On the night of the Maiuma, a festival to commemorate the joining of Dionysos and Aphrodite… A night of love, passion, revelry and baptism...
I shouldn’t be surprised… that one of my favorite bands are playing the same night.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that the singer of the band tells me that she thinks of my husband often, even though she only met him twice, and we speak in depth of love and death.
I shouldn’t be surprised.... that a total stranger asks me to talk about sexuality and the nature of unconditional love as I’m sipping strawberry beer.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that being the only person dancing on the dance floor is still worth it.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that another stranger tells me my dancing made the night even better for him.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that the band ends up playing 2 ½ sets because the other two bands cancel at the last minute.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that the night smells like rain and nostalgia.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that my mom remembered to buy me strawberries so I could make something special for a feast.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that wine and cider make a lovely combination.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that hot baths still make my heart pound.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that I have tears left to cry, though they are not happy or sad, but something else.
I shouldn’t be surprised… that the three red candles on the altar haven’t burnt out yet.
...
I shouldn’t be surprised… that I can still be surprised at all. But I hope I never stop.
I did my second blood offering to the Dionysian Dead.
The first time was a bit clumsy, this time was a little less clumsy.
So I’m not an expert here by any means, just sharing my experience
since it seems that others might be a bit hesitant to do this. Forgive
the lack of poetry, but I am anxious to get this down.
Background: I have done some basic ancestor work in the last year,
and have honored the dead at appropriate festivals (Samhain,
Anthesteria) but other than this, no special experience in working with
the dead. But my husband died unexpectedly last May, so that
experience, both coping with the grief and conceptualizing the
afterlife, has brought me close to the edge, so to speak. And even the
Anthesteria before he died there were signs that I should start focusing
more on the dead. I wouldn’t do intense work with just any wandering
dead, because that’s more than I’m prepared to deal with, but I feel
that when it comes to the Dionysian dead in particular, that Dionysos is
going to be the the mediating presence. I trust him.
What I gathered: paper, pencil, single blade razor, isopropyl
alcohol, paper towels, bandaid, pine resin salve, a vessel for burning
(like a small cauldron), other usual ritual accoutrements, tobacco and
whiskey for offerings, music
Practical side: Cutting yourself on purpose is harder than you think
it’s going to be. It just is. And probably not for everyone for a
variety of reasons. But I feel like for me it’s doable and just
something I’m trying to figure out the best method for. A knife was too
clumsy and hard to control, and the single razor I used was difficult to
get a decent depth of cut with, so I’m not wed to a particular method
yet, although the razor was better. Obviously, be careful and smart
about it. I especially like the idea of using pine resin salve
afterwards, though, if you can get or make some. It’s a good healer and
pine is associated with Dionysos, so it’s protective in a spiritual AND
antimicrobial way.
I called upon Dionysos first, and asked him to bring his blessed dead
and be the intermediary. Then I called upon the Dionysian dead
themselves, praised them and asked them to be present, to dance with me
and receive my offerings.
Dancing!
For anyone in the Thiasos of the Starry Bull that read and discussed Philostratus’ On Heroes a little while back, you might remember this bit:
To be cleansed of the body is the beginning of life for divine and
thus blessed souls. For the gods, whose attendants they are, they then
know, not by worshipping statues and conjectures, but by gaining visible
association with them. And free from the body and its diseases, souls
observe the affairs of mortals, both when souls are filled with
prophetic skill and when the oracular power sends Bacchic frenzy upon
them.
The last sentence in particular jumped out at me. What this says to
me is that not only must we be in an altered or frenzied state to
interact with the spirits of the dead, but the dead and/or the heroes
must be brought into a frenzy as well in order to interact with us.
There is a meeting in between, perhaps. In other words, we must do some
work to alter or raise their spiritual vibrations and our own to
similar frequencies. What does this mean? From what I can guess… Give
them energy, and specifically, energy that is reciprocal and flows
between the realms — offerings of food or drink, music, and things that
bring you into altered states of consciousness (dance, wine, chanting,
etc.) used with intention. The blood offering itself no doubt
does this as well, but since I wanted the blood to be a gift and not the
tool (if there’s a difference), I chose to play music and dance first.
Once I felt good about the energy raised, I sat down to do the blood
offering. I took a small piece of paper and wrote a spontaneous prayer
to the Dionysian dead. I read it aloud. And I took the razor and made a
couple cuts on my left thumb. I pressed the blood into the paper. I
hand-rolled a cigarette of organic tobacco and blew tobacco smoke onto
it. And then I burned the paper. Sprinkled some alcohol into the
flames. Blood and breath, earth and fire and spirit.
And then I danced some more. I had this mix of music that went from
Hellblinki to the Doors. After I settled down, I decided to use the
Oracle of the Doors to see how my offering was received. Which is where
things got interesting. The first response I got was:
You’re lost little girl.
Um, okay. That could be negative. Am I totally on the wrong track?
But then, that particular Doors lyrics just played so maybe it’s a
playful acknowledgement. To further clarify:
Don’t worry, the operation won’t take long and you’ll feel much better in the morning.
Hmmm, enigmatic, but positive hints toward the future and possibly the operation being the blood offering itself. One more: Go out and buy a brand new pair of shoes.
Okay, this one REALLY got my attention. Bizarrely, I had been shoe
shopping all day, trying to find a pair of shoes to go with a particular
dress, and did not have any luck. In fact, just before I did this
ritual I had a long rant to my mom about how I couldn’t find the right
shoes and didn’t even know what the right shoes would even look like,
because my qualifications and the dress itself are so particular. So
are they saying they were with me, watching me, while I was shopping
today….? Being tipsy and feeling like I was being played with, I said “No, really! How was my offering received?” And got:
it’s how it has to be
Okay. I could deal with that.
The next day, I went to an appointment and then found myself with
some free time before I had to get ready for dinner with a friend. So I
hit a Goodwill and looked for shoes again, bought a pair that pinched
my toes but probably wouldn’t look awful. I gave up and started to head
home. On my way, I missed a turn I would have taken if I’d been paying
more attention, but then the next turn I took I saw another Goodwill
where I didn’t know there had been one. Well, why not? It wasn’t until
that moment where I had pretty much given up again that I saw them.
THE PERFECT PAIR OF SHOES. Even just seeing them on the shelf I’m sure I
said, “No way!” under my breath and then, “But I bet they don’t have
the sort of heel I want.” But, they did. The particular shade of
brown, the pattern on the shoes that would offset the pattern on the
dress, it was so fucking unlikely that my heart was pounding when I
checked the size and tried them on. Just a tad too big, but that would
be a piece of cake to deal with!
Shoes may seem like a really silly thing to get excited about, there
is more to it… The dress that they needed to go with? Belonged to my
husband. (And yes, he looked really great in it.) And I have been
planning for months to wear it in remembrance of him, to the concert of a
musician we both love, whom he never got a chance to see. So even in
this girly, silly detail was this really special significance to me, and
to the dead. There is no doubt in my mind that they were an unexpected
gift to acknowledge my gift. I am overwhelmed at this, and the
immediacy and reality of it. I don’t think pictures do them justice, but here it is…
Things have been a bit hectic, but not uneventful! First of all, my epithet project of sorts was very illuminating. Even though it didn't quite come out to one epithet per day. One of our cats got very sick (but pulled through, thank Bast!), not to mention that sometimes I simply felt I needed more time with one. Even then, such a short time devoted to an epithet is by no means enough to explore all the sources, significance, aspects and nuances for each one. I mainly trusted on the tarot card and what chanced to comes up in the resources available to me as far as what focus to take. It was almost eerie how well some of the cards related to the epithets, even if it didn't seem that way at first glance. I enjoyed it, and expect I'll be doing it again sometime. In the midst of that devotional project, something else significant happened.
Somewhere between Dionysos Agrios and Dionysos Bromios, my husband and I were talking of gods, tricksters, archetypes, god consciousness... At the same time, he's drawing tarot cards as I work on blogging about epithets. He draws the 7 of Cups as I'm trying to research it, so we share thoughts about it. He mentions being an incidental Dionysian, which makes me smile. The topic changes and meanders.
That night we both woke up at the same time from dreams that seemed very significant, and became all the more significant when we shared the similarities later that morning. In mine, I was in a dry creek bed at night. There was a lot of foliage, and the sense that we were staying there, my husband and I. We were planning and preparing for a Dionysian ritual. But when I tried to speak to him, there was an emotional distance between us, the kind that I was uncertain how to breach. A group of women charged through the foliage, to join us perhaps. I remember thinking I would rather it would be just the two of us.
In his dream, I was putting on and starring in a Dionysian play. He was there with me the whole time, but not a part of the play itself, and felt distant and sad that he was not included... yet he wasn't sure how to ask since it was my "thing". Dionysos himself was present as the play was going on, weaving among and watching the performers.
After thinking about the two dreams, I asked, hesitantly, "Do you think its a message that we should be doing things together, spiritually, as far as Dionysos goes?"
This question was even hard for me to say. I'm not sure why, exactly. I think part of it is that I feel so damn lucky to have this person who I love so much, who loves me in return, share a spiritual belief system with me, that I would never presume that he would want to worship the same god. It is such a personal thing, after all. Which is another reason, I suppose... It is so close to my heart, that I'm a bit self-conscious about it sometimes. (Not for any good reason, just stupidly so.)
But when I asked, he agreed, and admitted that he has wanted to but did not wish to intrude.
So it seems we got a couple gentle smacks upside the head from the god for something we have both wanted but were afraid to ask each other.
The idea is still so novel, though, that I still feel baffled. I told my husband, I really don't know what I'm doing most of the time, so I'm not sure where to start trying to cultivate a concurrent practice...
And a deep part of me is still scared, even when all evidence points to the contrary, that he is just doing this for my benefit. Although I don't know why that's so frightening, because that isn't a BAD thing, even though it isn't something I'd want or expect. It's really hit me, consciously anyway, that my relationship to Dionysos feels intimate. Talking about him, specifically how I feel about him, or my experiences with him is as difficult (if not more difficult) than talking about how I orgasm or what I like during sex. Intimacy equals vulnerability. Which follows that my deepest, irrational fear is that if I let someone in to those experiences, then they can, hypothetically, try to discredit what is meaningful to me.
I have a specific memory of the first time I opened Otto's book, Dionysos: Myth and Cult. I was intrepidly, shyly beginning to explore Dionysos and my attraction to him. The prospect was new and a little scary, and my life was not quite ready for it (which is to say it needed it.) I mentioned a section in the book to the person I was with at the time, now my ex, wanting to share something that intrigued me, that seemed mysterious and promising, to see if we could have a discussion about it. But instead, he said something critical and dismissive. (Though that was often his way of "discussing", he loved to argue for the sake of argument. He was also a very cerebral couch-pagan, who occasionally practiced, seemingly for my sake.) But I just shut down and moved on. For whatever reasons at the time, I put down the book and didn't pick it up again for a couple years.
My husband has only ever been sensitive, interested, open-minded, and on the same page as me regarding the spiritual and mystical. So my hang-ups are all my own. And to some extent, it's also just hard to speak of what's hard to put into words. But I must work on unsticking my tongue, releasing old fears, and opening myself up to whatever the god and the future has in store for us. It's not an entirely new concept - he celebrated Anthesteria with me last year and the occasional devotional day - but now it feels as if it will be more together, hand in hand.
For the Haloa, we did a simple feast in honor of Demeter and Dionysos. We got local produce and locally made foods from a nearby farmer's market, as well as a bottle of sparkling blackberry mead and a bottle of "Dionysos" wine. The beverages were from Total Wine - the Dionysos wine was even from Greece. It was very good! I expect to be getting it again for devotional activities. (The same label also has a "Hermes" wine that I want to try.) The food was all wonderful, although the carrot and acorn squash soup I made was a little spicy! We shared the food with the gods on a temporary altar... Dionysos was represented with the statue usually on my shrine, Demeter with some sheafs of wheat. We played a variety of music, including some of the early (especially otherworldly) songs by múm, and selections from Stereolab's Not Music and Wisp's We Miss You . It was quite lovely.
I have so more to blog about, including a devotional day to Dionysos we had last week, the dream I had last night, the Lenaia that we're celebrating tomorrow... not to mention other things I've been meaning to talk about, including ecstatic postures and Ariadne. Things are buzzing...
It was the 30th anniversary of my birth, a new moon, and a solar eclipse (albeit not visible in this part of the world) all in one day. It seemed like an auspicious time to follow an oracle from Dionysos to "go to the forest."
I went alone, to an area whose energy is dear and familiar to me, though finding a place where I might have some solitude without hiking too much was difficult. I had precious little daylight to work with by the time I reached the place, since this was only a day trip. I settled on a place not far from the road but out of sight, with a steep hill next to a creek. Offerings in tow, I hiked down, over the water and then up. My plan was to get over the hill or to the top of the hill, but this proved impossible. It was steeper than I thought, and my step was still unsteady from my still-healing foot.
A little more than halfway up the hill I had to stop. Left with little choice, I picked the oldest, most impressive looking pine tree in the immediate vicinity and sat with my back to it and the creek so I would not slide down. The sun and I were in just the right position for me to see all the normally invisible, now illuminated, strands of spider webbing in the trees and brush before me. On the rising ground in front of me I fashioned an altar from a piece of tree trunk and put forth the various offerings I had been told to bring: eggs, a phallos, wine, flowers. And for my head, a crown that I fashioned of floral lights and ivy for an Ariadne costume a couple years ago, that has since had a permanent place on my shrine. The sensation of gravity pushing me into the support of the old tree, with the sharply rising ground and the setting sun in front of me, was a strange one. But I felt secure and secluded.
I called on Dionysos. I immediately felt the fullness of this place--just how much is going on both visible and invisibly, in constant vibration. I poured out wine to Him, drank wine, shared wine. Later that night, I wrote about my experience:
Dionysos is the god of nowness, the god of this moment. Nature itself is vibrating, breathing, exploding, ecstatic with energy all the time. He is not just the next time you drink wine or the next time you dance, he is the intense and tragic-wonderful experience of being alive NOW that is simply waiting for your awareness. What is your greatest joy and your greatest sorrow right now? He is in both.
I smoked a little leaf of diviner's sage. I sensed the vastness behind the nature I knew, the death behind the life. There was a glimmer of fear, but only a glimmer reserved for the unknown, for the overwhelming idea of "void". But that only pushed me more into a feeling of deep love. Somewhere around this time, I realized that I'd been digging my fingers into the soft soil and squeezing it through my fingers, over and over and over, with all this love and sorrow pouring through me.
Myself as a priestess of now, of the present moment. Overwhelming love for this earth, its physicality, its dimension and sensations and beauty. This is why I am a Dionysian, why I would be a Bodhisattva -- I would wish always to return to this.
Dionysos' associations with nymphs, with nature, and with death all coalesced into this sudden, half-drunk idea that some nymphs are simply maenads who wished to remain forever connected with the wild places they love, who were granted this by the god they love.
I stayed as long as I could, until it started getting dark and shivering cold. I ate at a raw food restaurant in town to ground myself before heading home.
Worth mentioning is that while I was there, I also had this intuitive tickle that there's something I need to explore more deeply in the future regarding the relationship between Ariadne and Dionysos and their complementary roles. (I don't like that last phrase but I'm having a hard time putting it better.) Synchronistically, earlier in the day I had stopped very briefly at a new age shop before heading farther north, picked up a single pagan book, and randomly flipped it open to a section on Ariadne. I have also recently changed my Aphrodite shrine to be a shrine to Ariadne-Aphrodite--but more on that later.
[My thanks to Sannion for being the vessel for the oracle that prompted this trip.]
I just finished reading a book called "Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure" by Suzi Gablik. It's one of those "one woman's spiritual journey" books, yet I was excited to read it based on its promised content... oracle work, embracing daily synchronicities, becoming suddenly drawn to and close to a specific deity (in her case, the Black Madonna.)
Unfortunately, the book didn't have the depth I was hoping for. The middle-aged author builds an altar to the Black Madonna and visits her statues in foreign places but does not detail any very noteworthy interactions with her as a deity - and almost ignores her entirely for the last half of the book. She uses I-Ching and bibliomancy which, although certainly valid forms of divination, are not what I'd consider "oracular". The book is a disjointed account of her doubts and affirmations regarding whether life is meaningfully synchronistic, interconnected and guided by outside forces or simply random. She describes years of following divination and omens which tell her to hold out hope for a specific romantic relationship, despite all outward evidence that this particular person was entirely disinterested. The book ends with the romantic interest rebuffing her once and for all and the author ends saying that the outcome does not nullify her experiences. Basically, "Who knows why things happen the way they do? This is my story, take it or leave it."
Urgh.
It brings up the whole question of whether or not the gods/spirits/PTB would be intentionally misleading or even blatantly lie in order to further our spiritual development. The author doesn't tackle this issue, having decided on a tenuous position of blind faith, and certainly seemed to think she emerged a stronger person. But still, I wonder. Certainly the gods themselves are ineffable and may mislead for reasons we can't comprehend at the time, but I like to think that divination in general is about revealing patterns. Was she then not reading a reality pattern but the pattern of her own psyche, which wasn't ready to give up no matter what her divinations revealed? I think that's why I have a hard time reading tarot for myself -- especially when I'm really emotionally invested. I feel like I'm reading what I want. Which is *a* truth, but not the truth I'm usually aiming for.
But this book about synchronicities actually seemed to be, well, synchronistic. It made me stop and take note of omens that have been appearing in my own life. Oddly, it even referenced a couple very specific things -- including redwood trees, a topic which I just read an entire book about and which seems to keep coming up, and a book by C.S. Lewis that a friend just gave me to borrow. Even in the ways the book was lacking and irritating me reminded me of my own shortcomings and what I want to strive for in my spiritual practice.
So, time not entirely wasted. Now I just need to figure out why the trees are trying to get my attention. Maybe I should just ask them?
Thursday I had set aside as a devotional day for Aphrodite. Somewhat unplanned, I ended up spending the whole day with someone I love very dearly, and we had some very intense and heartfelt conversation. Even looking back on the conversation itself, there is an air of something incredibly sacred about it.
So was the intention of having this devotional day ahead of time part of how it turned out, very much a day devoted to Her, though not the way I planned? Is it simply synchronous? I had in the back of my mind a bit of guilt that I hadn't meditated for the goddess specifically, hadn't done any of the solitary things I had planned. I didn't even give her offerings until Friday. But would She mind, considering how it went? A interesting lesson in what devotion is - not always what is planned, and that the spontaneous participation in life and its synchronicities can be even more powerful.
I am so filled to the brim with gratitude to Aphrodite and Dionysos and the immanent Divine for the gifts I've been given (and just as importantly, the knowledge to see these gifts with clarity) that I'm not sure how to express or repay it sufficiently. I am blessed. But how could I not be? I am god, as are You.
