Celebrating The Wheel Of The Year As A Hellenic Polytheist

Recently I put up a fairly extensive blog post about celebrating the Wheel of the Year, not in a ritual or religious sense, but in a festive, family, and traditional sense.  I think I came up with some really good stuff, but for it to really make a lot of sense, I need the religious and ritual aspect as well.  The traditions don’t hold weight unless they mean something, and the most enduring traditions are the ones that are steeped in layers of sacred meaning.

The thing is, I am a Hellenic polytheist, and the Wheel of the Year does not really come to us from Classical or Mediterranean culture at all.  Honestly, it is a synthesis of Northern European folk traditions and modern innovations.  I do want to celebrate it, though, even though there is not an obvious Hellenic connection, because although my gods are the gods of Ancient Greece, I feel a strong pull to the lore and practice of modern Druidry, which incorporates a lot of modern Neopagan practices, including the Wheel of the Year.

Though I find a lot to criticize about Wicca, I do find the Graves-Murray-Frazer-inspired theology of British Traditional Wicca absolutely fascinating.  While it may not actually be ancient, I think it has a lot of truth.  And, for what it matters, the modern practice of celebrating the Wheel of the Year is steeped fairly deeply in this stuff.  So the problem for me is to figure out how to think of the symbolism of the Neopagan Wheel of the Year in terms that are relevant and that make sense from a Hellenic polytheist perspective.

Some of it writes itself: the Wheel is very wrapped up in ideas of birth-life-sex-death-rebirth, and in the successive cycle of kings and gods, which are concepts we find everywhere in Greek myth.  Artemis has obvious connections to Imbolc, and the entire spectrum of fall-winter-spring is clearly connected to Persephone, Demeter, and Hades.  Dionysus is a god-king who dies and is reborn.  We have sun-gods, we have Zeus and Cronos, we have gods of sex and motherhood.  I feel like the pieces are all sitting there, just waiting to be put together.

One concern I have is completeness: if I just stick one god or goddess onto each of the eight major holidays, I will not come anywhere close to a full landscape of what Greek myth and Hellenic polytheism have to offer.  And I have a sense that as a cycle, the Wheel should in some sense be reasonably full and complete.  That means that the different holidays and cycles need to be related to more than one god and to more than one myth.  I’m fine with that–I like the idea, even.  The trick is, however, how to actually go about planning and practicing it.

Probably the Hellenic Kin of the ADF have a lot of resources and ideas about this very topic, but unfortunately their section of the ADF website is protected, which means you have to be a paid-up ADF member to take a gander.  I think I will probably wind up joining the ADF eventually, but I’d like to visit some meetings first.  And I’d like to not be as strapped for cash as I am now.  So I plan on having access to that stuff down the road, but it doesn’t help me right now.  Fall Equinox is rapidly approaching, and I don’t really want to let another Pagan holiday roll by without celebrating it meaningfully.  I also am eager to start the AODA first-degree curriculum, but in order to do that, I need to figure out a little better how to integrate Druidry with my own polytheist direction.

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Worship And The Pagan Gods

I was a faithful Mormon for nearly three decades, and while I definitely busied myself spiritually, and tried to be close to Heavenly Father, I never actually wanted to worship him. Worship in Mormonism is problematic anyway: in my experience Mormonism is much more about trying to experience certain things, trying to feel the Holy Ghost. What that winds up meaning is that the individual personal relationship with God is one in which the believer receives from God without responding worshipfully. Instead, the appropriate response is supposed to be obedience and righteousness, not praise and adoration. I believe that true worship is an almost foreign concept to Mormon belief.

So when I tried to make post-Mormon Christianity work for me, and I didn’t exactly feel as worshipful towards Jesus as I thought I probably should, I blamed Mormonism. My Mormon upbringing had taught me to believe without true worship, I said to myself, and so it had stunted and retarded my spiritual senses.

I no longer really think that is the case. When I think of or experience the Hellenic gods, I want to worship them. I want to fall down on my knees and subject myself to them utterly and totally. They are gods and goddesses who are truly worthy of worship, and they provoke a response in me that is supremely and almost painfully worshipful.

It’s kind of odd, really, because there’s a lot of material out there in Neopagan literature suggesting that an attitude of total worship is not only not required, but perhaps not even appropriate. Much more emphasis is given to the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the gods: we give so that they may give. Utter worship and submission to the gods is treated, at best, as a lingering bad habit from a Christisn upbringing.

But here I am, and that cannot possibly be the case with me. I was raised sort-of-Christian (it depends on whom you ask), but in a tradition that did not emphasize the kind of worship that gets the Pagan stamp of disapproval. Wherever I learned to worship, it certainly was not in my own religious upbringing. And during my post-Mormon Christian explorations, I never really felt the urge to worship. So I didn’t get it there either. I honestly believe that my desire to worship the gods is purely and simply because they have revealed themselves to me as proper objects of my worship. They are my gods, they are real, and they are incredible.

Furthermore, the more I think about it, the more I think that the submission-versus-reciprocity meme is a false dichotomy. If a proper relationship with the gods is one of kharis (hospitality and reciprocity), wherein we give to the gods and the gods give to us, then what greater gift can we give but total worship and utter submission? Perhaps such a gift is not mandatory, but certainly a gift to the gods is not inappropriate because it is too great.

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