The Clouds of Winter

The Gods are with us, day in and day out. We carry them in our hearts, and even when their religions are forgotten, they remain in all the others that follow us as we make our way through the myriad turns on the road of history. As the clouds of Winter bear down upon us, we are often calling upon them to help us survive.

Yet as we have become so wonderfully adept at creating things, technology, means of survival, we have changed the way we relate to them. We have made of them a singularity, referring to them in ways that seem to merge them, yet the shadow of what they truly are always remaining. No mythic system, not even the most rigorously monotheistic, has ever actually been truly monotheistic.

That being the case, it means that we human beings have a means of communication with whatever life it is that we call divine. And as I return from the Heliogenna to my pursuit of Hermes, I have to ask if that is, in fact, his domain. That domain of existence that links one dimension to another, one realm to another, that allows for communication between that which is here and that which is there.

The Gods, and what a simple word that is, they must also have need to travel from there to here. But is that even really the way to think about it?

The Universe, Multiverse, whatever, exists as a multilayered onion. One dimension layered over another, the highest dimension, eternity itself, being the “space” in which it all exists. If the Gods are those beings which exist as pan-dimensional, then they exist partly in our dimension, just as we exist in the first, second, third, and fourth dimensions simultaneously.

So, that being the case, the power of Hermes is far more than simple communication, it allows us to exist. If it were impossible for beings to be in more than one dimension at a time, if he did not power the ability for dimensions to share information, we could not exist as three dimensional beings in a four dimensional space in an eleven dimensional multiverse. Could we?

Heliogenna Day Nine

Heliogenna Day Nine: The Final Day
Friday, December 25, 2009

Blessed Helios, shining ever bright
Today we burn our prayers to you
And prepare to dance and be merry
As you watch from above, we will celebrate you

Blessed Helios, shining ever bright
Today we drink and lose ourselves in hope
And dance with the Satyrs and Nymphs
And Dionysos shall lead us

Blessed Helios, shining ever right
Today we will live for the moment
And in that moment hold hope
That tomorrow will be fruitful and happy

Blessed Helios, shining ever bright
Today we will revel and party
And forget not the lessons learned
And remember you, our lord, who watches over us

_____

Today is to be like a New Years celebration. All giddy hope and excitement, drink, dance, sex, and a full on embracing of life and its many gifts.

If you have been following these little posts, I hope you have found them a pleasant experience, and perhaps you will share with me what you did to commemorate the waxing and waning of the sun in the sky.

For now, the days will grow longer, and hope is in the air, because Spring is not that far away.

Heliogenna Day Eight

Heliogenna Day Eight
Thursday, December 24, 2009

On this cold December day I come to you o Gods above
You who dwell in splendor and laughter divine
Grant us a year of light and learning
Grant us a year of prosperity and peace
Grant us a year full of love and laughter

I pray thee Zeus, Lord on high
Do not take too heavily from the pot of evils
But grant me a year of well being

On this cold December day I come to you o Gods below
You who dwell in the darkness of the Earth
Grant us a year of prosperity and peace
Grant us a year of bountiful harvests and feasts
Grant us a year of life, that we may live it to the fullest

I pray thee Hades, Lord far beneath
Silently watch but do not come for me
I will, as all mortals must, pass on soon enough

On this cold December day I come to you o Goddess of the Hearth
You who dwells among us
Grant that me and mine be guarded from evil
Grant that I may understand the world around me
Grant that I not hide from what frightens me

I pray thee Hestia, Lady of the Hearth
Guard me and protect me
But not so strongly that I fail to live this rich life the Gods have allowed me


___


Along with this poem, I am writing short bits on lightly scented burning paper to each of the Gods as I know them. A short wish, a thank you, a tiny poem, and then tonight when the sun sets I will burn them in a small wrought iron urn I bought. The paper will burn almost instantly in the flame of the oil candle I will set inside the urn. Should you be doing this with others, a good idea is to use very light tissue paper a kin to smoking paper, which burns quickly and does not produce flying embers.

Tomorrow is the last day of Heliogenna, and I hope if anyone out there has been following me in this they have had a good time of it in whatever way they decided to proceed. Think of tomorrow as the New Year’s blast part of this festival. Drink, party, hell, grab your loved one and make some noise, if you know what I mean. The Sun is returning.

Heliogenna Day Seven

Heliogenna Day Seven
Wednesday, December 23, 2009

The day is bright
The night is gone
The sun will shine a bit stronger today

Blessed Hyperion, Titan of yesterday
Father of Helios
Father of Selene
Father of Rosy Eos
Blessed be your name

The night is gone
The moon is setting
The days grow longer as we march

Blessed Eros, Primordial and vast
Who brings us together
Who loosens our legs
Who stirs in our hearts a primal need
Blessed be your name

The moon is setting
The sun is rising
Hope is now on the horizon

Blessed Hekate, traveller on dark roads
Who guides man in decision
Who guides the souls of the passed
Who protects us from horrors seen and unseen
Blessed be your name

Blessed Helios, Lord of the Sun
Who shines ever brightly
Who rides the golden chariot
Who spies the good and the bad
Blessed be your name

In hope I pray
In hope I seek
In hope I ask of you

O Gods on high
O Gods below
O Gods who dwell upon the Earth
Blessed may you be

Grant us all peace and good health in the year to come

Heliogenna Day Six

Heliogenna Day 6
Tuesday December 22nd, 2009

To Hyperion the Titan Sun, Helios the Rising Sun, and Dionysos the twice born, and Eos who watches the gates of heaven.

Blessed Hyperion, Titan now gone
Shine brightly in your deep dark home
Light the fields of Elysium for the brave

Blessed Helios, son of Titans
Shine now and forever
Look upon the Earth with your shining face

Blessed Dionysos, son of Zeus
Sit upon your Delphic throne
Grant us hope as we fall into silence

Rosy Eos, of the morning light
Grant us another day
To glory at your beauty in the coming light of day

In the light of day
In the hues of twilight
In the darkness of night

Never leave us to our lonely course
But shine upon us your wisdom

Never leave us to die
Save that we may do so in your honor

Now and forever
My love to you

Now and forever
My hopes I ask you make real

Heliogenna Day Five

Day five of Heliogenna, or day two on the three day festival, is the day of silence.

This is not to say you have to be silent, although I imagine that could be an interesting interpretation, perhaps a day of incubation in a cool dark room, with nothing but your thoughts and the Gods as company, but it simply means that the hearth fire is dark (do not extinguish the previous days’ candles if they are still burning, just do not light one for the day) and no incense is burned. I also offer no offerings of poems or prayers.

The reason for this is to commemorate the “Dying Gods” if you worship them in such a fashion, and to commemorate the idea of the Sun God entering the underworld, though that is not strictly a part of the Hellenic Mythos (it is part of the way the Sun God was often seen in many other cultures, both Indo-European and otherwise), and to commemorate the Delphic transition between Apollo, the God of Light and Reason and Dionysos, the God of Madness and the primal heart.

Heliogenna Day Four

Heliogenna Day Four
Sunday, December 20, 2009

To Helios, the light, and Dionysos, the madness, and Apollo, the enlightened.

I am coming fore
From a place of chaos and darkness
Into the light of day
Where the Gods watch over me, and the world is lit by the Sun

I am awakening
From the madness of the wine
Forcing me to see things anew
In the light of Apollo’s mighty gaze, where lessons must be learned

I am drawn away
From the might and wonder of Dionysos
Lord of Madness and freedom
To steal humanity from the beast that lies within

I wish, I think
That I did not have to awaken
That I could stay in the bliss of raw animalism
That I could drink and fuck and be wild for all time

But his light shows me the way and I am reminded of love
That what Dionysos shows me deep inside
Is what the light of Helios forces me to hide
That I may share my being with the world and not be ruined

Blessed Dionysos, Lord of the Madness within
Blessed Apollo, Lord of Bright Enlightenment
Blessed Helios, who lights the way that we may see.
Accept my humble offerings in thanks
Be with me now and always.

___

Today I make an offering to Hades, Lord of the Underworld, of death, and of the riches of the Earth. I choose to offer wine, water, and milk into the earth of the river banks, and in his honor will burn a stick of incense of frankincense.

I will meditate with the following, perhaps to feel a response.

Ευχαριστίες μου, Άδη.
Αγάπη μου, Άδη.
Τους δίνω να σας!

Heliogenna Day Three

Heliogenna Day Three

Saturday, December 19, 2009

To the Primordial Gods

When time was still
And the sure foundations of the Earth were yet a wish to be made
In the great chasm did the Gods arise.
Great were their movements
Splendid was their cause

When space had no meaning
And from the nothingness arose mighty Darkness and grand Night
In this brave new word did she spread her wings
Brave was her flight
Divine her dance

When there was no up or down
And the world was but a dream still so far away
From the chaos arose broad bosomed form
Strong was her countenance
Lonely her work

When there were but these Gods
And the world had yet to know the embrace of lovers
From the chasm arose attraction
Beautiful was his every motion
Irresistible his divine charm

When the heart was lonely
And the Great Mother of form needed a companion
From her own form did she birth him
Violent was his temper
Dark his mighty destiny

Great Nyx and Erebus
Blessed Eros, o beauteous attraction
Divine Gaea and Ouranos
We give you our thanks
For you are the sure foundation of all that is
And from the Chaos came our destiny
Fresh and ever changing.

Heliogenna Day Two

Heliogenna Day 2
Friday December 18th, 2009

My thanks O Gods above!

Blessed Zeus and Apollo
Lords Hermes and Hephaestos
Blessed Poseidon and Ares
Lord Dionysos of the divine madness that carries me away.

My thanks O Goddesses above!

Splendid Hera and Athena
Ladies Artemis and Aphrodite
Brilliant Demeter and Hestia
Lady Hekate of the three way path.

Bless me and grant that I may forever know your favor.
For yours has been the light that has shown me the way.
Yours the obstructions that have taught me many lessons.
And yours the delight in my often weary heart.

Blessed am I who in this last year has known you.
My eternal gratitude, blessed Gods of the high places.
And the many ways to reach them.

Heliogenna Day One

To Helios, Eos, and Selene on the First Day of Heliogenna 2009

The year draws closer to ending.
And the sun is ready to set.
Blessed Helios draws on the reigns of mighty immortal steeds.

At the gates the doors lie open.
Sweet Eos awaits.
The lights of the horizon grow soft and rosy.

Far to the East, Selene.
Her silver gown gleaming.
Her silver steeds aching to fly.

They ride.
Shining the light of the Sun upon man.
Granting vision and warmth.

The year draws closer to ending.
The days grow far too short.
Helios needs his day of rest.
To reawaken his power, his glow.

Down into the Earth.
Blessed Helios will go.
Down where the dead walk in loneliness.

But Selene will not forget us.
Her silver gown will remind us.
That soon he will return, triumphant and gay.

And Eos, ever vigilant.
Upon the gates will descend.
To open the way for light and warmth to come.

Along with this, I am taking myself over to the river for a prayer, which will be quick because it is only 20 degrees out there this morning. Tonight, a candle lighting and offerings of incense I bought at Santosha.com for this occasion.

My plans for Heliogenna this year!

Heliogenna, which I have celebrated for a few years now, is my annual Winter Solstice celebration. It is a modern convention, not an ancient one, but there is evidence supporting the celebration of the Solstice, a time of year which has seen sacred elements attached to it in almost every known religion, modern and ancient, in the world.

I celebrate Heliogenna in three stages, and the vastest of these is a nine day festival, with a three day version, but there is no reason it cannot be further shortened to a single day on the Heliogenna itself, the Winter Solstice. This is easy to do because I broke down the festival into three segments right from the start.

Following the ancient convention of the day ending with the sunset, and thus a new day beginning if one thinks of the day as a 24 hour event, Heliogenna begins with the segment Sunset (ηλιοβασίλεμα - iliovasilema) and the Gods of the heavenly realms, especially those associated heavily with stars, sun, and moon are honored. Here the Gods are thanked and the year that has passed is remembered and one hopes, learned from. Thank the Gods for all they have given or allowed you, and be thankful for the people in your life who have given you so much.

The second segment, called Night (νύχτα - nichta) wherein the darker aspects of the Gods are commemorated.Although this can be seen as a somber element in the festival, try to remember that the darker aspects of the Gods are not about sadness and evil, they are abut facing truth, facing mortality, and remembering friends and family who have passed. Remember their smiles, their contributions to your life, the love and feeling they brought to you. This is, of course, a good thing. But also remember the heroes of our culture, the soldiers fighting in the fields of battle, and the men and women who face off with death every day and win, and those who do what they can but fail, all the more heroic for their struggle. At the center of Night is a day, or a time set aside, for silence. This is the 5th day of the nine day festival, or a few hours at the center of the second day of the three day festival, and this is a time set aside to commemorate the aspect of the sun as a dying god. Gods who share this aspect are to be remembered, but not prayed to or made offerings to. Take a moment or two to be silent, to hold your breath, as the Lord of Light makes his way through the underworld before emerging once again revived and new.

The third and final segment is call Sunrise (ανατολή - anatoly) and this is the great celebration. Song, dance, fire, incense, and, my favorite, prayers on burnable paper with prayers of hope and well wishes burned on the fire and sent forth for the Gods. This is like a New Years celebration, making promises, oaths, and looking forward.

This year my plan is to do an 8 Poems/Prayers in 9 days thing. The plan is to do them as follows done one a day.

Day 1: To Helios, Selene, and Eos. A piece for thanks.
Day 2: To The Olympian Gods in thanks for life, light, and all the things I have to be thankful for this year.
Day 3: To The Primordial Gods, in thanks for the foundation of life they set forth.
Day 4: To Helios and Dionysos. The light and the madness. Offering to Hades, the lord of death.
Day 5: Day of Silence. No poem or prayer this day. This is the day of the Winter Solstice.
Day 6: To Helios and Dionysos, the reborn Gods. Offering to Persephone, lady of hope in death.
Day 7: To Hyperion the Titan, Eros the Lord of Attractions, and Hekate the traveller and protector.
Day 8: To the Olympians and the Chthonoi, in hopes of a future bright with potential.
Day 9: To Helios the Sun, watcher of the Earth, Bringer of new life and light.

New Theme

I have redone the theme for iskios.com, on which this blog is primarily read, and I am hoping for some feedback. Please let me know what you think of it.

The Traveler

I will begin with The Traveler.

Life is a journey. It is often said by our Christian brothers, that “God created the world” and often in our own mythos, we see that the Gods created man kind, but this is really a misunderstanding of what creation is. The universe was not created, it is in a state of creation. Essentially, it is being created. Likewise man was not created, he is always in a state of creation, of forming, of becoming, and if we see life and the universe this way, as that path of creation, then the Traveler takes on a much larger significance than we might otherwise think. The Traveler, whom we call Hermes and the Romans called Mercury, is a God of creation. Of moving things along a path set forth by others, and also treading paths that others will not.

Hermes as a Traveler is different in aspect from Hermes as Messenger.

One clear way is intent. As Messenger, Hermes is an Angelos (I see Angels as small aspects of the Gods that serve to interact with the mortal world) of the divine realm. A being who is but one small part of a greater force, a greater power, a greater deity. That Deity we call Hermes (without epithet) and he is a power of great importance to every man, woman, and child on Earth, because we are all in need of contact with the divine realm, and in his aspect of Messenger he is indeed a contact between the mortal and the immortal.

As Traveler, however, he is not in contact with us. This is an aspect we do not really see, because he is always in motion, always making his way from the realms of light and eternity, the the realms of darkness and dissolution. From the Creative aspect of the divine realm to the destructive. This is, in my opinion, the core aspect of Hermes, it is, in fact, Hermes himself. This constantly moving, constantly in touch, constantly aware being who, like Helios, sees all, but who unlike Helios, is always in all places (Mythologically speaking, of course) because he has travelled all the paths, and travels them still.

As a traveler, the God Hermes is a God of life. Life, which is a journey, must be plainly on his path. That journey we are all undertaking is part of his domain, not the life essence itself, but the process that takes life from one aspect of the divine to the destructive.

Reaching

I am reaching.
Reaching for answers to questions I do not know how to ask, and I am ashamed.
Ashamed, not of my own inadequacies, but of my knowledge of them which none the less leave them unfixed.
Am I not to know the truth of who I am until my day to pass has come?
Can any man know who he is if he has not reached the end of his journey?

What gift, O Gods, this life of learning and experience.
Experience that gives us little by way of answers.
Answers that broach new questions, doubts, and fears that remain unanswered until the day we meet our end.
An end at which we finally see ourselves, in one final moment of bliss, in all that we have been soon to be lost.

I am reaching.
Reaching because it is all I know to do.
Because without reaching, without seeking, without wanting to know, I am nothing.
Nothing which one day will look back in wonder and ask himself, what manner of fool were you?
What manner of man?

What gift, O Gods, this life of constant questioning.
This life that, till now, has seemed but a waste and a pity.
But one which has lead me here, to this place, standing before you naked and proud even as my own heart sinks at the depth of the ocean of questions before me.
A sinking which reminds me that I do indeed have a heart worthy of being called human.
Worthy of reaching.

In taking this time with Hermes...

There are three aspects of Hermes that I want to try to call upon as I try to work my way into his domain of influence.

1: The primary aspect that most of us are familiar with is that of Hermes as the God of travelers, of movement between places. This is important to me because I consider this whole exercise as a form of movement. Movement from the me that was to the me that is.

2: Hermes as God of boundaries, because I need to set myself new boundaries, new ways of thinking, and new methods of finding the boundaries in my life and recognizing them so that I know what my limits are, hopefully in preparation to exceed them.

3: Hermes as a god of sexuality. This is very important to me since my time with Aphrodite taught me that I need to think about it. That I need to place myself in a position to not act on sex simply because my body wants it, and all our bodies want it, but because I, the thinking me, wants it. I should not be lead simply by my urges, but by my conscious desires. Hermes is a god of sexuality in a way very different from Aphrodite because he is part of the youthful masculine ideal of sex and sexuality.

I suppose to many, the first two seem to be of paramount importance while the third seems base, but bot to me. Since the death of someone I loved many years ago, I have indulged myself in lots of sex, I have been careful about it, but I have indulged. It is a good thing, the feeling of it, the smell of it, the joy of it, but what I have only done very very seldom is allowed myself to love someone on that personal level. That romantic level.

Now, you might wonder if Aphrodite was not the one to go to to learn about this aspect of myself, but she was not, she opened my eyes to the problem and now, as I move forward, I must take that and try to bring it to bear in my meditations. To allow the God who is the lord of these very boundaries to give me the strength to break through them.

Reminder

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Messenger of the Gods

It is something of a contradiction to me that the Gods would need messengers, helpers, angels, etc. After all, they are Gods. But in my readings, and no, it is not just reading academic books on the subject of Gods, myth, and religion, but actually almost any kind of reading, since you never know where an idea is coming from, or who may inspire a new way to look at something. I have come to understand that there is far more to the idea of a manifestation or epiphany of a god than meets the eye.

If the Gods are these vast eternal beings, as I believe they are, then compressing down to a level of interaction as limited as the mortal must be an undertaking beyond our abilities to understand. After all, have you ever tried to get a cat to understand you? Not just obey simple commands, but actually understand the concepts in your head? It’s impossible. The paradigm shift between man and cat is too large, there is little commonality between how we see the world and how we see it to ever get a viable conversation going with us somehow coming to an understanding that we must put ourselves in their world in order to communicate with them because they cannot put themselves in ours. (the cats, that is)

Gods must face a similar problem when dealing with human beings. We are wondrous creatures. We are resourceful, intelligent, violent, capricious, yet for all that, we are still mortal, with a limited facility for both comprehension and perception. They are eternal, capable of knowing all that is and has been. They do not simply know things as we know them, these things are part of them. They flow and ebb through the cosmos like the waters of the currents of the ocean do around the Earth.

They have too a capacity to understand the myriad probabilities that make up our progression through time. They can look upon these and see, with high precision, what might be in ways we are simply incapable of doing. Yet, in order to communicate with us, they must condense themselves to our level, to our dimension of being, and in so doing cut themselves off from the grand picture. Is this even possible for a God to do? And before you ask, of course there re things that even Gods cannot do, after all, belief in the ability to do the absolutely impossible is illogical. If something is impossible, it doesn’t matter how omnipotent you are, you cannot do it.

But even things like possibility are relative. I mean, it is impossible for me as a human being to fully comprehend, and by that I mean to fully envision and recreate, the higher dimensional planes. We cannot because we exit in a particular set of dimensional planes, and as long as that is the case we are locked into that paradigm, locked into the possibilities those dimensions offer us. So, relative to our dimensional planes, and how those operate in relation to the rest, the Gods are restricted in what they can do. Mayhap an eleven dimensional being can be turned into a porcupine with the wave of a hand, but not a three dimensional (or four dimensional) being like you and I.

I theorize that when the Gods have appeared to people, and no, I don’t think they are constantly walking the Earth appearing in toast and trees and the moldy stains on walls, they do so as pieces of themselves. Do you remember the movie Meet Joe Black? (Brad Pitt at his most deliciously sexy, by the way.) Do you remember that he was death, and that death had come to earth to learn what it was like to be human. That death had incarnated as a human being, or rather, in a human being, in order to comprehend. He was asked how it was that death could be here? Did it mean death had stopped while death was on vacation?

The answer, of course, was no. Death explains that he is but a small portion of who he truly is, a shard, a small infinitesimal part of a much greater whole, and that he was here and there, and when he was no longer here, among us, he would simply rejoin the greater part of himself.

That is how I see the Gods appearing to human beings. It does, also, explain, partially, the idea of aspects and the way Gods appear so differently to different peoples throughout the world.

But what of messengers?

Hermes, the God of Messengers, and Iris, his brightly colored sister, are said to travel the worlds bringing messages to humans from the Gods. In this sense, this aspect of the God is like an angelos, an angel, rather than a deity. He acts as a helper to the Gods. But as a conveyor of the spirit, he acts as a helper to man, or perhaps to the underworld. Hermes’ role is that of a communicator, and so one has to wonder, is there something about Hermes, the deity, that is particularly well suited to this? Is it that Hermes, God of Travelers, mastered the art of splitting himself into little pieces that he might constantly interact with the many dimensional realms of the cosmos? Perhaps.

But I think, maybe, there is something more to it than that.

I mentioned in my little bit about Meet Joe Black that Death had incarnated in a human being, correcting myself when I said he incarnated as a human being. There is a difference there. One is the taking over of a life, perhaps through possession, or through the animation and keeping alive of a dead person. The other is a true incarnation. A divine spirit being born and living a human life then dying as all mortals do and returning to it’s original place or state of being.

This concept is not alien to us, the Christians believe God incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth, Hindus believe Rama and Krishna are such divine incarnations, and in our own religion there are demi-gods who are said to have been the “children” of Gods, such as Herakles or Achilles. Were these human beings incarnations? After all, when a God impregnates a woman, is he not leaving a small part of himself in her to join with her and be born as a mortal being? Was Herakles both a man and Zeus himself?

I do not know of any particular character in the myths that I could rightly claim to be Hermes incarnate, unless they are all incarnations of the divine messenger, bringing something to the world that did not already exist through his incarnation. (A list of Herme’s Family is here: http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/HermesFamily.html)

But what is it about Hermes that makes him especially suitable to travel the worlds? Why does he choose to fracture himself like this in order to be a part of it all?

Hermes Who?

Hermes.

To most who follow the Hellenic Religion, the Gods, like Hermes, have clearly defined spheres of influence. Athena is the leading authority on all things relating to wisdom, Aphrodite is the ultimate authority on love and sex, and Hera is the authority on marriage. But the truth behind all of this is actually far more complicated than that, and seeing the Gods in so limited a way can be problematic.

To some, the Gods are of an inherent nature. Athena is inherently the lady of wisdom because it is her nature to be so, that Apollo is the healer because it is his nature to heal, but that leaves me a bit cold. You see, the Gods appear in so many ways throughout the world, that I have come to understand that they are given their religious iconography, their aspected forms, through their interactions with us. We give them specific attributes based on their interactions with us.

When Hermes answered the prayers of the people for protection of their lands, their herds, their livelihood, they imbued him, in their prayers and devotions, and most importantly, in their art, with the attributes we know today.

This isn't to say that there isn't something inherent in this divine being we call Hermes that was drawn to particular things, particular prayers, or particular circumstances, but that the particular attributes we place importance in are, in fact, given to the God by the people, almost as a thank you, as they acknowledge the help and intervention of a divine agency.

So, who is Hermes?

Mythologies all over the world acknowledge beings that travel the worlds. Beings that make their way from the divine to the mortal with ease, not just because as Gods or angels or spirits they are capable of such, but because it is even their divine duty to do so.

In our mythos, Hermes is a child of the great king. Child of the highest of the Gods, great and powerful Zeus himself. He was a prince of the Olympian court and it's divine messenger. When a direct message was needed between the upper world and the world of Olympus, it was Hermes, or sometimes Iris, who was called upon to descend into the world of men to deliver it. If you look at the Christian mythos, the angel that appears to Mary to deliver the message of God that she is chosen to bear a child is like Hermes was to the Greeks, just as the being that appears to Mary and leaves her with child is like Zeus, who is said to take many forms as he interacts with women who then bear his children.

But Hermes went further. Hermes was not just an agent of Olympus. In many ways, he was also an agent of mankind, and, of Hades, for Hermes traveled not just between the shining world of the Gods above, but also between the world of men and the world below, the world of the dead.

Here too Hermes had what can be called a female counterpart, a goddess that traveled between the world of men and the underworld, Hekate, and it is here where we run into Hermes as not just some glorified postman, but as a true God, a deity who had a clear and defined domain. Here we see Hermes not as an Angelos, but as a Theos with duties to the divine nature of the cosmos itself, as part of the balance of the universe as we experience it. Hermes a messenger of entropy.

Lord Hermes, I call to you

Bright wanderer
Bearer of the staff
I am calling to you

Like the mists of time
Or the distant horizon
You hide the ways

Bright messenger
Light on your feet
I am calling to you

Like the lines on a map
Or the marker of land
You define the ways

Bright traveller
Conveyor of words
I am calling to you

Like the wind on the grass
Or the board on the surf
You travel the ways

Bright God of motion
Bearer of gifts
I am calling to you

So long, Aphrodite

From the moment a boy hits puberty, nay, long before that at a subconscious level, he is at the mercy of Aphrodite. Biology has left him sometimes trapped in a cycle of sex, lust, and love that can be almost crippling for those who cannot differentiate between these. Coming to know Aphrodite is something we all do, Hellenistos or not, yet the subtleties of Aphrodite are something we don’t ever come to understand because our culture places such an unrealistic expectation on Love.

Love, you see, is something our culture has mythologized and made almost magical. The cure all for many who spend their lives in a desperate search for “the one” and hope to find that perfect lover who will complete them. Big mistake.

But our culture also conflates love and sex, as if the two only happened together and any time they happen without each other we are taught that we are committing a sin. This too as a very unhealthy ideal our culture feeds us.

But worst of all is how lust, which is different from both sex and love, has been so pushed down all of our throats in highly contradictory ways. Lust, you see, is not really about sex. Lust is an emotion of desire. It is the overwhelming desire for something one does not possess, or someone one has seen and desires to have contact with.

These differences, and how they connect to each other in varied ways, give us the continuum of emotion that we associate with sexual intercourse, and these can be as sublime as love and as low as hate, yet they all lead to the same inevitable end, the union of people in the act of worship to the goddess of love.

But we all know that all of these, while they cannot exist in a vacuum, can be acted upon without the others. I can love a man and make love with him, and be enraptured by the emotional links that can form when emotion and sex combine. But it is also possible for me to have rough romping sex with someone whose name I do not even know, and the experience can be just as passionate, just as intense as the other, and in the act of “worship” the goddess is just as much there as she is in the other.

But emotions are always present. You have to kinda like the person, or at least have a deep sense of physical attraction to him, in order to have a good sexual experience, but emotions are spontaneous things, and they will come when they will, at her instigation, and when they do they can be a dangerous thing. Our emotions can quickly turn to darkness and self destruction, and jealousy, that green eyed monster, is seldom far from the whole sex/love complex.

But I am not a jealous person. It is perhaps one of the few things about myself that I think about and feel a sense of pride in. I feel that any person I love and loves me, is a wholly independent person, he doesn’t complete me, he doesn’t make me whole, he is a person, I am a person, and I respect that enough to think that I should have no say in how that person feels or acts, that he is free to be who he wishes to be without my interference. Sure, if there are decisions to be made that affect us both I feel I need to be consulted, but as individuals, we have to be ourselves and live life to the fullest both together and apart.

And I have never been one to feel a sense of sexual jealousy either. I know it sounds strange, but when I am in a monogamous relationship I am fiercely loyal, and if I am in an open relationship, I remain loyal to the emotion of the relationship but am perfectly willing to be a total slut. This is the Eros and Aphrodite complex in me.

Eros, in my theological view, is not the God of love, he is the god of attractions. From gravity to the subtle attractions between people, and this includes purely sexual attractions. And because I see this difference in my theological view I also see it in my life, or perhaps because I see this distinction in life I also see it in my theology, and that gives me the ability to distinguish between the carnal needs of men and the emotions that bind us. So I can have an open relationship with someone who, like me, loves to indulge in sex and remain completely non plussed.

For this reason, sex cannot be used as a weapon against me. If you are with me and decide to have an affair to get back at me for something, you have only bothered yourself, because you having sex with another will not bother me. What will bother me is your dishonesty. If we have entered into a monogamous relationship, I can promise you that I will never cheat on you, and if I feel that our relationship is one that is not good for me, I will end it before I seek out a new partner. I expect you to do the same. Don’t profess to want a monogamous relationship and then cheat. That I will not have. Let’s talk about it and decide whether to end it or open it up, but don’t cheat on me. That dishonesty will end the relationship instantly.

I have come to see this as Aphrodite the Warrior and Protector. She has given me a clear sense of what I will and will not accept in my lovers, and as a result she is protecting me, and the fierceness with which I stand by these ideals is her Warrior aspect coming to me.

All of these things have come as a long process of learning to understand my inner self, and Aphrodite has instructed me on how to do this not by hitting me over the head with a frying pan, but by simply showing me a mirror and forcing me to look at it and cry.

It is not a difficult thing to think about one’s inner self, but it is an excruciatingly painful experience if you look into that mirror and are honest with yourself. As Goddess of Emotion, Aphrodite seeks to help you understand what you feel, even if it hurts, and as Goddess of Love, she wants you to come to love what you see in that mirror, changing yourself if necessary, in an honest manner. Don’t turn away from the parts of you that suck, embrace them and then use what else you see to change it. Come to an inner balance, because that inner balance, that purposeful merging of your emotions into a cohesive whole that is you is what self love is about. In fact, that is love in its most powerful aspect. The all encompassing and pervasive love that so many religions in the world seek to understand. To love oneself, thus giving you the ability to share that love with others, is the love that Christians speak of, the Moslems say they feel from Allah, that Hindus seek in meditation, and that is the promise of Nirvana.

Aphrodite Ourania, the heavenly, is that love. She is that force that forces us to love, to lust, to desire and then to see those things and seek to understand them in an inner balancing act that leads to inner peace. And I thank her for teaching me these things in these long years gone by, and for pointing them out to me again in these last few months that I have spent with her.

Blessed be Aphrodite
Heavenly Queen of Love
Bless my heart with your presence
Now and forever more.

Happy Halloween

Well, this time of year is always fun, and it’s always really cute to see the kids in costumes. There is a misconception about Halloween, especially among the evangelical types, that it is somehow about demons, in truth, Halloween is about bringing to light and conserving the child inside. You remember that child, don’t you? The one that had fun, that didn’t consider what everyone else thought before acting, the one that loved people without considering what he could get out of it?

Yes, let your inner child soar this Halloween, and see if you can’t keep him around a little while. It’ll keep you young.

Closing my time with Aphrodite.

I am approaching the close to my time with Aphrodite, and as I do so I want to take a few days to think about some of the things I have learned from here in the last few months. These little blog posts are meant to force me to think about my life, to see how I can allow myself to be changed and made better through the influence of the Gods.

But before I get to writing my final few entries on my time with Aphrodite, I would like to take a moment to explain again what it is I am doing.

The star diagram here is how I have seen the image of the Gods during meditation, each standing at a point, with Hestia replicated a second time at the center. I started at 12 O’Clock and then followed the lines of the star to the right wherever they lead. So, starting with Hestia I moved to Apollo, then to Hera, then to Poseidon, and now to Aphrodite. This means, of course, that I now move forward to Hermes, a God I am not sure I am ready for, but that too is part of the process.

I take time, meditating, writing about them, thinking about them, and trying to fix their images, their aspects, their attributes into my mind as a way to formulate new thoughts concepts and ideas about myself and the way I relate to the world around me. I really do reccomend this kind of thing to anyone who feels they need to make changes in their life. It is working for me, and I am hoping by the time I am done, who knows when, I will look back at when I started and be amazed at how much I have changed.

Aphrodite: She who humbles us all.

Sex. It is the great equalizer. When a group of men are nude and the power of Aphrodite is flowing between them (They are all horny) there is a funny thing that happens, and it is not just about men, it is about all of us. They all become equals. Oh, yes, I know, some still have ots more money than others. Some have hot sculpted bodies and others are more plump. Some have big cocks, some do not. But this isn’t about the details, this is about the nude human being, robbed of all the trappings of human social status, such as the silk shirt or the Wal-Mart jeans.

Those men in this hypothetical (Let’s just call it hypothetical, OK?) situation are all the same. They are all human, and that is all they are, because everything else is action. They all start on an even playing field, naked, exposed, and desirous of lustful interaction, and then they all get lost in the acts of sex and there is no me, there is no you, there is us, and the power of a divine being who affects us more than any others, for almost everyone, everything, is affected by the power of Aphrodite.

In these moments of carnal ecstasy, we are all lost to her. We are all lost to the power of her touch, and we are humbled by it. You are no longer the alpha male, you are her plaything. You are no longer in control, she has broken through that easily. You cannot resist her, and that lays you low and brings you eye to eye with the rest of us. We who are human, trapped in a cycle of lust, love, and loss, and who yearn for it, even when we know it can be painful, and that too humbles us. That too reminds us, me, of how helpless I can be to the whims and powers of nature, and the divine spirits that guide it.

The dove as symbol of Aphrodite.

When Christianity grew into a church, and then into a conquering theocratic empire, they did so through the assimilation of the symbols and customs of the people they conquered and forced to take their religion as their own. In many ways, the Christianity that started in the lands of the Levant and grew to power in Greece ended up bearing little resemblance to the religion that emerged as the Orthodox Catholic Church of Rome, as by then centuries had passed and the customs of the Greeks and Romans, including much of their religious and cultic practice and belief, had colored the rituals and practices of the Christians. One of these was the symbol of Venus/Aphrodite, the dove, as a symbol of Divine Love.

During a great deal of history, the goddess of love stood much maligned, if still much loved, as a goddess of the pornographic, the purely sexual, the base, yet underlying all those things there remained an aspect of the goddess that held true, that she was also a goddess of the people, Pandemos the Greeks would say, or Genetrix to the Romans. This view of the Lady of Love as a goddess of the people is also a recognition of her aspects as Ourania, the Heavenly, and part of that was the recognition of Aphrodite as the goddess of divine love, of the subtler, higher functions of love. Those feelings that inspire sacrifice and the power to merge your wants and needs with another are powerful, and when the Christians merged her with their God, making him the source of all love, while conveniently stripping him of all the sexual, sensual, and erotic aspects of the goddess, they also merged the symbol of the dove, symbol of purity, of the purity of love, with his divine attributes.

But that symbol is one we too sometimes forget, that idea that Aphrodite is a goddess that gifts mankind with the capacity to love and love deeply. Aphrodite Ourania is a goddess who loves us, and we easily forget that because her aspect as Porne is so much fun, so divinely playful, and so overtly prevalent in our society.

But the dove is not a symbol of the romanticized love we see in Hollywood movies, that odd little paradigm we still teach our girls to buy into hook, line, and sinker that oh so often leads to disaster and codependency, rather this is a symbol of a much more subtle power that we all possess. The capacity to sense, deep inside ourselves, what is right and what is wrong based on our capacity to love.

You see, this capacity to feel love as it embraces other feelings, like empathy, fear, anger, rage, compassion, is a guiding principle in how we form our moral values, and it is something that has been perverted by the church to force people into a fear filled puritanism that I find disgusting. It is time we, all of us who worship love in her true form, as a distinct power in the cosmos, to take back our symbol. It is time we took back the dove and the purity of love it symbolizes from those who have perverted it into a means to control the masses with fear.

The Mirror of Aphrodite

As the most stunning of all female creatures in the cosmos, one can imagine that the mythic Aphrodite would be a rather vain creature. How could she not be with every man in the cosmos falling over his feet to have at her. But, does Aphrodite want us to be vain? Is that fact that Aphrodite is mythically portrayed as vain mean that that should be an emulated behavior in humans? Should man steal things because Hermes is mythologically portrayed as a thief by stealing the herds of the Apollo?

I have always wondered at what point do we human beings see the mythological portrayals of the gods as encouraging behavior or warning against behavior. But, when it comes to Aphrodite’s vanity, I have to wonder what it is that she is actually looking at in that mirror? Is she looking at herself and being overly proud of her appearance, or is she looking at herself and acknowledging a truth? That she is the most beauteous of all women. Is it truly vanity to acknowledge your own beauty?

Aphrodite would seem to be saying “Take a look at yourself and acknowledge what you are, do not hide behind false modesty, which is itself a form of vanity.”

For those of us who are beauty challenged, though, what should we be seeing in that mirror?

The Girdle of Aphrodite

In our myths, the goddess known as Aphrodite bears a girdle which, for all intents and purposes, is an instrument of magic. That magic is the allure of the sexuality and sensuality of women, not just their beauty, but some other quality that when properly exercised and displayed, can turn a man from warrior into a slave.

This we see partly in the myth in which Hera, wishing to seduce her husband asks Aphrodite to borrow that girdle so that she may become irresistible. But the goddess also goes to great lengths to prepare for the seduction, she bathes and scents her body, she makes of her clothing, her face, her hair the most she can, making herself beautiful, and yet beyond this she asks for the girdle.

One can rightly state that the girdle of the goddess is not so much an instrument of magic, but a symbol of the magic of the inner beauty certain people seem to possess. That, beautiful as Hera was, and how could a goddess not be beautiful, she also desired that quality that Aphrodite possessed to make men weep at the very sight of her.

Beauty, you see, is both external and fleeting. Time, work, and the mishaps of mortality all conspire to take what outer beauty we may possess from us, but deep within here is a bubbling beauty that so few of us ever try to tap into, and I have to admit, I rarely admit I possess, though others point out to me that I seem to have a quality about me, the way I walk, stand, talk. These are all, in spite of the fact that I am not very attractive on the outside, made me, often enough, a hit with the guys.

But the girdle of Aphrodite is also about something else, not just the exuding of sexuality from within, but the ability to carry oneself with a dignity that has nothing to do with sex. It is a dignity earned through a life of learning, experiencing, and dealing with all life has to offer, good or bad, and knowing that one can handle it. Call it confidence, perhaps, or pride, but it is a quality that the goddess lends us all, a quality born of our love for ourselves, even when we don’t recognize it as such.

In the myth, the goddess Hera does not disrobe to make herself alluring to Zeus, rather she dresses herself. The naked body is just that, a naked body, and after you have seen a few, not all that alluring anymore. Sure, when we are aroused, the sight of the naked form brings us to passion, but as a means to provoke that passion, that lust, that desire, is not a body clothed in a way that teases us, that presents us with a mystery, or allusions to things that may happen better? Is not that stud dressed in leather enough to make you hard? Is not that woman, gorgeous gown that accentuates her femininity while keeping you from seeing it all the more erotic? Is not the girdle that final piece of that puzzle, that mystery, that hidden treasure within that makes us want to touch each other, love each other, and fuck like wild animals?

The power of Aphrodite was never in that girdle, but in the way the girdle was worn, and in he way we accept the gifts of the Goddess of Love.

The coming season

Autumn comes, and with it the days of mourning for our dear goddess Demeter. Tomorrow, when the season comes, I will be running through a mantra in hopes of calling to myself her divine force into my consciousness.

But in these meditations I am doing, and the focus on Aphrodite which seems to be running forth indefinitely into the future, I am being forced to confront myself at a basic level, a level of which Aphrodite is divine warden. That emotional turmoil within me, which is within all of us, is also, or has been too often on display for all to see, and that is unacceptable to me.

It is not that I need to be a closed off person, I am far too closed off as a person, but that my control of my own emotions has too often lead me astray even as parts of me which were gentle and kind were kept hidden within me.

Yes, I am saying that I have been way crazy in my life, and anyone who has followed my words in the various discussion groups connected to both Hellenism and to homosexuality can tell you that I have been someone people have had to worry about in the past.

But thanks to the Gods, this idea I had to focus my meditations on a single deity at a time on a guided path that would lead me from Hestia, though the Olympian Gods and back to Hestia again has had a most positive effect on me. I have become a much more stable person, much better at conveying my ideas to others around me, and with the help of Aphrodite now, I am hoping to get a grip on my internal self so that maybe I can turn myself inside out.

What?

I mean that I want to take that gentle, caring person who is inside and hidden away out of fear of, what, rejection?, and relaese him so that he can affect change in myself and the people around me while I take that too often tumultuous, mercurial, and even a little scary me and learn to quell him and put him in his proper place in my own mind and heart, hidden away from those who do not need to see it.

More than any other, Aphrodite is forcing me to really look at myself and acknowledge how far I still have to go, and by doing so to find the right ways to deal with the emotion and fear that has guided me through too much of my life.

So, because getting these things out in the open is so often the best way to bring them to light and deal with them, I will try to explain some of them here.

• Exasperation: I am so easily exasperated with people because they do not have the means to explain to me what it is they want from me. It is hard for me because I am so often bewildered by the way people say one thing but mean another. I am a fairly observant person, but not when it comes to what people are thinking, and I wish people were a little more honest about what they want or need. But, I need to learn how to ask the right questions.
• Fear: OK, so, the way i talk and write I often seem rather fearless, but the truth is that tat covers up an inherent fear that I hold inside, a fear that I am never right, never smart enough, never good enough, and always inferior to the people around me while at the same time I know that I am usually smarter than most of the people I know. Why is this? Why should I have this feeling of physical inferiority while holding onto a feeling of intellectual superiority? I know I am not inferior or superior to anyone, not at the basic level, yet I am holding on to these fears that I am which causes me to hold myself back out of fear that people will see my inferiority.
• Desire: I have touched on this one before, that I have an inner life filled with sexual and physical desires that I rarely share with people I know because I think they will not understand, but also because I still have in me a touch of the puritan that is part of the general American psychological make up.
• Physical Self Loathing: I am fat. I do not have to be, I don’t buy into the BS that it is some kind of disease, I am fat because I eat more than I should and do not exercise to compensate for that, but I think I am coming to terms with the fact that I am fat for a reason, that part of me loathes me so much that it desires to destroy me through this. How I come to terms with this part of me is something I will have to figure out as I go, but in the meantime, I am going to have to do something about the physical manifestation of this self loathing, the over eating, and figure out its source as I go.
• Intolerance: I admit that I am rather willing to accept anyone, as long as they show me the respect I feel I deserve, but I do know that I have certain intolerant ideas and feelings inside of me that need watched, because I am fearful that they could lead me down a wrong path.

Later...

Sacred spaces and me.

I often think about the common conception of Aphrodite as a sex goddess, and I am also reminded of the dichotomous ide of Aphrodite having prostitutes raise money for the temple, a dichotomy because the Greeks themselves had ideas about the miasma of sex and how it affected sacred spaces. To have sex in a sacred precinct was considered a big no no, yet what of the Orgia of Dionysos or the Prostitutes of the Eastern temples of Aphrodite.

It is, and this is simply my opinion, that the conflation of the Eastern form Astarte and the Cypriot Aphrodite that lead to the prostitutes of the temple, yet the prostitution would not have been allowed in the temple itself, rather around it. In whorehouses, gardens, etc. that would have been owned by the temple, but which the Greeks would not really see as sacred ground.

I am forced to look into myself and consider this because we, of course, are not ancient Greeks. We live in a completely different culture that considers things like prostitution and even sex itself as bad, sinful, and even dirty. Is Aphrodite offended by our puritanism, or does she see it as helpful as a way to maintain a proper respect for her sacred spaces? Am I to take a good look at my both puritanical and extremely liberated ideas about sex and find a way to meld them into a state in which they can become part of the sacred space itself?

Several years ago, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to be initiated into a cult. It was an all male cult of the Celtic type, invoking the gods in a Celtic form, and involving several levels of initiation, many of the deeper levels of which he could not speak of to the uninitiated. What he described to me, however, was an ecstatic form of sexual worship that I could easily identify with the orgia of Dionysus (the ecstatic release of the mind free to act our sexually) and the erotic passions aroused by Aphrodite and Eros. Yet I found myself declining the offer, even though I am very much intrigued by things such as group sex (which I do participate in with care). Why did I do that?

I had always used the excuse that I try not to ever participate in rites that are not Hellenic in nature, but was I afraid of something else? Was I in a place, emotionally, that would not have allowed me to accept the sacredness of sex?

Questions that arise as I move forth in my meditations on Aphrodite, and which I find myself too often hard pressed to answer.

Little did I know

Little did I know
I would think of you so much
That your leaving us so soon would affect me so much

Little did I know
That the world would be a little darker
That the mention of your name would make me misty

Little did I know
That not knowing you very well was a mistake
That I would never have the chance to rectify

Little did I know
That growing older was about sadness
That the pain of loss was my fellow traveller on the path of life

Breaking from lust...

As a way to honor the Goddess Demeter, I am attempting to take a break from lust, and I have found it far harder than I thought. Lust, you see, is part of every day life for most men. Not being a woman, I can’t really speak for them, but as a man I can tell you that it is true what they say about how men think about sex, lusting in their hearts.

To our Christian majority culture, this is seen as a bad thing, but to me it is a constant source of amusement. The weird ideas that come to me as I walk down the street or ride my bike to work, or go shopping, are funny, and sometimes really hot. This is not an all consuming kind of thing, mind you, but rather the normal way in which I see the world. Life is about sex, believe it or not, almost everything we do, from children to jobs to our consumerism, have to do with sex at some primal level, and that is Aphrodite’s domain for sure.

This month, which I consider holy to Demeter and Persephone, the Two Goddesses of Eleusis, and while I know the Mysteries themselves have never really been discovered, I take it upon myself to honor these two deities during this time. One of the things I do is try to abstain from sexual activity, and this year I have been trying to notice and stop my mind from wandering in that direction, and that is just not very easy at all.

To that end, however, I am going to try and take this month to focus on aspects of Aphrodite as Ourania rather than Porne, and focus on her more emotional, soft, and those aspects of the goddess that do not specifically focus on our sexuality and desires. My time with Aphrodite does not seem to be ending any time soon. This goddess has a lot she wants me to think about, and because I see her power as so all pervasive in my life, I see now that understanding how I relate to Aphrodite will inform all I learn about myself and the other gods as I proceed.

By The Way...

Remains of an ancient cult to the goddess of love have come to light in the southern Golan Heights site of Susita

Click Here for Article.

Sacred Sexuality

I have been pondering the idea of sacred sexuality, and I have had some stumbling blocks set in my own mind by the prudish culture I live in. After all, Christian dominated culture, like so many other cultures, sex is a base, dirty, and sometimes even evil thing that so many Christians (saying Christian here because America is a Christian dominated culture, but this would apply to Judaism, Islam, and even Hinduism too) seem to almost fear. It is a strange and dichotomous thing, of course, because in the same cultures where sex is so prudishly handled, it is also a strong underground economic power house. If you think there isn’t a great deal of illicit sexual behavior going on in Islamic countries, for example, then you are fooling yourself.

The ancients also had their hang ups about sexuality itself, but sex itself does not seem to have been one of them, at least not among the Greeks and Romans. To them sex was a natural thing that everyone had, but there were matter of status, social standing, and the perception of “masculinity” that had to be considered when having sex. This could be, to those who were caught up in the wrong classes (the very high end and the slaves), a horror because for slaves, sex could be something that was constantly forced on them while for the very high levels of society, men and women were trapped in rather strict proscriptions of what was or was not proper sexual behavior. In the middle, somewhere, there was a sort of free for all where people could engage prostitutes, have homosexual affairs, and essentially fuck whatever moved without much fear of reprisal, except perhaps from a jealous lover or wife.

The concepts of “Gay” and “Straight” were not really defined forms then. People were not categorized, in general, by their sexualities as people were mostly free to partake of whatever sexuality they wished, the higher classes having the need for extreme caution and discretion. There were no gay communities. People did not identify as homo or hetero, they just did what they felt like doing.

One of the concepts that has come down to us through the filter of study, and no doubt partially tainted by Christian bias on the subject, is the concept of sacred sexuality. The field is not often studied, mostly because of the bias of our culture on the subject, but we do know that sex could often be part of a festival experience. That when our ancient forefathers practiced the honoring or celebration of the Gods it could become what we call an orgy of partying and sexual liberation.

But what is sacred about sexuality and how can we, as moderns, apply it to our lives, our worship, and our ideas about love, life, and the divine?

Allow me to say that there is a clear distinction between sex being itself a ritual and ritual evolving into an orgy-like experience. And to that add the fact that the word we get orgy from, orgia, was not seen in the same way, not defined the same way, as we do today.

When we think of the term “Orgy” in our modern parlance, we think of a sex party. People get together, they eat, drink, they have sex in a group which dynamically shifts and changes while it is alive with the sexual energy of the participants. In ancient times, however, the orgia was a religious activity which was expected not to be a sexual event, but an ecstatic event. When Pentecostals worship and go into their Dionysian talking in tongues, they are worshipping in a form of orgia. When celebrants of tribal religions in Africa, the Carribean, Brasil, and other areas heavily influenced by ancient African religion undergo what is called possession, they are worshipping in the form of an orgia. It is an ecstatic experience in which the human mind is elevated (some might say lowered) to a different state of being. In this state, the man or woman is lost in his worship. One can say that they are possessed in a way, moved by the spirit, the god, or the ghost that is being called.

In a group setting, in cultus, this kind of ecstatic unleashing of the primal aspects of our minds and bodies can easily lead to unbridled sexuality. The unleashing of the mind from the normal societal restraints leads participants into activities, not just sex, that they might not otherwise partake of, and here is where sacred sexuality comes in.

To me, simply setting up an sacred orgia because one wants to get laid is just an orgy, and if you want to do that, do it, it is fun, exciting, and an experience worth having, but don’t lie to yourself and say you are doing it for the god. If sexuality happens within the context of a religious experience, a spontaneous event, then that is truly sacred. That is truly inspired by the gods.

I admit to having often been carried away with myself in sex and once or twice lost myself in a kind of spiritual haze when I am with a man, or men, who touch me on a deeper level than just the physical, and that too is a kind of sacred acknowledgment of the bonds of sex, so sometimes it just happens to us without seeking it out, when we are falling in love as we make love, and that, my friends, is the greatest gift Aphrodite gives us all in the act of worship. The ability, if we are open to it, to get lost in one of the most basic of the activities of life and raise it to the heights of the sacred.

Quick Note

One of the things I really love is the comics medium. The superhero is our modern form of mythology, and in many ways I see it that way, expressing ideas about the world, human nature, and even the divine that are more subconscious than most of us would imagine.

So I started a Comics blog over at blogger: http://metahumanism.blogspot.com/

It’s mostly ramblings about different comic books concepts and my opinions of different series, but maybe you might like it.

Walk Along

Walk along.
On the pathway that leads to places you can't imagine.
In darkness not absolute.
Where sound and sight become one.

Walk along.
On the pathway that twists and turns unto itself.
In darkness and fear.
Where all your fears are made manifest and conquered.

Walk along.
On the pathways of the Earth.
In darkness of the soul.
Where you find yourself and rejoice.

Walk along.
On the pathways of the Lady of the Dead.
In darkness and hope.
Where the Persephone's labyrinth leads.

Walk along.
On the pathways that go full circle.
In darkness destroyed.
Where light is reborn to light the way.

Back to Aphrodite...

One of the things I am having to deal with is this economy. A person like me can sometimes be almost immune to these economic downturns because, to be honest, I have no money anyway, but I have also had to deal with illness, and bills from hospitals that I cannot pay and government programs that are supposed to help people like saying no to me.

I am not going to take up this space to talk about universal health care or anything, but I do want to take this chance to talk about my mental health during these times when everything seems to have collapsed around me. In the online Hellenistic (we need a different adjective to differentiate between us and the Greeks, who are traditionally Hellenes) community, many people have seen me go through some rather whacky behavior. I have suffered from depression and mild bi-polarism since I was in my teens, and it often showed in the way I dealt with people.

Even after finding the Gods, I was a mess, but then I discovered the hindu and buddhist tradition of meditation and prayer as meditation (rather than simply speaking for the Gods to hear) and have learned to create within me a level of peace that is very different from anything I have felt before.

I don’t spend a lot of time in meditation, I don’t practice it the way a Hindu or Buddhist might, but I have learned to use what I have learned of it to force myself to focus and think, often by invoking a God to guide me in the process, and over these last five years I have become a much more peaceful person. I have learned to be outspoken, yet more considerate (still honest though, because I try not to be too much of a fake) and at the same time how to control the rampant emotions that have caused me so much pain in the past.



As I try to focus my attention on Aphrodite during this time when I am on her point on the star, I am reminded that there is one thing I need to meditate on that I have neglected. Self love. No, not masturbation, but actual love of myself. Exploring the things that I find are worth loving about myself and why. I am not sure how to do this yet, but I have to explore it, because I am being pushed to discover myself, and if I can’t discover what it is about that is worth loving, then what exactly is the point of all this?

Blessings!

Shame!

The Gods are walking.
They are walking away.
We are not calling to them anymore.
Shame!

The Gods are staring down.
Staring down in disbelief.
We are killing each other over words.
Shame!

The Gods are listening.
Listening in horror.
We spew our hatred couched in words of concern.
Shame!

The Gods are hating.
Hating what we have become.
Bathing in the mud of a false religion.
Shame!

The Gods feel.
Feel our pain and anguish.
Feel we are lying to them with every breath.
Shame!

The Gods are.
They live and watch.
Perhaps ready to turn their backs on us for good.
Shame!

Plato...

Just a little interlude to share this.

Open publication - Free publishing - More belle waring

The Gods in Myth: Malicious?

Since I brought up the subject of seeking guidance from the Gods, opening oneself up to whatever guidance from them one might glean in the world, I have to ask a question here.

Do you perceive the Gods the way they are often portrayed in myth, as often malicious, short tempered, and violent beings who play with the lives of man for sport?

I do not, you see, and I tend to see Myth as interpretations of the nature of the Gods in a way that the ancient Greeks were capable of doing.

I see the Gods as a fairly neutral force in the lives of human beings. We have free will, so we are capable of choosing, and with choice comes consequence, consequence we must be willing to accept if we are to accept our free will and all the responsibilities that come from it.

But when it comes to myth, we are often faced with a view of the Gods that is a bit unsavory. All religions face this. YHWH, or El, is not really a very pleasant God in the old testament, Egyptian Gods are often odd in their behavior toward mankind, and the Hindu Gods are, like the Greek Gods, very mischievous. But i think most religions realize that the stories of the Gods are interpretations of a divine reality that we do not really have full access to. This means that the nature of the Gods, whether you see them in Judaeo/Christian, Hindu, Egyptian, Aztec, etc. terms, is one that is different from what we see in myth. That they act not out of maliciousness, or even beneficence, but out of necessity, which the Greeks called “ananke”.

This leaves me with a bit of a problem. I, like most, do ask the Gods for guidance, help, the occasional lottery numbers, etc. But believing as I do means that I know they will not directly grant these things. That is not their function. That is not what the Gods do, so I believe that we open ourselves up to guidance by seeing what the Gods do do in our world, and hope that i learn good lessons and how to behave in such a way that I will be led in the right direction.

Finding Guidance

You ever have things happen to you and rather than just have them be things that happen you choose to use them as signs from the Gods?

I don’t do that often, too often it seems like superstition, but after writing the previous post and having a nut tell me I am stalking him when clearly he is projecting something on to me (He even contacted a friend of mine and talked about me as if I were someone else, someone in his own mind, and he does not know my friend anymore than he really knows me) I decided that Aphrodite was telling me to open my eyes and notice all the frickin nut cases that are out there and how I really need to take the idea of meeting people with a grain of salt and with some clear precautions.

The Gods, it is said, use the world around us as a way to tell us things. I prefer to think that they force us to see the world in new ways, not that they manipulate the world for my benefit. Just force me to actually see it rather than see it through my rose colored shades. And I guess Aphrodite has forced me to take a good look at some of the people I have had come into my life in the last few years and be a little afraid.

Changes

I have made a few changes to the blog, which include a change in how the comments work. I am being harassed by someone, not sure why, but he has it in his head that I somehow owe him my friendship and attention, and I am unwilling to give it so he follows me and comments on me, changing his name or using anonymous comment posts. I can detect his writing style, so I almost always know it is him, so I have made it so no more anonymous posts can be made to the comments section.

I don’t get a lot of people commenting here, so I don’t think I am inconveniencing many people at all, but if I do inconvenience you, I apologize. Reading the blog will not change, and anyone can do it.

A Video Interlude

Seeking Guidance...

        Today I am praying for some guidance. Of course, this whole blog is actually about my search for guidance, but when it comes to Aphrodite, guidance can be a tricky thing. If you think about it, when you ask a deity like Athena for guidance, you are asking for strength, strategy, and the wisdom to use both. That seems straight forward. When you ask a deity like Apollo for guidance, you are asking for health and the where with all to be a healthy person, inside and out, which includes artistic expression as a form of psychological health. Straight forward.

        But, when you ask Aphrodite, you are asking for a broad spectrum of things that are all part of Emotion, Love, and the physical expression of those emotions which are so often sexual or sensual in nature that it is often hard to decide when something you are feeling is the manifestation of her guidance or a manifestation of your own emotional illnesses.

        We all feel emotion all the time, it is part of what we are, and Aphrodite, more than any other deity, is the force of nature that is that rampant and chaotic thing we call our inner emotional selves. But when you seek her guidance, when you seek for her to send you onto a particular path, how do you know which parts of what you are feeling are her guidance and which are just your own random emotions and thoughts? So as I try to ask for a particular path to walk on, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed here.

        So, what exactly is it I am asking for?

        I have not been in a relationship of any kind for a couple of years here. After I broke it off with Jim, I let a year or so go by before trying to get another relationship going, which was with a very nice but somewhat troubled man named Todd, and that did not end well. It did not end well because he was troubled by depression, something I have struggled with in my life, but he was not willing to talk about it. And after I told him I was definitely falling for him, he seemed to fall deeper into depression and I simply decided that I could not be his psychiatrist and decided to end it before I let myself fall into a trap of co-dependence.

        I always try to leave time between any kind of romantic relationship. I don't like to jump from one boyfriend to the next, I think it cheapens the idea of a relationship if they are so easily replaced. But I also feel that I am at a point right now where I will not be placing my expectations or bitterness about my last relationship on a new one, so I am hoping to find her guidance in this. I want her to guide me to someone I can spend time with and be happy with. Forever? I don't know, that might be a bit much to place on any relationship, but certainly someone I can try to make that happen with.

Now to decipher all the feelings and thoughts that come with that state of mind....

Shame or embarrassment?

So, what is it I actually feel with regard to a lot of my own sexual and emotional past? Is it shame, embarrassment, or simply a sense of propriety? I have been forced to ask myself this as I pondered the things I wrote in the last couple of entries.

On the one hand, I tend to be fairly open with my friends, and with you all, about much of what I like and what I sometimes do, while some things simply remain hidden away in me because I either feel embarrassed or perhaps because I feel that some things should just be private out of a sense of propriety. Others I hold on to out of a sense that I want them to be all mine and sharing them would somehow cheapen them.

Now, all of these seem perfectly normal, right? We all reveal somethings and hide others as a matter f course. We have public and private matters in our lives, but mine are a bit conflicting and often don’t make sense.

On the one hand, I am perfectly willing to tell you that I love to indulge in sex. Sex with a lover, or with a group, in totally random and anonymous forms as well as in loving unions between myself and someone I feel utterly attracted to. Yet if I do make love to someone I am really utterly and madly attracted to, meaning I could definitely fall in love, odds are you will get no details. I am perfectly willing to tell you how many cocks I played with one weekend, but if it was one with a man I was falling for, you would not know it.

I often ask myself why that is, and pondering such things with Aphrodite I have been forced to confront this.

I am perfectly willing to discuss romance as an outdated and often detrimental concept, yet yearn for a man to treat me that way. I long for it, yet I am not sure if I am capable of it myself. Not because I do not know what romantic behavior is, but because I feel almost like a phony when I try to put it on. Aphrodite might say if you don’t feel it, don’t fake it, but as a matter of propriety shouldn’t one want to put on these airs of romance for someone if there is genuine attraction there?

I am being forced to confront this conflict in myself.

Why do I feel a sense of embarrassment at emotion? Is it just the way we men are, or were, raised? Are we forced to hide too much emotion? And when we do show it, how much is too much? After all, I sometimes see some of these emo fashion victims crying about their favorite Idol being voted off and I want to slap them.

Yes, in confronting these things I hear the logical answer, if you don’t feel it don’t fake it, but don’t others require some expression in order to gauge your state of being and to understand you? After all, they can’t read minds anymore than I can.

Aphrodite is forcing me to face these things, to ask these questions of myself.

So why do I bring up shame now?

I will open up a bit here, I was brought up a Pentecostal, and part of me maintains a level of shame or embarrassment at certain things that that particular religious sect set in place. I was also brought up Puertorican and American, and often that has set up a conflict of ideas in my own mind with regard to certain things.

The idea that there was something other than “God” out there was always part of my life, since my own maternal grandfather was a believer in Santeria, something that we were not allowed to explore for ourselves, but which was never hidden from us. But the Pentecostal Church was a big can of nuts, and not the crunchy salty honey kind, the weird jumping around fomenting hatred kind, and I rejected it quite early in my life, even if I never understood on an intellectual level why.

As a gay man, I have also felt the enforcement of society’s hatred toward me because my sexual proclivities and emotional requirements are different from the mainstream. I have often rebelled against what I must have subconsciously perceived as the demands of a society that has always been very hypocritical about sex by doing things that I sometimes think on and feel shame about. Yet, if I think about my own personal beliefs on freedom of all kinds, I wonder why my own mind seems to fight with me on the issue of shame for those things.

I did, after all, grow up with a knowledge of disease that generations before me were not given because of society’s unwillingness to discuss sex, and so I have been responsible while at the same time being a wanton slut (a word I don’t actually believe in, but which describes how society might label me if I were a woman, for example) so as a man, an adult, I must not allow myself to feel shame to the point that I will not discuss these things, because when we allow that to happen to ourselves we also shut down our stream of knowledge and wisdom.

But there is still a sense of shame that my upbringing and culture have imposed upon me, programmed me with and made me feel.

This time I am spending with Aphrodite is forcing me to look at these things in my own mind and heart, and I hope that I can find the means by which I can reprogram myself so as not to feel shame at something so simple and natural, but to feel understanding of my own behaviors, those which have been natural and enjoyable and those which have been self destructive so that I might learn from them.

Shameless Aphrodite

Shame. It’s one of the most useful of all emotions if what you want to do is belittle, crush, manipulate, and control people. People who feel shame will do a lot of ridiculous things to cover that shame, and sometimes, the same we feel is justified. A rapist should feel shame. A thief should feel shame. A murderer should feel shame. But, should a woman feel shame at her breasts and hide them her whole life? Should a gay man feel shame and live in a closet his whole life? Should men and women feel such shame at the act of sex that they often refuse to talk about it or hear about it to such an extent that they are not educated about things, like Sexually Transmitted Diseases, that can save their lives?

No, and it is a shameful thing indeed that for thousands of years now, the Abrahamic Religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) have made it a point to establish moral codes that do very little to truly reinforce good behavior while castigating people for perfectly normal behavior like sex, love, and the free expression of emotion and physical affection.

These religions have all changed and evolved over time, but they retain these ideas of orthodox behavior, a kind of Borg-like conformism that I find entirely offensive. We love you, as long as you are just like us. We want peace on Earth, and that will happen as soon as we make all of you just like us. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.

But we see in Aphrodite something of a spark of hope. You see, Aphrodite broke the conventions of society. Women were supposed to be quiet, demure, not seen, she was bold, flirtatious, and open for all to see. Women were to marry and have children to whomever her father chose, she married and then fell for a man she wanted, regardless of what her father and society said. She did not feel shame at being caught, in fact, she was gorgeous in her captivity and even her detractors wanted her.

That is not to say that Aphrodite does not respect and expect propriety, but rather that she wants us to feel what we feel and be honest about it. She wants us to enjoy sex, to fall in love, to express our joys and sadness and not feel shame at it. She is not shameless, she transcends shame.

I like sex, a lot!

I am a man, after all, and I love sex. But allow me to share something which I have mentioned before, and that is that for me sex is not really a physically pleasurable event the same way others seem to explain it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it tremendously, but I think maybe I must be a bit different from most people when it comes to the physical sensations of sex. I don’t know why it is, but the intense physical sensation others describe are not something I feel, and therefore those are things I sometimes have trouble relating to.

However, sex is about more than just how your winky feels when you stick it somewhere. It is about an entire experiential event. About the meeting of eyes, the first kiss in the throws of arousal, the feel of a nipple under the palm of your hand, the warmth of a body, and the sounds, scents, and feelings, emotionally/psychologically speaking.

It is this aspect of sex that I love, and often enough, being the man ho that I am, those are things I experience with men I barely know, if I know them at all. (No worries, I am a ho, but a careful ho)

I am intensely attracted to the sexual arousal, the foreplay, and the inner turmoil of sex. And what do I mean by inner turmoil? I mean those feelings that arise from pondering your partners as you have sex. Is he loving this? Am I pleasing him? Are we enjoying this equally? Am I really into this guy, or am I just satisfying some urge?

Thought doesn’t end with sex, and all through sex, just as while I try to sleep, while I work, etc., I am thinking, and those thoughts are often highly disconnected to the actual experience at hand. What time is it? What kind of soap does he use? Etc. And these thoughts often bother me. Our romanticized view of love and sex makes it hard to know, often, what is actually natural during the act of sex, or love making, and we often beat each other up for things that are simply natural but which our society obfuscates in flowery language and crappy lyrics to bad love songs.

If I am enjoying a sexual encounter with a man, and a the current level of my toothpaste tube comes to mind spontaneously, then I simply have to laugh at that and move on, because sometimes Aphrodite just likes to toss wrenches in the works to see if we are paying attention.

Aphrodite The Lover

Perhaps the one aspect of Aphrodite I have indulged in the most is that of a sexual goddess. Aphrodite’s most oft depicted aspect is that of Goddess of Lust and Sexuality, and that may be because her impulsive chaotic influence in the cosmos filters down to us by way of our own physical impulses. These include emotions like love, compassion, and joy, but also lust, the one emotion we men struggle with more than any other.

I have said it before, lust and love are not separate emotions. They are both connected to a deep need for companionship and closeness with other human beings. It is part of what makes us want to be with a man or woman, be it for a long term relationship that blossoms into fully developed love, or a couple of nights of orgasmic bliss. It is all part of the continuum we call love. We human beings are enraptured by sex, it is part of what we are at a most fundamental level because it is part of the way life works. It is part of the fundamental nature of life itself, yet we men are particularly prone to the influence of lust because our society has always allowed us to indulge it. We have society’s permission to be sexual far more than women do. Yet even at a biological level, we men seem to struggle with lust far more than women do because we are geared toward the propagation of our genes, not only with a female, but with many females so that our children possess a vast variety of genes that can help guarantee their success in the wild world.

But allow me to say, that we men also suffer from another issue, we are also more detached from lust and love than women are, and in that sense, I think we miss something. Lust is a beautiful thing, it can bring about some fantastic sex, but maybe if we could better engage with our partners, even if only for that short time we are sexually engaged, we might have a better understanding of the reasoning, on a psychological level, for our actions with regard to lust so that we might better enjoy what we have, and maybe learn to make better judgements in how we pursue these adventures in sex.

Don’t misunderstand me, I am a strong proponent of free love, free sexuality, free sex. I do not believe in the horribly hurtful sex hating puritanism that the Abrahamic religions seem to espouse, but I am mindful of the fact that the Gods require us to examine what we do so we are not going over into harmful territories. Like the maxims says, Αρχε σεαυτου, Control Yourself, and Μηδεν αγαν, Nothing to Excess, and this must include our indulgence of even our fundamental natures.

Aphrodite’s influence on us requires that we see her as a Goddess of Sex, and that we recognize her power as we engage in that most sacred yet base of activities. If we are to honor her, we must learn to be good at sex, whether we be a passive or active partner. We must learn to be considerate of our lovers, be they those we love or those we simply meet in a bathhouse. Remember them as people, not simply sexual organs.

Aphrodite as a form of chaos.

In my last post I asked the question, might not Aphrodite’s power be made manifest in chaos?

To clarify something, when I say chaos here, I am talking about the modern scientific principle of uncertainty. A principle which plays a major part in modern science, but which most people, myself included, would have a hard time wrapping their heads around. After all, the universe, in spite of all its immense complexity, seems to work so beautifully, like a well maintained clockworks, but the truth is that underlying all of that is chaos.

In her cosmic aspect, one could extrapolate that a goddess that causes such chaos in our hearts, such turmoil, such pain, might also be a chaotic force that underlies all the beautiful workings of the cosmos. a chaos without which all that magnificent beauty could not happen.

The Greeks also had a concept of Chaos, one which is spoken of only briefly in the creation myths of the Gods, and in that case, the word Chaos actually means gap. Like the Northern concept of the Ginnungagap. This is not Aphrodite, this is not love, this is simply the primordial state of the universe as pure potential, from which all things would emerge. In essence, they were describing the empty cosmos, or perhaps even the singularity from which the cosmos erupted.

But the forces of chaos, and the forces of this powerful being who is made manifest by it, are all around us in every aspect of our lives, and we try, harder and harder, to impose order on it only to be rebuked by her. She smaks us down, forcing us to face that which scares us the most, that we are not in control of everything, that emotion and thought come, like the wild winds, and often topple us like old trailers in the path of a mighty tornado.

If Aphrodite is not, like her brother Dionysos, part of that dynamic of chaos, I don’t think I can ever truly understand her.

Aphrodite in Myth: Mother of the Erotes

In my persona; gnosis, my personal idea of what the Gods are, there are actually only a few Gods. That numbers around 24, but I never say that that is the absolute truth, because no man can ever truly know the absolute truth about, well, almost anything.

In my personal pantheon, there is a clear distinction between Eros, the primordial God that brings things together, like gravity, and the Eros of later myth who is better known among the English speaking world as Cupid. Further, the mythos also gives us the Erotes, plural of Eros, who are like little angelic Cupids that do the bidding of their mother and give mankind things like Love, Jealousy, Hatred, etc.

Cupid Eros and the Erotes are, to me, simply angelic aspects of the Goddess Aphrodite herself, as are most of her mythic children. The Erotes are kind of special, though, because like Venus, the Roman Aphrodite, the little Cupids have made their way into the modern world in many ways. Many of the Christian representations of angelic figures like Cherubs are clearly based on them, and in many ways, the modern idea of “God is Love” would render this aspect of the Christian God as Aphrodite herself. But that is a discussion for some other time.

The Cherubic Erotes are mischievous little creatures, and are often depicted as infants, with that lack of propriety, that lack of sense, and that lacking a sense of consequence that children of that age would have. They are like the most primal aspects of Aphrodite, sheer unfiltered emotion, and that is something we are all familiar with, because like these little Erotes, emotion comes and plays havoc with us and then goes upon its merry way.

The little Erotes are Aphrodite as she manifests in all of our little emotions, the vast complexity of which make us all what we are.

The Erotes are emotion. Not just what we human beings generate and feel, but that which is manifest in the cosmos itself. Thoughts and emotions are spontaneous in us, and often we ask ourselves where do they come from? I believe we humans generate them ourselves, but the very existence of emotion is due to the manifestation in our universe of the power of Aphrodite.

Emotion is also chaotic. Spontaneity is, by its very nature, a chaotic process, one which is inherent to our universe from the most base to the most expansive of its aspects, and as such I have to wonder if this does not make Aphrodite herself part of the primordial (basic) functions of the cosmos.

That would seem an easy enough question to answer, after all, aren’t all Gods part of the basic function of the cosmos? Yes, but I am talking about the Primordial aspects of the cosmos, the elemental structure of the universe. If Eros’ power is manifest in gravity, and Ge’s in matter, then might not Aphrodite’s be manifest in chaos? Might her power not be part of what we call quantum uncertainty?

Just a question for you to ponder.