man had to be a farmer and cattle wrangler (yeeee-haw) and the wolf was a danger to the herds of the Greeks as they were, and often still are, to almost all cultures.
As a god of cities, of civilization, Apollo would have had to take on a role as destroyer of wolves even as he was himself very much a wolf by nature.
According to some sources, Latona, the mother of Apollo, was identified with a bitch-wolf, and in many ways, Apollo here is destroyer of his own mother (Latona is another name for Leto) and as a hunter, he, Leto, and Artemis all take on forms of the very beasts they destroy.
I said that this is an aspect of Apollo, Lykeios, that I don't quite get, and then go on to give rational explanations for it, thus contradicting myself. But, what I don't actually get is the wolf thing itself. I have a great imagination. I can picture amazing things in my head, come up with varied and complex stories in my mind, and I can imagine sex of which your mama would have been very ashamed, but this is a point at which my imagination always fails me. My ability to imagine myself as a wolf, as a wild beast in the woods, is very limited, and as a result I am a bit lost sometimes with regard to this specific aspect of the God.
On an intellectual level I get it. All Gods, at lest in the mythos, hold within them their own opposition. They are both light and dark, good and bad (not in the evil sense), masculine and feminine, etc. Apollo, as the great hunter God, is also the wolf God. He is both hunter and prey. In this sense, Apollo is very familiar to me in this sense because he is very much all the other Gods.
It is the specific aspect of Lykeios, the Wolf-Slayer, that I am often at odds with because while the title implies a hunter, which Apollo clearly is, the association with the wolf is not simply secondary, but also primary. In many ways, Apollo is the wolf as much as he is the hunter that slays the wolf.
In modern times we may see this aspect of Apollo in fuzzy eco-friendly ways. Protecting the wolf, for example, would seem to fall as part of the potential activities to participate in in honor of Apollo. But in ancient times, the wolf could be a very real threat to man kind. Much higher population of wolves and a much smaller population of human beings and you can see the potential problem. Add to this that in order to become civilized man had to be a farmer and cattle wrangler (yeeee-haw) and the wolf was a danger to the herds of the Greeks as they were, and often still are, to almost all cultures.
As a god of cities, of civilization, Apollo would have had to take on a role as destroyer of wolves even as he was himself very much a wolf by nature.
According to some sources, Latona, the mother of Apollo, was identified with a bitch-wolf, and in many ways, Apollo here is destroyer of his own mother (Latona is another name for Leto) and as a hunter, he, Leto, and Artemis all take on forms of the very beasts they destroy.
I said that this is an aspect of Apollo, Lykeios, that I don't quite get, and then go on to give rational explanations for it, thus contradicting myself. But, what I don't actually get is the wolf thing itself. I have a great imagination. I can picture amazing things in my head, come up with varied and complex stories in my mind, and I can imagine sex of which your mama would have been very ashamed, but this is a point at which my imagination always fails me. My ability to imagine myself as a wolf, as a wild beast in the woods, is very limited, and as a result I am a bit lost sometimes with regard to this specific aspect of the God.
Monday, December 3, 2007
The light of...
You are the light of reason
The wise son of Zeus
Beautiful ad everlasting
You are the light of civility
The sure footed son of Leto
Lover of women, fair and sweet
You are the light of restraint
The brilliant brother of Artemis
Feller of the beasts of the wood
You are the light of the city
The loving father of Asklepios
Lover of men, young and strong
You are the light of the healer’s art
The dark son of Zeus
Bringer of pestilence and death
You are the light of hope
The heavenly son of Leto
Purifier of sins and evil in the hearts of men
The wise son of Zeus
Beautiful ad everlasting
You are the light of civility
The sure footed son of Leto
Lover of women, fair and sweet
You are the light of restraint
The brilliant brother of Artemis
Feller of the beasts of the wood
You are the light of the city
The loving father of Asklepios
Lover of men, young and strong
You are the light of the healer’s art
The dark son of Zeus
Bringer of pestilence and death
You are the light of hope
The heavenly son of Leto
Purifier of sins and evil in the hearts of men
Thursday, November 29, 2007
On Asklepios, the doctor.
In the Greek religious system there are Heroes, and Heroes are the Greek answer to ancestor worship that has occurred and continues to occur all over the world to this day. In addition, the Hero system also seems to be connected to the idea, arising most prominently to the fore in the Hindu system, of the avatar. We see it to this day in religions as far ranging as Christianity and Hinduism, and in many ways in the Prophets of Islam and Judaism.
An avatar is essentially a physical earthly manifestation of a divine being. That is to say, a god made incarnate as a human being (The entire deity or just a subset?) and as a result becoming very much an individual being since the avatar does live a human life of extra ordinary proportions.
Rama is an avatar in the Hindu religion. Mohamed in Islam may well have been seen as a kind of avatar. And in Christianity, Jesus is, perhaps, the world's best known avatar form. Who these people may have actually been and how their teachings have been misinterpreted and misapplied through history is beyond the scope of this posting, and not in my consciousness enough for me to give little more than simple opinion.
But in the Greek Religion, there are several beings in the mythos who are clearly avatar forms and who may well have been true human beings who were born of the essence of the divine, but having been born in the mortal world lived and died as mortals do, the divine essence returning to the divine sphere where it came from.
Herakles, Odysseus, Achilles, the Dioskouroi, and Asklepios being in the forefront of these. The Greeks called them Heroes, and sometimes Hero Gods, continuing their worship long after their deaths and seeking their aid and protection. Some of these, like Asklepios and Herakles, are often thought to have transcended human mortality, due to their divine essence, and lived on as Gods, independent and whole, in the divine sphere.
Asklepios was a physician, son of Apollo, more often than not a sign that a hero was an avatar was direct descent from a God in the mythos, who in his efforts to heal people made the fatal mistake of bringing the dead back to life. This is an unforgivable breach of the order of the cosmos, and Zeus took action, killing Asklepios.
The myths say that Apollo took revenge, and that as a result of his revenge was punished by Zeus to become the servant of a mortal king. A true come down for a God.
Asklepios confuses me in many ways because the concept of the avatar is fairly new to me. The very idea of a God walking among us, living a normal human life, perhaps even unaware that he or she is an avatar of a God, yet always pushed by his or her divine nature to do extraordinary things is something that both fascinates me and scares me a bit.
How many people, for example, develop delusions about themselves that cause them to lead people astray because they think they have a right to tell others what the Gods think? Can I be such a person? Am I, in sharing this site with you, being arrogant enough to think of myself in this way? The possibility scares me a bit. We human beings are so easily lead to arrogance and zealotry.
And what about Zeus in all this? Was there no other way to stop Asklepios? Was death the only way, or is it simply that by his very nature he must have a dreadful ending?
If one thinks about many of the people in our history who could have been avatars of the divine, one can imagine a Martin Luther King Jr or a Malcolm X as such, each having met sad and sudden ends. But what of other more notorious men like Hitler or Stalin? Could it be that an avatar can turn from the divine path through human will and corruption to an evil beyond anything the Gods would wish upon us?
It is all a bit scary at times to contemplate. After all, the Gods do not necessarily have our individual best interests at heart, and just as Troy fell at the hands of the Heroes, so to might we, judged by the Gods unworthy of continuing.
An avatar is essentially a physical earthly manifestation of a divine being. That is to say, a god made incarnate as a human being (The entire deity or just a subset?) and as a result becoming very much an individual being since the avatar does live a human life of extra ordinary proportions.
Rama is an avatar in the Hindu religion. Mohamed in Islam may well have been seen as a kind of avatar. And in Christianity, Jesus is, perhaps, the world's best known avatar form. Who these people may have actually been and how their teachings have been misinterpreted and misapplied through history is beyond the scope of this posting, and not in my consciousness enough for me to give little more than simple opinion.
But in the Greek Religion, there are several beings in the mythos who are clearly avatar forms and who may well have been true human beings who were born of the essence of the divine, but having been born in the mortal world lived and died as mortals do, the divine essence returning to the divine sphere where it came from.
Herakles, Odysseus, Achilles, the Dioskouroi, and Asklepios being in the forefront of these. The Greeks called them Heroes, and sometimes Hero Gods, continuing their worship long after their deaths and seeking their aid and protection. Some of these, like Asklepios and Herakles, are often thought to have transcended human mortality, due to their divine essence, and lived on as Gods, independent and whole, in the divine sphere.
Asklepios was a physician, son of Apollo, more often than not a sign that a hero was an avatar was direct descent from a God in the mythos, who in his efforts to heal people made the fatal mistake of bringing the dead back to life. This is an unforgivable breach of the order of the cosmos, and Zeus took action, killing Asklepios.
The myths say that Apollo took revenge, and that as a result of his revenge was punished by Zeus to become the servant of a mortal king. A true come down for a God.
Asklepios confuses me in many ways because the concept of the avatar is fairly new to me. The very idea of a God walking among us, living a normal human life, perhaps even unaware that he or she is an avatar of a God, yet always pushed by his or her divine nature to do extraordinary things is something that both fascinates me and scares me a bit.
How many people, for example, develop delusions about themselves that cause them to lead people astray because they think they have a right to tell others what the Gods think? Can I be such a person? Am I, in sharing this site with you, being arrogant enough to think of myself in this way? The possibility scares me a bit. We human beings are so easily lead to arrogance and zealotry.
And what about Zeus in all this? Was there no other way to stop Asklepios? Was death the only way, or is it simply that by his very nature he must have a dreadful ending?
If one thinks about many of the people in our history who could have been avatars of the divine, one can imagine a Martin Luther King Jr or a Malcolm X as such, each having met sad and sudden ends. But what of other more notorious men like Hitler or Stalin? Could it be that an avatar can turn from the divine path through human will and corruption to an evil beyond anything the Gods would wish upon us?
It is all a bit scary at times to contemplate. After all, the Gods do not necessarily have our individual best interests at heart, and just as Troy fell at the hands of the Heroes, so to might we, judged by the Gods unworthy of continuing.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
What I should not be seeing...
Along with what I hope to see, I must also come to understand what it is I make myself see out of sheer hope but which is not to my best interest or which may not be reasonable to expect when I look through that door and seek to see what is ahead for me.
For one thing, I have allowed my feelings of a personal and romantic nature to interfere with what I am seeking to learn here. That, perhaps, Apollo is telling me that I have not been focused on the right realm of being because I am allowing the erotic, Aphrodite's realm, interfere with my goal in this stage of my meditations.
But, and myth tells us this, the Gods do not demand that we be exclusive, even at times like these, so what he may be telling me right now is to watch out for the obsessive nature of love and eroticism and not let it blind me to him at this time.
I need to find some means by which to truly connect with him, for, as I have mentioned before, I have never been particularly close to Apollo. I mention him in my prayers, I name him in my invocations, and I ask for his protection and blessings when I bless my home in the name of the Gods, but I have never really felt a personal touch from him. Even Ares, a god with whom I have so little in common, has made himself strongly felt in my life in many ways.
Exploring the many epithets of Apollo has really only made things worse. So complex a figure is hard to grasp, and further exploration of other figures in his mythos have further complicated the issues at hand.
How does Asklepios, who I see as an avatar of Apollo himself, reaffirm this Gods connection to humanity, and why does that connection go so awry? Does Apollo's misfortune with love give a clue to the nature of love itself that we men seldom come to grips with? And his bisexuality, what does that indicate to me at this time?
For one thing, I have allowed my feelings of a personal and romantic nature to interfere with what I am seeking to learn here. That, perhaps, Apollo is telling me that I have not been focused on the right realm of being because I am allowing the erotic, Aphrodite's realm, interfere with my goal in this stage of my meditations.
But, and myth tells us this, the Gods do not demand that we be exclusive, even at times like these, so what he may be telling me right now is to watch out for the obsessive nature of love and eroticism and not let it blind me to him at this time.
I need to find some means by which to truly connect with him, for, as I have mentioned before, I have never been particularly close to Apollo. I mention him in my prayers, I name him in my invocations, and I ask for his protection and blessings when I bless my home in the name of the Gods, but I have never really felt a personal touch from him. Even Ares, a god with whom I have so little in common, has made himself strongly felt in my life in many ways.
Exploring the many epithets of Apollo has really only made things worse. So complex a figure is hard to grasp, and further exploration of other figures in his mythos have further complicated the issues at hand.
How does Asklepios, who I see as an avatar of Apollo himself, reaffirm this Gods connection to humanity, and why does that connection go so awry? Does Apollo's misfortune with love give a clue to the nature of love itself that we men seldom come to grips with? And his bisexuality, what does that indicate to me at this time?
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Apollo Postaterios and the view to the other side of the blocked doorway.
So, Apollo is blocking me. He is standing in my way, forcing me to look at what I am doing, how I am doing it, and why, and I have presumed that was it, that he wanted me to look at this all and see what I have done wrong, what I have done right, and what I could do to make those things synch with each other to make me a better person. But as I looked at the Rapidweaver window thinking about this post, it hit me. He is standing at the doorway, blocking me from going through, but what about that door?
The door itself is not closed, and though he stands there (this is metaphor, I am not literally seeing a god standing in a door) I can still see what is ahead through it. Or, rather, I can seek to see what it is I expect to be on the other side of that threshhold, and I have to admit, I am not sure. Do I have a true goal, other than the vague golas of becoming a better person, being more centered, being less ornery and a bit more open to others. What exactly am I expecting of the future if I continue to follow througn here?
Why had it not occured to me that the prophetic God was pointing out my lack of direction, something that directly relates to my future?
I dunno.
So, what are my goals? What do I truly seek to accomplish with all this?
That's hard to answer, and thus why the Gods is standing in my way. He is forcing me to think about it and making me make decisions about what I hope to do from here on in, and, perhaps, to tell me not to rush and not to try so hard to work my way through, but rather just work and make it through as I can.
But, to be fair to myself, I should outline one or two goals.
1: To be a better man. This vague goal is very powerful, because it leaves me with a great many things to explore and improve upon. My temper, for one, has been greatly helped by this. My meditations and hopeful outlook with regard to them have filtered their way through to the rest of my life. I am a much more pleasant person, and this is part of my goal in being a better person. To become a person to whom anyone can turn for advice and know they will not be judged or lectured to. Someone patient and sincere who will, none the less, know when to keep his secrets. I am all of these things now, but this man is shrouded in a veil of bitterness and deep hurt that emerges from a very injured child deep inside who had his very spirit beaten out of him by life, family, and a society that didn't care.
2: To be truly open to love. I have loved people, well, men in my life. But to be honest, I am not sure if I have ever really been "in love" in that heart wrenching way that people write songs about. I don't think I am that kind of person. But I have loved, and I do know that I can love someone, but what about them loving me? Am I the kind person who does not let anyone love him? Yes, in many ways I am, and into my life the Gods have thrown a man who is a lot like me. He is not very emotionally expressive, a little shy, and yet at the same time very passionate. Making love to him is like losing myself in feeling, and I think he feels the same way, but neither one of us is very good at voicing these things, and it seems that right now, that is perfect, because we are men, and we men really do express ourselves very differently from women, and that way is often through physical contact, through a kiss, througha smile or the touching of a hand at certain moments, and I am very refreshed by that. Being open to love must mean being open to all of these things and a true acceptance of myself as a man, a gay man, a man who can express his feelings and allow others to express theirs and be well disposed to them.
3: To better educate myself. I have to come to a point when I can go take a few classes, learn to speak Greek, further my knowledge of Portuguese and French, two languages I really love, and to recconnect with my latin culture by studying in more depth the history of my people.
Those are three basic goals, and I hope to contemplate this further and get to work on some more. maybe Apollo will allow me to move through that door then.
The door itself is not closed, and though he stands there (this is metaphor, I am not literally seeing a god standing in a door) I can still see what is ahead through it. Or, rather, I can seek to see what it is I expect to be on the other side of that threshhold, and I have to admit, I am not sure. Do I have a true goal, other than the vague golas of becoming a better person, being more centered, being less ornery and a bit more open to others. What exactly am I expecting of the future if I continue to follow througn here?
Why had it not occured to me that the prophetic God was pointing out my lack of direction, something that directly relates to my future?
I dunno.
So, what are my goals? What do I truly seek to accomplish with all this?
That's hard to answer, and thus why the Gods is standing in my way. He is forcing me to think about it and making me make decisions about what I hope to do from here on in, and, perhaps, to tell me not to rush and not to try so hard to work my way through, but rather just work and make it through as I can.
But, to be fair to myself, I should outline one or two goals.
1: To be a better man. This vague goal is very powerful, because it leaves me with a great many things to explore and improve upon. My temper, for one, has been greatly helped by this. My meditations and hopeful outlook with regard to them have filtered their way through to the rest of my life. I am a much more pleasant person, and this is part of my goal in being a better person. To become a person to whom anyone can turn for advice and know they will not be judged or lectured to. Someone patient and sincere who will, none the less, know when to keep his secrets. I am all of these things now, but this man is shrouded in a veil of bitterness and deep hurt that emerges from a very injured child deep inside who had his very spirit beaten out of him by life, family, and a society that didn't care.
2: To be truly open to love. I have loved people, well, men in my life. But to be honest, I am not sure if I have ever really been "in love" in that heart wrenching way that people write songs about. I don't think I am that kind of person. But I have loved, and I do know that I can love someone, but what about them loving me? Am I the kind person who does not let anyone love him? Yes, in many ways I am, and into my life the Gods have thrown a man who is a lot like me. He is not very emotionally expressive, a little shy, and yet at the same time very passionate. Making love to him is like losing myself in feeling, and I think he feels the same way, but neither one of us is very good at voicing these things, and it seems that right now, that is perfect, because we are men, and we men really do express ourselves very differently from women, and that way is often through physical contact, through a kiss, througha smile or the touching of a hand at certain moments, and I am very refreshed by that. Being open to love must mean being open to all of these things and a true acceptance of myself as a man, a gay man, a man who can express his feelings and allow others to express theirs and be well disposed to them.
3: To better educate myself. I have to come to a point when I can go take a few classes, learn to speak Greek, further my knowledge of Portuguese and French, two languages I really love, and to recconnect with my latin culture by studying in more depth the history of my people.
Those are three basic goals, and I hope to contemplate this further and get to work on some more. maybe Apollo will allow me to move through that door then.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Apollo Prostaterios, and the blocked doorway.
I am at a loss. I think I am doing the right things by opening myself up a bit. Letting people in a little more so that I can fully realize my potential and effect on others as well as how they affect me, but Apollo stridently stands at the door, blocking my way.
The dream that caused me so much confusion, the sexy porn star and the childhood home dream, and the one that made me take a closer look at my views of the future, that of the witches and the commune, have lead me astray somehow. Oh, those dreams are still valid, and they require further meditation, but my interpretations of them must be flawed.
Or, perhaps, their meaning has changed because I have changed.
Is it possible that in the last few months, as I have undertaken this little path of self discovery, I have changed so much that those two dreams are now different to my mind? Do I dare ask for more dreams to guide me along, knowing that these two were already rather confusing to me and made me a little crazy?
And what about some of the other things that have been happening to me lately?
I have come to a more open set of ideals with regard to sexuality. I no longer really see myself as simply gay, but something a little more open to other possibilities. I am dating a man who was once married, and has children. How will I deal with that when the dating goes further and I have to meet and interact with them? What if I fail at yet another relationship? Will that send me backward again, forcing me to do this all over?
The dream that caused me so much confusion, the sexy porn star and the childhood home dream, and the one that made me take a closer look at my views of the future, that of the witches and the commune, have lead me astray somehow. Oh, those dreams are still valid, and they require further meditation, but my interpretations of them must be flawed.
Or, perhaps, their meaning has changed because I have changed.
Is it possible that in the last few months, as I have undertaken this little path of self discovery, I have changed so much that those two dreams are now different to my mind? Do I dare ask for more dreams to guide me along, knowing that these two were already rather confusing to me and made me a little crazy?
And what about some of the other things that have been happening to me lately?
I have come to a more open set of ideals with regard to sexuality. I no longer really see myself as simply gay, but something a little more open to other possibilities. I am dating a man who was once married, and has children. How will I deal with that when the dating goes further and I have to meet and interact with them? What if I fail at yet another relationship? Will that send me backward again, forcing me to do this all over?
Thursday, November 1, 2007
So, on with the show!
So, I move on with the show here, and as I say so long to Apollo Akesios I must now say hello to Apollo Thearios (of the Oracle) and Prostaterios (he who stands before the entrance) becaue I think I have seen something in my interaction with Apollo that has awoken something in me. Apollo is standing before the entrance, the doorway, forcing me to think about the future and whether or not I am ready to move forward before I am allowed to continue.
I always pictured that I would work this little program I devised, or was inspired to devise, and that I would learn a thing here or there about myself from the Gods and move forward. I didn't quite picture that a God would stop me in my tracks and say, no, you may not move on because you have not considered everything you should consider.
I have always been a very rationalistic type of person, more Bones than Booth (You get a star if you get the reference.), and as a result of that I always picture any decisions I make about my life as my own, which lays the blame for my crappy life on my doorstep as well, of course, but when one decides to let the circumstances guide one, as this program is designed to do, one finds that much more of what we do has to do with how the world forces us to bend and twist to its dance.
I am in control of my life, but perhaps what Apollo os forcing me to do now is look beyond what I decide to the circumstances that force me to do things. Perhaps he wants me to better examine those circumstances because within them are locked decisions I never considered, or considered and decided wrongly about.
As the oracular God, one has to pay special attention to such things, and the fact that he is standing in my way now is going to force me to look carefully at my next few steps before I take them.
I always pictured that I would work this little program I devised, or was inspired to devise, and that I would learn a thing here or there about myself from the Gods and move forward. I didn't quite picture that a God would stop me in my tracks and say, no, you may not move on because you have not considered everything you should consider.
I have always been a very rationalistic type of person, more Bones than Booth (You get a star if you get the reference.), and as a result of that I always picture any decisions I make about my life as my own, which lays the blame for my crappy life on my doorstep as well, of course, but when one decides to let the circumstances guide one, as this program is designed to do, one finds that much more of what we do has to do with how the world forces us to bend and twist to its dance.
I am in control of my life, but perhaps what Apollo os forcing me to do now is look beyond what I decide to the circumstances that force me to do things. Perhaps he wants me to better examine those circumstances because within them are locked decisions I never considered, or considered and decided wrongly about.
As the oracular God, one has to pay special attention to such things, and the fact that he is standing in my way now is going to force me to look carefully at my next few steps before I take them.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Fate's hand...
I don't believe in Fate. Not in the traditional sense. I think Fate is all that is and has been, not what will be. What will be is simply open to chance, to probability and entropy. It is unpredictable.
But I do believe that we can achieve things in the world, and for ourselves that we set out to do without actually setting ourselves that goal, and that often, the hands of the Gods seem to play a part.
When I undertook this little scheme to follow the star into a path of self discovery, I knew I would also have to come to understand the Gods themselves as I know them in different ways, and one of those ways was to come to an understanding that my assumptions and knowledge of the Gods is necessarily flawed. I am, after all, human.
The hand of Fate steps in and forces us to do things we might not have otherwise done, and thus it is the force that lays out obstacles before us.
The hand of Fate is forcing me to make certain moves on this chess board called life that I am very unsure of right now.
I find myself at the cusp of what may be a very real relationship. What I have to try to do now is see if I can put my own selfish needs aside for someone else again. If I can face up to something I have never had to deal with before, a man who has children who must, by all means, come first in his life.
Apollo is forcing me to face up to these questions in my life. I now see that. But why him? I was certainly not expecting that matters of this type would come up at this point in my exploration. And as I ponder the dream of the commune and the witches, I think it makes sense to me now. The witches represent people who are different from me. The man I am seeing is a Christian, and if I am indeed heading into a relationship, I must try not to hurry into it, but rather, to respect the lay of the land and allow myself to learn what he is all about, what his faith may mean to him in contrast to my own.
We have not discussed such matters, he and I, and when next we have a sit down I must broach the subject. The last thing I want to do right now is find myself falling in love with him only to be rejected because of differences in religion. And since I will not give up my faith for anyone, it would end it if he asked me to.
But I do believe that we can achieve things in the world, and for ourselves that we set out to do without actually setting ourselves that goal, and that often, the hands of the Gods seem to play a part.
When I undertook this little scheme to follow the star into a path of self discovery, I knew I would also have to come to understand the Gods themselves as I know them in different ways, and one of those ways was to come to an understanding that my assumptions and knowledge of the Gods is necessarily flawed. I am, after all, human.
The hand of Fate steps in and forces us to do things we might not have otherwise done, and thus it is the force that lays out obstacles before us.
The hand of Fate is forcing me to make certain moves on this chess board called life that I am very unsure of right now.
I find myself at the cusp of what may be a very real relationship. What I have to try to do now is see if I can put my own selfish needs aside for someone else again. If I can face up to something I have never had to deal with before, a man who has children who must, by all means, come first in his life.
Apollo is forcing me to face up to these questions in my life. I now see that. But why him? I was certainly not expecting that matters of this type would come up at this point in my exploration. And as I ponder the dream of the commune and the witches, I think it makes sense to me now. The witches represent people who are different from me. The man I am seeing is a Christian, and if I am indeed heading into a relationship, I must try not to hurry into it, but rather, to respect the lay of the land and allow myself to learn what he is all about, what his faith may mean to him in contrast to my own.
We have not discussed such matters, he and I, and when next we have a sit down I must broach the subject. The last thing I want to do right now is find myself falling in love with him only to be rejected because of differences in religion. And since I will not give up my faith for anyone, it would end it if he asked me to.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Dreams
So, in search of some kind of contact with Apollo I have sought out dreams as a way to let him in. As I lay myself down to sleep, I ask that he join me in my dreams, and he seems to do so, or at least that's how I am choosing to see it now.
So, I woke up yesterday and I had just had this dream, but as so often is the case with dreams, you remember it only then, as you wake, only to have it slip away. But then, as I made my way to work, it hit me again, the dream. It was really rather odd. I was in this situation, fully aware of it, immersed in it, and it went like this.
I was part of a commune, living in a shared home with, and this is the strange part, the elder witches from the movie Practical Magic. Now, I have to tell you, I have seen and did very much enjoy that movie, but it is not a movie I have seen many times, nor is it a personal favorite the way American Beauty or Children of Men is.
But the dream was not about these women, they were just part of the reality I was immersed in, and the dream, short as it was, was me standing with these elder witches looking at the big yard of our communal house and at the edge of the yard were a large trees. I said to the elder witches, and to Stockard Channing in particular, that what I wanted to do, my dream for the property, was to plant trees and turn it into a small forest and build into it small paths that lead to a shrine to the Gods.
She admonishes me, with a look of pity on her face, that I should be careful and respect the "slope of the land."
I'll be damned if I know what that means...
So, I woke up yesterday and I had just had this dream, but as so often is the case with dreams, you remember it only then, as you wake, only to have it slip away. But then, as I made my way to work, it hit me again, the dream. It was really rather odd. I was in this situation, fully aware of it, immersed in it, and it went like this.
I was part of a commune, living in a shared home with, and this is the strange part, the elder witches from the movie Practical Magic. Now, I have to tell you, I have seen and did very much enjoy that movie, but it is not a movie I have seen many times, nor is it a personal favorite the way American Beauty or Children of Men is.
But the dream was not about these women, they were just part of the reality I was immersed in, and the dream, short as it was, was me standing with these elder witches looking at the big yard of our communal house and at the edge of the yard were a large trees. I said to the elder witches, and to Stockard Channing in particular, that what I wanted to do, my dream for the property, was to plant trees and turn it into a small forest and build into it small paths that lead to a shrine to the Gods.
She admonishes me, with a look of pity on her face, that I should be careful and respect the "slope of the land."
I'll be damned if I know what that means...
Monday, October 22, 2007
Apollon Akesios: Friendship and friendliness...
So, to follow the road laid out for me, I have made myself more open to people. My inherent sense of isolation and shyness has to be set aside, and my inherent fear of meeting new people has to be quashed. So, a friend from West of here has had surgery, and as a result he has been isolated and trapped on his couch. Looking forward to weeks of solitary life, another friend decides to get him out and about.
He can't walk too much, his heel is healing and he requires regular shots of pain killers to keep him sane, but we all decided that if he could make that effort to come out, we could make the effort to meet him out there for some drink and laughter.
It went splendidly.
So, I decide since I am already opening myself up to this, I might as well open myself up to something else, and I call up a guy I have been on a couple of dates with and invited him to join us. He wasn't sure he could make it, but said he would if he could, and thankfully, he did. It was a pleasant surprise to me to find that I really felt myself drawn to him. I wanted to be near him, and he, pleasantly enough, wanted to be with me too.
The night out with friends was a blast of fresh air. It woke me up to something I have been missing, and which both apollo and Hestia seem to have pointed out, human contact...
He can't walk too much, his heel is healing and he requires regular shots of pain killers to keep him sane, but we all decided that if he could make that effort to come out, we could make the effort to meet him out there for some drink and laughter.
It went splendidly.
So, I decide since I am already opening myself up to this, I might as well open myself up to something else, and I call up a guy I have been on a couple of dates with and invited him to join us. He wasn't sure he could make it, but said he would if he could, and thankfully, he did. It was a pleasant surprise to me to find that I really felt myself drawn to him. I wanted to be near him, and he, pleasantly enough, wanted to be with me too.
The night out with friends was a blast of fresh air. It woke me up to something I have been missing, and which both apollo and Hestia seem to have pointed out, human contact...
Monday, October 15, 2007
Apollon Akesios: More Distance...
So, Akesios is pushing me to explore this distance i have set up between myself and humanity, and, as a result, between myself and the Gods. I should have seen it immediately, really, since it was one of the things I ran right into when Hestia was my focus. In her case the relevant revelation was that my concept of "home" should not be so enclosing or protective that it allowed nothing in or me out.
The basic idea remains the same, and Akesios is forcing me to face the fact that I have not yet learned my lsson, a lesson Hestia tried to get me to acknowledge and now Apollo forces me to confront and solve before I can move forward.
The problem is that this is all a rather large puzzle. It actually marks a rather major part of my base personality that I tend to be a little distant, a little reluctant to share, a little private (not that you'd know that from reading this blog, but I actually am all of those things) and while I have developed rather strong attachments to Athena and Hestia over the years, I have never really tried to form deeper relationships with any of the other Gods, except maybe Aphrodite, who I have given more worship to than I care to admit (cough), but those have not been deep spiritual experiences on the level I am hoping to establish with all this.
First and foremost, I have to stop isolating myself, and part of that will have to mean getting further involved in the local pagan community, friends, gay community, family, etc. The problem with that is that my natural "shyness" comes into play, and it becomes almost unbearably stifling to me when unknown people are involved.
Do the Gods want me to further involve myself with other pagans? Family and friends are obvious, but other Pagans always bug me a little, and I have to wonder what it is I should learn there. I guess Akesios is telling me that I will never know until I try...
The basic idea remains the same, and Akesios is forcing me to face the fact that I have not yet learned my lsson, a lesson Hestia tried to get me to acknowledge and now Apollo forces me to confront and solve before I can move forward.
The problem is that this is all a rather large puzzle. It actually marks a rather major part of my base personality that I tend to be a little distant, a little reluctant to share, a little private (not that you'd know that from reading this blog, but I actually am all of those things) and while I have developed rather strong attachments to Athena and Hestia over the years, I have never really tried to form deeper relationships with any of the other Gods, except maybe Aphrodite, who I have given more worship to than I care to admit (cough), but those have not been deep spiritual experiences on the level I am hoping to establish with all this.
First and foremost, I have to stop isolating myself, and part of that will have to mean getting further involved in the local pagan community, friends, gay community, family, etc. The problem with that is that my natural "shyness" comes into play, and it becomes almost unbearably stifling to me when unknown people are involved.
Do the Gods want me to further involve myself with other pagans? Family and friends are obvious, but other Pagans always bug me a little, and I have to wonder what it is I should learn there. I guess Akesios is telling me that I will never know until I try...
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Apollon Akesios: Distance...
Distance is, and has always been, a problem for me. I never connected on an emotional level with my family, at least, not in the way most people seem to. For me, emotion is almost always intellectual in nature. When I see someone in need of help i help them because I think that is what a man should do, help someone in need. When I see a friend crying, I comfort him or her because I think that is what I should do, and because intellectually, it is something that I should do.
When it comes to family and close friends, there is a little bit more to it than that, but still, my reactions to whatever emotions come to me are intellectually motivated, not emotional impulse. This kind of emotional detachment is, I think, what Apollo wants me to explore first, and now that I think of it more carefully, it is something the dream indicates.
If you don't remember the dream, it was of a beautiful man, one colton ford, should you decide to look him up (beware, the images may not be kid friendly) and he is somehow bound and I, and someone I don't know, must carry him to a tent within which a wild orgy is occurring. He invites me to join in on the fun, and I decline, turning instead to enter my childhood home in Puerto Rico.
The distance there is that in the dream I am not the least bit desirous of entering the tent while in life I would probably jump in and have at it. And the decision seems, on retrospect, to be wholly unemotional. I turn away from something enjoyable, something that offers sensation and connection to the animal side of me, and that is something I do tend to do with regard to emotion.
Does the beautiful man represent emotion?
I need to try to explore that further...
If you don't remember the dream, it was of a beautiful man, one colton ford, should you decide to look him up (beware, the images may not be kid friendly) and he is somehow bound and I, and someone I don't know, must carry him to a tent within which a wild orgy is occurring. He invites me to join in on the fun, and I decline, turning instead to enter my childhood home in Puerto Rico.
The distance there is that in the dream I am not the least bit desirous of entering the tent while in life I would probably jump in and have at it. And the decision seems, on retrospect, to be wholly unemotional. I turn away from something enjoyable, something that offers sensation and connection to the animal side of me, and that is something I do tend to do with regard to emotion.
Does the beautiful man represent emotion?
I need to try to explore that further...
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Apollon Akesios
Akesios, or Alexikakos, is an epithet of Apollo that means "averter of evil" and Akesios is a form of the epithet used in Elis. As averter of evil, Apollon has many things in common with several other deities, if not all of them, who are known to be helpers of man in reference to the concept of "evil". So, is this the right place to start?
My recent inspiration to beg the gods to smite the horrid beast called Ann Coulter has lead me to conclude that yes, Akesios is the place to start. Why? Because my concept of evil is one that involves man, not some evil divine force, and the evil that we do, both to each other and to ourselves needs addressed.
So, what evils am I doing that need addressed, and am I doing things to myself or to others, or is it both?
My expression of hatred for Coulter is a clue, but it is not the hatred itself, because hatred is a perfectly natural human emotion, but how much am I allowing these negative feelings to control me, make something of me that the Gods dislike, and which, perhaps, I should dislike as well.
So, I must explore the negative attitudes I am expressing in my life.
Let's start with the generalities. I have a rather negative attitude toward people I disapprove of. At work this manifests as a sense of "Ugh!" when I see new clients walking in. It stems, perhaps, from a sense of bitterness that hides inside me from the earliest parts of my life, but it is something worth further exploration.
I have a somewhat negative attitude toward women. Not in a general sense, I get along fine with women, but I do also see a certain inequity and hypocrisy in the way women treat men that I find disturbing, and I find that I let it color my opinions with regard to them. Don't mistake this for misogyny, though, I have no hatred of women and am a firm believer in the equality of women, with equality being the key word there.
I am distant, not only from people I know here in Dayton, but from family back home. I am distant in a way that seems cold and uncaring, and it must affect those who care for me profoundly. Not sure if I can fix that one, it is such a part of who I am that I am rather self contained that I may be killing off a piece of myself that is important in some way.
Hmm, as I write this I am touched by the realization that this distance I hold toward people must also apply to the Gods. Hmmm!
My recent inspiration to beg the gods to smite the horrid beast called Ann Coulter has lead me to conclude that yes, Akesios is the place to start. Why? Because my concept of evil is one that involves man, not some evil divine force, and the evil that we do, both to each other and to ourselves needs addressed.
So, what evils am I doing that need addressed, and am I doing things to myself or to others, or is it both?
My expression of hatred for Coulter is a clue, but it is not the hatred itself, because hatred is a perfectly natural human emotion, but how much am I allowing these negative feelings to control me, make something of me that the Gods dislike, and which, perhaps, I should dislike as well.
So, I must explore the negative attitudes I am expressing in my life.
Let's start with the generalities. I have a rather negative attitude toward people I disapprove of. At work this manifests as a sense of "Ugh!" when I see new clients walking in. It stems, perhaps, from a sense of bitterness that hides inside me from the earliest parts of my life, but it is something worth further exploration.
I have a somewhat negative attitude toward women. Not in a general sense, I get along fine with women, but I do also see a certain inequity and hypocrisy in the way women treat men that I find disturbing, and I find that I let it color my opinions with regard to them. Don't mistake this for misogyny, though, I have no hatred of women and am a firm believer in the equality of women, with equality being the key word there.
I am distant, not only from people I know here in Dayton, but from family back home. I am distant in a way that seems cold and uncaring, and it must affect those who care for me profoundly. Not sure if I can fix that one, it is such a part of who I am that I am rather self contained that I may be killing off a piece of myself that is important in some way.
Hmm, as I write this I am touched by the realization that this distance I hold toward people must also apply to the Gods. Hmmm!
Prayer
Blessed Gods in gleaming Olympus
Lords of all you survey
Grant me this prayer.
Blessed Goddess of the bountiful Earth
Ladies of all the grows
Grant me this prayer.
Blessed King and Queen of the world below
Monarchs of death
Grant me this prayer.
Let Ann Coulter not be long for this world.
Let her success and celebrity falter.
Let her dark evil soul find no peace in this world.
May she be forever reminded of the hatred she spews as it returns to her.
If ever I have done you honor.
If ever the world has loved you.
Grant us this prayer.
Lords of all you survey
Grant me this prayer.
Blessed Goddess of the bountiful Earth
Ladies of all the grows
Grant me this prayer.
Blessed King and Queen of the world below
Monarchs of death
Grant me this prayer.
Let Ann Coulter not be long for this world.
Let her success and celebrity falter.
Let her dark evil soul find no peace in this world.
May she be forever reminded of the hatred she spews as it returns to her.
If ever I have done you honor.
If ever the world has loved you.
Grant us this prayer.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
OK, still troubled over here...
OK, so I am being pushed. Pushed to explore him, the god of light, but here is the problem, he, Apollo, is being mean to me.
Unlike Hestia, whose exploration I took on with fervor and felt that she was helping me along, I feel that Apollo is actively pushing against me. The problem, of course, is in me. I think I am trying too hard. Trying to create something that is not there yet. I ran toward the wrong aspect of Apollo, the healer, before I was fully aware of what needed healing in me.
It hit me just now as I turned on RapidWeaver and searched my own heart in search of something to say. Apollo is pushing against me because I am in too much of a rush. I am trying to force a healing. Trying to force his hand. If there is even a small lesson in that it is this, Gods do not like being pushed. They act when they act, not any sooner, so no sense trying to force them to.
But, if the healer, perhaps Apollo's most famous aspect, is not the right aspect to start with, which is? Where am I right now? What do I see in the mirror that needs fixing and why?
So, here are some basic facts about me.
I am hispanic. Puerto Rican to be exact, and this often causes a problem in my own mind because I am fully Americanized, yet as I get older, I find myself realizing that I do hold some particularly hispanic attitudes toward certain aspects of our American culture. Not a bad thing, but I also realize that I may be a little too out of touch with my own Puerto Rican culture since it surprises me so much that I hold such attitudes.
I am 40 years old. OK, that's not a big deal, but it is a big deal from my own perspective. From my own mental image of myself, that seems off. I do not feel or look 40, and then I have to look at myself and ask, just what the hell is 40 supposed to feel and look like?
I am fat. Yes, fat. I got as fat as 340 pounds, and that is horrible, but I have managed to take it back down to about 240, and now I am faced with another problem, those last 70 pounds are hard to take off, and I am so not into the whole gym workout thing. I do get exercise, I bike anything from 12 to 20 miles a day, Summer or Winter, but maybe Apollo is telling me it is time for a different approach.
I am facing some health issues not related to my weight, and the fact that I am essentially poor means my ability to deal with them is very limited. Is there a way to deal with these things without money?
So, the healer needs to come last, it seems, but what aspect of Apollo need I meditate on to get myself rolling down the right path?
Unlike Hestia, whose exploration I took on with fervor and felt that she was helping me along, I feel that Apollo is actively pushing against me. The problem, of course, is in me. I think I am trying too hard. Trying to create something that is not there yet. I ran toward the wrong aspect of Apollo, the healer, before I was fully aware of what needed healing in me.
It hit me just now as I turned on RapidWeaver and searched my own heart in search of something to say. Apollo is pushing against me because I am in too much of a rush. I am trying to force a healing. Trying to force his hand. If there is even a small lesson in that it is this, Gods do not like being pushed. They act when they act, not any sooner, so no sense trying to force them to.
But, if the healer, perhaps Apollo's most famous aspect, is not the right aspect to start with, which is? Where am I right now? What do I see in the mirror that needs fixing and why?
So, here are some basic facts about me.
I am hispanic. Puerto Rican to be exact, and this often causes a problem in my own mind because I am fully Americanized, yet as I get older, I find myself realizing that I do hold some particularly hispanic attitudes toward certain aspects of our American culture. Not a bad thing, but I also realize that I may be a little too out of touch with my own Puerto Rican culture since it surprises me so much that I hold such attitudes.
I am 40 years old. OK, that's not a big deal, but it is a big deal from my own perspective. From my own mental image of myself, that seems off. I do not feel or look 40, and then I have to look at myself and ask, just what the hell is 40 supposed to feel and look like?
I am fat. Yes, fat. I got as fat as 340 pounds, and that is horrible, but I have managed to take it back down to about 240, and now I am faced with another problem, those last 70 pounds are hard to take off, and I am so not into the whole gym workout thing. I do get exercise, I bike anything from 12 to 20 miles a day, Summer or Winter, but maybe Apollo is telling me it is time for a different approach.
I am facing some health issues not related to my weight, and the fact that I am essentially poor means my ability to deal with them is very limited. Is there a way to deal with these things without money?
So, the healer needs to come last, it seems, but what aspect of Apollo need I meditate on to get myself rolling down the right path?
Monday, October 1, 2007
Exploring the epithets of Apollo
So, in his names we may find the answer. In the epithets he bears, in the way man named him as honor for his aid.
Perhaps the one I have already been invoking here is best to start with, Apollo Epikourios, who is Apollo the Helper or Healer.
Since I am placing myself in his hands in an attempt to better understand myself and therefore heal myself. It is important to understand that like all the gods, apollo is bringer of both light and darkness. Both healing and disease. He is balanced in a world that requires such balance to exist. Therefore when i asked apollo for help and rather than send me clear cut answers he sent me turmoil and a sense of disappointment, I was naturally worried. But the truth is that I should have expected it. The Gods seldom make things easy for us. We may be guided, but at every step on that path it is we who must make decisions, we who must choose, we who must interpret what we see around us properly while at the same time accepting that each interpretation may indeed be the correct one given a certain place and time and set of circumstances.
So when i seek out apollo and ask him to guide me and he chooses instead to make me sick, give me odd dreams and nightmares, make me feel insufficient to the tasks I place before myself, what is it he is saying to me?
Apollo Epikourios is the healer, the helper, but how he chooses to help is another thing to consider here.
One of the many forms of aid sought from Apollo and his mythic son Asklepios, who I see as an aspect of Apollo in much the same way as I see Herakles as an aspect of Zeus, was called incubation. Incubation is a form of intentional dreaming, if you will, but not in the same sense as one might consider lucid dreaming, but as a kind of deprivation.
Essentially, a person went to a temple, or perhaps a sacred cave, or some such place, and sought to remain in the presence of the sacred in an attempt to have the God guide one or perhaps heal one directly.
I have always wanted to do this, but I simply do not have any such place to turn to. Where should I go?
I have considered turning a large closet into a sacred space of this kind. Large enough to sleep in if necessary, though probably not comfortably, and perhaps find a way to connect.
If I really seek to heal myself, then I have to try this. Perhaps this will be a good project to document here...
Perhaps the one I have already been invoking here is best to start with, Apollo Epikourios, who is Apollo the Helper or Healer.
Since I am placing myself in his hands in an attempt to better understand myself and therefore heal myself. It is important to understand that like all the gods, apollo is bringer of both light and darkness. Both healing and disease. He is balanced in a world that requires such balance to exist. Therefore when i asked apollo for help and rather than send me clear cut answers he sent me turmoil and a sense of disappointment, I was naturally worried. But the truth is that I should have expected it. The Gods seldom make things easy for us. We may be guided, but at every step on that path it is we who must make decisions, we who must choose, we who must interpret what we see around us properly while at the same time accepting that each interpretation may indeed be the correct one given a certain place and time and set of circumstances.
So when i seek out apollo and ask him to guide me and he chooses instead to make me sick, give me odd dreams and nightmares, make me feel insufficient to the tasks I place before myself, what is it he is saying to me?
Apollo Epikourios is the healer, the helper, but how he chooses to help is another thing to consider here.
One of the many forms of aid sought from Apollo and his mythic son Asklepios, who I see as an aspect of Apollo in much the same way as I see Herakles as an aspect of Zeus, was called incubation. Incubation is a form of intentional dreaming, if you will, but not in the same sense as one might consider lucid dreaming, but as a kind of deprivation.
Essentially, a person went to a temple, or perhaps a sacred cave, or some such place, and sought to remain in the presence of the sacred in an attempt to have the God guide one or perhaps heal one directly.
I have always wanted to do this, but I simply do not have any such place to turn to. Where should I go?
I have considered turning a large closet into a sacred space of this kind. Large enough to sleep in if necessary, though probably not comfortably, and perhaps find a way to connect.
If I really seek to heal myself, then I have to try this. Perhaps this will be a good project to document here...
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Esoteric?
So, what do I mean when I speak of the "esoteric?"
The definition of esoteric is something likely to be understood by a few with specialized knowledge or interest. That is to say, something that is fairly "hidden" in a sense from the common man. The Mysteries, for example, were esoteric in that they were known only to a select few, the initiated.
In a broader definition, one others may not necessarily agree with, I see esoteric as meaning "occult" or "mystical." These are things that have always bothered me. I believe that esoteric knowledge is essentially selfish. If something is useful to mankind, I think it should be shared openly. That aside, however, I am very much against the idea of magic as anything other than fantasy and ritual. As pure ritual, magical ritual is no different from any other. I have no issues with magical ritual.
My issues are with those who claim to possess special preternatural powers. Powers that they feel they should not prove because they should just be believed at their claims. As a rational person, I very much oppose this kind of insistence on blind faith. I don't think the Gods approve of it either. And I certainly do not see a God like Apollo approving of that kind of blindness.
But is Apollo calling me to something esoteric?
I think he may be, but what?
Is there a mystery unfolding before my eyes that I am just not seeing? And if so how do I see it?
The definition of esoteric is something likely to be understood by a few with specialized knowledge or interest. That is to say, something that is fairly "hidden" in a sense from the common man. The Mysteries, for example, were esoteric in that they were known only to a select few, the initiated.
In a broader definition, one others may not necessarily agree with, I see esoteric as meaning "occult" or "mystical." These are things that have always bothered me. I believe that esoteric knowledge is essentially selfish. If something is useful to mankind, I think it should be shared openly. That aside, however, I am very much against the idea of magic as anything other than fantasy and ritual. As pure ritual, magical ritual is no different from any other. I have no issues with magical ritual.
My issues are with those who claim to possess special preternatural powers. Powers that they feel they should not prove because they should just be believed at their claims. As a rational person, I very much oppose this kind of insistence on blind faith. I don't think the Gods approve of it either. And I certainly do not see a God like Apollo approving of that kind of blindness.
But is Apollo calling me to something esoteric?
I think he may be, but what?
Is there a mystery unfolding before my eyes that I am just not seeing? And if so how do I see it?
Monday, September 24, 2007
Difficulty with Apollo
So, here we are, I am struggling with Apollo. He is a god who I have never had much of a calling toward, and as a result I am finding it difficult to break the ice, so to speak. Gods are not people. One does not simply sit with a god and have tea, even if there are kooks out there who claim to do just that. Gods communicate with us, but not just us. Gods stir the world into action, not just us. Gods have means and needs and functions that have nothing to do with us just as they have those that matter very much to us.
The Gods are not our personal assistants. It is not their job to make sure we win football games or lotteries or care for our children. Do they offer protection and favor to those who seek them out? I suppose they do, though I suspect that they do not always do so the way we think they should. I ask Apollo for guidance in understanding myself, in healing myself, and he sends me into turmoil, misunderstanding, and confusion.
I don't judge this to be bad, only that I should always be careful what I ask of the Gods. They may very well give it to me.
But my difficulty with Apollo is stemming from myself, not him. I feel that I disappoint him, and that is a difficult thing for me to personally deal with. But, also, I have to remember that while I am seeking them, the Gods, in my attempts at self healing, it is still "self healing" and it is my own mind, my own unwillingness to open myself up that is causing my problems.
When I asked the God for a vision, a dream, or some such, he sent me one. It made sense, in a way, and yet I have not heeded it. I have still walked away from the orgy, so to speak, i have looked at something I really want, in the dream it is the beautiful Colton Ford, in life it is my own inner health, and just as I turn away from the tent in the dream and enter my childhood home, I feel that I turn away from my inner health in life and tunr instead to the pain and torture of a great deal of my childhood. I cling to it like a safety blanket because it is what I know, and turn from what I do not know because I fear it.
Singing the Moola Mantra the other day (The Moola Mantra invokes deity in somewhat vague forms, so I do not feel as if I am invoking something I should not.) I was touched by what it implies. It is like the longing of a soul to open itself up to the greatness of the divine. Of opening itself up to life and finally, truly, being alive in the truest sense.
I have often been accused of being afraid of the more esoteric forms of worship in our tradition, I must admit that, as Apollo is painfully revealing to me, and Hestia has as well (remember that I realized that I was isolating myself too much in my concept of home) I have indeed allowed my own fear to guide too much of what I believe. That just as the man in the dream turns from ecstasy for the safety of home, I turn away from the ecstatic for the safety of my false certainty.
That, ladies and germs, is a hard one for me to admit. I am a bit too arrogant in my own mind to admit that easily, but the Gods are requiring of me nothing if not my honesty, and I am obliged to give that for my own benefit.
The Gods are not our personal assistants. It is not their job to make sure we win football games or lotteries or care for our children. Do they offer protection and favor to those who seek them out? I suppose they do, though I suspect that they do not always do so the way we think they should. I ask Apollo for guidance in understanding myself, in healing myself, and he sends me into turmoil, misunderstanding, and confusion.
I don't judge this to be bad, only that I should always be careful what I ask of the Gods. They may very well give it to me.
But my difficulty with Apollo is stemming from myself, not him. I feel that I disappoint him, and that is a difficult thing for me to personally deal with. But, also, I have to remember that while I am seeking them, the Gods, in my attempts at self healing, it is still "self healing" and it is my own mind, my own unwillingness to open myself up that is causing my problems.
When I asked the God for a vision, a dream, or some such, he sent me one. It made sense, in a way, and yet I have not heeded it. I have still walked away from the orgy, so to speak, i have looked at something I really want, in the dream it is the beautiful Colton Ford, in life it is my own inner health, and just as I turn away from the tent in the dream and enter my childhood home, I feel that I turn away from my inner health in life and tunr instead to the pain and torture of a great deal of my childhood. I cling to it like a safety blanket because it is what I know, and turn from what I do not know because I fear it.
Singing the Moola Mantra the other day (The Moola Mantra invokes deity in somewhat vague forms, so I do not feel as if I am invoking something I should not.) I was touched by what it implies. It is like the longing of a soul to open itself up to the greatness of the divine. Of opening itself up to life and finally, truly, being alive in the truest sense.
I have often been accused of being afraid of the more esoteric forms of worship in our tradition, I must admit that, as Apollo is painfully revealing to me, and Hestia has as well (remember that I realized that I was isolating myself too much in my concept of home) I have indeed allowed my own fear to guide too much of what I believe. That just as the man in the dream turns from ecstasy for the safety of home, I turn away from the ecstatic for the safety of my false certainty.
That, ladies and germs, is a hard one for me to admit. I am a bit too arrogant in my own mind to admit that easily, but the Gods are requiring of me nothing if not my honesty, and I am obliged to give that for my own benefit.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
If the Inner Choir stops singing...
Blessed Musagetes leads me to question certain things about myself, like my fear of public performance.
I am told I have a very pleasant and forceful voice. It resonates well with people who hear it, but I always make it clear that there is no sense in asking me to sing, I just can't do it, not in front of an audience. Oh, sure, my shower curtain has gotten some really good concerts, and my computer screen must be tired o listening to me sing along with Deva Premal or The Sugarcubes or Margareth Menezes, but when it comes to people, I have a very distinct phobia about singing before them.
So, if music is indeed to be something of a conduit for my understanding of how Apollo is going to aid me, should I not do something to overcome this fear? I don't know. I have no aspirations to be a singer, but maybe this phobia, this fear, is connected to something else, something deeper.
So, I turn to him, I ask that he gives me some clue, some guiding dream or vision, and I get the same dumb dream, albeit not exactly the same, of myself in that childhood home and the tent with the wild orgy going inside and the beautiful porn actor asking that I join them only to have me walk away from him, even though I would love nothing better than to jump his bones. Why?
Oh, i have given this dream some thought, of course, and I have come to the conclusion that he asks me to look at who I am by seeing who I was and why I chose, CHOSE, to be as I am in reaction to how I was, but why is it that music and this, including the obvious sexual imagery, are connected?
I have tried to think on it, and there are some obvious ideas at play here, including music as a medium for the transmission of eroticism (music can be very erotic) but it seems unsatisfying as an answer. Music as an expression of inner emotion, is a good reason, of course, but so obvious as to be laughable. What part of me has been broken or damaged by what I was that music can somehow help fix?
And here is another question, can our "inner choir" break? Can the inner voices that bring us inspiration, impulse, desire, etc. stop functioning, and am i being warned that, perhaps, this inner choir of voices and emotions is on the verge of breaking?
It is a good question, and one I may not be able to answer on my own.
I am told I have a very pleasant and forceful voice. It resonates well with people who hear it, but I always make it clear that there is no sense in asking me to sing, I just can't do it, not in front of an audience. Oh, sure, my shower curtain has gotten some really good concerts, and my computer screen must be tired o listening to me sing along with Deva Premal or The Sugarcubes or Margareth Menezes, but when it comes to people, I have a very distinct phobia about singing before them.
So, if music is indeed to be something of a conduit for my understanding of how Apollo is going to aid me, should I not do something to overcome this fear? I don't know. I have no aspirations to be a singer, but maybe this phobia, this fear, is connected to something else, something deeper.
So, I turn to him, I ask that he gives me some clue, some guiding dream or vision, and I get the same dumb dream, albeit not exactly the same, of myself in that childhood home and the tent with the wild orgy going inside and the beautiful porn actor asking that I join them only to have me walk away from him, even though I would love nothing better than to jump his bones. Why?
Oh, i have given this dream some thought, of course, and I have come to the conclusion that he asks me to look at who I am by seeing who I was and why I chose, CHOSE, to be as I am in reaction to how I was, but why is it that music and this, including the obvious sexual imagery, are connected?
I have tried to think on it, and there are some obvious ideas at play here, including music as a medium for the transmission of eroticism (music can be very erotic) but it seems unsatisfying as an answer. Music as an expression of inner emotion, is a good reason, of course, but so obvious as to be laughable. What part of me has been broken or damaged by what I was that music can somehow help fix?
And here is another question, can our "inner choir" break? Can the inner voices that bring us inspiration, impulse, desire, etc. stop functioning, and am i being warned that, perhaps, this inner choir of voices and emotions is on the verge of breaking?
It is a good question, and one I may not be able to answer on my own.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Another little Mantra
Στην αρχή.
Χάος.
Έρωτας.
Νύχτα.
Γη.
Φως και σκοτάδι.
Σας χαιρετίζω!
Sing the first five lines as if a single sentence, but clearly pronouncing the words, as part of the power of Mantras is that they are believed to have power over us. They have an innate power to change the way we think and feel, giving us a greater capacity to reach states of being that help to enlighten us. The last two lines individually.
Because Mantras are so central to Hindu prayer, they tend to be seen as Hindu or Eastern practice, but prayer is universally seen as a means to reach into the higher plane, to make contact with the divine, so if this helps in some way, we should go for it.
As always, if you see errors in my Greek (or the other languages) let me know.
Pronunciation:
STEEN ahr-HEE (when I place an H in initial position take it as an aspirated and slightly guttural H sound similar to the CH in Scottish)
HAH-ohs
EH-roh-tahs
NEE-hta
GEE
eh-lah-FREESS keh skoh-TAH-dhee (dh is a soft TH sound, slightly voiced but not heavily aspirated)
SAHS heh-reh-TEE-zoh
Translations:
In the beginning.
Chaos.
Eros.
Night.
Earth.
Light and darkness.
I salute you!
In the beginning.
Chaos.
Eros.
Night.
Earth.
Light and darkness.
I salute you!
En el principio.
Caos.
Eros.
Noche.
Tierra.
Luz y oscuridad.
¡Los saludo!
No começo.
Caos.
Eros.
Noite.
Terra.
Luz e escuridão.
Eu os saudo!
Χάος.
Έρωτας.
Νύχτα.
Γη.
Φως και σκοτάδι.
Σας χαιρετίζω!
Sing the first five lines as if a single sentence, but clearly pronouncing the words, as part of the power of Mantras is that they are believed to have power over us. They have an innate power to change the way we think and feel, giving us a greater capacity to reach states of being that help to enlighten us. The last two lines individually.
Because Mantras are so central to Hindu prayer, they tend to be seen as Hindu or Eastern practice, but prayer is universally seen as a means to reach into the higher plane, to make contact with the divine, so if this helps in some way, we should go for it.
As always, if you see errors in my Greek (or the other languages) let me know.
Pronunciation:
STEEN ahr-HEE (when I place an H in initial position take it as an aspirated and slightly guttural H sound similar to the CH in Scottish)
HAH-ohs
EH-roh-tahs
NEE-hta
GEE
eh-lah-FREESS keh skoh-TAH-dhee (dh is a soft TH sound, slightly voiced but not heavily aspirated)
SAHS heh-reh-TEE-zoh
Translations:
In the beginning.
Chaos.
Eros.
Night.
Earth.
Light and darkness.
I salute you!
In the beginning.
Chaos.
Eros.
Night.
Earth.
Light and darkness.
I salute you!
En el principio.
Caos.
Eros.
Noche.
Tierra.
Luz y oscuridad.
¡Los saludo!
No começo.
Caos.
Eros.
Noite.
Terra.
Luz e escuridão.
Eu os saudo!
Monday, September 17, 2007
Disappointing Apollo
So, I am smacked in the face with a realization as I continue to ponder the things I am asking Apollo to reveal to me, and among these is the distinct feeling that I am disappointing Apollo, the God of Light. That is not an easy thing to realize or think. We are talking about Apollo here. If I were disappointing Ares for not being martial enough (And I am sure I am) I can live with that. If I disappoint Artemis by being overtly sexual, slutty even, I can live with that. But Apollo?
Of all the Gods, this God is the one who seems to symbolize the modern man the best. Strong, beautiful, powerful, yet at the same time thoughtful and civilized to a fault. It gives me a feeling of, well, despair, thinking about that.
Of all the Gods, this God is the one who seems to symbolize the modern man the best. Strong, beautiful, powerful, yet at the same time thoughtful and civilized to a fault. It gives me a feeling of, well, despair, thinking about that.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
The inner choir
Music, in this leg of my journey, is playing a central role because it is a means by which I soothe my soul and quiet the turmoil of my mind. The chaos of my brain is stilled, if only momentarily, by the rhythm of music, by the sound of the human voice enraptured in song. It allows me to move with deliberation into moments of my life, memories, that are relevant to who I am and why I am the way I am.
Apollo is wise, and as the maxim says, all things must be taken in moderation, and the steps I take toward a sense of healing must come one at a time.
Meditating on a variety of thngs this week have lead me to some conclusions that I don't like, but which are true when I am honest with myself.
One of the things that has bothered, or even tormented me, in my life is my physical appearance. I have allowed myself to become fat and ugly in a world where beauty is a desired state. I have allowed myself to become fearful, in a world that requires courage. I have been isolated in a world that requires interaction.
All of these contribute to my "physical appearance" because, and I have to thank Apollo for this, I am beginning to see that I have not allowed myself to become these things, but have willfully become these things in an attempt to hide from something very fundamental to my nature as a human being, the idea that the son becomes the father.
My father is not a good man. Sure, he is fairly normal these days, but he is becoming an old man and, perhaps, is learning to regret much of what he did to us as we grew up. I, however, cannot forget, or at this point forgive, him for any of it. Yet my whole life I have been burdened with a problem, and that is that I look just like him. My facem hair, height, all of it a reflection of him, and I think part of me has purposely gone out of my way to stop myself from looking like him by deforming myself. But as he has ggrown older he too has become a bigger man, and I have managed to do the exact opposite, I have somehow made myself look more like him than ever before.
The curse of the self fulfilling prophecy.
Apollo was often invoked through a practice called incubation. It is a practice in which a god is invited to enter our dreams to help us see things clearly, to offer up advice on how to heal, etc.
Just two nights ago, after I extinguished my hearth candle and lay myself down to sleep, I invited Apollo to grant me a vision, a dream, that would help me, and in doing so I opened the door for all of this. I had a dream, and it was a very sexually charged dream, but one that remained strangely G rated, except for the nudity.
I was back in Cibao, in that house my mother had to fix up after my father abandoned us, and there was a tent outside, small, like something you take camping, and there was a huge orgy going on inside and I, and an unknown and essentially non-descript person, had a beautiful man, I recognize him now as singer and sometime porn actor Colton Ford, tied up. He was not a captive, he was a willing participant, and I, and the non-decript other, picked him up and took him to the tent ad put him inside.
I was welcome to come in, in fact, the beautiful man wanted me to come in, but I refused, staying outside and walking back into that house.
I woke up thnking it a strange dream, but now that i have given it some thought I am aware of something remarkable about the dream. I was a child when I lived in that house. And the tent was filled with adult activty. The beautiful man was inviting me to leave my childhood behind, to leave the pain and suffering of that childhood where it belonged, in the past, and join him in the adult world. To join him in rejoicing in being a living, breathing, and fully engaged human being. To join him in being a man and relegate the hurt boy to his proper place in my life.
It is an amazing thing to realize, of course, that a God has heard you and answered. I may not necessarily like what he has said to me, after all, if I am acting too much like a boy, not being a man in his eyes, than i am disappointing him. I am disappointing Apollo, and that is something else to deal with. Something hard.
The music is pushing me to seek myself out, and in so doing it is forcing me to face my inner choir. Those inner voices that sing the song that is me.
Apollo is wise, and as the maxim says, all things must be taken in moderation, and the steps I take toward a sense of healing must come one at a time.
Meditating on a variety of thngs this week have lead me to some conclusions that I don't like, but which are true when I am honest with myself.
One of the things that has bothered, or even tormented me, in my life is my physical appearance. I have allowed myself to become fat and ugly in a world where beauty is a desired state. I have allowed myself to become fearful, in a world that requires courage. I have been isolated in a world that requires interaction.
All of these contribute to my "physical appearance" because, and I have to thank Apollo for this, I am beginning to see that I have not allowed myself to become these things, but have willfully become these things in an attempt to hide from something very fundamental to my nature as a human being, the idea that the son becomes the father.
My father is not a good man. Sure, he is fairly normal these days, but he is becoming an old man and, perhaps, is learning to regret much of what he did to us as we grew up. I, however, cannot forget, or at this point forgive, him for any of it. Yet my whole life I have been burdened with a problem, and that is that I look just like him. My facem hair, height, all of it a reflection of him, and I think part of me has purposely gone out of my way to stop myself from looking like him by deforming myself. But as he has ggrown older he too has become a bigger man, and I have managed to do the exact opposite, I have somehow made myself look more like him than ever before.
The curse of the self fulfilling prophecy.
Apollo was often invoked through a practice called incubation. It is a practice in which a god is invited to enter our dreams to help us see things clearly, to offer up advice on how to heal, etc.
Just two nights ago, after I extinguished my hearth candle and lay myself down to sleep, I invited Apollo to grant me a vision, a dream, that would help me, and in doing so I opened the door for all of this. I had a dream, and it was a very sexually charged dream, but one that remained strangely G rated, except for the nudity.
I was back in Cibao, in that house my mother had to fix up after my father abandoned us, and there was a tent outside, small, like something you take camping, and there was a huge orgy going on inside and I, and an unknown and essentially non-descript person, had a beautiful man, I recognize him now as singer and sometime porn actor Colton Ford, tied up. He was not a captive, he was a willing participant, and I, and the non-decript other, picked him up and took him to the tent ad put him inside.
I was welcome to come in, in fact, the beautiful man wanted me to come in, but I refused, staying outside and walking back into that house.
I woke up thnking it a strange dream, but now that i have given it some thought I am aware of something remarkable about the dream. I was a child when I lived in that house. And the tent was filled with adult activty. The beautiful man was inviting me to leave my childhood behind, to leave the pain and suffering of that childhood where it belonged, in the past, and join him in the adult world. To join him in rejoicing in being a living, breathing, and fully engaged human being. To join him in being a man and relegate the hurt boy to his proper place in my life.
It is an amazing thing to realize, of course, that a God has heard you and answered. I may not necessarily like what he has said to me, after all, if I am acting too much like a boy, not being a man in his eyes, than i am disappointing him. I am disappointing Apollo, and that is something else to deal with. Something hard.
The music is pushing me to seek myself out, and in so doing it is forcing me to face my inner choir. Those inner voices that sing the song that is me.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Back to Apollo and the sacred sound of music...
Apollo is the God of music. More importantly, he is the god of the inspiration behind music. He is Musagetes, the leader of the Muses, and together they inspire the artistic impulse of man. But I want to focus a bit on music and how it affects us, and more importantly, how we can use it to change ourselves and be healed, another aspect of this God.
For many many years now, I can't say I remember exactly how many, I have been a fan of a particular style of music that is referred to as New Age, but don't mistake what that means. I do not like Yanni, I do not like most of what is called New Age, but rather, there is a very special type of New Age music that tends toward a fusion of cultural styles. Among the artists most famous in this particular category of New Age are Enya, Maire Brennan, Azam Ali, Niyaz, Vas, Deva Premal, Rasa, Paul Schwartz, and a few others whose names escape me right now.
What is different between these artists and other New Age artists is a reliance on traditional sounds and styles that help to inform us of something far deeper in ourselves and them (the artists) that needs expressing. Something profound and powerful.
These also have something else in common. They tend to be melodic and almost hark back to a medieval or gothic vocal style that includes things like choirs, and some are even distinctly religious (Rasa and Deva Premal are both part of the Hindu/Indian tradition, Maire Brenna and Paul Schwartz are both distinctly Christian, and Azam Ali sings song of Persian Islamic style and content) and it is here that they tend to find in me a certain resonance.
Religious feeling has always made for profoundly powerful music, but whatever the religion, it has always also carried with it a powerful ability to lift us up from the mundane and into a higher state of mind. It is this that attracts me to these particular artists. It is this that I trust in when I think about Apollo and the power he conveys in humanity's love of music. A love that is almost universal, for every culture on Earth has its own connection to this primal power. Every human being has an intrinsic attraction to it, and it can heal us, make us feel whole, spiritual, and alive.
I just bought Deva Premal sings the Moola Mantra, and if you have any love for this kind of uplifting force, if you trust in the healing power of music, you should give it a shot.
For many many years now, I can't say I remember exactly how many, I have been a fan of a particular style of music that is referred to as New Age, but don't mistake what that means. I do not like Yanni, I do not like most of what is called New Age, but rather, there is a very special type of New Age music that tends toward a fusion of cultural styles. Among the artists most famous in this particular category of New Age are Enya, Maire Brennan, Azam Ali, Niyaz, Vas, Deva Premal, Rasa, Paul Schwartz, and a few others whose names escape me right now.
What is different between these artists and other New Age artists is a reliance on traditional sounds and styles that help to inform us of something far deeper in ourselves and them (the artists) that needs expressing. Something profound and powerful.
These also have something else in common. They tend to be melodic and almost hark back to a medieval or gothic vocal style that includes things like choirs, and some are even distinctly religious (Rasa and Deva Premal are both part of the Hindu/Indian tradition, Maire Brenna and Paul Schwartz are both distinctly Christian, and Azam Ali sings song of Persian Islamic style and content) and it is here that they tend to find in me a certain resonance.
Religious feeling has always made for profoundly powerful music, but whatever the religion, it has always also carried with it a powerful ability to lift us up from the mundane and into a higher state of mind. It is this that attracts me to these particular artists. It is this that I trust in when I think about Apollo and the power he conveys in humanity's love of music. A love that is almost universal, for every culture on Earth has its own connection to this primal power. Every human being has an intrinsic attraction to it, and it can heal us, make us feel whole, spiritual, and alive.
I just bought Deva Premal sings the Moola Mantra, and if you have any love for this kind of uplifting force, if you trust in the healing power of music, you should give it a shot.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Corrected translation...
Thanks to Diodoros on the Hellenic boards for offering up this corrected translation into the Greek.
Κύριε τού Φωτός
Κύριε τού Τραγουδιού
Κύριε τής Τέχνης
Σπάσε τούς τοίχους πού μέ πολιορκούν
Nά μέ φωτίσεις έλα
----------
KEE-ree-eh too fo-TOHS
KEE-ree-eh too trah-goo-dee-OO
KEE-ree-eh tees TEHCH-nees
SPAH-seh toos TEE-hoos poo meh poh-lee-or-HOON
NAH meh foh-TEE-sees EH-la
(Don't aspirate the T's)
Κύριε τού Φωτός
Κύριε τού Τραγουδιού
Κύριε τής Τέχνης
Σπάσε τούς τοίχους πού μέ πολιορκούν
Nά μέ φωτίσεις έλα
----------
KEE-ree-eh too fo-TOHS
KEE-ree-eh too trah-goo-dee-OO
KEE-ree-eh tees TEHCH-nees
SPAH-seh toos TEE-hoos poo meh poh-lee-or-HOON
NAH meh foh-TEE-sees EH-la
(Don't aspirate the T's)
Apollo of the sacred sound...
Apollos is a God of art, music, dancing and all manner of forms of expression of the emotional self to the external world. While he himself is seldom painted as an overly emotional being, he is none the less depicted as a being that expresses emotion in ways that are controlled and full of silent passion.
Art, for example, is a means of expressing great emotion. Anger, rage, love, passion, lust, they are all emotional states of being that we human beings experience on a daily basis, and the artist expresses in song, paint, sculpture or any other medium of artistic expression you can imagine.
Like apollo, I am a rather reserved person. I express in writing, in artwork, and in my choice of music and while singing in the shower. I have come to fall in love with a certain kind of music and chant that has its origins in the Eastern world, India, to be precise, and it is very much part of the hindu, Hare Krishna, and Buddhist movements today, and to some extent the Pagan movements of the world.
A good example of this is the Mantras put to music of such artists as Deva Premal and Rasa, and I have wondered for a while now how we might, as Hellenists, seek to put Mantras devoted to our own gods to work in helping us achieve a greater sense of connection to the Gods.
I was a little inspired, and so I wrote one for Apollo.
I started with an English mantra, which is essentially something short that can be repeated over and over in the mind, either simply spoken or chanted to a rhythm or music.
Lord of Light.
Lord of Song.
Lord of Art.
Break the walls that surround me!
Come forth and enlighten me!
I then ran this through a translator, as my Greek is basically phrase book stuff at this point.
Λόρδος του φωτός.
Λόρδος του τραγουδιού.
Λόρδος του σπασίματος αρθ.
Oi tοίχοι που με περιβάλλουν!
Ελάτε εμπρός και με διαφωτίστε!
Now, I can pronounce this. It will take me a while to get it memorized so that I can chant it in a varying set of rhythms so that can actually meditate as I do so, using it as a way to set the mind into a meditative state, but I think it will work. At this point, however, I need someone to look at this and correct it so that it is in proper Greek (Modern, not ancient, as I do not subscribe to the idea that ancient Greek is somehow more sacred than modern)
I also translated it into Spanish:
Señor de la luz.
Señor de la canción.
Señor del arte.
¡Rompa las paredes que me rodean!
¡Venga adelante y acláreme!
and Portuguese:
Senhor da luz.
Senhor da canção.
Senhor da arte.
Quebre as paredes que me cercam!
Venha adiante e me ilumine!
(I couldn't remember the word for enlighten. I guessed, I think correctly, but if it's wrong let me know)
I tried Italian, but I am very very very rusty...
In any case, I am going to give this mantra a shot, gotta find something instrumental that will work, like Enya or a Maire Brennan instrumental, and hopefully I can stand before Apollo better, perhaps better understand him this way, by expressing my heart to him in a way he sems to rejoice in. Controlled and purposeful.
Art, for example, is a means of expressing great emotion. Anger, rage, love, passion, lust, they are all emotional states of being that we human beings experience on a daily basis, and the artist expresses in song, paint, sculpture or any other medium of artistic expression you can imagine.
Like apollo, I am a rather reserved person. I express in writing, in artwork, and in my choice of music and while singing in the shower. I have come to fall in love with a certain kind of music and chant that has its origins in the Eastern world, India, to be precise, and it is very much part of the hindu, Hare Krishna, and Buddhist movements today, and to some extent the Pagan movements of the world.
A good example of this is the Mantras put to music of such artists as Deva Premal and Rasa, and I have wondered for a while now how we might, as Hellenists, seek to put Mantras devoted to our own gods to work in helping us achieve a greater sense of connection to the Gods.
I was a little inspired, and so I wrote one for Apollo.
I started with an English mantra, which is essentially something short that can be repeated over and over in the mind, either simply spoken or chanted to a rhythm or music.
Lord of Light.
Lord of Song.
Lord of Art.
Break the walls that surround me!
Come forth and enlighten me!
I then ran this through a translator, as my Greek is basically phrase book stuff at this point.
Λόρδος του φωτός.
Λόρδος του τραγουδιού.
Λόρδος του σπασίματος αρθ.
Oi tοίχοι που με περιβάλλουν!
Ελάτε εμπρός και με διαφωτίστε!
Now, I can pronounce this. It will take me a while to get it memorized so that I can chant it in a varying set of rhythms so that can actually meditate as I do so, using it as a way to set the mind into a meditative state, but I think it will work. At this point, however, I need someone to look at this and correct it so that it is in proper Greek (Modern, not ancient, as I do not subscribe to the idea that ancient Greek is somehow more sacred than modern)
I also translated it into Spanish:
Señor de la luz.
Señor de la canción.
Señor del arte.
¡Rompa las paredes que me rodean!
¡Venga adelante y acláreme!
and Portuguese:
Senhor da luz.
Senhor da canção.
Senhor da arte.
Quebre as paredes que me cercam!
Venha adiante e me ilumine!
(I couldn't remember the word for enlighten. I guessed, I think correctly, but if it's wrong let me know)
I tried Italian, but I am very very very rusty...
In any case, I am going to give this mantra a shot, gotta find something instrumental that will work, like Enya or a Maire Brennan instrumental, and hopefully I can stand before Apollo better, perhaps better understand him this way, by expressing my heart to him in a way he sems to rejoice in. Controlled and purposeful.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Healing a broken heart
It seems to me that I got this vision of a star for a reason. I got it a long time ago, and have since gotten it more than a few times. I have spoken of it from time to time on lists I belong to, and have often gotten comments of interest and bewilderment. I have been forced to confront two very basic realities of human existence, that my self, home, tribe, and nation are all part of the shell that protects me from the world around me, and that as with all things, relying on it to excess is dangerous to the development of the human soul.
I have, in my life, suffered a great many deprivations. Each one has forced me to rely on others to get through them, and each time i had to rely on others a piece of my self reliant nature was stripped away. It becomes easy as time goes by to simply rely on the world around you to prop you up, hide you, protect you. Then, one day, you wake up, pick up, and move away from the people you know, love, and trust (even though they drive you insane) in order to force yourself to be your own person. In truth, the above should be written in the first person, as it describes me, but I think many if not most of us go through it at different times in our lives.
But the deprivations of my life have left me with what I can only call a broken heart, and by that I am making no reference to love relationships, but to a general broken spirit that has forced me to too often be harsh and cold hearted to the people I encounter. It has, that means, made me rather bitter with the world, and sometimes, with the Gods.
When I think on this, what I am trying to do here, I am astounded that until now I have never made the connection between my need for a tranquil home and the healing of my broken spirit. That this endeavor has forced me to look at my conception of home and then follow it with an examination of the great healer. That is, that I am in obvious need of healing, and it becomes clear as I go forth, have been for a long time.
Here's hoping I learn well from Apollo as I move forward into his domain.
I have, in my life, suffered a great many deprivations. Each one has forced me to rely on others to get through them, and each time i had to rely on others a piece of my self reliant nature was stripped away. It becomes easy as time goes by to simply rely on the world around you to prop you up, hide you, protect you. Then, one day, you wake up, pick up, and move away from the people you know, love, and trust (even though they drive you insane) in order to force yourself to be your own person. In truth, the above should be written in the first person, as it describes me, but I think many if not most of us go through it at different times in our lives.
But the deprivations of my life have left me with what I can only call a broken heart, and by that I am making no reference to love relationships, but to a general broken spirit that has forced me to too often be harsh and cold hearted to the people I encounter. It has, that means, made me rather bitter with the world, and sometimes, with the Gods.
When I think on this, what I am trying to do here, I am astounded that until now I have never made the connection between my need for a tranquil home and the healing of my broken spirit. That this endeavor has forced me to look at my conception of home and then follow it with an examination of the great healer. That is, that I am in obvious need of healing, and it becomes clear as I go forth, have been for a long time.
Here's hoping I learn well from Apollo as I move forward into his domain.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Epithets of Apollo
Apollo is known by many titles.
Akesios: Averter of evil. (Akestos and Alexikakos)
Aigletes: The radiant.
Agetor: Leader (Leader of men, Leader of souls, etc.)
Agonius: Helper in struggle and contests.
Agraeus: The hunter.
Agyieus: Protector of streets and public places.
Archegetes: Patron, founder, protector of colonies.
Isodetes: He who binds impartially.
Loxias: Prophet of Zeus.
Lykeios: Wolf like, wolf-slayer.
Marmarinus: God of marble.
Moiragetes: Leader or guide of fate.
Musagetes: Leader or guide of the Muses. (Inspiration)
Noumius: Pastoral.
Paean: The healer.
Phoebus: The shining.
and many many others.
Now, clearly with Apollo, or Apollon, we are dealing with a god who was worshipped in an amazingly varied number of places, cults, and ways. As a prophet, Apollo was the god called upon in Greece's most famous and most respected oracle in Delphi. The prognostication and odd sayings of the prophetess there were very highly sought after and, according to the stories, at least, very accurate, even if not in the way people interpreted them.
As a healer, Apollon was also the god of disease, and he was often shown punishing mankind with plague. As a god of civilization he was seen as a protector of cities, colonies, and countries. and most importantly, perhaps, he was seen as a bringer of light. The light of healing, the light of prophecy, the light of civilization and art. He was a god who inspired among the ancients, and remains seen as that today among those who worship him.
Akesios: Averter of evil. (Akestos and Alexikakos)
Aigletes: The radiant.
Agetor: Leader (Leader of men, Leader of souls, etc.)
Agonius: Helper in struggle and contests.
Agraeus: The hunter.
Agyieus: Protector of streets and public places.
Archegetes: Patron, founder, protector of colonies.
Isodetes: He who binds impartially.
Loxias: Prophet of Zeus.
Lykeios: Wolf like, wolf-slayer.
Marmarinus: God of marble.
Moiragetes: Leader or guide of fate.
Musagetes: Leader or guide of the Muses. (Inspiration)
Noumius: Pastoral.
Paean: The healer.
Phoebus: The shining.
and many many others.
Now, clearly with Apollo, or Apollon, we are dealing with a god who was worshipped in an amazingly varied number of places, cults, and ways. As a prophet, Apollo was the god called upon in Greece's most famous and most respected oracle in Delphi. The prognostication and odd sayings of the prophetess there were very highly sought after and, according to the stories, at least, very accurate, even if not in the way people interpreted them.
As a healer, Apollon was also the god of disease, and he was often shown punishing mankind with plague. As a god of civilization he was seen as a protector of cities, colonies, and countries. and most importantly, perhaps, he was seen as a bringer of light. The light of healing, the light of prophecy, the light of civilization and art. He was a god who inspired among the ancients, and remains seen as that today among those who worship him.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Going to the next point...
Let me begin with the most basic aspects of this God as we see it in myth, both Greek and Roman, for Apollo made his way into Roman religion almost unchanged (at least in name and iconography) and he did so as a God of civilization, healing, music, and to some extent, dance and art as a whole. Apollo is always portrayed as a beautiful but young male who is resplendent and radiant, and in later times even became assimilated into the solar mythos. The shining one (Phoebus) is Apollo as celestial being who, unlike most of the other Gods, has almost subsumed the Chthonic aspects of his being into the more Ouranic aspects which overwhelm with their resplendent glow.
Apollo is also a "Father God" who, like Zeus, produces popular children like Asklepios, the healer who is killed by Zeus when he arrogantly chooses to break the natural order by bringing the dead back to life. Asklepios, like Herakles, is then worshipped as a Hero God and his temples are places of healing where the practice of incubation, a distinctly Apollonian practice, has people sleeping in temples or other sacred places to either Apollo or Asklepios in order to either be healed or be told by the god how to heal themselves.
This aspect of the Apollonian realm, and I do see Asklepios as an aspect of Apollo just as I see Herakles as an aspect of Zeus, seems a rather apropos reason for me to have to turn to Apollo next in my exploration of my inner self and the world around me. If Hestia forced me to recognize what my true home was (this form, this mind, this being who is me) then having to move to Apollo next will force me to recognize where that home is broken, where it is leaking, where it is too drafty or stuffy, where it needs cleaning, etc. That logic had not occurred to me until now, but now that I see it, now that I have explored Hestia, it seems only logical that to recognize the patient is the very first step in figuring out if he is sick and in need of healing...
Before I move on...
Before I move on, I want to take a minute to explore a concept.
The Gods are often seen as cosmic forces. We often call Hestia the Hearth, Aphrodite we call Love, Ares is War, but I think we often get into trouble when we attempt to discuss this because it tends ot offer our detractors ammunition when speaking out against us as idolaters or simple nature worshippers.
When I speak of Hestia as "The Hearth" or "Lady of the Hearth" or "Hearth Goddess" it is not that she actually is the hearth, the hearth is just a man made fire pit in which to control fire for our own use. What the title "Lady of the Hearth" means is simply that this is where she is worshipped, honored, offered sacrifice. What she offers to us freely, we recognize in the hearth. It symbolizes for us what she has given to us and why we are thankful to her.
Aress is not literally War, we war with each other, it is up to us to take responsibility for it, but Ares does inspire in us a sense of competition, aggression, and even lust, and it is how we have acted upon these things which we can turn to him to help us deal with, that we see Ares as "War" or "War God" or "Lord of War."
The Gods are divine architects, molding the universe, life, and all the lies between, into forms that are somehow in symmetry, in balance while at the same time retaining their chaotic/entropic natures, yet they are not themselves gravity or the sun or the earth. We accpet in these things a symbolism of what the Gods are, since we mortals have such a limited range of perception molded by our evolution, and it serves us well, but we must from time to time clear the board and make people understand that Helios is not really The Sun, but the Sun symbolizes him. We see Helios as radiant, life giving, seeing all that is, and the Sun symbolizes that perfectly.
The Gods are often seen as cosmic forces. We often call Hestia the Hearth, Aphrodite we call Love, Ares is War, but I think we often get into trouble when we attempt to discuss this because it tends ot offer our detractors ammunition when speaking out against us as idolaters or simple nature worshippers.
When I speak of Hestia as "The Hearth" or "Lady of the Hearth" or "Hearth Goddess" it is not that she actually is the hearth, the hearth is just a man made fire pit in which to control fire for our own use. What the title "Lady of the Hearth" means is simply that this is where she is worshipped, honored, offered sacrifice. What she offers to us freely, we recognize in the hearth. It symbolizes for us what she has given to us and why we are thankful to her.
Aress is not literally War, we war with each other, it is up to us to take responsibility for it, but Ares does inspire in us a sense of competition, aggression, and even lust, and it is how we have acted upon these things which we can turn to him to help us deal with, that we see Ares as "War" or "War God" or "Lord of War."
The Gods are divine architects, molding the universe, life, and all the lies between, into forms that are somehow in symmetry, in balance while at the same time retaining their chaotic/entropic natures, yet they are not themselves gravity or the sun or the earth. We accpet in these things a symbolism of what the Gods are, since we mortals have such a limited range of perception molded by our evolution, and it serves us well, but we must from time to time clear the board and make people understand that Helios is not really The Sun, but the Sun symbolizes him. We see Helios as radiant, life giving, seeing all that is, and the Sun symbolizes that perfectly.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Putting the Hestia Consciousness into practice
Putting the Hestia Consciousness into practice is a matter of learning to recognize what home is in the world around you. If I am home, if this body is the home of my soul, if home is where the heart is as they say, then what it is I want to carry with me wherever I go? What is it that I wish to decorate this home that is my heart, my body, my soul and all that surrounds it with?
Hestia Consciousness is a peaceful one. She is the fire of the hearth, and that fire calls to you, wants you to come closer, to warm you. It has the potential to destroy you if you fall too far into it, if you cloister yourself, but it's desire is to aid you and succor you, not destroy you.
Bringing her to mind at the right moments, reminding myself that I am not alone even there where it is just me at home, is a miraculous feeling if the feeling is true. And bringing that feeling that when I face the world I do so with the army of Gods at my back, is one of the reasons why man turns to the Gods. We need them, and bringing them into our consciousness and allowing them to work through us is perhaps the hardest thing we face as people. We feel a need to control, not be controlled. Allowing ourselves to fall into their hands and know we will be caught, that is putting this divine consciousness into practice, and it is not something we can take a few weeks to contemplate and then do.
I will seek to move forward now and carry her, Hestia of the Hearth, with me into the tunnel where I hope to see a great light soon.
Hestia Consciousness is a peaceful one. She is the fire of the hearth, and that fire calls to you, wants you to come closer, to warm you. It has the potential to destroy you if you fall too far into it, if you cloister yourself, but it's desire is to aid you and succor you, not destroy you.
Bringing her to mind at the right moments, reminding myself that I am not alone even there where it is just me at home, is a miraculous feeling if the feeling is true. And bringing that feeling that when I face the world I do so with the army of Gods at my back, is one of the reasons why man turns to the Gods. We need them, and bringing them into our consciousness and allowing them to work through us is perhaps the hardest thing we face as people. We feel a need to control, not be controlled. Allowing ourselves to fall into their hands and know we will be caught, that is putting this divine consciousness into practice, and it is not something we can take a few weeks to contemplate and then do.
I will seek to move forward now and carry her, Hestia of the Hearth, with me into the tunnel where I hope to see a great light soon.
Friday, August 17, 2007
So far...
So, what have I learned so far?
I have taken to introspection, to looking for the Gods within as well as without. That the vision I had served a purpose, and will continue to serve that purpose throughout my life. The purpose being to guide me in some quest to understand who I am in relation to all that is from the divine gods to the smallest of animals. What is my place, and if not why, then why not.
By starting at the top, with Hestia at the 12 o'clock point, I am forced to start with my immediate surroundings and to look at how they reflect who I am on the inside. Why, for example, does my home reflect a certain calm quality that is sorely missing in my inner soul? Some say it is my desire to be calm, hence my turn toward being so much more isolated, so much more introverted, so much more of a hermit in this calm environment i have created for myself. If I must understand this it is in the understanding that this home reflects what the Goddess Hestia wants me to understand.
I have learned that the fire within is always reflected in my actions, but that is not a revolutionary thought, what is revolutionary to me is that that self same fire and how it is reflected in the actions I take also tend to form the world I see around me because I choose and pick what I want to see, what I want to hear, what I want to experience in life while being guided by an inner conflict that seeks to force me to something while part of me refuses to allow it. This is what the Gods want me to face, do battle with, and even if it means I end up a bloody beaten mound of flesh at the sword of my own demons, I will come out of it better for understanding myself.
Hestia is the first impulse toward that, and this is why it was inevitable that I start with her. It was inevitable that I try to face her, who is so quiet, so seldom heard from even if ever present.
I have taken to introspection, to looking for the Gods within as well as without. That the vision I had served a purpose, and will continue to serve that purpose throughout my life. The purpose being to guide me in some quest to understand who I am in relation to all that is from the divine gods to the smallest of animals. What is my place, and if not why, then why not.
By starting at the top, with Hestia at the 12 o'clock point, I am forced to start with my immediate surroundings and to look at how they reflect who I am on the inside. Why, for example, does my home reflect a certain calm quality that is sorely missing in my inner soul? Some say it is my desire to be calm, hence my turn toward being so much more isolated, so much more introverted, so much more of a hermit in this calm environment i have created for myself. If I must understand this it is in the understanding that this home reflects what the Goddess Hestia wants me to understand.
I have learned that the fire within is always reflected in my actions, but that is not a revolutionary thought, what is revolutionary to me is that that self same fire and how it is reflected in the actions I take also tend to form the world I see around me because I choose and pick what I want to see, what I want to hear, what I want to experience in life while being guided by an inner conflict that seeks to force me to something while part of me refuses to allow it. This is what the Gods want me to face, do battle with, and even if it means I end up a bloody beaten mound of flesh at the sword of my own demons, I will come out of it better for understanding myself.
Hestia is the first impulse toward that, and this is why it was inevitable that I start with her. It was inevitable that I try to face her, who is so quiet, so seldom heard from even if ever present.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The temple of the soul
I spoke of the body as a home of the soul, but in reality that should read more like "Temple of the Soul" for I see the soul not as something innate to human beings (and other life forms) but something a kin to a gift from the Gods, something we borrow from them and return at our death.
This temple of the soul is something we must take into consideration here, for Myth tells us that Hestia, of all the Gods, abides with us in our homes. that hers is the sacred fire that lights the fires of all altars and temples, and by extension, that makes our bodies something like a temple to this great goddess.
It is a difficult thing for me to have to contemplate because I have not treated this temple well. I have not given it the respect it requires. I have, in essence, let the temple go to pot, and that must seem like a disrespect to the goddess of the home. Just as I would not allow my home to go to the dregs, so too must I take it upon myself to treat this, the temple of the sacred fires of the soul with respect and care for it.
This temple of the soul is something we must take into consideration here, for Myth tells us that Hestia, of all the Gods, abides with us in our homes. that hers is the sacred fire that lights the fires of all altars and temples, and by extension, that makes our bodies something like a temple to this great goddess.
It is a difficult thing for me to have to contemplate because I have not treated this temple well. I have not given it the respect it requires. I have, in essence, let the temple go to pot, and that must seem like a disrespect to the goddess of the home. Just as I would not allow my home to go to the dregs, so too must I take it upon myself to treat this, the temple of the sacred fires of the soul with respect and care for it.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
The inner fires
We often refer to the inner impetus, the spontaneous nature of thought and emotion, as a fire that lives within us. Hestia is there too, for the body is the home of the soul, but the soul is, in my definition, the point where the animal and the spiritual meet. That spark of the animal that connects with the divine and which draws from the divine that spontaneous creativity that we call thought.
This isn't to say that Hestia is thought, but rather that we as human beings think and feel and all of that happens within this sacred vessel we call our bodies and souls, and that just as we pay a certain respect for our homes (house, apartment, town, city, state, nation, etc.) as the places where we are sheltered, so too we must pay respect to the nature of this form of ours, a form we may owe to the Gods much more than we may be willing to accept sometimes. (I will explore evolution and such in later connections, such as my connection with Ares)
The inner fire is, perhaps, our most prized connection, and one that man recognized and sought to embrace early on. We sought to propiciate the Goddess of the hearth, for she helped us achieve something great, and now it is up to us, who have come so far, to move beyond the simple propitiation and superstition of the past and come to connect to the Gods as beings of mind and spirit, capable of great thought.
This is a great challenge, one that I am trying to come to terms with with this blog, but which I am still having difficulty with. But, as I said before, it is a life long process, and if it takes me years to come to terms with it all, so be it. Perhaps on the day I die I will look back and say, "oh, OK, I think I get it now..."
This isn't to say that Hestia is thought, but rather that we as human beings think and feel and all of that happens within this sacred vessel we call our bodies and souls, and that just as we pay a certain respect for our homes (house, apartment, town, city, state, nation, etc.) as the places where we are sheltered, so too we must pay respect to the nature of this form of ours, a form we may owe to the Gods much more than we may be willing to accept sometimes. (I will explore evolution and such in later connections, such as my connection with Ares)
The inner fire is, perhaps, our most prized connection, and one that man recognized and sought to embrace early on. We sought to propiciate the Goddess of the hearth, for she helped us achieve something great, and now it is up to us, who have come so far, to move beyond the simple propitiation and superstition of the past and come to connect to the Gods as beings of mind and spirit, capable of great thought.
This is a great challenge, one that I am trying to come to terms with with this blog, but which I am still having difficulty with. But, as I said before, it is a life long process, and if it takes me years to come to terms with it all, so be it. Perhaps on the day I die I will look back and say, "oh, OK, I think I get it now..."
Monday, August 6, 2007
Respect
The proper respect for the Gods is shown through our piety. Piety in Hellenismos, however, is a different set of strictures than it is among the Judaeo-Christian systems in which man must always consider himself subordinate to God, his slave even. Man, in Hellenismos, approaches the Gods, if not as an equal, than at least as deserving of respect.
The Gods are powerful, creative forces, but man is never their slave. Man worships and honors the Gods because it is proper to be grateful and to offer respect, but not because he has to or else. In fact, belief or non-belief in the Gods was never a condition for entering a blessed after life in the Hellenic religion and mythos. A man could choose to worship as he saw fit, honoring the Gods as his tribe and family saw them while not giving much thought to how others did so. At the same time, a man could travel to a foreign land and their offer the gods tribute as the foreigners did and not feel that he was dishonoring the Gods in any way.
With Hestia and her fire, however, I think man always had a bit of a tenuous and reverential relationship. Fire was, and continues to be, at the heart of man's capacity to create and innovate on a grand scale. So long as man could harness fire he could build extravagant homes and heat them. Cook his food so as to avoid disease. And yes, make his offerings to the Gods upon fiery altars of many types all over the world.
Even the dead, in many cultures, are set off upon a pyre.
The cult of the hearth is, perhaps, the most ancient of all Hellenic cults. Attested to in the archaeological record as far back as is possible to call any culture "Greek," the Greeks worshipped at the hearth. This we see in the theological mythos when Hestia is called both the eldest and the youngest of all the Olympians.
Fire, however, must be respected utterly. Man has learned the disaster of his folly in not paying proper respect to fire, a lesson Hestia teaches all too well.
The Gods are powerful, creative forces, but man is never their slave. Man worships and honors the Gods because it is proper to be grateful and to offer respect, but not because he has to or else. In fact, belief or non-belief in the Gods was never a condition for entering a blessed after life in the Hellenic religion and mythos. A man could choose to worship as he saw fit, honoring the Gods as his tribe and family saw them while not giving much thought to how others did so. At the same time, a man could travel to a foreign land and their offer the gods tribute as the foreigners did and not feel that he was dishonoring the Gods in any way.
With Hestia and her fire, however, I think man always had a bit of a tenuous and reverential relationship. Fire was, and continues to be, at the heart of man's capacity to create and innovate on a grand scale. So long as man could harness fire he could build extravagant homes and heat them. Cook his food so as to avoid disease. And yes, make his offerings to the Gods upon fiery altars of many types all over the world.
Even the dead, in many cultures, are set off upon a pyre.
The cult of the hearth is, perhaps, the most ancient of all Hellenic cults. Attested to in the archaeological record as far back as is possible to call any culture "Greek," the Greeks worshipped at the hearth. This we see in the theological mythos when Hestia is called both the eldest and the youngest of all the Olympians.
Fire, however, must be respected utterly. Man has learned the disaster of his folly in not paying proper respect to fire, a lesson Hestia teaches all too well.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
The home fires
The fire of the hearth is the home fire. It is that light and warmth that calls to us and makes us sit still in front of its protection from the night and cold. Hestia is that hearth fire.
Close your eyes, breath evenly and deeply. When your mind feels as if it is slowing, stilling, open your eyes and light the hearth candle, or the fire in the fireplace, and let the light of the fire dull you into another state of awareness.
This isn't easy, but I try to do it from time to time as a way to meditate on the essential nature of this goddess. Not her personailty, but the essence of her. An essence that is both light and warmth and the destructive power of fire. A fire that can not only burn but also burn away that which harms from within.
Imagine, if you will, your heart and soul as a sword being forged. The metal of the sword needing that fire to burn away the dullness, impart strength, and which allows it to gain form from formlessness. So too do the Gods prove to us humans. As the fires that both strengthen us but can also burn and destroy us if we lose ourselves too long in them.
But the fire that is Hestia is very special. One must wonder at early man and how frightening it must have been to tame fire, to control it and worse, to bring it home once he started living in structures. A gift of the goddess of the hearth, one that must be properly respected and maintained. It is a gift we take for granted in the modern world.
Close your eyes, breath evenly and deeply. When your mind feels as if it is slowing, stilling, open your eyes and light the hearth candle, or the fire in the fireplace, and let the light of the fire dull you into another state of awareness.
This isn't easy, but I try to do it from time to time as a way to meditate on the essential nature of this goddess. Not her personailty, but the essence of her. An essence that is both light and warmth and the destructive power of fire. A fire that can not only burn but also burn away that which harms from within.
Imagine, if you will, your heart and soul as a sword being forged. The metal of the sword needing that fire to burn away the dullness, impart strength, and which allows it to gain form from formlessness. So too do the Gods prove to us humans. As the fires that both strengthen us but can also burn and destroy us if we lose ourselves too long in them.
But the fire that is Hestia is very special. One must wonder at early man and how frightening it must have been to tame fire, to control it and worse, to bring it home once he started living in structures. A gift of the goddess of the hearth, one that must be properly respected and maintained. It is a gift we take for granted in the modern world.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Home, inside and out.
When thinking of home, it is important to think of all of the ways that the word affects us. Home, both from an inner and outer perspective, and, from an inside and outside perspective.
The inner perspective of home is the inner emotion and feeling of safety one feels internally when home. The external aspect of home is what we call home. It can be one's home, town, state, nation, family, etc. or combinations of these. Inside and outside perspectives are different, we are here talking about being at home and being away from home. How do those two perspectives change the way we feel? How does Thea Hestia pull and tug at us as we move about in the world?
I have travelled outside the US. Portugal, Spain, France, Andora, and within them many cities. Within the US I have lived or travelled to many places as well. Dayton, my current home, Stamford, CT, where I spent my formative teen years and most of my twenties, Portland, Oregon, a city I still have amazingly fond memories of, Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Providence, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, etc.
All of these, even when the visits have been brief have left an indelible mark on my being. And part of that mark is the feeling of being away from home. And then, when you return home, either because you live there or for a visit because you now live elsewhere, there is a feeling of relief when returning home.
That sense of belonging is not simple familiarity, in my opinion, it is divine.
This divine connection to a place and a time, sometimes, makes us long for home, even if home can be many different places. depending on the time one references. It is also what draws us to different religions, philosophies, etc. because those can also feel like home. It draws us to her who is the keeper of the sacred flames of the holy hearth, and that hearth is something we carry within us every day of our lives.
The inner perspective of home is the inner emotion and feeling of safety one feels internally when home. The external aspect of home is what we call home. It can be one's home, town, state, nation, family, etc. or combinations of these. Inside and outside perspectives are different, we are here talking about being at home and being away from home. How do those two perspectives change the way we feel? How does Thea Hestia pull and tug at us as we move about in the world?
I have travelled outside the US. Portugal, Spain, France, Andora, and within them many cities. Within the US I have lived or travelled to many places as well. Dayton, my current home, Stamford, CT, where I spent my formative teen years and most of my twenties, Portland, Oregon, a city I still have amazingly fond memories of, Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Providence, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, etc.
All of these, even when the visits have been brief have left an indelible mark on my being. And part of that mark is the feeling of being away from home. And then, when you return home, either because you live there or for a visit because you now live elsewhere, there is a feeling of relief when returning home.
That sense of belonging is not simple familiarity, in my opinion, it is divine.
This divine connection to a place and a time, sometimes, makes us long for home, even if home can be many different places. depending on the time one references. It is also what draws us to different religions, philosophies, etc. because those can also feel like home. It draws us to her who is the keeper of the sacred flames of the holy hearth, and that hearth is something we carry within us every day of our lives.
Friday, July 20, 2007
The Concept of Home
Close your eyes. Remove yourself from your worries by seeking to still your mind so that you are alone in the world. Now, breathe slowly and think about home. Not your particular home, but home as a concept. What does it mean?
When I think of home, the concept, it brings about flashes of places. Some I have called home, like the small concrete block we called a house in Puerto Rico when I was a child. My mother made it into a home by her sheer will, since she had little money to care for four children after my father abandoned us.
I think at an apartment in a slum in Stamford, Connecticut. (Yes, Connecticut has slums) I remember the sound of weapons being fired. The screams of people being beaten, and the fear with which people always spoke about the neighborhood. Yet within that neighborhood there was light. There were friends and fierce protectors. They were not always the most savory of people, but they were like the warriors of ancient Mycenae, strong and proud and protective of their own.
I also see what I have created of what little I have in terms of creating a home. It is not much, but when people enter, they seem to relax and find themselves feeling at home themselves, even though if I must be honest i am not the most welcoming of people, too much of a loner really.
Home is also a feeling, a feeling of security that engulfs you and makes you feel safe in a world. Something like what one imagines the womb must feel like to an infant ready for birth. This feeling is almost maternal, and yet Hestia is never presented as a mother.
As I close my eyes I imagine myself home, and the image changes from tropical island to New England winters to Ohio's corn fields and somewhat ornery and a little uncivilized people (Close the gates, the barbarians here.) And yet Hestia, that sacred center, that sacred fire at the center of the feeling that is home, a feeling we all know but which is hard to put into words, is constant, eternal, a pillar of strength in the hearts of mankind.
I will make a confession, on my way home yesterday I stopped by a local UDF (United Dairy Farmers) store and bought some OJ, milk, and a couple of muffins to have for breakfast during my weekend. I do not have much money, and as I left the store I was approached by a homeless man begging for money. I had to take into account what I had and what I might be able to spare, and I decided I could not give him anything.
As I sit here writing this, I am reminded that I could have given him something, even if just the 85 cents in my pocket, because unlike me, he has nowhere to call home. I am reminded too of the more Athenian or Aresian ways of thought that tend to dominate my thought processes, that if he just spent as much time working as he does begging, and stopped drinking, he could afford a small place here in Dayton, a place that is not all that expensive to live in.
As I sit here writing this I am forced to confront the conflicts in my own mind that I must learn to reconcile. The decision not to give him something because my own need outweighed his to me was logical, but perhaps it should have come from a deeper more emotional place, that place that pities someone who cannot get it together enough to get himself a small piece of what we all want and need, a home to call his own.
When I think of home, the concept, it brings about flashes of places. Some I have called home, like the small concrete block we called a house in Puerto Rico when I was a child. My mother made it into a home by her sheer will, since she had little money to care for four children after my father abandoned us.
I think at an apartment in a slum in Stamford, Connecticut. (Yes, Connecticut has slums) I remember the sound of weapons being fired. The screams of people being beaten, and the fear with which people always spoke about the neighborhood. Yet within that neighborhood there was light. There were friends and fierce protectors. They were not always the most savory of people, but they were like the warriors of ancient Mycenae, strong and proud and protective of their own.
I also see what I have created of what little I have in terms of creating a home. It is not much, but when people enter, they seem to relax and find themselves feeling at home themselves, even though if I must be honest i am not the most welcoming of people, too much of a loner really.
Home is also a feeling, a feeling of security that engulfs you and makes you feel safe in a world. Something like what one imagines the womb must feel like to an infant ready for birth. This feeling is almost maternal, and yet Hestia is never presented as a mother.
As I close my eyes I imagine myself home, and the image changes from tropical island to New England winters to Ohio's corn fields and somewhat ornery and a little uncivilized people (Close the gates, the barbarians here.) And yet Hestia, that sacred center, that sacred fire at the center of the feeling that is home, a feeling we all know but which is hard to put into words, is constant, eternal, a pillar of strength in the hearts of mankind.
I will make a confession, on my way home yesterday I stopped by a local UDF (United Dairy Farmers) store and bought some OJ, milk, and a couple of muffins to have for breakfast during my weekend. I do not have much money, and as I left the store I was approached by a homeless man begging for money. I had to take into account what I had and what I might be able to spare, and I decided I could not give him anything.
As I sit here writing this, I am reminded that I could have given him something, even if just the 85 cents in my pocket, because unlike me, he has nowhere to call home. I am reminded too of the more Athenian or Aresian ways of thought that tend to dominate my thought processes, that if he just spent as much time working as he does begging, and stopped drinking, he could afford a small place here in Dayton, a place that is not all that expensive to live in.
As I sit here writing this I am forced to confront the conflicts in my own mind that I must learn to reconcile. The decision not to give him something because my own need outweighed his to me was logical, but perhaps it should have come from a deeper more emotional place, that place that pities someone who cannot get it together enough to get himself a small piece of what we all want and need, a home to call his own.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The Hestia Consciousness
Many people speak of spreading a Christ Consciousness or a Krishna Consciousness (I believe the Hare Krishnas have always spoken of such a thing) and I interpret this as meaning that you allow the attributes of the deity to pervade your being, and especially your consciousness so that you almost become as the deity yourself, acting as the deity might (according to your interpretation, of course) and spreading good will as the deity might.
We who follow truly polytheistic religions or who have polytheistic mindsets, as Hindus and other Vedics do even though their religions allude to a strong monistic quality, have the benefit of being able to choose and explore the religions we are a part of for a deity to follow. In my case, it has always been Athena, but the polytheistic system allows me to balance the influence upon my consciousness by the strong and sometimes overpowering Athena with the softer, gentler Hestia, or the loving and sensuous Aphrodite, or the bright and healing Apollo, etc.
When I speak of a "Hestia Consciousness" I am talking about the willingness to allow the influences of this Goddess to pervade my consciousness and become part of it so that as I walk and breathe I become as if a conduit for her will.
Why would I want to do such a thing and how does it benefit me as a human being, and you as a recipient of that will, since my interactions with everyone else is influenced by that consciousness.
I suppose I should be clear that as a polytheist, I allow more than one deity to influence me this way, and as a result I should be referring more to the "Olympian Consciousness" than to that of any specific deity, but I am in a process here, one that is exploring Hestia and her power over me, so I will try to limit myself to her during this particular discussion.
Hestia Consciousness is focused on the ideas of "Home" and "Fire." These can be rather vague concepts to contemplate, so it is easier to understand them in terms of their specific influences. Home, then, becomes analogous to protection, cave, enclosure, limits, boundaries, walls, etc. Fire becomes analogous to heat, survival, health (cooking certain foods is necessary for health), destruction, fear (we faced our natural fear of fire to tame it for our own use), etc.
Contemplating these is how we come to Hestia Consciousness. But rather than just contemplating these, we must contemplate them in relation to the divine and how these are not just experiential concepts, but concepts of eternal truth.
In Home I am forced to not only look at my home as a sanctuary, but also as a prison of sorts. I am forced to see this body as my home, and my mind as the fire that burns within it, perhaps slowly destroying it in the process. I am forced to examine the walls I build around me, both physical and spiritual, and to break those down so that She can enter and touch me the way I truly need.
So, we proceed...
We who follow truly polytheistic religions or who have polytheistic mindsets, as Hindus and other Vedics do even though their religions allude to a strong monistic quality, have the benefit of being able to choose and explore the religions we are a part of for a deity to follow. In my case, it has always been Athena, but the polytheistic system allows me to balance the influence upon my consciousness by the strong and sometimes overpowering Athena with the softer, gentler Hestia, or the loving and sensuous Aphrodite, or the bright and healing Apollo, etc.
When I speak of a "Hestia Consciousness" I am talking about the willingness to allow the influences of this Goddess to pervade my consciousness and become part of it so that as I walk and breathe I become as if a conduit for her will.
Why would I want to do such a thing and how does it benefit me as a human being, and you as a recipient of that will, since my interactions with everyone else is influenced by that consciousness.
I suppose I should be clear that as a polytheist, I allow more than one deity to influence me this way, and as a result I should be referring more to the "Olympian Consciousness" than to that of any specific deity, but I am in a process here, one that is exploring Hestia and her power over me, so I will try to limit myself to her during this particular discussion.
Hestia Consciousness is focused on the ideas of "Home" and "Fire." These can be rather vague concepts to contemplate, so it is easier to understand them in terms of their specific influences. Home, then, becomes analogous to protection, cave, enclosure, limits, boundaries, walls, etc. Fire becomes analogous to heat, survival, health (cooking certain foods is necessary for health), destruction, fear (we faced our natural fear of fire to tame it for our own use), etc.
Contemplating these is how we come to Hestia Consciousness. But rather than just contemplating these, we must contemplate them in relation to the divine and how these are not just experiential concepts, but concepts of eternal truth.
In Home I am forced to not only look at my home as a sanctuary, but also as a prison of sorts. I am forced to see this body as my home, and my mind as the fire that burns within it, perhaps slowly destroying it in the process. I am forced to examine the walls I build around me, both physical and spiritual, and to break those down so that She can enter and touch me the way I truly need.
So, we proceed...
Monday, July 9, 2007
Divine Connection continued...
The conclusion that man does not have an immortal soul may not seem as obvious to you as it does to me. In a way, the Gods become aware of us as objects of curiosity worthy of guiding not because they took some special interest in our evolution from the beginning, but because we sought them out after experiencing them. Man is the product of evolution, not divine design, and as a result, we partake of the mortal nature of our four dimensional space-time. Or, more precisely, the mortal and transitory nature of matter.
But, before you jump to the conclusion that this makes us unimportant or that it isolates me as a human being in a lonely way, the opposite is actually true. It gives me a sense of power beyond what the implications and limitations of mortality may dictate. Man pulls himself up from the mud of evolution and transcends the animal nature to contemplate bigger things. In a way, we move ourselves closer to the divine by reaching out to it. We don't become divine, but we aspire to it which none the less gives us a sense of divinity that we lay claim to because of our connection to the divine.
Hestia, the lady of the hearth, is not only a connecting force but also a moving force in the mental evolution of man kind. How? I once wrote a piece in which Hestia is characterized as the Goddess that gives man fire. In myth this is actually said to be the Titan Prometheus, who is then punished by Zeus, but in my view this Promethean myth is one of the Great Deity we call Hestia, but which is essentially "The Great Fire God." This distinction is essentially irrelevant, since I worship in the Hellenic context, and that context lays the gift of fire into the hands of a Titan, and that actually makes sense.
Hestia, a name which means hearth, as a figure of veneration, is a very ancient Goddess. Evidence in Mycenaean and Minoan archaeology shows that the hearth cult goes back into most ancient antiquity, and to our species, this makes sense, and mythologically, it goes back into the Titanic age using a Titanic tool, the raging fire, which is then tamed for our use. Hence, the titanic and destructive fire becomes the amiable and humble hearth, and that deity becomes the Hearth Goddess, Hestia.
If Hestia is that fire deity, and she is, then her tending of the fire is linked to her tending of the home, and here we go into the symbolic concept of the human body being the home for the fire that is life, and more importantly, sentience and sapience.
Man's use of fire, which equates to man's reaching out to that deity, is a very important movement toward intelligence and the evolution of civilization. Thus, the human spirit, that part of us that strives for greater things, is sparked here at the beginning when man goes from being just another animal, perhaps a little more wily than most, to a possessor of fire, both physical and spiritual.
OK, so this is, essentially where Hestia has taken me so far. And now, as I continue to explore her, I must move toward what it means for me, today, to live and breathe and experience the Gods, especially this Goddess.
But, before you jump to the conclusion that this makes us unimportant or that it isolates me as a human being in a lonely way, the opposite is actually true. It gives me a sense of power beyond what the implications and limitations of mortality may dictate. Man pulls himself up from the mud of evolution and transcends the animal nature to contemplate bigger things. In a way, we move ourselves closer to the divine by reaching out to it. We don't become divine, but we aspire to it which none the less gives us a sense of divinity that we lay claim to because of our connection to the divine.
Hestia, the lady of the hearth, is not only a connecting force but also a moving force in the mental evolution of man kind. How? I once wrote a piece in which Hestia is characterized as the Goddess that gives man fire. In myth this is actually said to be the Titan Prometheus, who is then punished by Zeus, but in my view this Promethean myth is one of the Great Deity we call Hestia, but which is essentially "The Great Fire God." This distinction is essentially irrelevant, since I worship in the Hellenic context, and that context lays the gift of fire into the hands of a Titan, and that actually makes sense.
Hestia, a name which means hearth, as a figure of veneration, is a very ancient Goddess. Evidence in Mycenaean and Minoan archaeology shows that the hearth cult goes back into most ancient antiquity, and to our species, this makes sense, and mythologically, it goes back into the Titanic age using a Titanic tool, the raging fire, which is then tamed for our use. Hence, the titanic and destructive fire becomes the amiable and humble hearth, and that deity becomes the Hearth Goddess, Hestia.
If Hestia is that fire deity, and she is, then her tending of the fire is linked to her tending of the home, and here we go into the symbolic concept of the human body being the home for the fire that is life, and more importantly, sentience and sapience.
Man's use of fire, which equates to man's reaching out to that deity, is a very important movement toward intelligence and the evolution of civilization. Thus, the human spirit, that part of us that strives for greater things, is sparked here at the beginning when man goes from being just another animal, perhaps a little more wily than most, to a possessor of fire, both physical and spiritual.
OK, so this is, essentially where Hestia has taken me so far. And now, as I continue to explore her, I must move toward what it means for me, today, to live and breathe and experience the Gods, especially this Goddess.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Divine connection?
OK, so I have to step back for a second and explain what all this is about that I am talking about. Like I have already explained I have seen an image in my head, the twelve pointed star, the flame at its center, etc. I have also said that I chose to begin with Hestia, goddess of the hearth.
Now how, you may ask, is Hestia connected to all this? The answer has come to me as I meditate on her, contemplate her or ask her for guidance as I contemplate things. When I say the words contemplate or meditate you may imagine me sitting cross legged on a mat in front of an altar, and yes, I do that from time to time, but I meditate in motion a lot, and I do so to music or to the rhythm of work or to the motions of my body as I work, so more often than not, I am working, having conversations, speaking to customers, etc. and at the same time be contemplating what it means to have a soul.
So, when I first saw the star in my mind's eye I confused the central fire with Hestia. This is not at all hard to do, considering the fire takes the form of a hearth or campfire (which is itself a kind of hearth, a place where fire is held in control) but I was wrong. The hearth at the core of the star was the human spirit, that spark of life that goes beyond the strictly animal, that internal fire that we often call a soul.
So, here we are and at the end of the last post I posted the ominous uh oh! Why uh oh? Well, I have never believed in an eternal or immortal soul, so if this fire represents the soul, it also tells me that the soul itself is not immortal, as fire is not an eternal or never ending thing. But when contemplating these things, the idea of the fire also representing the connection between the mortal and the divine came into play, it became necessary for me to ponder further what it means to have a connection between the mortal and the immortal realms if we are ourselves mortal in the true sense.
So, last night as I was laying myself down to sleep, I sought her out, asked her to guide me in my dreams that I may understand, and as the saying goes, you should be careful what you ask for. I barely slept. My mind just kept turning and twisting around concepts that I cannot properly convey to you here. It is not that they are beyond human understanding or anything, but that my language does not cover these concepts.
In essence, however, the concepts were of the brain and how it is like a computer. If a computer does something, it does so through the mechanism of mathematics, and the brain does too in its own way. If the computer in room A does a mathematical calculation, the one in room B can do it too, and come to the same conclusion because they are designed to do it the same way, but also because as a language, mathematics is very precise. Given a simple addition of 2 + 2, both computers have to come up with 4, but in the human mind, this is different, because while the brain can come up with the same answer, it can also be sparked into new lines of thought by this simple task.
That is to say, the human mind is volatile. It is both highly organized and random at the same time. When man experiences something, in this case the divine, he comes to the conclusion that it is Gods he is experiencing. So far so good, but this experience then creates vast tangents of thoughts, which are themselves random, and then those form what you and I receive outwardly as religious imagery and depictions of the Gods. (The Imagery and attributes of the Gods as envisioned by religion are products of these thought patterns inspired by our experience of them)
So what, you may ask.
Well, the divine isn't forcing these images, and it is not forcing what I call the "connection" between man and the Gods. It seems that we reached out to them. We sought to connect to them, and in so doing, we got what we wanted, an inner connection to the divine.
If this is the case, than my supposition that man has no immortal soul is essentially correct.
Gotta run to work (yes, I work on the 4th of July) but I'll b back later...
Now how, you may ask, is Hestia connected to all this? The answer has come to me as I meditate on her, contemplate her or ask her for guidance as I contemplate things. When I say the words contemplate or meditate you may imagine me sitting cross legged on a mat in front of an altar, and yes, I do that from time to time, but I meditate in motion a lot, and I do so to music or to the rhythm of work or to the motions of my body as I work, so more often than not, I am working, having conversations, speaking to customers, etc. and at the same time be contemplating what it means to have a soul.
So, when I first saw the star in my mind's eye I confused the central fire with Hestia. This is not at all hard to do, considering the fire takes the form of a hearth or campfire (which is itself a kind of hearth, a place where fire is held in control) but I was wrong. The hearth at the core of the star was the human spirit, that spark of life that goes beyond the strictly animal, that internal fire that we often call a soul.
So, here we are and at the end of the last post I posted the ominous uh oh! Why uh oh? Well, I have never believed in an eternal or immortal soul, so if this fire represents the soul, it also tells me that the soul itself is not immortal, as fire is not an eternal or never ending thing. But when contemplating these things, the idea of the fire also representing the connection between the mortal and the divine came into play, it became necessary for me to ponder further what it means to have a connection between the mortal and the immortal realms if we are ourselves mortal in the true sense.
So, last night as I was laying myself down to sleep, I sought her out, asked her to guide me in my dreams that I may understand, and as the saying goes, you should be careful what you ask for. I barely slept. My mind just kept turning and twisting around concepts that I cannot properly convey to you here. It is not that they are beyond human understanding or anything, but that my language does not cover these concepts.
In essence, however, the concepts were of the brain and how it is like a computer. If a computer does something, it does so through the mechanism of mathematics, and the brain does too in its own way. If the computer in room A does a mathematical calculation, the one in room B can do it too, and come to the same conclusion because they are designed to do it the same way, but also because as a language, mathematics is very precise. Given a simple addition of 2 + 2, both computers have to come up with 4, but in the human mind, this is different, because while the brain can come up with the same answer, it can also be sparked into new lines of thought by this simple task.
That is to say, the human mind is volatile. It is both highly organized and random at the same time. When man experiences something, in this case the divine, he comes to the conclusion that it is Gods he is experiencing. So far so good, but this experience then creates vast tangents of thoughts, which are themselves random, and then those form what you and I receive outwardly as religious imagery and depictions of the Gods. (The Imagery and attributes of the Gods as envisioned by religion are products of these thought patterns inspired by our experience of them)
So what, you may ask.
Well, the divine isn't forcing these images, and it is not forcing what I call the "connection" between man and the Gods. It seems that we reached out to them. We sought to connect to them, and in so doing, we got what we wanted, an inner connection to the divine.
If this is the case, than my supposition that man has no immortal soul is essentially correct.
Gotta run to work (yes, I work on the 4th of July) but I'll b back later...
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Connection
So, the connection to the divine is an internal thing. We express it outwardly just as we express all of our inner self to the world, and because we are social creatures, we seek to express these things in concert with others. We call this religious ritual. That external connection to the divine is a social one, we seek to establish a connection between our societies and cultures and the divine we know exists through our inner connection.
But the inner connection is an individual thing. We all have it, even if we interpret it differently, and nature itself provides us with a variety of such connections to itself, giving us instinct, but the divine connection is different because our connections to nature are an absolute necessity. We have to be connected to nature because we are part of that nature. What about the connection to the divine? If we are connected to the Gods in this internal and fundamental way, does this mean we are also part of the divine nature?
You would think such questions would be fairly basic, but if you know me, either from reading this site or from interacting with me on the Hellenist sites (or other places) you also know that I am a firm believer in the mortality of man. If our connection to the divine, however, implies that we are also divine in some way, then I have to re-examine a great deal of what I believe with regard to human mortality. And if you know me at all you also know how hard that is for me. I tend to be stubborn, but I made myself a promise, and that is that I would follow through with this exploration of the divine connection within myself, even if it means turning myself inside out and my beliefs upside down.
So, the connection is there. There is no denying that at this point, and the Gods often make their will known to us through that connection. But what is that connection?
I find that I can only answer that question by asking more questions of myself, and then seeking to answer those before returning to the original question.
So, the third one I mentioned sparked something in me, something that is not an original thought by any means, but which brings up something that may be important to me as I proceed.
According to one myth, the God Dionysos was killed by "Titans" and they consumed him. Enraged, Zeus destroys the Titans in a flash of lightning and from the ashes the heart of the God is rescued and the ashes are used to form mankind. This story illustrates that man kind is composed of two distinct divine essences, the Titanic and the Dionysian, which is Olympian by nature. Now, the Gods are, in my world view, eternal and the Titans of myth are, in my opinion, just other forms of the same Gods (as are all Gods as seen by all people) but this myth would seem to indicate that man came into being at the turn of things, when the Titanic world shaping aspects of the Gods were waning and the Olympian aspects were on the rise. The one essentially destroys the other, but because they are the same, the two remain and live on in us. Both the Titanic and the Olympian are immortal essences, and the earth, of which the ash itself plays symbol here, is not.
So, I am, we all are, partly divine in the same way that Adam is divine in Genesis by virtue not so much of his being created by God, but by God breathing his essence into him. We are divine not by virtue of being created by the Gods, or divine nature, but because we partake of their essence through the mixture of the titanic and Olympian in us.
If that is so, then mankind's connection to the divine is a in to mankind's connection to the tree, the grass, the deer, and the lion. We are a different order of life from the gods, but we are part of the greater whole that encompasses us all.
In reference to this, the question of how the connection works may also become clear if I understand myself not so much as an individual, but as a single cog in a vast machine. Physics, believe it or not, answers this nicely.
We are three dimensional beings living in a ten dimensional universe (twelve dimensional if you count the Olympian and the Chthonic as the two polar dimensions encompassing the whole cosmos) but even as three dimensional, living in the third dimension, we experience the second and first dimensions as well as the fourth (time), so we must be part not just of these dimensions, but essential of all of them because we are part of the totality.
Here is the connection, it transcends the dimensional perceptions we have, because they are necessary to our survival, and gives us an ability to look beyond the our experiences to a larger world, perhaps our very consciousness is a result of this connection sparking it to grow.
But there is a problem. This does not necessarily satisfy. It makes us all a little too unimportant, and how human would I be if I didn't think of myself as part of the best and greatest of all species? (oy vey)
My humble act aside, the connection seems more than that. Why would nature allow such a connection if it is not intrinsically necessary to our survival?
As I ask myself many questions I keep coming back to a conclusion I don't really like, an which needs to be further explored, and that is that nature allows the connection because we have an immortal soul that requires it.
Uh oh!
But the inner connection is an individual thing. We all have it, even if we interpret it differently, and nature itself provides us with a variety of such connections to itself, giving us instinct, but the divine connection is different because our connections to nature are an absolute necessity. We have to be connected to nature because we are part of that nature. What about the connection to the divine? If we are connected to the Gods in this internal and fundamental way, does this mean we are also part of the divine nature?
You would think such questions would be fairly basic, but if you know me, either from reading this site or from interacting with me on the Hellenist sites (or other places) you also know that I am a firm believer in the mortality of man. If our connection to the divine, however, implies that we are also divine in some way, then I have to re-examine a great deal of what I believe with regard to human mortality. And if you know me at all you also know how hard that is for me. I tend to be stubborn, but I made myself a promise, and that is that I would follow through with this exploration of the divine connection within myself, even if it means turning myself inside out and my beliefs upside down.
So, the connection is there. There is no denying that at this point, and the Gods often make their will known to us through that connection. But what is that connection?
I find that I can only answer that question by asking more questions of myself, and then seeking to answer those before returning to the original question.
- If I have a connection to the divine in this matter, and I am part of nature (a given) then does not every other living thing have the same connection?
- Is that connection one of trillions, or is there but one connection shared by all life? This has fundamental repercussions for me, because this would imply, if a single connection, that all life, here and in the rest of the universe, is part of a whole (or perhaps each planet is a whole, which could make sense to me)
- This one may seem a bit off, but here we go, is the connection to the divine part of an adversarial nature between the human spark of divinity and that of the Gods? Mortal versus immortal? Olympian versus Titan? (I am going to go into this one a bit after this list)
- How should the exploration of this connection affect the way I connect to the outer world? This may seem rather easy to answer, but it can actually be a very complex question because we live in societies that demand certain things from us, and as a religion, we Hellenists do not have the same kind of support for the ascetic as do Hindus, for example.
So, the third one I mentioned sparked something in me, something that is not an original thought by any means, but which brings up something that may be important to me as I proceed.
According to one myth, the God Dionysos was killed by "Titans" and they consumed him. Enraged, Zeus destroys the Titans in a flash of lightning and from the ashes the heart of the God is rescued and the ashes are used to form mankind. This story illustrates that man kind is composed of two distinct divine essences, the Titanic and the Dionysian, which is Olympian by nature. Now, the Gods are, in my world view, eternal and the Titans of myth are, in my opinion, just other forms of the same Gods (as are all Gods as seen by all people) but this myth would seem to indicate that man came into being at the turn of things, when the Titanic world shaping aspects of the Gods were waning and the Olympian aspects were on the rise. The one essentially destroys the other, but because they are the same, the two remain and live on in us. Both the Titanic and the Olympian are immortal essences, and the earth, of which the ash itself plays symbol here, is not.
So, I am, we all are, partly divine in the same way that Adam is divine in Genesis by virtue not so much of his being created by God, but by God breathing his essence into him. We are divine not by virtue of being created by the Gods, or divine nature, but because we partake of their essence through the mixture of the titanic and Olympian in us.
If that is so, then mankind's connection to the divine is a in to mankind's connection to the tree, the grass, the deer, and the lion. We are a different order of life from the gods, but we are part of the greater whole that encompasses us all.
In reference to this, the question of how the connection works may also become clear if I understand myself not so much as an individual, but as a single cog in a vast machine. Physics, believe it or not, answers this nicely.
We are three dimensional beings living in a ten dimensional universe (twelve dimensional if you count the Olympian and the Chthonic as the two polar dimensions encompassing the whole cosmos) but even as three dimensional, living in the third dimension, we experience the second and first dimensions as well as the fourth (time), so we must be part not just of these dimensions, but essential of all of them because we are part of the totality.
Here is the connection, it transcends the dimensional perceptions we have, because they are necessary to our survival, and gives us an ability to look beyond the our experiences to a larger world, perhaps our very consciousness is a result of this connection sparking it to grow.
But there is a problem. This does not necessarily satisfy. It makes us all a little too unimportant, and how human would I be if I didn't think of myself as part of the best and greatest of all species? (oy vey)
My humble act aside, the connection seems more than that. Why would nature allow such a connection if it is not intrinsically necessary to our survival?
As I ask myself many questions I keep coming back to a conclusion I don't really like, an which needs to be further explored, and that is that nature allows the connection because we have an immortal soul that requires it.
Uh oh!
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