badstar

Just posed this over at the blog

Marsayas, After the Contest

You cut to kill, but I may yet survive
and if I do, you've given me much to consider.
Laid bare to blood-drenched muscle,
every movement, every slight breeze
sears my nerves with fresh pain.

If I die, surely it will be of agony, not injury.

I don't think you will be wearing my hide;
such is undoubtedly well beneath you.
Though perhaps someday I will wear yours:
not in death- for you, there is none
but if someday you shed your skin
like you shed a tear, molting like a snake,
if I should come along at just the right time,
I would seize it up and wrap it around me-
could I then be you, for just a moment
before your essence is lost?

Yes, I am delirious.

You may think me a fool to challenge a god,
but even if I die today, I will be immortal.

so I've had this idea kicking around for a few days and am thinking more and more of details of how to approach it and I think I'm starting to zero in a bit more on what to do.

Basically, I've been considering my fascination with random, usually fairly obscure deities who have little to no mythology and sometimes not more than a few cursory mentioned in ancient texts. I see a name, a few lines of information, and I want to know more but...there is no more, so I sometimes ponder what their mythology may be like and what stories there might be.

So...that's the project. Writing about what their stories might have been. Speculative Mythology is the term that's formulated in my brain.

For this and a couple of other things, I think I'm going to start a second blog, to keep Pain and Light a devotional blog for Apollo.

Watch this space for details.

Speaking of which, I have a new post over at http://painandlight.wordpress.com

On Tuesday evening, I was walking to the train to go to work. From where I was to the nearest train stop was about a twenty-minute walk. When I had last glanced out a window before leaving where I was, the sky was clear with jsut a few clouds. In the twenty minutes or so from that point until I got outside, the sky had suddenly become heavy with very dark, ominous clouds- large patches of a very green tint to many of them suggested strong tornado potential- though that didn't bother me too much, since it is a fairly rare thing for tornadoes to touch down within large cities. The clouds though were pretty impressive. I tried to take some pictures with my cell phone camera but they didn't come out very well. There was this one large swirl of clouds that curved across the sky like an immense, sweeping arm- that and another cloud formation that I can't really easily describe also looked like strong indicators of tornado potential.

But beyond that...well, I've never really gotten a sense of Zeus before, and I had this sudden "knowing" that he was behind all this- it didn't feel anything like what I feel in the presence of the gods that are more familar to me, like Apollo, Hermes or Dionysus- I can only really describe it as feeling as if there was a distant, over-arching sentience to the sky, and one of the thoughts I had was that the long, sweeping arm of clouds that I saw was one of Zeus's arms.

The last stretch of my walk to the train stop took me down a long, winding hill which was rather busy with traffic at the time, and rain was starting to fall and I didn't have an umbrella on me, and REALLY didn't want to be stuck out in the sort of rain that was on the way. So I did the best thing I could think of- I had a drink in my backpack side pocket, pulled that out, and poured a bit out, asking him to let me get to the train stop- or at the very least to the bridge before it (the walk to that train stop takes me under a raised section of Interstate 83 and over a stream it's pretty cool, so that's either six or eight lanes of highway there, can't remember exactly- provides considerable shelter. I was about a hundred feet from there when the rain started to get heavier and just made it as it really started pouring. Thankfully, l I only had to wait a few minutes before it let up and I could continue to the train stop, another fifty yards away or so. Thunder, lightning and the occasional splatter of rain continued and trains going in my direction were rather heavily delayed for reasons unknown to me, but only for a brief few minutes did I have to duck under an overhang again, and for a decent chunk of the time, I was able to talk to Gavin on the phone. Unfortunately, while I was sitting at the train stop, most of this had left my head on all but a very basic intellectual level and in the midst of training a new guy at work and being ridiculously tired for a few days, I forgot about all this until I was on my way back to work this gorgeous, sunny afternoon, and I wrote this:


Hail Zeus, Labrandeus, whose furious storms race across the sky!
Hail Zeus, Skotitos, whose swirling clouds gather and darken the sky!
Hail Zeus, Keraunios whose crashing thunder echoes through the sky!
Hail Zeus, Astrapaios whose flash of lightning tears the sky!
Hail Zeus, Ombrios whose falling rain pours down from the sky!
Hail Zeus, Euenemos whose fair winds come again to clear the sky!

I will sing of the earth-shaking Poseidon, son of Cronus, brother of Thundering Zeus. Dark-haired mighty land-rumbler, your quakes cause the mountains to be born, their jagged new peaks thrusting towards the sky while old ones shatter and fall. Great Lord of the sea which dashes against rocky cliffs and laps the sandy shore, your strength can crush a ship to splinters or cradle it upon your rolling waves.

It is in your honor that voyagers make sacrifice, that you may protect them as they cross your vast expanses and with your blessings, colonists sent forth by the Far-Shooter may reach new lands unharmed.

Hail to you, Poseidon, who rules the harsh and gentle seas! I pray that you will grant honor to my song.



Just wrote this one today. It's been a while since I wrote one of these. I've got a decent start on one for Dionysus too I think.

Charles is hellbent on me teaching a class at Ecumenicon on something or other Hellenic. Preferably, it seems, related to the Homeric hymns (this came up back in October after he saw some of the ones I'd written) and current;y has two time slots reserved for me.

Eep. Two. When I was talking to him before, he was talking about doing this for the 2009 conference. I had later emailed him with a different idea that was more apropos to the conference theme, he liked that idea and asked me to write up a proposal if I wanted to do it....and then a whole bunch of things happened and it fell by the wayside. Then I came into work tonight and found an email from him in my inbox saying that I have two spaces reserved. (Unfortunately, one is up against Jane Sibley's ritual, which I would love to take part in again. It was quite the experience last time.)

So I emailed Charles and told him that what I would want to do is one on a discussion of ancient hymns, and one on creation myth and the protogenoi.

So...it seems the gods want to keep me out of trouble. Arkon Polemakros, CLG Witan, clergy training, now this.

This all reminds me, I haven't been writing hymns lately. I need to start doing that again. I opened a notebook yesterday and found the beginning of one to Athena...I remember having a great idea for one and then losing it. Hopefully, I can recover it. Or come up with something else.

So I'm looking through the Ecumenicon schedule and seeing several classes on material apropos to the CTP- mostly in the realm of divination. That can't hurt. Pass up the opportunity to learn about rune casting with Jane Sibley? Not I. Ethnics of divination....yeah, very useful topics.

While writing a post to the Neokoroi list tonight, two things kinda got smashed together in my brain at once that could make for an awesome piece of fiction if it were written right....

Okay, I have to figure out a way to make this work.

To those of you reading who write frequently and openly about your relationship/s with the deity/ies of your choice...

Have you ever been reluctant to do so? Not because you're afraid of sounding silly or people who don't need to know finding out, or anything like that, but because you're afraid that putting things into words on a journal will somehow make it all less "real"?

There's a lot that I would write, that I want to, but I've got it in my mind that I'll "lose" it if I do. So I only write about dreams- dreams are easy to write about. Or the stuff that is absolutely undeniably concrete to me.


In other realms, I'm so happy that Ferarri isn't fazed by thunderstorms.

I finally wrote a personal religion essay that I'm happy with. Of course, I left it on my desk at work (reasonably sure I did anyway, really hope I did.)

Today at the Grove, we talked about the Spring Equinox and what we're doing. We've decided to do a ritual this time for the strengthening and protection of native trees against invading species like Aleantha. Everyone is supposed to research, looking for deities that are connected to the protection of forests and/or trees. Caryn seems to be very set on the idea of a ritual asking the assistance of Artemis, to which I said that we would definitely need to include the nymphs (more specifically, hamadryads) in this venture. The hamadryads' lives depend on the lives of the trees (Though, what about hamadryads connected to the trees of the invading species...?)

And folks are also researching other possibilities. We'll see what is found. I went looking for non-Greek stuff too, but haven't found any deities or spirits so far that are as intimately connected to the trees.

In any event, I am working up an adaptation of the festival of Thargelia, for possible celebration this year instead of Beltane. (The idea seems to be going over pretty well with people. Nothing is decided yet of course, but everyone that's heard it seems to have an enthusiastic response so far.) Since I am so interested in doing that, I will certainly be happy if people decide that two Greek rituals in a row are in order, but I would not be nearly as vocal in expressing a particular opinion for this one as I might otherwise. I would, of course, help out in ny way I could...but I would do the same for any other ritual.

After the Grove, Steph, Jesse, Dominic and I went to Barnes & Noble down at the harbor. I bought a new journal tonight, for a specific purpose. None of the blank books that I currently have actually suit my desires for this use- mostly in that none seem to have enough pages. I've been feeling for a while like I should be keeping some sort of track of my regular religious activity- daily, weekly, etc. and I got some more motivation this morning when I was reading over some thigns on the ADF website and found that a log of no less than four months' time was required for just this sort of thing.

I figure this one should last me a decent part of the year. Writing about this sort of thing on a mostly daily basis should take up, in most instances, less than a side of a page at a time. Though I haven't really talked about it, I have for a while now been working on daily religious practice. I've got the weekly thing down quite well by now I think :-P

On a different topic, I decided a while back that I was interested in learning about the Iberian Celts. There's something about obscure cultures that fascinates me. I was just talking to Jon a little while ago, he's going to send me a list of source information that he's got. He's a history snob, so I think I'm safe there. The only thing that I've managed to find myself was a single issue of a single academic journal online.

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm going down to Caryn's place with jackgreen60 to talk about the ritual upcoming at Four Quarters Farm in two weeks. I'm really on the fringes of this one, and I'm ok with that. Yeah, I have the day off work tomorrow. It's Presidents Day and I work exclusively with schools so no work for me. Oh, and I had volunteered to work on MLK day. So there you are.