Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dionysia at my place

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Party date: Friday, 20 January 2012
time: 7.30pm – whenever
dress: Smart casual or Informal, masks optional
menu: Mezze (provided — but you’re more than welcome to bring something, provided you confirm ahead of time)
drinks: wine, hot cider, ouzo, and soft drinks provided; beer and cocktails are BYOB
additional info: No children, house shared with three cats (allergy warning); parking info still being worked out. Invitees please include your number of guests with RSVP (max 3 guests per party — singles are afforded up to three guests, couples are afforded up to three guests)
RSVP by: 6 January 2012

Amongst my friends, I’m kind of known for planning parties “too far” in advance, but that’s not a bad thing, cos everybody who attends has a great time, and loves the food (even though sometimes my food themes can be very very wrong).

So, I was hoping to host a Boeotian New Year party at my place this December — until I re-checked this year’s calendar and was reminded that this year’s Boeotian New Year is just days before the Gregorian new year, and so this doesn’t make good party sense, since it’ll essentially be competing with other parties by people who’ve lived in the area longer than I have. So I immediately scrapped that idea for the Rural/Lesser Dionysia.

If you’re on FaceBook and local to me (or at least willing to drive to Lansing, MI), feel free to friend me for an invite — and message me, mentioning this post so that I know you’re not just another Friend Collector looking for the latest trading card.

I’m planning a table of fruits, punch, and finger-foods, wine, plenty of good music, silent cinema on the telly, and plenty of art around the place. An hour prior to party time, I’m also planning a libation to Dionysos, so that my non-HP friends will have plenty of time to avoid ritual they have no need for.

I’m going to stop taking RSVPs after 6 January 2012, so that I have plenty of time to make sure I have everything I need.

Πανδημος: Aphrodite the Red

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I often see reconstructionists of various tribe advocating a political persuasion that’s neo-conservative or outright Fascist (for the record, though, I’m not counting “radical traditionalism” as either, since the bare bones of that philosophy is social and can easily be applied to just about any political creed1). While the most discussed interpretation of Aphrodite Pandemos, “Aphrodite of All People”, is that of one in contrast to Aphrodite Urania, “Heavenly Aphrodite”, with implications (if not outright statements) that the Divine and the Material are two sides of a coin, always separate faces, never intermingling. I say this is a false dichotomy, for if the Heavenly does not regularly insert itself into the material, then what right do human beings even have to worship deities in the ancient way? Why don’t Hellenists just disregard the material world as so irreparably wicked that we must prostrate ourselves before bitter Deities and beg Their salvation? This is where I tend to see Platonism as “like Christianity, only not”, cos it lends itself too well to that sort of “logic”, and as a priest of Eros, I see no real separation between the Divine and the Material, it’s all interwoven together in the great tapestry, so positing a dichotomous Aphrodite Pandemos/Urania will ultimately fall apart because of a third side called reality, and then you realise that reality isn’t sided like a coin or a die, but faceted, like a crystal or cut gemstone.

But I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, either, and I see another interpretation of Aphrodite of All People: She is the uniter, the community organiser, charismatic leader, and the radical. She’s the Populist, not the Individualist, and so is very easily at home with Socialism, Democracy, and other Populist parties — including Right Wing Populism.

The Πανδημος/Pandemos epithet is also shared with Eros, and so I suppose it would be hard to find a dedicated Aphroditian who is also a dedicated Libertarian, if not impossible. These are unselfish deities with Their gifts, and so the appeal of individualism and elitism would not lend easily to Their lessons. Though not exactly in a pro-Marxist light, populism and anti-aristocracy themes were prominent in the founding of The Church of Aphrodite.

1: And for the record, I don’t identify as RadTrad, either, oh no, I’m far too much of a modernist, but I’m just saying that after careful examination from the outside for the last few years, I’ve been able to see that philosophy for what it is: a benign far-fringe social movement endorsed by some decent people, and some not so much. As a Derek Jarman fan, I’d encountered the term long before I was aware that it had anything to do with modern polytheist movements, though he’d never personally self-applied the term. In fact, I find it bizarre that critics and fans of Jarman apply the term to him at all, since while I suppose his penchant for re-claiming history is certainly “radical”, and one could argue that his clear British identity is “traditional”, his family had a holiday property in the Mediterranean, growing up, and he also identified with the Mediterranean, and his methods of reclaiming history and tradition was anything but traditional. He was a complex hodge-podge of traditional and modernist, if anything.

Ακιδαλια

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ACIDA′LIA, a surname of Venus (Virg. Aen. i. 720), which according to Servius was derived from the well Acidalius near Orchomenos, in which Venus used to bathe with the Graces; others connect the name with the Greek akides, i. e. cares or troubles.

I was looking through epithets for this post, to see if there was something specific to Boeotia that hasn’t been touched on a thousand times before, and this really struck me. It struck me in the same way that the famous Praxitelian Eros of Thespiai described centuries after it ceased drawing crows from all over the Hellenosphere as “Love as Suffering”.

How often is it that love leaves us troubled and shattered? Conflicted? Paranoid?

This is further why I reject the modern syncretisation of Aphrodite with Eirene, as love seldom brings peace on even a personal level, so whoever first assumed it could bring peace on a global level clearly doesn’t strike me as one who has ever been in love.

Even requited love is not without its heartache, and the Moirai have left us with no shortage of evidence of lovers who die young, lovers who fall out of love with us, lovers who hurt us in all sorts of ways.

…and if not directly, trouble comes indirectly: Relationships with friends are all too often forever changed, the approval or disproval of family members has been the subject of many a thesis, for some of us our work suffers, and for others our art suffers. Love can be a distraction, and some have suggested that a key element to intellectual brilliance is to remain unloved, or to never fall in love.

To far too many people I’ve known, there appears no real evolutionary advantage to our wide range of emotions, and if not for other traits, they imagine our emotions would’ve been so distracting that we’d at least be further down on the food chain. I reject this notion, and suggest that for as troublesome as our emotions are, they have saved us just as much. The only other species that comes close to displaying near the range of emotion as human beings is the elephant, so advanced in its emotional development that it’s the only creature aside from humans that has rituals for its dead, and it will extend this ritual to humans who have lived around them for years — but I digress. Without this wide scope of feeling, our pre-historic ancestors would’ve been less inclined to look out for our young and familial adults, reducing the power and safety of numbers, whereas a lion is no more likely to protect members of her pride than she is to just let them go to a larger animal on the attack. Pigs are lauded as fairly intelligent, but even if in packs, are pretty much out for only their own hides. Even whales don’t go to the lengths to protect their young and others of their species that human beings do. It’s our emotions which save us from outside threats, from each-other, and from ourselves, so clearly the trouble is worth it.

Boeotian Theoi: Aphrodite

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CULT IN BOIOTIA (CENTRAL GREECE)

I) THEBES Chief City of Boiotia

Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 16. 3 :
“At Thebes [in Boiotia] are three wooden images of Aphrodite, so very ancient that they are actually said to be votive offerings of [the mythical queen] Harmonia, and the story is that they were made out of the wooden figure-heads on the ships of Kadmos. They call the first Ourania (Heavenly), the second Pandemos (Common), and the third Apostrophia (Rejecter). Harmoina gave to Aphrodite the surname of Ourania (Heavenly) to signify a love pure and free from bodily lust; that of Pandemos (Common), to denote sexual intercourse; the third, that of Apostrophia (Rejecter), that mankind might reject unlawful passion and sinful acts. For Harmonia knew of many crimes already perpetrated not only among foreigners but even by Greeks, similar to those attributed later by legend to the mother of Adonis, to Phaidra, the daughter of Minos, and to the Thrakian Tereus.”

II) TANAGRA Village in Boiotia

Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 2. 1 :
“Beside the sanctuary of Dionysos at Tanagra [in Boiotia] are three temples, one of Themis, another of Aphrodite, and the third of Apollon.”

III) THESPIAI Village in Boiotia

Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 27. 5 :
“Here [at Thespiai, Boiotia] too are statues made by Praxiteles himself, one of Aphrodite and one of Phryne [historic lover of Praxiteles], both Phryne and the goddess being of stone. Elsewhere too is a sanctuary of Aphrodite Melainis (Black), with a theater and a market-place, well worth seeing.”

Aphrodite, as per Hesiod, is not the mother of Eros. This seems pretty consistent with other Boiotian writers. This seems to be of Attic origin, and Attika certainly ensured that myth’s popularity.

Like Adonis’ cult, Aphrodite’s was most likely a Near Eastern import via the island of Kypris, and Aphrodite’s Roxk is still a prominent attraction off the coast of the island, as it’s regarded as the Goddess’ legendary birthplace, formed from the sea-foam created of the castrated loins of Ouranos. Her conception is sort of the opposite of parthenogenesis, which is the conception of a baby without a male counterpart — indeed, She was created of three males: The seed of Ouranos, the skin of Okeanos, and the hand of Zeus. This is probably what lends well to the Second Wave Anti-sex Feminist dismissal of Aphrodite as “every man’s fantasy”, but I posit that She is something deeper than that.

Even in science, parthenogenic birth makes sense, either as a design of the species or in cloning, because females possess a womb, and/or the ability to lay eggs. It is thus that Aphrodite is an impossible thing: Even the ancient Hellenes, in spite of their faulty understanding of how conception actually works, formed mythology that has no shortage of parthenogenesis, and displays at least a squintable understanding that infants need to be nourished by the human body —thus Zeus had to swallow Metis to birth Athene, and had to sew Dionysos into His thigh (which my house-mate insists is code for weiner, but that’s another story for another time). Aphrodite, even by the internal logic of mythology, is thus an impossible thing, and yet She was born as fully-formed as Athene, and exists as plainly as Dionysos; by all reasoning, She shouldn’t be, and yet She is.

Thalia

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Sorry these weren’t always incredibly obvious for why I decided to post them for each Kharis, but I assure you, I have a good reason for each of them. If any selection confuses, just feel free to ask (serious, people don’t comment enough, and I have no other way to really gauge if people get anything out of these posts).