“Walk The Line” – Johnny Cash
“All Along The Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix Experience
“L.A. Woman” – The Doors
“As Time Goes By” – Jimmy Durante
“Take On Me” – A-Ha
“Holy Diver” – Dio
“Stairway To Heaven” – Led Zeppelin
“The Number Of The Beast” – Iron Maiden
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division
“Wish You Were Here” – Pink Floyd
“Have You Ever Seen The Rain” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Let It Be” – The Beatles
“A Few Hours After This” – The Cure
“Battle Against Time” – Wintersun
I have decided to celebrate Samhainn–opening my year as a Druid Apprentice–with a rite honoring Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. It seems appropriate since not only is Samhainn traditionally a time to celebrate the dead, when the gates of the underworlds are thrown open and the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead are thinner, but it is also a celebration of the harvest (the final harvest!). And coincidentally, it also can be conceptualized as the threshold between fall and winter, which in Greek Mythology is the time when Persephone leaves her mother Demeter and goes to reign in the underworld with her husband, Hades. Demeter’s grief at the loss of her daughter inaugurates winter, when plants turn brown and die and the earth goes cold, and it stays that way until Persephone returns in the spring, bringing with her the rebirth of the living world.
Unfortunately one of my main resources for prayers honoring the Hellenic gods is now lost for all time thanks to the death of Geocities, so I don’t really have a prayer honoring Hades, and I am having a hard time writing one. I’m sure this bottle of Jaegermeister next to me isn’t helping, but I just don’t know enough about Hades to write a decent prayer to him.
So I’m stuck, and cranky. And tipsy, I guess. I think I’m going to play video games online with my brother and worry about this tomorrow. Of course, the problem with that attitude is that I plan on celebrating Samhainn on Sunday, and Sunday keeps getting closer. I mean, if all else fails, I guess I can always just come up with a sort of impromptu invocation, and that’s probably what nI’m going to wind up doing. So the whole thing isn’t foiled; I’m just feeling irritatingly uncreative. Maybe I should try to pray to Hades before Sunday, and ask for a bit of his dread underworld inspiration. I mean, if anyone knows how Hades wants to be honored, it would probably be Hades, right?
I do have a lot of other cool stuff planned for the holiday, but this rite is sort of supposed to be the fulcrum of the whole thing, and celebrating the Wheel of the Year is supposed to be a part of my AODA First-Degree Druid curriculum, so it is kind of important to me.
On the other hand, I did manage to be creative to write a New Eleusinian Mystery Rite. It’s fairly awesome, and contains the secrets of life, death, and immortality, but I don’t know anyone who I can initiate who can then turn around and initiate me. And what’s the point of having initiatory mysteries that nobody gets initiated into? And it’s not really the kind of thing you can initiate yourself into, either.
Posted in Spirituality | Tagged ADF, Alcohol, Ancient Order of Druids in America, AODA, Apples, Autumn, Celebration, Celtic New Year, Ceres, Creativity, Cross-Quarter Days, Death, Druidry, Earth, Eleusinian Mysteries, Fall, Geocities, God, Goddess, Gods, Greek Mythology, Hades, Halloween, Harvest, Hellenic Polytheism, Immortality, Initiation, Internet, Jaegermeister, Life, Liturgy, Marriage, Motherhood, Mystery Religion, Mystery Rite, Myth, Mythology, Nature, Neopaganism, New Eleusinian Mysteries, New Year, Paganism, Persephone, Plants, Pluto, Polytheism, Prayer, Proserpine, Religion, Rite, Ritual, Samhain, Samhainn, Samhuinn, Spirituality, Spring, Sunday, Theism, Underworld, Wheel of the Year, Winter | 8 Comments »
Sponde!, an excellent and user-friendly introduction to Hellenic polytheism as a living faith, is back online again at a new site. If you are interested in a hands-on approach to the gods and goddesses of ancient Hellas, it is an excellent first step. It has my stamp of approval, for what its worth, and I have duly updated my links page.
Posted in Spirituality | Tagged Ancient Greece, Faith, God, Goddess, Goddesses, Gods, Greek Mythology, Hellenic Polytheism, Hellenismos, Internet, Paganism, Polytheism, Religion | Leave a Comment »
The other day, my little boy brought me a clay pot that he had planted a seed in awhile ago and he was concerned that nothing had ever grown in it (it had, but unfortunately we have a mischievous cat that likes to pick at and eat young growing things). I realized that we had a bunch of pots and seeds that we had never used, so he and I decided to just go ahead and plant everything.
So we took down a handful of red clay pots, got out our half-full bag of potting mix, and our packets of seeds, and just kind of started planting. We’re moving soon, so it is not certain that these seeds are going to amount to anything–even if we manage to take them with us, they won’t necessarily survive the trip. But it was an intense reminder of how much I long to be connected to the cycles of life and death and nature and growing things.
I’m not much of a gardener, but for at least a couple of years I have had the unshakable instinct that I need to be. Something inside of me desperately craves a connection to the living world, even if I’m a big-city-lawyer. If I do not get it, I am certain that I will go insane.
It;s not practical for me (for us) to just run away to the backwoods and become self-sufficient subsistence farmers, even though I fantasize about it all the time. I have a mountain of debt from law school that’s only going to get paid off by slaving away in the Biglaw Law Mines. And I’m not unhappy about it, to be honest with you–I am fortunate in that I have found an area of the law to practice that I genuinely enjoy. But I am intensely aware that I am going to need to be connected to nature and to growing things, even as a busy urban professional.
I have big dreams for our new place in Chicago–I’ve been poring over my book (a christmas gift last year from my beautiful and sexy wife) The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City and getting all kinds of ideas for projects, depending on how much space and how much access we have to the outside we wind up having when we get to Chicago. But I can’t wait that long: even if planting now is a fool’s errand, it was something I had to do (and it was an awesomely fun way to spend the morning with my three-year-old as well). So we have pots of spinach, rosemary, and sage sitting on our windowsill, where the little monster-cat hopefully can’t get at more than one of them.
We’ll see how it turns out, but in any case, this is definitely a taste of things to come.
Posted in Farming, Spirituality | Tagged Agriculture, Biglaw, Cats, Chicago, Children, Debt, Economics, Family, Farming, Food, Gardening, Instinct, Law, Law School, Marriage, Mental Health, Mini-Farming, Nature, Parenting, Planting, Plants, Rosemary, Sage, Spinach, Spirituality, Urban Homesteading | Leave a Comment »
Here’s a picture of our shrine to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and arguably the central focus of Hellenic pagan household worship.

Yes, in case you were wondering, it’s just a tart burner from Yankee Candle. The trend in modern Hellenic polytheism, as far as I understand, is to put a shrine to Hestia in the kitchen if your home doesn’t actually have a hearth. For some homes, that might make sense, but for mine it doesn’t really, as the kitchen is not the center of our home life (it is sort of tucked-away).
My shrine is humble, not flashy. It doesn’t burn all the time like maybe it’s supposed to (tealights have kind of a short lifespan). But every morning I light it and offer a quick but sincere prayer to Hestia to honor her and to ask for light, life, love, a happy home, and a happy family, and every evening (at least when I remember) I put my hand on it–by that time, it probably isn’t burning anymore–and offer my thanks to her for those same things. It may not be orthopraxy, and I might even be accused by the particularly rigid of insufficient piety, but it feels right, and it feels good.
In our next home, I would like to have an actual hearth with a fireplace, but I imagine our shrine to Hestia there won’t actually be much different. The tart burner is a flame, after all, and one that is practical and simple to light every day (if not keep lit all the time), and the wax potpourri tart fills the home with comforting smells, helping to make it an inviting, comfortable place. We’ve talked about getting a series of tart burners, to change them out through the course of the seasons, and that would be nice. I also think I might spruce the shrine up a bit with a votive offering or two and some shrine-y decorations. But at the center will still be the tart burner, a humble reminder of the good things that home and family have to offer.
Posted in Spirituality | Tagged Candles, Deity, Family, Fire, Flame, Goddess, Greek Mythology, Hearth, Hellenic Polytheism, Hellenismos, Hestia, Home, Impiety, Kitchen, Light, Marriage, Neopaganism, Orthopraxy, Paganism, Piety, Polytheism, Prayer, Shrine, Vesta, Worship, Yankee Candle | 2 Comments »
Today is Thursday, which means it is my day to pray to and worship Aphrodite (though truth be told, I pray to and worship Aphrodite much more often than just on Thursdays). Today I spent time meditating on the birth of the goddess, and then I offered my typical prayers, hymns, and offerings. When I was finished, it occured to me to do a tarot reading about my relationship with the goddess, so I sat down with my cards, I invoked Apollo as the god of oracles and prophecy, and I asked for the cards to reveal to me the nature of my relationship with the goddess, past, present, and future. This was the spread I laid out:

(In case those links ever expire, those are the Ten of Cups reversed, the Page of Wands reversed, and the Nine of Swords).
Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of it. The first card, the reversed Ten of Cups, makes sense. After my initial contact with the goddess, which blew me away and filled me with warmth, light, and love, my continued spiritual floundering has left the fulness of spiritual joy represented by the Ten of Cups, that I feel can be available to me through Aphrodite, has been truncated and stunted. My own hemming and hawing, whatever my reasons, has kept me from having the joy in the goddess that I might otherwise have had. Nothing odd or unexpected there.
Its the reversed Page of Wands and the Nine of Swords that have me troubled. The Page came up ecently in an extremely important reading I did for myself, and at the moment I am sort of getting ready to embark on a path of (spiritual) action: a very definite journey of spiritual work that I think the Page represents. So why is he reversed? Am I doing something wrong?
And the Nine of Swords? What does that mean? That my Page-of-Wands journey is ill-considered and abortive and will lead to regret and hearbreak, at least as far as the goddess is concerned? Or is the whole thing a warning? Could it not be saying that my present quest is in fact corrupted and askew, but that if I do embark on it like I have planned, but then I let it fall by the wayside, if I am lazy about it, then it will end in sorrow and tragedy, and a possible loss of relationship with the goddess altogether?
In other words (because I know I am being cryptic and confusing), is the reading telling me something definite or conditonal? Is it warning me that my present course is distorted and cowardly, and will result in anguish, or is it warning me that if I veer from my present course–reverse the Quest, in other words–that it will lead to anguish? It seems a bit vague about something that is kind of important.
Posted in Spirituality, Tarot | Tagged Action, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apollon, Cups, Divination, Emotion, Future, Goddess, Hellenic Polytheism, Light, Lucifer, Mind, Past, Prayer, Present, Quest, Reversal, Sacrifice, Spirit, Spirituality, Swords, Tarot, Ten of Cups, Venus, Wands, Worship | 2 Comments »
My Little Boy: “Mommy, I have to wash my hand.”
My Beautiful And Sexy Wife: “Why?”
My Little Boy: “Because I peed all over it.”
Posted in Life | Tagged Children, Family, Humor, Hygeine, Marriage, Potty, Urine | Leave a Comment »
America has been made safer today thanks to the valiant efforts of the Transportation Safety Officers at LAX airport. It turns out that today’s permutation of the ever-changing FAA security regulations say that liquids have to be in containers holding 3.4 ounces or less. In an obvious evil plot, I tried to openly carry on a bottle of Aqua Velva in my transparent ziploc bag of personal hygeine liquids that measured an insidious 3.5 ounces.
I was generously offered the option to check my bag instead (which now costs $20 per bag) but I told him to “just fucking throw it away.” Apparently that’s not an option though, and he had to test it first, before he would give me back my stuff.
The best part though was how my belt was in the same tray as my bag of liquids. When I reached for it, the man actually grabbed it out of my hands and took it from me. I was flabbergasted. So I had to just stand there with my pants falling down, bereft of dignity, while this Real American Hero tested my frighteningly 0.1-ounce-oversize bottle of aftershave that I was not going to be able to take on the plane anyway, to make sure it was not a bottle of Liquid Evil.
When he finally came back to give me my other safely-3.4-ounce-or-less liquids and my belt, I gave him a “way to keep America safe from Aqua Velva” salute, put on my belt, and went on my way, feeling pissed off and helpless.
This is not security; this is security theater. This does not in any way make us safer; it just makes us irritable and late for our planes.
Fuck Congress. Fuck the FAA. Fuck the assholes who work for the TSA. Fuck the cowardly terrorist pieces of shit who make this kind of bullshit possible. And fuck each and every one of us for being so completely fucking spineless that we’re willing to trade our dignity so we can pretend we’re somehow safer.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Airport Security, Congress, FAA, Regulations, Terrorism, Travel, TSA | 3 Comments »
