Tag Archives: Right-Relation

Uncategorized

Rethinking the Wheel of the Year

The morning after the Winter Solstice, I started thinking pretty heavily about the substantial disconnect between our “standard” Gregorian calendar, the liturgical calendars used by various polytheisms, and the Wiccanate neopaganisms’ “Wheel of the Year”. For newer seekers and the general laity, this is a hurdle to regular practice and thus to stronger cultus.

So, for the last couple of weeks I’ve spent a lot of time noodling how to reframe the Gregorian calendar as a liturgical calendar. While I’m really designing this around my particular brand of syncretic polytheism, I’m hoping that it will be useful for others.

I don’t intend it as a replacement for reconstructed liturgical calendars, especially in mystery traditions. Rather, I think of it as a gateway calendar- a way to help reprogram our relationship to time.

Currently, it’s nigh-impossible to escape the crush of monotheism in our overculture’s calendar. However, “Holy Mother Church” taught us the power of subverting a culture’s existing calendars, holy days, and observances. I think we need to heed that lesson. Heck, they kinda stole that idea from the ancient Romans anyway.

Most of the “Wheel of the Year” charts I see split the year either by the solstices and equinoxes or by holy days that fall roughly halfway in-between those- such as the Irish calendar. The Wiccanate Wheel of the Year is a combination of both:

A four-armed Sun Cross. An eight-armed Solar Cross.

 

Of course, many cultures historically divided their year up differently- the Hellenic, Kemetic, Hindu, and Cree calendars, for example. In all of these cases, their agricultural seasonality is different from the “typical” Gregorian seasons.

In thinking through this new Wheel of the Year, I wanted to aim for a decidedly American (U.S.) calendar. If this takes off, I think folks in Canada, Mexico, and many other places could easily use the same principles to adapt their own.

I’m going to get into specific observances later, but for now I just wanted to share my first draft of the wheel:

A first-draft Wheel of the Year for SANCT.

I’m not entirely happy with the “tide” names for the liturgical months, so those will probably change. Suggestions?

That said, changing tides at roughly the ides of the Julian month seems to help the calendar feel aligned with the solar quarter days without turning them into moveable “feasts”. Of course, this won’t work for Work that requires the actual astronomical moment; but, many rituals already get scheduled for the nearest weekend anyway.

I’ve added a ring with four alternate “seasons” since not all of us get real winter (or summer- Minnesota?). These are based more on the feeling of available light than on specific cultural assumptions like snow, falling leaves, or going to the beach. I also included a rough mapping of rainfall patterns in Central Texas to reinforce how our “seasons” don’t necessarily fit the “traditional” pattern.

I said earlier that I would get into specific holy days and such in later posts, but I did want to share some (very) rough noodling about the transition days at the center of the four “sun seasons”:

Yuletide (Dec. 31 to Jan. 1) – “New Year’s”: A day for safeguarding all that is good in our past and correcting or discarding that which is not. Cleansing and warding Work should definitely be undertaken, even more so than normal.

Blossomtide (Mar. 31 to Apr. 1) – “April Fools”: A day for frivolity and rejoicing in the sensorium, a celebration of life and living.

Victorytide (Jun. 30 to Jul. 1) – “TBD”: I still have a lot of unpacking to do here, but it has something to do with the Gods’ restoring the divine order and us following their example to restore right relations.

Harvestide (Sep. 30 to Oct. 1) – “Autumn Sage?”: A day for taking stock, planning for the future, budgeting, and making hard choices.

Those are very cursory descriptions- obviously, I didn’t really get into the specific Gods and the specific liturgy for worshipping Them on those days. I’m just not yet far enough along in the process to do so.

Anyway, that’s a quick overview of one of my many projects.

-In Deos Confidimus

 

Announcements, Theology

On Terminology

Recently, there has been a bit of a race war (pre-Blumenbach usage of “race”) on Twitter/Tumblr/etc. regarding those Gods worshipped by the ancient peoples of Greece. There is a lot going on there and I’m not about to wade into the morass of who and what rightly constitutes “Hellenic” religion.

Kaye Boesme wrote a very heartfelt position piece on her Kallisti blog that takes strong positions- especially against allowing theological and ethical arguments to fall into petty abusiveness.

In addition of her condemnation of abuse for the sake of the abuser’s emotional satisfaction, she very rightly calls out the impact this has on the broader polytheistic population. Such persons often have no close community and are left with only online discussions as guidance for their own praxis and piety.

I’m publicly on-record as pushing for bringing polytheists closer together regardless of their tradition. I want to be clear that I’m not pushing for erasure or universalization. I simply recognize that our peoples have more common cause and shared worldview with each other than with monotheists and atheists. There is plenty of time for our traditions to move farther apart again once they have strength and stability.

I recognize that this is a privileged position. My polytheism, while recondite due to its apparent secularization, is arguably one of the most universal (if under-practiced) in the United States. I can see representations of my Gods all around me- not hidden away, but in positions of honor and importance.

Yet, my faith is trapped in a “catch-22”. Were my faith to gain wider recognition, those statues and bas-reliefs would, under our laws, be removed. The assumed “metaphorical” purpose of those idols and icons protects them, allowing the Gods of my nation to reach out and influence us even today. At the same time though, that “allegorical” labeling prevents many from acknowledging and offering cultus to Them as the Holy Powers They are.

However, specific to the terminology argument at hand, I have always shied away from the term “Hellenic” (and certainly “Hellenismos”) to describe my faith.

Why? Let’s consider some important aspects:

Syncretism

My faith is not directly rooted in a single, unbroken tradition. While a great many indigenous polytheistic faiths practice syncretism to varying degrees, here in the U.S.A., none of the Old World faiths are indigenous.

Furthermore, because of our physical residence in the New World, we owe respect and cultus to the spirits and Powers of this land as well. As such, while our dealings with Them are not part of an indigenous religious tradition, we are technically syncretizing our practices by incorporating Their worship- even in our bastardized and imperfect form.

Similarly, our worship of Old World Powers is not and cannot be identical to the traditions of ancient faiths. This is in part due to lost information, in part due to cultural and linguistic disconnect, and in other ways by necessity (see above).

Thus, while researching ancient knowledge of The Gods is important to the modern practice of my faith, it cannot be a direct template. Historical information provides points for triangulation and self-correction, but not a point-by-point liturgy or dogma.

American

I am neither Greek nor Roman. I am not even Celtic, Slavic, or Germanic, though my ancestors generally are. I am an American, both in the broad, hemispherical sense and in the narrower sense commonly used in the United States.

My faith is directly born of the syncretic nature of American culture.

Neo-Classical

The early generations of my nascent nation took inspiration from the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. America’s founders looked to Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic for guidance on governance and the pitfalls thereof. The Enlightenment philosophies that justified the American Revolution (and Mexico’s) were built on attempts to reconcile Classical philosophy with the differing worldviews of Renaissance and Colonial Europeans.

Throughout Europe (and later the Americas), people began to draw inspiration from the Greek and Roman Gods and Their mythologies. These Gods, adopted first as allegorical icons, began to be covertly recognized as Themselves, however imperfectly scholars of the time understood the differences between Them.

Through Them, the illusion of “The One, True God” dissolved like cheap cloth left too long in the sun. In New England, once the epicenter of monotheistic religious extremism in the New World, an American of African descent openly praised without irony the Goddess Columbia. While monotheists and atheists might argue this was purely poetic, Wheatley’s words clearly denote Columbia- not Jesus or Yah, as the heavenly Power protecting our land.

One century scarce perform’d its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.

Following Independence, the peoples of our nation widely embraced many forms of Classical art and architecture. This trend started in Enlightenment Europe, but here our leaders sought to draw a direct visual connection between the new American Republic and the old Roman Republic. As a result, many of our most important government buildings, especially capitals, are built in this “Federal” or “American Neoclassical” style.

It is important to note, therefore, that my faith is new (in historical terms). It is a syncretic revival of Classical faiths interpreted through the numerous philosophical lenses that shaped (and continue to shape) my nation and the global civilization it helped to bring about.

Tradition

At the same time, my faith has direct person-to-person heritage going back hundreds of years. Our peoples’ relationship with these Gods in this form (through masks both ancient and more recent) is no longer a New Religious Movement (NRM).

Rather, it is a set of mythologies, assumptions (worldview), and practices (praxis) that are widespread and so commonplace as to be largely unremarkable to the average American. Yet, as with other faiths, mine is threatened by the twin Adversaries manifest in monotheist hegemonic oppression and in atheist/postmodernist erasure of meaning.

My goal is to restore health and piety to this extant tradition by exploring both the new masks worn by my Gods as well as ancient understandings of these Holy Powers. At the same time, I hope to restore right relation between my peoples and the sacred Powers and places of this new land we inhabit far from the homes of our ancestors.

So there you have it- my faith is the Syncretic American Neo-Classical Tradition.

-In Deos Confidimus

Theology

Our Longing for Nemesis

The ancient Greeks recognized many goddesses associated with concepts that we might today simply label “justice”. Amongst these, Dike and Themis tend to be the best known, ruling over mundane law and divine law, respectively. Though that is a gross oversimplification, it’s about as close as our modern worldview can grasp quickly, i.e.- without delving a whole separate academic paper.

This is, of course, because our civilization has for hundreds of years insisted on one, single form of justice- the letter of manmade law, judged by men, and enforced by men. We blinded our “Justice”- to suggest impartiality. Yet a recurrent critique of our system is its lack of self-awareness, self-critique, and self-improvement. In other words, our justice system is not blind to privilege, wealth, and power as it should be, but rather to its own biases, shortcomings, and failures.

To be sure, this is not universally true of everyone in the justice system. Even so, there is an increasing sense amongst the body politic that our justice system has become a perverse inversion of itself and its intended function.

Thanks to Edward Butler, I found this blog post by Sheena McGrath that triggered something in me. I realized that my understanding of Nemesis had been woefully incomplete. While I recognize that this is true of every deity given my limitations, in this case I felt a sudden inrush that palpably discovered a preexisting emptiness.

Which led me to realize how civilization-wide this emptiness is.

How many times have you heard someone throw around the concept of karma? For example, this quote attributed to the author Jessica Brody:

“Karma comes after everyone eventually. You can’t get away with screwing people over your whole life, I don’t care who you are. What goes around comes around. That’s how it works. Sooner or later the universe will serve you the revenge that you deserve.”

Of course, that’s a vast oversimplification of the religious concept of karma, but at least according to some ancient Greek and Roman sources- it is one of the things Nemesis actively does. In the ancient Classical worldview, Someone always stood ready to correct or punish wrongdoing, inequity, and even excessive good fortune lacking in proper humility and charity.

Indeed, when we explore the ancient Greek understanding of many-faceted justice and the many deities associated therewith, we see a much richer and more complete understanding of human interaction with concepts like right-relation and fairness.

Of course, that’s not to say the Greeks got everything right- pederasty, misogyny, and slavery were just three of their many societal failings.

However, they did understand that healthy human societies require not just courthouses and written laws, but belief in a deeper, more fundamental form of fairness. Modern philosophers and psychologists like to call this the “Just World Fallacy” and label it a cognitive bias that clouds our rationality.

Yet, in the absence of a just world (or at least a world trying to be more just), all moral systems disintegrate. The proof of this is all around us as wealth and power flow towards cruelty and crude cunning instead of towards benevolence and wisdom.

The rise of both far-right and far-left violent extremism have their roots in a desire to institute what (in their misguided eyes) would constitute a “just” world.

As I mentioned in my post about Ares, “Oh, HELL no!” and “Over my dead body!” are amongst His gifts to humanity in time of need. In these particular cases, what we are seeing is those healthy impulses corrupted by the lack of a broader framework of justice and piety.

His daughter, Adrestia, goddess of vengeance and justified rebellion, likely takes Her name from one of Nemesis’ epithets- “Inescapable”. Her mysteries are another form of justice the Greeks once recognized. Today we denigrate this as “vigilante justice”, a laughably thin ruse to prop up our failing justice system’s willful ignorance of the importance of honor, equity, and humanity.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting that we all need to dust off our muskets and rebel or sharpen our knives to get back at our enemies.

What I’m saying is that part of our society’s ills flow from our crippled and intentionally limited understanding of what constitutes justice- i.e., right-relation and fairness.

It is right, I think, that the Greeks classed Nemesis as a Primordial. I’ve made no secret of my belief that our universe is caught in a struggle between two inimical and omnipotent (in their own times) poles and that our existence is made possible only through the intervention of The Gods (of many pantheons and others still unknown to us).

The Gods’ order makes life itself possible.

Nemesis makes intelligent life possible, by standing firm between the “In me only is there justice” of the Devourer and the Divider’s “Justice does not exist”.

She reminds us that while a totally just world does not exist and might never exist, there is at least one fundamental and exceedingly ancient Power striving to make it so. Without this middle ground in which causality is at least sometimes understandable, we would most certainly destroy ourselves in fits of anxious rage or through hopeless apathy.

She reminds us that justice, fairness, equity, and right-relation are not derived from human sources. Yet, by embracing Nemesis and the broader Classical concepts of justice and the divinities Who champion them, we can contribute to them. Through this we find that humans have a place in Their plan.

A place for us that is meaningful and beautiful.

-In Deos Confidimus