Hint: Don’t listen for words or rhythm or construct any more than the whole. Getting lost in one part —lyrics, rhythm, movement— is for Dionysians ( ;-p ), or to be more accurate, it distracts from Apollon’s presence in all truly inspired works of musical genius.
A: Anyone who don’t know Apollon.
Mine is a religion of Creation.
Eros, god of Beauty, Love, Sex, Desire, and ultimately, Creation. All other theoi, ultimately, create things. Even the Goddesses Parthenos.
The path of the hoi polloi is to work, procreate, and pass on.
The path of the hero is to use one’s gifts to create from one’s life a legacy that outlives, outshines one’s mortality.
The path of the artist is to hone one’s craft and create, create until one can do so no more. This, too, brings immortality. Artists live forever through their creations and the desire of those who love it to keep it alive.
Is creativity, in any of its forms, integral to a pagan identity? I’d say yes.
If one’s gods do not create, then what incentive is there to worship Them? If one is going to say “oh, I worship nature”, then what is a seed? Water and fire don’t necessarily destroy, they just create smaller objects from bigger ones. If you’re not passing on your path, either via initiation, familial procreation, or just engaging others and teaching them, then you’re destroying it. If one can’t even muster up the courage to be not just inspired by their Deities, but to make something that future generatons can enjoy, then one might as well set fire to the Louvre, for one who does not act on that creative spark, ultimately, destroys it.
Poseidon had a daughter with Pitane, the nymphe of a Laconian spring of a city She gave Her name to. Pitane named the girl Euadnê, and Euadnê grew to be quite beautiful, and she was raised in the Arkadian palace. As Euadnê grew older, Apollon became smitten, and asked Pitane to arrange that He could perhaps lay with Her daughter, and, with joy, Pitane agreed and took delight in dressing Her daughter for the occasion.
When Apollon lay with Euadnê, He believed He was clear to communicate His identity, but Euadnê, unaware of who her real father was believed she was completely mortal and didn’t really believe Him, and having never eaten the sweet nectar of Olympos she was more mortal than the deathless ones, so perhaps it was in her best interest not to, as she was certainly aware of the fate of Semele. 
When Euadne became full with child, she hid it from her parents, and when the time came, she bore the boy alone and took him far beyond the palace, leaving him in a patch of violets, in hope that someone would find him, and give him a decent life.
On Euadne’s walk home that night, her step-father had a dream that she had given birth to the son of Apollon and had left it in abandoned amongst the tiny purple flowers. 
When Euadne returned home, the king greeted her and then sent her back out to retrieve the boy. When she arrived, a shepherd had found the child, intending to raise him alone.
“But this is my son,” Euadne pleaded, weeping. “My father tells me I have born the son of Apollon and I must take him back home to retain the god’s favour over Arkadia.”
“But you exposed the child to the elements at the outskirts after carrying him for over half a year; I have been with the boy for barely five mi utes and have already given him a name. I had a vision of a child amongst the wildflowers and when I awoke I felt compelled to find it. Apollon gave me this son to raise as my own and finally make my family happy, by giving them a grandson.” 
“If you truly want the child and to become part of his life, my father can have us married. You would receive a handsome dowry for saving the boy.”
After a moment to consider this, the shepherd agreed to return with Euadne to the palace and formalise the engagement with her father that the girl had offered. 
The engagement was announced, and the wedding was big and lavish.
The boy was named Iamos, after the violet patch, and like this step-father, received visions and prophecies. This gift later led him to Olympia, where he established the Iamidai, the House of the Violets, which continued for centuries in ancient times to hold prophecies and oracles of Apollon.
The violet is sacred to Apollon, and the colour named after it is the colour of prophecy, divination, fate. I’ve always linked it to the Moirai.
In Hyperborea1, there are many deities whose mythos were unknown to the ancients, or whose tales were lost to time. This version is only one that may be revealed to people both ancient and of today’s age.
In the journeys of Herakles, He once layed with Keltine, daughter of the king Bretannus, and bore the Divine Goddesses Britannia (Prydein) and Hibernia *Ériu), and the other gods and goddesses known to the Keltoi peoples. Britannia being brown-eyed and sandy-haired, lithely-muscled and boyish in frame; Hibernia had dark hair and blue eyes, round and feminine.
Britannia was raised in the temple of the Dioskouri, and guided Her people across the Channel separating a tiny pair of islands fortold to her to be a safe-haven for the Keltoi, where they would enjoy a favoured temperate climate and master the seas that surrounded them.
Hibernia was a priestess of Apollon, and praised Him with song. She directed use of the great stone circle of Wiltshire, and was the first to dedicate offerings to Him there, brought over many weeks by foot and by ship from Delphi.
The Divine sisters, being the eldest two, each had different ideas about how to guide the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses and the people bestowed upon Them. Britannia, the eldest of Them all, sought rule, conquest, and dominance. Hibernia wanted to guide Their people in a balanced life, and strife broke out amongst the Gods and Goddesses of the Keltoi, and amongst the Keltoi themselves. The fighting lasted for centuries, some say it even ended.
The two Goddesses continued in their dichotomous existence: When Britannia led the Keltoi to modernise, reasoning it logically, Hibernia sought tradition for its own sake.
In spite of Their differences, the Sisters always sought the guidance and wisdom of each-other, and when Their people become too violent in their in-fighting, the Goddesses are saddened, but when even one from Britannia’s island and one from Hibernia’s can come together in friendship or love, the goddesses rejoice and are glad.
Pindar was born in the 65th Olympiad in Cynoscephalae, a village outside Thebes. His mother’s name was Cleodice and no-one can seem to decide if his father’s name was Daiphantus, Pagondas or Scopelinus. 
Unlike Hesiod, he seems to be from the ancient Boeotian equivalent of a bourgeoisie background, and clearly this is one of those things that hasn’t changed about Western Society, as unlike Hesiod, he included practically none of his family’s dirty laundry in his own work. Pindar’s got class, so there’s not much I can goof on (affectionately, of course). There’s a legend that his gift for “honey-like verse” came from having his mouth stung by a bee as a youth, and that’s seriously all anybody really knows about ol’ high-falutin’ Pindar until he was maybe twenty — of course, if you think about it, it’s far more impressive that Hesiod, being from a lower class tier, made it past that age, this was a time when the mathematically-average lifespan was 40-ish, but if one could make it past the age of 15-ish, when the typical life expectancy was around 55-ish and the higher your class, the more likely you were to live into your seventies1 
— and making it past the age of twenty at a time prior to even 18th Century medicine is a far more impressive feat when you’re a toiler than when you’re from “elegant learning”. In poetry, Pindar was tutored by Corinna of Tanagra (a fellow Boeotian) and also relocated to Athens to be further instructed by Lasos of Hermione. By the age of twenty, he was commissioned for his first Victory Ode by a wealthy family from Thessaly. At about the age of thirty, Pindar was at the Pythian games where he met chariot winner and Sicilian prince Thrasybulus, nephew of Theron of Acragas, and they became lifelong friends thereafter — it’s unfortunate that this seems to be one of the less slashtastic ancient Hellenic male-male friendships, but maybe I’m just letting my perversion show with that comment.
Er… *ahem!* Carry on!
So, it seems Pindar was a triple-threat lyric poet; he wrote the lyrics, he wrote the instrumental accompaniment, and he choreographed. 
In modern terms: Pindar was one melodramatic script away from being The Ultimate Theatre Geek™. Sometimes he’d train performers at his hime in Thebes, but he’d also get commissioned by patrons of the arts and would travel all over the ancient Hellenic world to put on shows. He was practically a celebrity, and like modern celebrities, there was sometimes rivalry for jobs, but Pindar’s got class — sure, some of his poetry reflects these rivalries, but only in vague metaphors, like with ravens and apes and shit like that. Even today, people speculate who this was really all about, but like I said, Pindar’s got class. 
Still, Pindar got mixed up in politics. Once, after writing praise of Athens, the rival city of his home city of Thebes, fined him 5000 drachmae, and rumour has it that Athens responded with a gift of twice that. Other hometown drama llamas were ridden in on by the fact that he was a friend of Sicilian tyrant Hieron, the subject of one of Pindar’s first Pythian ode, and it was probably all this bullshit that later led him to write another ode denouncing all tyrants. It’s also been suggested all over the place (and at times seems rather apparent) that Pindar used his fame and his odes as a vehicle for advancing both personal interests and those of his friends. Alright, maybe Pindar’s class is limited, but still, man’s got it; after all, of his personal life, we have very little: his wife was Megacleia, and his son was named Daiphantus, and he had two daughtrers, Eumetis and Protomache. He lived in Thebes near the shrine of the oracle Alkmáon.
Pindar died at about the age of eighty2, and his daughters took home his ashes to Thebes, and the Thebans, despite visiting much drama upon the man in life, regarded his house as one of the city’s landmarks, a practical tourist attraction, and it is said that Alexander the Great so revered Pindar (possibly in no small part to the favourable writings he made of Alexandros I of Makedon) that when he had the city burned in the name of “building Hellenic unity”, Pindar’s house was the only one in the area left intact. Delphi’s Temple of Apollon displayed Pindar’s iron chair that he sat upon during the Theoxenia festival, and one of his daughters claimed to have inscribed a posthumous verse of Pindar’s honouring Persephone.
1: Seriously, in nearly 3000 years, we’ve only really gained about twenty years in life expectancy for the average person, and a statistically insignificant increase in life expectancy for higher classes, and the important factor hasn’t been in prolonging the lives of the elderly, but in all but eradicating paediatric mortality. Remember maths class: “average” figures for ancient life span account all the millions of people dying before the age of eighteen, which skews averages making it look like hardly anybody would see the age of thirty-five, when this is clearly bull.
2: Seriously, octogenarians don’t seem like that big a deal now, do they?
[Also, apologies for dragging this "week" out so long — it's mainly been allergies, which have been bad enough this last couple weeks that I've been feeling muscle weakness and will wake up practically choking on my own snot. Wasn't nearly so bad this morning. ☺]
22 July is a day of many things — of shoes and ships and ceiling-wax, of cabbages and kings. Here are some amazing facts about my birthday!
*The year I was born (according to HMEPA), 22 July was 7 Hekatombion (Attic calendar) or 7 Ippodromios (Boeotian) — the seventh day of the Lunar month being sacred to Apollon.
*My actual “due date” was ten days previous, on the first day of Hekate’s Deipnon.
^I was born in one of the years that 22 July is in Leo rather than Cancer; both signs have mythology related to Herakles (of note, two of my best friends are Gemini)
*I share a birthday (though a different year) with Rufus Wainright — our forenames both mean “red-haired”, though neither one of us really is (my natural colour is auburn, not ginger).
*Birthday also shared with Oscar de la Renta, Terrance Stamp, Alex Trebek, George Clinton, David Spade.
*If you’re Catholic, this is the feast day of Mary Magdelene; intriguingly, Mary Magdalene is commonly portrayed with red hair.
*This year, is on the 20th day of the Lunar month, also sacred to Apollon.
*By modern tradition, birthstone for July is the ruby, by zodiacal tradition, for Leo it is Onyx.
*Flower for July births is Delphinium Larkspur, the sacred flower of Hyakinthos.
I love Adonis.
Though there’s Peanut Gallery commentary decrying any worship of Him and Kybele in a Hellenic context as “un-Hellenic”, it’s pretty obvious that Their cults had been thoroughly Hellenised by the time of Hesiod (if you haven’t seen people making such ridiculous claims, consider yourself lucky; in fact, I consider myself a lesser person for even mentioning it). I find myself especially fascinated with Ptolemy Hephaestion frequently linking His love as shared with Aphrodite and Apollon, which may seem unusual to those who are only familiar with the versions of Aponis’ mythos that link Him with Aphrodite and Persephone. 
“Adonis, having become androgynous, behaved as a man for Aphrodite and as a woman for Apollon.” – Ptolemy Hephaestion, New History Bk5 (as summarized in Photius, Myriobiblon 190)
There’s a fragment from Hesiod that describes Adonis as the son of Phoenix (son of Amyntor), and most primary sources name His mother as Smyrrhna, who had a metamorphosis into the tree from which myrrh resin is harvested.
In myth and in cult, there are many easy comparisons to Dionysos — from a position in life-death-rebirth cults, his apparent links to sexuality, vegetation, and Khthonic deities (especially Persephone), 
academic and ancient syncretic likening to Osiris, and the public face of His cult was decidedly female (though this is where things begin to differ — male Dionysians existed in ancient times as much, if not more, than in modern — male Adonians, at least in the ancient Hellenic world [I haven't a clue about the Phonecian or Syrian world where it's clear His cult originated], seem apparently non-existent and, even in modern times, seem few, at best). 
But at least in the Hellenic world, it’s very clear that they are not the same — in some mythology, Aphrodite bore Adonis a daughter, Beroe, who is one beloved of Dionysos.
His cult likely came into the Hellenic mainlaind through Kypris, the birthplace and local name for Aphrodite, and by about the 6th Century BCE, was already well-known in Hellas. This is not insignificant: This not only cements a relationship with Aphrodite’s cult, it also really shows the aforementioned Peanut Gallery where to stick it — MWAHAHAHAHA!!! 
Seriously, folks, at this point in time, I think it’s safe to admit that the Adonis cult was thoroughly Hellenised. The academia really try to “un-Hellenise” Adonis, and indeed, many of these arguments seem to make sense, until you get into several glaringly apparent facts:
1) Adonis is a central part of Aphrodite’s Hellenic mythology — and I word it this way because a ssignificant amount of Her mythology and cult is clearly “imported”, comparative mythologises easily link Aphrodite to nearly every Near Eastern Goddess from the Babylonian Ishtar to the Zoroastrian Anahita. 
If one is going to conclude that Hellenic polytheists should worship only Hellenic deities, then there is an awful lot of archaeology that could easily reason that Aphrodite’s cult is not “indigenous” to Hellas any more than that of Adonis’.
2) It’s absolutely likely that Adonis’ cult was “imported” at the same time as Aphrodite — and even the much-touted Walter Burkert, apparently Greek Religion is a veritable gospel to some people, sure seems to agree with this idea: 
The cult of the dying god Adonis is already found to be fully developed in Sappho’s circle of young girls around 600 [BCE]; indeed, one might ask whether Adonis had not from the very beginning come to Greece along with Aphrodite. For the Greeks it was well-known that he was an immigrant from the Semetic world, and his origins were traced to Byblos and Cyprus. His name is clearly the Semetic title adon, Lord. For alll that, there is in Semetic tradition no known cult connected with this title which corresponds exactly to the Greek cult, to say nothing of a counterpart to the Greek Adonis myth. (pp176-177)
Indeed, investigating Near Eastern mythology, the closest deity with a cult matching the Adonis cult is we see named is “Tammuz”, not Adonis. Perhaps “Adonis”, in this instance, is merely a loan-word made name? 
3) The name Adonis, while clearly being the sticking point for identifying His cult as “foreign”, as a language arts major I can clearly see as a mere convention on the same level as “Kytheria” or “Kypris” as a name for Aphrodite — and one clearly accepted as “Greek enough” for many scholars for centuries — indeed, Thomas Taylor takes “Kypris = Aphrodite (= Venus)” for granted in translating the Orphic hymns — and indeed, Cyprus was Hittite land until fairly late Bronze Age; which would be roughly the period estimated for the import of Aphrodite and Adonis cults. 
Indeed, in most mythological traditions, Cyprus is also the birthplace of Adonis, not merely His cult — so it obviously flabbergasts that somehow this can make Aphrodite “Hellenic enough”, but not Adonis.
One can clearly only begin to imagine the whys and such for the reluctance to accept Adonis cult as “Hellenic enough”, when all evidence clearly shows that it is so. 
One idea may simply revert to etymology — though clearly acceptable early on in the Hellenisation of Adonis cult practise, later it became a sticking point due to what would now be called racism or nationalism — kinda the same logic “birthers” use to accuse President Barak Obama of being born well-outside U$ soils, in spite of all clear evidence to the contrary. Another idea being that since His cult, in ancient times, was dominated by women to the point of apparently becoming female-only kept the cult well outside the “mainstream” of the civic religion, and so, in a sense, “foreign” to ancient writers, who tended to be men — it could therefore arguably be sexism that kept the Adonis cult regarded as “foreign”; if one considers that many often wrote of the Adonis cult and its symbols with a hint of derision (it’s arguable that the old idea of “green leafy salad = women’s food” is an idea started in ancient Hellas — not only is lettuce sacred to Adonis, but one writer once joked [or perhaps seriously believed] that lettuce causes male sterility), this hypothesis makes a lot of sense on paper.
But perhaps I digress….
I was initially attracted to Adonis as an extension of the “flower boys” — His floral associations include roses (in some versions of the mythos), windflower / anemone poppies, and the “adonis” genus of flowering plant. I make no secret of my veneration of Narkissos as a Daimone and Hyakinthos as hemitheos. Even Krokos, Paeon, and Orchis have found their ways into the mythos I hold dear. 
The “flower boy” myths intrigue me on many levels: For starters, think about what a flower is — not what it represents in this culture, but what it is. It’s a part of certain plants, but which part? The genitals. In a certain light, it can seem kind of perverse how much cut flowers —severed plant genitals— play a part in (especially heterosexual) romance, courtship, and marriage. The boy gives the girl a cluster of severed, essentially hermaphroditic genitals to show he likes her. A few centuries ago, especially the middle classes, the boy’s visit would then only really last as long as it took for girl to pluck the protective petals from around the reproductive centre. Near the end of the wedding ritual, where people especially like to be surrounded by these hermaphroditic plant parts, the bride throws another bushel of genitals on her friends, with the hope that the cycle will start anew.
And if that’s not enough for you to handle? In many flowers, it’s the especially phallic-looking bit in the centre that’s the “female” part of this hermaphrodite.
It’s clear that Western culture is seriously obsessed with sex and sex organs — even when it tries to pretend it’s not, it’s filling children, especially girls, with an onslaught of symbols of fertility and virility and Martha Stewart is joyfully arranging severed genitals in various vases, often with the especially phallic lady-bits, right there on daytime telly (that woman seriously seems to love her lilies and callas — which aren’t lilies, they’re arums, and their “male bits” are typically attached to the “female bit” — now THINK ABOUT THAT).
I find it hard to get close to Aphrodite. Not for lack of trying, mind, but perhaps she senses something about me (In Real Life™, I tend to be generally more comfortable getting emotionally close with men, while women I tend to befriend more casually — and the few exceptions to this kind of prove the rule, in their own unique ways), and either decides to maintain that distance, or simply appoints any and all contact to be through one of “Her Boys”: Either Eros, Whom I’ve already become especially close to, or Adonis, another Flower Boy for my bouquet.
Narkissos, I consider especially precious. My own views of His mythology apparently differ from the mainstream, and the versions of His mythos I hold most dear 
(and indeed, there are dozens of ancient re-tellings and re-imaginings — the Battlestar Galactica franchise has had fewer re-interpretations by a wide margin) seem rather obscure, even if they’re versions that still seem to maintain the dominant trappings of the popular versions. To me, He is a holy daimon: A spirit of self-love, and a protector of those unloved. His namesake flower is sacred to Him, as are mirrors and reflecting pools; the species narcissus poeticus is especially sacred, as this is the exact flower He gave form to. He comes to you in a form reminiscent of you see yourself, perhaps a daimon of the Ego Ideal. He is the son of a nymphe and river god of Thespiae. 
His spurned lover, Ameinias, became anise; you can help to heal the tears Narkissos shed for both His own cruelty and for Ameinias with an offering of anise. Also, a bit of anise in a coffee for a reading may shed light on who loves you. Popularly, at least historically, He seems to have an especial link with gay man, and “narcissism” was initially used as a term for the “sexual perversion” of male-male love.
Hyakinthos’ flower, contrary to modern assumptions, is the delphinium larkspur. He is the son of the Moisa Goddess Kleio and Magnes’ son Pieros (Magnes being the first, now legendary, king of Magnesia, and a son of Zeus), and in some mythological traditions, He is either brother or cousin to Daphne — and perhaps the common-enough urge to link their myths is part of the collective consciousness trying to remind people of this (presumably?) once-ancient connection. 
By Spartan tradition, Hyakinthos is identified with the Thessalian Hymenaios, the God of marriage and the wedding bed, carrying associations with virginity, True Love, and legitimate partnership — again, I have to voice flabergastion that at the fact that so many modern Hellenic polytheists insist that only heterosexual partnerships have a right to spiritual or ritual legitimacy. Did Apollon not love Hyakinthos in the mythos? Is a god’s love not legitimate? Is the love felt by a mortal somehow unture? (If so, then logically, no marriage with a base of love, which is indeed what the overwhelming majority of Western marriages are, can possibly be ritually legitimate within Hellenismos — and I seriously doubt that very many people would want to get behind a fringe religion with self-proclaimed “authorities” who endorse a return to strictly-arranged het marriages based in social-climbing and dowries.) 
Or would people rather wax philosophical about “symbolism” and “metaphor” in myth rather than accept that the best symbol of a thing is the thing itself — and the mythos she the thing itself as a deep love and bond that was met with a tragic end. Though mortals may be imperfect, even flawed things can be true, legitimate — death is the greatest, most glaring flaw that mortals have, when compared to the Theoi, but our deaths are overwhelmingly true, a truth that is glaringly obvious.
And again, we come back to blues — immortal blues for Love Himself. From “…something borrowed, and something blue,” to “L’amour est Bleu” (perhaps is is not insignificant that this song rose to fame via the Hellenic singer Vicky Leandros? LOL). The first I saw Hyakinthos, I knew the Spartans were onto something with their associations with Hymenaios, for the first time I saw Hyacinth (in a dream, mind), He was at a small pool or spring, sitting on a rock at the centre of a thick round of His flower, peacock feathers tied into His hair (giving allusions to Hera, a Goddess whose domains include marriage), and Apollon identifying this breath-taking youth as His beloved Hyakinthos, who He “fought the West Wind for, and won”. Their love, as I see it, is a wedded one that is renewed annually with Hyakinthos’ death and rebirth. 
He is therefore arguably, too, an Erote of Love Renewed, of Tragic Love, and a god of rebirth from tragedy.
Because of my interest in Boeotian traditions, especially of Thespiae and the surrounding area, I often revert back to Hesiod. Hesiod names a beautiful Thessalian boy beloved of Apollon, Hymenaios — or at least this is the Evlyn-White translation of the relevant fragment. The pseudo-Apollodoros notes a Thessalian Hyakinthos was seduced by Apollon away from Philammon, and that this Thessalian youth was accidentally slain by discus. Clearly this mythology is an example of one-in-the-same, simply with different names. At this point, I’m convinced, and urge: Whether you call Him Hyakinthos or Hymenaios, call on Him to bless the bond of love.
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