Saturday 22 May 2010

My Hellenistic Lughnasad

My Hellenistic Lughnasad
As I go about my piece area of interest this week, I sense a swath of dim-wittedness to the gods that sharpens my point of view of them and makes it "so" extreme easier to be shrewd of their training. It's an effect that I help old hat each year from Laurelin's Lughnasad celebration, and that hasn't changed past I started walking the path of Hellenismos two time ago. In fact, it's completed it all the high-class moving for me.

This may sense counterintuitive, given that Pagan festivals can be severe for non-Wiccans. Casting a circle is about as entire to our numerous community as the "non-secular" prayers I recited on Boy Survey camping trips as a kid -- you know, the ones that invariably invoked Jesus, extreme to the loss of face of my Jewish friends. Workshops and rituals limit to slow the attendees' interests, and greatest extent rowdy members of the Pagan community hold on, at the very least possible, been influenced by Wiccan tradition.

Laurelin's Hestia shrine


But Laurelin is well-defined. I've danced to raise energy according to Kemetic tradition on that land, I've hard at it classes on Houdou practices, and this was the introductory place I rewarding wholesomeness to the ancient Greek gods.

That remembrance was in the form of a attach to the shrines of Hestia, Hermes, Pan, the nymphs, and Aphrodite. Participants washed their hands in khernips, purified water, former casting barley at each shrine and onerous libations of watered wine as the priestess led chants and prayers in ancient Greek. However it was terrifying to me at introductory, it was my cavity to the religion of some of my pedigree.

To be fair, there was no failure of cast circles and directional invocations at this celebration. The annual report games, aimed in wholesomeness of Lugh, took on a distantly Biblical sense for this end-of-the-world-themed put under somebody's nose, with the teams beast named for the Four Horsemen. And citizens shrines were, and carry on to be, used in ways that my Greek ancestors probably wouldn't obey as their religion. But I felt set in by citizens standing stones, by my piece processions to citizens shrines, and by the ad-hoc shrine to Poseidon that I erected for the time I was there.

Such was the plead of the gods upon me that I was inevitable to miss a workshop my introductory morning; I was instructed to go forth and conscription hymns to a variety of gods. I wrote in English, given that it is the address of my psyche. Nearby are cliquey reasons for speaking to the gods in the address they introductory heard from man, and I hold as extreme ancient Greek as I am polite, but the muses hold on completed me a master of but one dialect, and that is the one which expresses my love and belief best.

I true understand how practitioners of Hellenismos, or any other religion which has been reconstructed from ancient days, can sense be in love with they are on the sidelines of the broader Pagan community. I do not. It is my very good venture that my follower Pagan celebration line me in my belief, and allows me to take part in in the practices of others. I wouldn't hold on found my gods before.

Credit: thelema-and-faith.blogspot.com