I ran across this interesting article on Edward Butler’s Twitter feed. It discusses new interpretations of the Parthenon’s design and purpose in light of updated scholarship.
The Truth Behind the Lost Statue of Athena and the Virgins of the Parthenon
Written by Phillis Wheatley, who was enslaved as a child and later became the first American woman of African heritage to publish a book of poetry in the English-speaking world. Though she was emancipated before the American Revolution, she died at age 31 of preventable, poverty-related illness less than a year after the formal end of the war.
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,
Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light
Involved in sorrows and veil of night!The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel bind her golden hair:
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise.Muse! bow propitious while my pen relates
How pour her armies through a thousand gates,
As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms,
Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms;
Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar,
The refluent surges beat the sounding shore;
Or thick as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign,
Such, and so many, moves the warrior’s train.
In bright array they seek the work of war,
Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in peace and honours,—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!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.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.
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
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
We Americans have a problematic relationship with Ares.
I didn’t realize this until recently. It started with Galina’s Ares agon in March, and the revelations have been coming over time since.
Lest this seem primarily academic, I’d like to note that has become increasingly clear to me that Ares is (and always was) a powerful force in American culture. Indeed, the great conflicts tearing at our nation can be viewed as having their root in the unresolved conflicts between an Athenian worldview and an Arean worldview.
We need to be able to synthesize the union of both if we are to have any hope of healing our nation and preserving the worldwide progress (yes, there’s actually been a lot of good) made possible by our divinely-inspired experiment of a republic.
Let’s start with our typical, Western understanding of Ares. We know Him as the God of War… and that’s about it. The portrayals of Him tend to fall into one of two camps- a god of courage and honor in the face of bloody horror or a god who delights in unmitigated slaughter.
Here is a clip from the film Patton, based on a real (and more profanity-filled) speech General Patton gave. If you can find the entire speech, it typifies attributes we might associate with Ares as a god of courage and bloodlust:
The latter portrayal, fairly common in media, holds Ares up as some sort of “god of war crimes”. For instance, the recent Wonder Woman film imagines a character (very) loosely based on Ares guiding humans in the creation of chemical weapons. Other example can be found in the game God of War, in which the protagonist becomes embodiment of this stereotype in his quest to kill Ares for tricking him into slaying his wife and child.
To be fair, courage and bloodlust are both most certainly aspects He embodies. But is that really all?
In the Iliad, Homer represents Ares as dishonest for supporting both sides in the Trojan War. Homer even goes so far as to suggest that Zeus Himself holds this view. But of course, the Iliad is also a story, one passed down verbally across generations and likely to some degree altered to fit the prejudices of its audience- namely scholars.
I find it interesting that a deity who is frequently named among the Olympians is always presented so two-dimensionally and nearly always antagonistically.
If Ares is a cardboard villain, why is He an Olympian? In fact, given that He is usually portrayed as losing, why is He the God of War at all?
Because He’s not a caricature.
Look at the Classical antagonism between Athena and Ares. Clearly there is a difference in methods and mentality between Them, despite both being associated with war.
Athena is generally shown as consistant, intelligent, and considered. Ares, on the other hand, is usually represented as inconsistent, stupid, and foolish.
Laying aside the prejudices of Athens-aligned Greeks, why is that? Why would the Spartans have held Ares up as a model soldier if He were indeed wavering, mulish, or prone to losing?
Let’s remember that the Hellenic powers often carry opposing mysteries, not good-and-evil, but rather differening sides of a “higher” concept. Take the titan Prometheus (“Forethought”) and His brother Epimetheus (“Afterthought”). In Them we find a dichotomy of divinities, one clever and the other foolish.
Does this mean that since Athena carries the trait of wisdom, Ares must carry the trait of foolishness? Only if wisdom is the trait in question. I suspect the conflicted distinction between Them is something else entirely.
Let’s leave aside this question of wisdom for now and look at what else we know about Ares from the little that comes down to us.
Ares killed another divinity for raping His daughter Alcippe. He stood trial and was acquitted because the other gods considered the murder justified. Even the people of Athens (who typically gave Ares short shrift) enshrined this facet of Him by continuing to hold their most serious criminal cases on the same hill where that first trial is said to have taken place.
So is He a god of justice? Certainly not in the traditional sense, though the Hellenes had no shortage of such deities. Dike and Themis stand amongst the most notable, yet there are others such as Nemesis and Adrestia and even the Erinyes. These latter powers carry more vengeful forms of addressing wrongdoing- yet the people of Athens also acknowledge Them as employing valid methods in the correct time and place.
Adrestia, in particular, is of note here because She is the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. Another daughter of Theirs is Harmonia, the Goddess of Concord (yes, PEACE).
It doesn’t make much sense that a god whose only traits are slaughter, machismo, and foolishness could father such a child, even in the arms of Aphrodite, whose love is beyond human comprehension. Given that some of their other children include Phobos (“Fear”) and Deimos (“Dread”) who bring much of the horror associated with Their father, it’s clear that the apples didn’t fall far from the tree.
Let’s look at a couple of the other deities who arise from the union of Aphrodite and Ares- Eros and Anteros. Eros holds the mystery of sexual passion, while His brother Anteros both blesses mutual (requited) love and avenges wrongful spurning.
Are you noticing the trend here? There are other traits than violence, or perhaps one big trait, at work in these offspring. Of course, given the variances between different Hellenic cosmogenies they might be more allegorical than literal; but, if so the stories become all the more valuable in helping us to understand how Classical polytheists understood Ares.
One of Athena’s defining characteristics is how She exemplifies a rich internal life replete with introspection, knowledge, careful consideration, and precise exercise of Her strength to achieve an end. She is patient, observant, and measured, to some observers even cold and unemotional. She is also no stranger to subtlety and uses Her superior intellect to lay traps for Her foes.
If we examine Ares through this lens, we find something interesting. He rarely hides anything (and fails when He tries). He acts, rather than taking time to weigh options. He speaks His mind, to the point of seeming boastful, childish, or inconsistent to some observers. Ares’ life is almost entirely external and filled with intense passion and emotional honesty.
While some might see this as akin to a male-female dichotomy, or something like the interplay in the Taiji, I suspect the Hellenes viewed these traits more granularly. After all, while Ares is certainly very masculine, so is Zeus, who carries mysteries that require much more internalization and consideration.
If this raw openess, not slaughter or courage, is the great mystery of Ares, how then does this change our understanding of Him? How does this alter our perceptions of the Hellenic relationship with Him and how should it refine and redefine how we seek to build and sustain relations with Him?
Let us stop to consider some common American phrases that might help us bridge to these other faces of Ares:
All of these (and more) seem to me to carry some small spark of this mystery of Ares, the power of externalizing and acting instead of internalizing and contemplating.
That’s not to say that there is no place in a human life for Athena’s mysteries- of course there are. What I’m suggesting is that we are unbalanced as a society. Those of us on the more educated side of things tend to favor an Athenian approach, perhaps even to the complete exclusion of Arean methods where appropriate.
Again, if we stop thinking of Him purely as the God of War and instead respect Him in this wider role, we have much to learn that is to our benefit. For instance, as the patron of “Oh, HELL no!”, Ares lends validity to our first, instinctive gut reactions. How many of us have known going into a situation that it would turn out badly, but intellectualized our way into it anyway?
As the patron of “Hold my beer”, Ares encourages us to take risks and to challenge ourselves in new ways. Our nation was built largely by people who risked everything for something they hoped would be better. While plenty of avoidable conflict resulted, risk-taking also gave us new forms of art, explosive growth in science and technology, and even many experimental social reforms that once seemed unthinkable.
Speaking of social reform, as the patron of “Over my dead body”, Ares gives the strength of conviction in times when no rational person would do what is necessary:
Notice there is no howling, no bloody berserker rage, and yet this is a battlefield. You can’t see it in the picture, but by the end, hundreds would die. Any one of those tanks could have ground that protester into hamburger without hesitation. But they did hesitate. They hesitated because that young man embodied “Over my dead body”, not with violence but with the willingness to suffer it.
Was Ares involved in that exact incident? I can’t say for sure. However, I suspect some power stepped in. Given that a statue of a torch-wielding Goddess of Liberty was destroyed nearby the night before, it’s certainly possible that Athena and Ares were both paying close attention.
On the flip side, of course, our nation has many citizens who only operate from an in-the-moment, gut-driven viewpoint. Obviously they have a great deal to learn from Athena’s mysteries.
In general, though, those people aren’t reading this.
I’m writing this to me, and to you… and we both have a lot to learn from a holy power that many our culture has written off as a monster, or a moron at best. Ares is Ares, and we need to embrace His mysteries too if we want to become healthy, balanced human beings.
Tune: Battle Cry Of Freedom, by George Frederick Root (Played adagietto)
We were threatened by a king from the darkened age of yore,
A red tide to wash away our freedom!
But like tinder and a spark, our young nation knew fervor-
Fanned by the Goddess known as Freedom!
(Chorus)
Athena, Minerva, Columbia too,
Liberty’s author, and Washington’s Muse.
We got Victory from Her sword, the Republic from Her pen,
Honor the Goddess known as Freedom!
Torn asunder by mistrust when the markets would not mend,
The Colonies could never form a union.
When rebellion flared again, a Constitution did they pen,
Thanks to the Goddess known as Freedom!
(Chorus)
Then Women, Slaves, and Tribes, all abandoned, all ignored,
Called for the gift of Her Republic.
But tradition raised a sword, vultures feasted on the gore,
She wept, oh the Goddess known as Freedom!
(Chorus)
The great battles come and go, but the wisest of us know,
The struggle for freedom’s in our own hearts.
Alone mortals cannot win, the Republic will fall in,
Without the great Goddess known as Freedom!
(Chorus)
Of late, I’ve started to see a lot of prayers, affirmations, workings, ceremonies, and such that petition for the “highest and best good” in a particular situation. I grasp that this phrasing is meant to account for our own limited knowledge and understanding. That said, it’s also presumptive, dangerous, lazy, and frankly- a bit rude.
Let’s start off with the basics- something that the author of the link above seems to be blissfully unaware of. The entities with whom you are interacting have their own personalities, agendas, and methods- the exact opposite of:
They wish to be supportive of the individual’s life plan. This is their only agenda. They wish to do so without interfering—to be supportive of the person’s highest and best good. A spirit guide does not impose their agenda on another. Their only aim is to be supportive.
That’s not to say that Holy Powers and other spiritual beings are bad, just that it’s selfish and naive to think of them as being solely concerned with our wellbeing. Such a belief is solipsistic at best and has no place in an enlightened spirituality. Deities are well-known to sacrifice individuals for their own purposes, though those who serve them well before and during that process are generally rewarded. This is a fairly consistent thread across cultures and religions.
So, if Holy Powers are fully-realized, independent individuals with their own personalities and motivations, what does that imply about asking for your highest and best good?
It means you are asking for the highest and best good to which that Power can put you. In a way, that sounds very deeply pious and devotional. On the other hand, it can REALLY suck. If you’ve ever met someone who’s experienced Shaman Sickness, they can give you some idea of what it means to be put to highest and best use. For other examples, we need only turn to history- prophets and other “change agents” of the Gods are often martyred for their faith. It’s a very brave thing to knowingly offer your life in service to a deity. It’s quite another to do so flippantly and without such an intent.
This sort of request gets even more inauspicious when one is addressing “Spirit”, “God”, “Deity”, or the “Universe”. Our Universe, while it likely possesses a consciousness (very much unlike our own), is probably not the Power picking up the “phone” when you call. If you’re just throwing your request out to a Monist or Monotheistic generalization, you don’t have a lot of control over who answers your call.
Would you fling a $100 bill into a crowd while yelling “somebody use this money for my highest and best good”? Yeah, probably not.
In appealing to Holy Powers, it’s important to ask the right entity. Why? Because someone who prays to a New Age notion of glowing “white light” perfection is quite capable of having their prayers handled by Yah, Amaterasu, Apollo, a dead relative, some random angel, the lamppost in the front yard… you get the idea. Such a person might also get Lucifer or some other less-than-friendly entity with a glowing light theme. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in personal evil- They believe in you.
If we just throw stuff around willy-nilly, we get whoever answers. Specificity helps, even if it’s just “My honored dead and our beloved Gods and spirits”. That at least narrows it down to your ancestors and Powers that you (and they) have knowingly served- though if Uncle Joe was secretly in some other religion, you could still be in for a surprise.
Another problem with the “highest and best good” phrasing is that it assumes divine omniscience- the ability to know everything about everything. The second we remove the mask of monotheism and look at actual religious traditions, the more we find that even the Gods are typically not omniscient. Whether this is a self-imposed limitation or not can be argued, but even a seemingly monotheistic book like the Bible offers examples of a deity “finding out” something rather than instantly knowing (or pre-knowing):
God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.
– Genesis 6:12
Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”
– Genesis 18:20-21
There are many other examples if you look for them. But this is not surprising as Judaism was originally a henotheistic religion- one that acknowledged other deities but served only one. Monotheism was a later, human invention.
I find the second passage above to be highly illustrative of my point. Note that Yah says “the outcry that has reached me”. This indicates that He was made aware of the situation in Sodom not through omniscience but through the petitions and prayers of the faithful. Yah even travels in human form to visit Sodom and check things out for Himself. That’s not to say that He or any other deity is incapable of getting a good view of things remotely. It does, however, suggest the importance of clear communication if one desires assistance from spiritual sources.
Coupled with the earlier statement about WHOM we might be petitioning for help, the need for a clear request becomes even more important. Even in the case of praying specifically to a major Holy Power, that doesn’t mean that He or She has to intervene personally. Deities often work in groups- if someone requests Odin’s help with romance, He might ask Freyja to handle it. Assuming that She does get involved, She in turn might have one of Her retinue take responsibility for that person’s case. She could also decide to pass it back to the petitioner’s ancestors, depending on the nature of the issue.
Therefore, the petitioner in this case (or in any case) would be wise to be very clear and precise in their requests. Praying for one’s “highest and best good” doesn’t have anything (overtly) to do with romance at all. Even praying for one’s “highest and best good in love” is really, really open to interpretation. Perhaps the entity handling your case thinks you should breed like rabbits to swell the ranks of the faithful. Maybe said entity thinks love is a fool’s game and will try to steer you away from it. Be clear and precise in your requests.
While this might not convince a Holy Power that disagrees with your request to help you, it also makes it less likely that such a Power will use the energy that YOU are putting into the request in a way that you would dislike. It may also increase the chances that an agreeable deity, spirit, or ancestor will be the one to respond.
Of course, prayer is not a WYSIWYG tool. You can’t push a “marriage” button and be instantly transported to the end of a Disney movie. The threads of causality are complex and we are imperfect beings. Even in the case of a powerful deity’s direct intervention, we humans have an uncanny capacity for gumming up the works. If we are clear in our communication, it means that we have at least some conscious idea of the goal- maybe we will be less likely to screw up.
Is it arrogant to ask?
One of the main reasons that people fall into “highest and best good” is the belief that we humans, limited as we are, simply do not know as much about a situation as the Gods. While this is often true, once we remember that omniscience is a falsehood created by humans, it is right and proper for us to communicate more fully. Just because an entity can know about something doesn’t mean that said entity grasps our perspective of the situation. Isn’t good communications about a two-way sharing of perspective? We might not hear Their responses, but it’s rude to assume They can’t (or don’t want to) hear ours.
That’s not to say we can’t acknowledge our limited perspective. Let’s imagine the case of praying for a friend who has fallen ill. It’s perfectly appropriate to pray:
Please heal my friend Amos who has brain cancer. Please help him to recover fully and swiftly. I know that I might not fully understand the situation and if healing is not an option, please help my friend and his loved ones to get through this with as little pain as possible.
Similarly with prayers about love or romance:
Please bring me a spouse that will be loving and supportive. Please help us both be good partners throughout our lives. I realize that maybe that’s not what I need at the moment, but I’m very lonely. If I can’t have such a person in my life right now, please help me to overcome my loneliness in healthy ways.
The same principle applies across the spectrum of human experience and topics of petition. We can and should ask for what we want (perhaps with an explanation). We can and also should admit to our limitations and our motivations- especially in the case of entities with whom we have (or are building) relationships. With very few exceptions, honesty is a sound policy in any relationship.
Centuries ago, in a land long since drowned, a man stepped out of a tavern and closed the door. His heart was heavy with fear and anger and worry. The distant hooting of an owl echoed through the trees as he stepped into the night. Smoking his clay pipe, the man walked home with apprehension, stopping near the top of a hill to look down at his farm.
“What troubles you, Daniel,” inquired a woman’s voice.
Looking around, the man saw a well-dressed woman sitting on a tree stump. He could not believe that he had been so lost in his thoughts that he had missed her sitting there holding a torch, especially a torch that shone so brightly and steadily-for it did not gutter and flicker in the wind.
“I am worried that the tax men will take my farm,” he answered, not knowing why he shared this burden with a strange woman that he did not recognize. She was handsome, but in the sturdy way of the Yankee women who labored in the snow alongside their husbands. He appreciated her strong beauty, but knew that it was not feminine wiles that moved his tongue.
“Yes, they are going to take your farm. I’m sorry.” The strange woman looked genuinely sad. “It was necessary.”
“What do you mean, necessary? Are you the one taking my farm?”
“Directly? No. But you offered it to me when you took up my cause, and now it is needful that it be sacrificed.”
“To you? I never… Who ARE you?”
“You do not recognize me?” The woman looked genuinely hurt. Her eyes widened, and in the torchlight shone silver, like mirrors. The man felt his attention pulled into those vast, shining eyes.
He stood, again, in a field that he had stood in many years ago. The sun beat down upon his woolen tunic, smoke and stench filled his nose. Ragged militiamen crowded around him, seeking reassurance, courage, leadership from the poor farmer. He himself looked about for guidance. A sea of carmine marched inexorably closer- the finest and most feared soldiers in the world advanced across the field, bearing death. Horrified now, the man glanced about like a drowning man seeking a tree limb. His eyes locked upon a giant of a man astride a white horse. The General. Behind him, almost invisible, a woman whispered in his ear.
Standing again upon the hilltop, the man realized that this strange woman’s collar and bodice were not of cloth, but of hammered bronze. Her dress was not cloth, but mail so finely wrought as to drape and billow in the breeze. She shifted, and he could see the hilt of a sword buckled about Her waist.
“Columbia.” As the name left his lips he had to fight the buckling of his knees. Terror and ardor played across his bones as he faced Her, knowing that Her words rang with truth.
“Or, as Doctor Franklin preferred, America. And other names to other men in other days.” She smiled briefly and then Her face grew serious.
“When your great men declared independence, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor- to each other, and to me and to my Republic. Many of those men’s sacrifices have already been laid upon my altar. When you took up their cause, you offered the same.”
“But the war is won. Why do you come for me now?”
“Is it? Just now you came from a meeting in which your friends begged you to take up your sword and lead them against the tyrants in Boston.”
“I sold my sword. I needed the money.”
“This sword?” She gestured at the hilt at Her waist. The man could see that it was the very same sword given to him by LaFayette. “My sword is every sword wielded for justice. My spear is every spear thrust against tyranny. Do not despair at the want of a sword, I offer you another.”
“To defeat Bowdoin and his bankers?”
“No. To be defeated by them.”
The man recoiled in horror. “Why then offer me the sword if I am to lose?”
“My strategy is not measured in single human lifetimes. A war amongst men is but a skirmish in my campaign. If my Republic, OUR Republic, is to survive the next century, you must fight Boston… and lose.”
“Will I die?”
“It is hard to say. You might. Certainly, some of your followers will lay their lives upon my altar. Live or die, I can promise you disgrace and if you live, financial ruin.”
“Then why try?”
“Right now, these United States are anything but united. Your neighbors to the north, the rugged hill folk of Vermont, have been forced to declare independence from the very nation they helped to birth. Commerce between the states is tenuous, they cannot agree on what money has value. Poor men, many of them veterans, find themselves silenced in the halls of power that they fought to erect. The young eagle is tearing itself apart before it even fully hatches.”
“So let Washington fix it. Let the other great men fix it. I’m a farmer.”
“You are also a soldier, a leader- and a good one.”
“But there are others, better leaders. Let them put the Republic back together.”
“If they could, do you not think I would require it of them? Your poverty, your relative isolation, your non-involvement in petty politics… all these place you and only YOU at the touchhole. You and you alone can ignite this conflict and see it through to its necessary end.”
The man trembled, his eyes glittering with tears at the enormous burden placed upon his soul. “If I do this, will it save the Republic? Will it end the conflicts tearing us apart?”
“No, Daniel. But it will make a stronger nation, one that might be able to survive what must come next.”
“Next? NEXT?!” He trembled now in fury as much as fear. “How much more death do you want? Are you so bloodthirsty that you demand endless war of us?”
“Not I, but the weakness of men- the same great men who led your nation to independence. They embraced my Republic, but they did not offer it to all who dwell upon these shores.”
“The slaves,” he breathed.
“And the Indians, and the women, and the countless hordes that will come to dwell in the light of my freedom. By not accepting them now, your leaders have guaranteed that those people must purchase entrance into my Republic by struggle, sacrifice, and sadly- blood.”
The men fell to his knees and wept. “It is too much! You ask me to give up the last of what I have, and for what? A world in which my children and their children must make the same sacrifices? Is there no end?”
He fell Her hand upon his cheek, and She lifted his chin until he gazed deep into the silvery pools of Her eyes. Through Her eyes he saw terrible horrors and a growing peace that followed in their wake. He saw injustice and cruelty- yet he saw the spread of laws and equality and charity as humankind sought to give a better world to their children. “My campaign is long, Daniel. I have waged this war for longer than men have recorded their history. Every battle fought in my name, every victory, every defeat, every sacrifice- each one advances my strategy. Each one brings your kind closer to the civilization that you are ultimately capable of. Each one brings humanity closer to my Republic.”
“But is there a final victory?”
“Victory is never certain, Daniel. All I can offer you is a sword, and my promise that in future days other men and women will study your struggle and decide that your sacrifice improved the lives of the generations that followed.”
“You promise this?” He struggled to rise.
She offered him Her hand. “I promise that if you do as I have told you, if you withhold nothing and fight as if you can win- history will declare your defeat a victory.”
He took Her hand and rose, finding himself alone in the dark holding a sword.
One of the major difficulties in worshipping a modern, New World manifestation of an ancient goddess is the lack of a continuous religious tradition. We have some historical documentation of how She was worshipped in places like Greece and Rome, but much of the cultural meaning is irrelevant or even abhorrent to Americans today. That leaves a bit of a gap to fill and quite a quandary in terms of planning ceremonies for Our Lady.
Interestingly, though, there is one tradition that seems to be fairly analogous between ancient Greece and the modern United States- burning meat. The ancient form of this ritual was called “hecatomb”, meaning essentially “one hundred cattle”. The modern form of this ritual is called “barbecuing” or “grilling”.
Mind you, I doubt that most Americans today would view their fire+meat activities as a ceremony for Our Lady, let alone a sacrifice to Her. Yet, here in the U.S. the three dates when we feel the most social pressure to engage in barbecue-type picnics are festivals quite appropriate to Her worship- Memorial Day (Athena Promachos – “First in Battle”), Independence Day (Athena Laossoos – “Rallier of Nations”), and Labor Day (Athena Ergane – “The Worker”). I find the synchronicities a little too pat to think them mere coincidence.
Okay, so fire+meat is pretty much a given. I’m pretty sure that we aren’t going to be slaughtering a hundred head of cattle in front of the whole town anytime soon. So, in developing a modern liturgy, we will need to consider not just scale but the availability of materials. In the Greek hecatomb, priests typically burned long bones, fat, and hides- things that were readily available because the cattle were slain on the spot. Most Americans would have trouble finding an uncured cowhide, and few supermarkets carry whole bovine femurs or large sheets of suet.
On top of this comes the issue of fire. Unfortunately, here in the States, outdoor fires are increasingly heavily regulated, meaning that the size and scope of our sacrificial fires would often be limited. Worse, in many areas the only sites available for fire ceremonies for Our Lady would be public picnic areas. It’s a little hard to erect and hold sacred space when surrounded by errant frisbees and poorly-thrown footballs, let alone self-righteous interlopers.
Another issue (unrelated to fire+meat) is the shape of a gathering. Many in West seem to think that all non-Abrahamic rituals need to take place in a circle, yet we don’t see a lot of that in Classical worship of Our Lady, nor in the practices of those modern institutions most closely identified with Her. If anything, something more akin to a military formation is probably more appropriate.
Music might be a good idea, but most of the American songs that reference Her also call out to an unnamed deity, generally assumed to be Yah by virtue of His cultural dominance in the West. Since I haven’t seen much evidence that He had much to do with our Republic, I’d prefer to steer clear of those. That means having to compose new hymns and teaching them to people.
Then there comes the problem of democratizing the ceremony to just the appropriate level that it honors Her message of responsibility and empowerment while allowing the ceremony to work. I think one of the keys will be having two or more “tiers” of ceremony- not just a “high holy” ritual but a “friends and family” rite that people can perform at home.
Hmm, I’ve rambled on enough. I need to noodle a bit more.
I don’t have a huge amount of altar space in my home. With three cats, all three appropriately named after some form of mischief and/or destruction, we have to keep sacred things in very safe boxes. I wanted to share my humble little altar emplacement with you, just to give you inspiration, if nothing else:
The cloth is a handwoven piece from “the Bonnie Weaver”, who makes the ren faire circuit in New England. The pattern is a type of “shadow weave”, a method that I’m told was actually invented in the 20th Century by Mary Meigs Atwater, the woman who reintroduced hand weaving to the United States. Given that Our Lady is also known as a goddess of weaving, the cloth seemed highly appropriate- both as an example of weaving and the advancement of an art.
I don’t think that it’s necessary to go track down a master weaver to buy an expensive piece of cloth for your altar. However, if you are going to include an altar cloth, I think that something handmade is best if you can find it or make it.
Until about a month ago, the cloth was the only piece on my altar. I haven’t been able to find any small statues that resonated with me- neither anthropomorphic pieces nor owls. So the owl you see was a providential find. I’ve struggled for a long time to find an appropriate owl- most of the statues I find have eyes that are… wrong. It’s hard to describe, but a lot of them have eyes that look vacant or vapid to me- hardly fitting for a goddess of wisdom.
This owl on the other hand, has enormous, piercing eyes that are actually magnifying lenses. From my usual focal distance, they look like silvery windows into a different version of our world- a version that is slightly out-of-focus and unseen. These owls are available from Pier One, a store that I don’t normally frequent. My wife was looking for pillows and the owl jumped out at me. If I hadn’t found that one, I might have picked up an owl with a more “scrutinizing” or “inquisitive” expression.
Of course, I’m still on the lookout for a statue of Our Lady that blends Her modern and ancient symbolism. So far, the statue of “Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace” atop the U.S. Capitol is probably the closest, but it’s still not quite updated enough for my purposes. One of these days I may have to try sculpture, or at least get rich enough to afford to hire a sculptor to make one.
The card and the coin are really recent additions. I talk more about them here.
That’s my altar to Our Lady of the Republic. I wish it was larger and more complex, but I only have so much room in the cat-proof spaces.