13 Friday Dec 2013
11 Wednesday Dec 2013
Posted in Academic, Divinity, Hekate, Personal Work and Practices, Writing
I will be using a template of sorts to help me with my research on Hekate, the Olympians and the rest of the Theoi by participating in the 30 Days of Deity Devotion challenge!
I’m going to start out with Hekate, and I’ll see if I like the topic prompting to transition into my other research. I am starting soon, but will get a few entries done before I start posting. I’ll probably start them either on the Deipnon or the Noumenia, not sure which yet (start posting, not writing).
16 Wednesday Oct 2013
Posted in Life, Media, Personal Work and Practices, TFE, Thrift
Hey guys! Midterms are the reason for my silence right now, I’ll be back to posting regularly soon. Just wanted to toss out some quick updates!
First, check this out- http://www.polytheismwoborders.com/
It’s a blog and forum dedicated to polytheists of all paths and it is absolutely wonderful!
Next, this- http://theforestsedge.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/open-ritual-with-the-forests-edge/
Our trad is having an open ritual! Whoo! If you are in the Nashville area (or hell, the middle TN area in general) come on by! We won’t bite, too hard at least! *winkwink*
Pagan Pride Day just went down, and I got two awesome lovlies as well as participating in my first large public ritual!
First, a pretty little faerie door from the most wonderful shop that had so many fantastic polymere clay creations and rekindled my interest in working with the medium!
The second is the most wonderfully delicious and creepy mug I’ve ever laid eyes on. I went to it 4 times before I decided to splurge. It also makes me want to finish my Lovecraft anthologies!
The creators of these pretty little things have etsy shops, https://www.etsy.com/shop/zoeowyn and https://www.etsy.com/shop/thedruidsden respectively.
Also, I realized I had never posted any pictures from our Mabon ritual! I won’t go into details much (I may or may not later) but here are a few photos of the altar set up!
I’m working on a few different things, as always, but soon I hope to add polymere clay to that list. I was silly and didn’t realize that sculpy was polymere clay, and so I realized that I could just use colored clay for my roses (herp derp) instead of trying to paint the damned things and all their tiny cracks!
Also, from a combination of having years of partial or full snake sheds from my wonderful corn snake as well as needing some extra funds to hopefully increase my blogging presence by upgrading the blog to pro (I can’t stand that wordpress may start running adds on free blogs without the author’s consent), I’ll be selling segments of partial sheds. I won’t sell full sheds, I keep all of those, but I’m offering 6 inch segments for $5. Shipping is included as I’ll probably press it fairly thin and just send it in an envelope. Email me at fringenymph@gmail.com if you are interested. If you specifically want an area that includes the head or tail, ask and I’ll set that aside for you until the areas run out. I use snakeskin as offerings (both in fire, albeit a bit stinky, as well as just a plain offering itself) to Hekate, but snakes are also associated with most underworld/chthonic deities. Zeus, Demeter and Ares are all associated with snakes (sometimes winged serpents), as well as several other of the Theoi. You can also use snakeskin as a point of contact/offering for getting in touch with Snake as a spirit guide. Snake is a fantastic partner for journeying, as well as being a keeper of great knowledge and a mystic (I’m actually just starting to delve into work with Snake myself).
Any money from selling the skins will go straight to the pot to fund the blog. I need $99 for this upgrade, and it will do several things:
-domain name and mapping
-no ads (yay!)
-allow me to upload my own videos
-add another 10G of storage to the site for photos and videos
-allow me to make custom css changes
I would really like to delve further into blogging and offer as much as I can to the community. To remain blog free and to allow me to share my own direct videos, as well as work on making the blog more aesthetically appealing, I’d really love to get the upgrade, but I can’t justify it out of pocket, being a poor student and all. If you’d care to support me, purchase some lovely snake skin! I’m also going to be enabling a donate button on the side, and anyone who donates over $3 can email me for a basic tarot reading!
Also, I wanted to let you guys know about a future project I hope to get started soon. I want to run a podcast for the Theoi, where I read aloud myths concerning Them, then present research and evidence of their historical worship, and then discuss modern interpretations and worship of Them. I’d like to do this on a “God by God” basis, so to speak, where I’d examine each on their own show (or two to three, depending on the length). Any money I get from the skins and any donations after the $99 for the WordPress upgrade will go straight to funding this project! I’d like to start it as soon as Yule and the holiday season (possibly right after Yule). I am also interested, at some point, to have a separate podcast on my more witchy practices, but that will take a backseat to this first project.
Soon I hope to start selling some of my artsy stuff on etsy, I’ll link my store whenever I have stuff for you to buy on it. I’m sorry for the blatant self promotion, but I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do, and I’m going to use any proceeds to help give back to the community the best ways I can!
Anyway, I have to shower before I run off to class. I’ll post more soon!
16 Wednesday Oct 2013
Tags
He-ka-te
He-ka-te
Mighty as Earth
He-ka-te
He-ka-te
He-ka-te
Vast as Sea
He-ka-te
He-ka-te
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Bright as Heaven
He-ka-te
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Darkness in Night
He-ka-te
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Silence in Hell
He-ka-te
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Wisdom in Magic
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Bearer of Torches
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Spectre of Crossroads
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Guide of my path/Guide of paths (depending on the chanter’s relationship with Her)
He-ka-te
11 Wednesday Sep 2013
For a while now I’ve struggled with questions like “Are you a soft or hard polytheist? What do you mean when you are panentheist, and isn’t that just a cop out for people who have monotheist sympathies? How can you be in both your tradition and also be as influenced as you claim with the Hellenic Gods? Isn’t feeling drawn to Gods from multiple cultures just appropriation and a bad habit? Isn’t eclectic just a synonym for appropriation? How can you be a witch and worship the Hellenic Gods?” Quite frankly, many of these questions aren’t ones that have been directly stated to me (hell, I’ve gotten very little direct badgering over my blog and, let’s be honest, who would come to this tiny corner to insult me, and if they did why would I give a shit?) and are in fact questions I’ve been anticipating before I involved myself into any sort of serious discussion with the broader Pagan/polytheistic community. Particularly with the way that the Neo-Pagan flavor of things has gotten a very bad rap and the way that many polytheists and Pagans now shut down any of the influences drawn from the Neo-Pagan movement, I’ve been quite hesitant to involve myself with the community at large.
In some ways, dealing with these both inner and outer questions has been a major roadblock in my path. They lead to much inner skepticism that has made it at times impossible to fully throw myself into my practice and devotion to the gods and spirits. Yet, over time I think I’m finally beginning to conquer these questions, at least in my internal monologue. Whether or not these would prove satisfactory in communicating with a skeptical polytheist, Neo-pagan or anyone else is still remained to be seen, but quite frankly at this point I don’t give a shit. I eventually do want to involve myself with the community at large. Although perhaps not at the moment (being barely able to function with school such a large part of my life) I think that I will be able to contribute to the Hellenic polytheist community. If all goes well I’ll be graduating with a bachelors in Classical Civilization within the next two years, with a year and a half each in Greek and Latin (with my own private goals to continue studying the languages until I can translate the Theogony and Marcus’s Meditations for myself, the latter a gift for my sweetheart) and then going on, I hope, to get my MLS and become a librarian. If anything, I have access to sources that many people can only dream of, being able to access a library of a top 20 (US rankings, not world) University with a Master’s Graduate Program in Classics and a fairly thriving Undergraduate department (not trying to sound snobbish, but I have a goal to saturate myself with the academic study of both Classical religion, comparative religious studies and modern social and religious movements so that I can specifically be a better member of the community and help develop it so that, maybe when I’m old and gray, I can point my maybe existing in the future children to this time and show them the vast amount of progress we’ve made, instead of showing them to the mass of petty squabbles and internet cat fights that have been going on lately).
I realize that I want to share the strides I’ve made, mentally, about these questions-in part, because I usually do better with discussion than with purely internal monologue, and in part because I hope that they can stand up to base scrutiny and that, just maybe, they can help inspire others to critically examine their own cosmological views so that they can at least try to understand the notion of internal consistency (again, not to sound condescending, but I do notice a tendency towards inconsistency within individuals that I find to be a weak point in the state of both the larger Pagan/Neo-Pagan movement as a whole and in the respective smaller movements). I’ll probably do this in a set of posts, since it is difficult to address all of what I want to mentally in a concise format. Already I’m over 700 words in this post alone, and I’d rather not create TL;DR monsters that make people skim over my blog like old milk- these are supposed to be serious examinations that could possibly provoke serious conversation, and even if it doesn’t (considering the small scope of my blog thus far) I’d like to at least delude myself into thinking that they will have that potential. I’m off to campus soon, but I hope to post something later today with more specific substance.
Until then, enjoy this little fantastic bundle of awesome and let it make you have the most enormous smile today (even if people look at you like you are crazy!) (no seriously, I’m not kidding. Watch this and you will be skipping afterwards)-
