Getting Started

[This piece is dedicated to Oinokhoe, many of whose ideas can be found in here and reflected in my own evolving spiritual practice. It was written from the perspective of Hellenismos, but the basic principles hold true of any reconstructionist polytheist faith, and so I am reprinting it here.]

So you’ve decided to become a Hellenist. Congratulations! Even though I don’t know you from Pandora, I bet I can guess what led you here: the gods, and probably one or two of them in particular. It most likely started off as mild curiosity. You read about them somewhere and something clicked. Then you began seeing that name appear with greater frequency in random places, probably surrounded by some weird coincidences, until a powerful and indescribable attraction took hold of your spirit. You found yourself tugged increasingly in their direction. The more you read about them, the deeper this fascination became until you couldn’t deny it any longer: you were hooked. This was no longer just an intellectual exercise for you, but had taken on all the feeling of a religious conversion. And now you’re here, a Hellenist, and you probably don’t know what the hell to do after that. There’s so much information out there. So much of it is dense, and contradictory, and dealing with stuff you couldn’t care less about. You just want to know the best way to worship your god – do you really need to know how to calculate a luni-solar calendar along the metatonic cycle or how to recite a Homeric hymn in the proper Attic dialect? And heaven help you, dear child, if you poked your head into one of the lists and asked your questions there. Unless you’ve got skin made of asbestos I bet you’re feeling like tucking your tail between your legs and running for the hills!

So, here’s the first thing you need to do: stop worrying! I mean it. Right this second. I know it’s natural to feel some anxiety when you’re first starting out on a new path. There’s so much you don’t know, and you want to get it right because this is important to you, and you don’t want to make a terrible mistake and have everyone laugh at you because you look like a foolish n00b, nor do you want to accidentally piss off the gods through some breach of ritual etiquette. (Though really, what kind of gods would they be if they smote you for accidentally knocking over a water-basin?) And these are all good motivations, but they can also be crippling. They can weigh you down so much that you end up not doing anything at all because you’re so afraid of getting something minor wrong. And that, my friend, is much worse than making a mistake. Because it’s far better to have tried and failed than to spend your life on the sidelines watching the world pass you by, never experiencing large passions directly, never getting the chance to learn from your mistakes. And do you want to know a secret? You’re not alone. We’ve all been there, and most of us did things far more embarrassing than you ever will, and sometimes continue to do them even when we’ve been around forever. Yup. Even me. Heck, I make a major faux pas at least once a week. It keeps things interesting and me humble. So, my advice to you is: do it anyway. Even knowing that you’re going to fall on your face, that you’re going to look a little awkward and silly, even if it’s uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Give it time. You’ll start to pick things up, you’ll find the words and actions coming naturally to you, and a couple years from now you’ll look back and laugh at how hesitantly you approached everything.

Now, this next part is going to be a little difficult for you to accept. If you’re anything like I was when I started out, you’re going to want to rush in as soon as the gate opens, try to tackle it all at once, completely immerse yourself in it until you think, speak, eat and breathe Hellenismos. And, if you’re anything like I was at that stage, you’re going to find yourself burnt out after a short period. Hellenismos is huge and there’s a lot to absorb. And in my opinion the best way to do that is slowly, gradually, letting it sink in and spread through your awareness until it has become so natural to you that you don’t even have to think about it anymore: it’s simply the way that you react to the world around you, to the people you meet and the gods who guide all things.

So, when you’re first starting out my advice is this: don’t do anything differently for a while. (I know, I just told you to do it anyway – but hear me out for a moment.) Don’t feel like you have to know all the myths and every one of their variants, or worry about memorizing all of the Homeric and Orphic hymns, the Lyric poets, and large chunks of Plato besides. Don’t worry about buying a trunk-load of incense and barley groats, a beautiful marble statue and golden offering plates or about arranging your shrine to exact specifications as outlined in the ancient texts. Don’t worry about having a properly cut and folded white khiton with purple trim and a golden crown in the shape of laurel leaves. Don’t try to perform libations three times a day, every day, and keep every single festival you can find in books and websites for each of the gods. Don’t worry that every gesture you make has to be exact, or that all your prayers conform to the precise Hellenic formula.

All of these things are nice. Really nice sometimes, as they add a wonderful element to your worship, but in the end, they’re just props, tools, pretty accoutrements, and none of them are necessary. Hellenic worship is very simple. Deceptively so at times. It’s about gratitude and embodying this feeling in acts and tangible expressions. It’s something that can be performed at any time, anywhere, whether you’re by yourself or in a crowd of people. It’s an awareness that the whole world is permeated with a multitude of gods and divine spirits, and that those divinities are responsible for everything that we see, and feel, and experience in the world around us, that in fact without them there would be no life and no world for us to live in. And so for all these untold blessings we give thanks – and because their blessings are not just internal and imaginary, we show our thanks in real ways, through prayer, through offerings given back to them, through the way that we live our lives as a testament to their presence in them and in the world. This gratitude is a full-time thing, and with the proper mindset, every action you do can become an expression of that gratitude.

And that’s why I suggest you don’t rush into things. Really spend time cultivating this feeling. Focus on the ways that the gods have intercepted your life. The things that they’ve done for you. The things that you’d like their assistance with in the future. Really try to be aware of their presence around you at all times. Break down this notion of modern man that the divine is something remote, infinitely far off from the everyday world that we live in. Try to see the sunrise as an epiphany of Helios; a tree rustling in the breeze as the presence of a nymph; that intense burst of inspiration you get or the solution to a problem suddenly falling into place as the gift of a god. Shifting your awareness in this way isn’t always easy: sometimes you can feel a little silly attributing perfectly rational natural phenomena to divine action, but the funny thing is, the more you begin to see the world in this way, the more examples of this you’ll discover. Maybe it’s a case of seeing what you want to in things – or maybe it’s something more than that. Maybe the more open you are to this sort of direct encounter, the more willing the gods are to reveal themselves to you. After all, would you bother with somebody who was constantly doubting everything you said or even the fact that you existed at all?

The next thing that I’d suggest doing is probably what led you here in the first place. Study. Read up on everything you can about the gods. Not just the gods that you’re most interested in, but also those for whom you feel nothing. Because the gods, like everything in the world, do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in relation to the other gods, who are mythologically related to them as brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, friends and enemies, lovers and more. All of these relationships give context to the myths, and help reveal the contours of the gods themselves. I’ve had some very profound insights about Dionysos by studying Hera, things I never would have grasped about him without that relationship with her. And when I suggest studying the myths, I don’t mean just read them passively and forget about them as soon as you’ve closed the book. Really wrestle with the text and try to uncover its deeper, hidden meaning. Understand that there are often many levels to a myth, and that not all of them are meant to be taken literally. What kind of meaning do they have at that point? Are they just simple allegories, or something more, something that contains higher, universal truth, but can only do so when expressed in a timeless, creative fashion? Read the different versions of a myth, and ask yourself what the difference is. What does it mean when Dionysos has the goddess Persephone as his mother versus when he is carried by the mortal princess Semele? Ask yourself what these stories express about the nature of the gods, about the world we live in, and about the men who first told them. Would the myths be different if they were told by people today? Spend a lot of time in this sort of introspection, and expect that your ideas will change as you learn more and experience things differently.

But the myths are only one source of knowledge that we have about the gods, and not always the most accurate. For instance, in Homer Hera comes off as a jealous shrew of a wife, but in cult she was a much more powerful goddess, with influence over the whole range of women’s experience, control of the sky, of agriculture, and of cattle. Similarly, one gets the impression that Apollon is a golden boy, a god of art and music and moderation, and we hear very little of his darker prophetic aspects, of his role in agriculture and animal husbandry. To know a god, we must understand all of his manifestations, and the best way to do that is to study how he revealed himself to the ancients and how they responded to him through cultus. Read what you can about Greek ritual, about history, about culture and how all of these shaped the ancients’ conception of their gods. Authors such as Walter Burkert, Walter Otto, Carl Kerenyi, Martin Nilsson, and Fritz Graf are good places to start, though they can be a little dense at first. And every author, no matter how good they are, has his biases and things change as new discoveries are made and old theories are tested and found wanting, all of which must be taken into consideration when weighing a source. Question everything you read, and check it against other authors wherever possible.

Also try to read what the ancient authors themselves wrote. While they are just as much subject to bias as a modern, and less aware of some archaeological discoveries that have come to light in recent years, they were closer to the source, and lived in a time when the gods were felt to be real and the religion was still being practiced. While the poets and playwrights and philosophers are all great, try especially to read authors like Pausanias, Plutarch, and Diodoros Sikeliotes for they are concerned with actual cult practice, as opposed to its mythological expression. And lastly, don’t discount the wonderful resource that we have in the Hellenic Polytheist community, where people are directly experiencing and worshiping the gods, and thus may have a better understanding of them than some dry academic who is studying them as little more than specimens of antique curiosity.

Now, while it is good to immerse yourself in this knowledge and allow it to help shape your understanding of the gods, nothing is going to replace direct experience of them. There are a number of things you can do to accomplish that.

The first thing that you can do, and something that I recommend no matter how long you’ve been practicing this faith, is to set aside special time for just you and your gods each day. It doesn’t have to be an extraordinarily long period of time, and you don’t even have to do anything formal or ritualized during this time. But it should be set aside just for them. Keep all of your ordinary thoughts and daily concerns out of it. Treat it as you would a rendezvous with a lover. Just as it would be rude to talk about business or how much you hate the commute to work while you’re supposed to be cuddling and making out with them, so too would it be disrespectful not to make the gods the center of your attention. This is something you can do at home, or at a park, or on your way into work in the morning – just make sure that you won’t be interrupted and you’ll be able to give them your full focus. If you’d like you can light a candle or burn some incense to set the mood, and music is a wonderful aid in this. And then just spend time with them. You can think about who they are, what they’ve done in your life, mull over what you’ve read about them, the things you associate with them. You can meditate or do visualization, or you can just sit there and watch the sun set or the trees shiver in the breeze and let your thoughts wander where they will. You can choose to speak at this time, either through formal prayer or just spontaneous off-the-top-of-your-head kinds of things – an intimate heart-to-heart with your gods – or you can be totally silent during the whole time. Whatever works best for you and them.

Something else that you can do, either in conjunction with this or on your own, is make things for your gods. Write poems or short stories or essays about them. Paint or draw, either representations of them or things associated with them or just whatever comes into your mind while thinking about them. Make stuff out of clay or wood, little votive statues or boxes that you decorate with images associated with the gods on them, or ritual items you want to use for them. Make mix-tapes or CDs for your gods. This can be a wonderfully powerful experience. Sit down and really think about all of the songs that remind you of the god. It may be something in the lyrics, an obvious word or phrase or just some kind of emotional response it conjures in you. It could be the music itself, or sounds that they make, certain instruments or special effects – whatever it is that screams out to you that this song belongs to that god. It doesn’t have to make any kind of tangible sense, as long as it sparks within you some memory of them. Work hard on putting the compilation together, and then listen to it whenever you want to think about them or feel close to them. Another thing you can do is take up a musical instrument and play your own music for them, or sing or dance for them. These were common elements in ancient worship, and they’re things that I think are neglected far too often in modern worship. Any of these things – and plenty that I’ve left out – could be used as ways to draw you closer to the gods. Really, the only limitation is your own imagination.

Now, this may seem a little odd considering the main thrust of this article so far, but ethics is far too often neglected in discussions of our religion, and I think that’s terribly unfortunate because the two are deeply entwined – ethics is doing right by our fellow men, piety is doing right by the gods – and when people forget that, you have behavior of the sort which predominates on so many of the lists today. Hellenic ethics and piety rest on one simple principle – sophrosune. What does this odd Greek word mean? Moderate self-control is how it’s often translated, but it also implies introspection, knowledge, gentleness and civility. We see this expressed in the two most famous of the Maxims which were enshrined at Apollon’s temple at Delphi: meden agan (everything in moderation) and gnothi seauton (know thyself). (Incidentally, these were but two of approximately 130 maxims that were inscribed there, the work of the legendary Seven Sages of Greece, wise men but certainly not gods. The Greeks were optimistic about man’s ability to raise himself up to moral excellence and did not require divine sanction for their ethics, unlike the Abrahamic faiths which seem to feel that man is such a base creature that he could never have figured out how to treat his fellows right without god telling him how.)

The Greeks were a pragmatic people and recognized that very few things were bad in and of themselves. There are situations in which things that we might normally think of as evils are called for to avert greater evils, and also times when normally good things can cause great harm. The key is knowing when, and in what measure these things are called for, and to avoid an excess of them. For too much of anything can be dangerous. It is an excess of faith, normally one of man’s noblest qualities, which makes things such as 9.11 and the Inquisition possible. For Plutarch, piety was the middle ground between two hateful extremes, atheism on the one hand and superstition on the other. You will find the words of Theognis – “the middle course is best” – echoed again and again throughout the long course of Greek history, and I encourage you to stamp those words on your heart and let them guide you in all your actions. Do not be a door-mat – but don’t give yourself over to unrestrained anger. Don’t hate the body and its pleasures, but don’t allow them to control your every thought and drive you to commit horrible acts. Be respectful of the gods and listen to what they have to say – but don’t mistake your every thought or whim for a divine monition. To control yourself in this manner can be the most difficult thing a man can do, but it is only through this moral struggle that we discover our true humanity. How does all this ethical stuff relate to religion? Well, you cannot think that if you treat your fellow men with reckless disdain the gods will not notice. They aren’t blind, and they do act in the world. Zeus is the god of oaths, Hera presides over our committed relationships, Dionysos is deeply concerned with liberty and the individual’s free expression of his will, and Hermes is honored through kindness to strangers and those in need. When you turn your back on these things, you are offending the very gods themselves. And the gods do not take hubris – over-reaching pride, shameful abuse of others – lightly.

Just as ethics must be lived and expressed in our daily lives to have any value, so must we embody our piety towards the gods in actions, in ritual. So, at this point I would suggest slowly introducing these ritual actions into your everyday life. For instance, it is traditional to thank Hermes when you receive a sudden stroke of good luck, be it something as simple as finding a five dollar bill on the ground or getting that job you’ve had your heart set on. When you pass a river or spring or forest or come into sight of a mountain range, you should offer a quick prayer to the spirits who reside there. At meals it is proper to thank the gods for the food you are about to eat, and many even set aside the first portion of it for them and offer that in sacrifice later. In ancient Greece it was customary to greet the sun with prayers upon waking, and to pray either to the moon or Hermes upon going to bed. The center of every house was the hestia or hearth, to which prayers and sacrifices were offered, and if you lack a proper fireplace or gas stove you may wish to keep a perpetually burning votive candle lit for her. Some people keep shrines to Zeus Ktesios, the Agathos Daimon, and for Hermes, Hekate, Apollon and Zeus in their courtyard – but if you live in a small apartment, a college dorm, or with people who do not share your faith, you may wish to forgo these and simply offer regular prayers to them instead.

Another ancient custom which you may wish to include in your practice is that of the Noumenia. The Noumenia was the first day of the Hellenic month, when the sliver of the new moon (hence its name) was first visible. At this time the whole house was cleaned, especially the family shrines, and fresh flowers and other gifts were placed on them. It’s a great way to start the month out, fresh, new, and purified, and it really helps you attune yourself to the sacred rhythms of the year. Some people have trouble following a lunar calendar and so have substituted the start of the civic month for this observance. I say do whatever works best for you – but there is real power in tying your observances into the lunar cycle, which allows you to share in this with the whole of creation.

Another observance linked to the phases of the moon – and this I feel cannot simply be substituted for convenience – is Hekate’s deipnon or meal, which fell on the dark of the moon or last day of the Hellenic month. At such a time people would take a meal – usually consisting of cakes, but you can offer whatever you’d like – and leave them at a crossroads, preferably where three roads met. This is also a time to say prayers and leave offerings for the underworld gods and the spirits of the dead. In Greek thought the deceased had sustenance only so long as the living remembered them – so this is a time to honor your beloved deceased, whether they are of your own family or consist of the great men and women who have walked this path before you.

These are but a few of the ways that you can make Hellenismos a vital and living experience for yourself, and I encourage you to discover many other ways to do this besides the ones that I have mentioned. As you can see, none of them require a great deal of time or extravagant props. In fact, the most basic, fundamental, consistent and powerful expression of our faith is the sacrifice, sharing a portion of the things which provide our essential sustenance with those who so kindly provide it for us in the first place. No, the gods don’t actually derive sustenance from these things in the way we do – if they did, they would have died off long ago from lack of our table scraps during the Christian occupation – but they do appreciate the gesture and what it means, how it shows that we notice, that we care, and that our appreciation is real enough that we are willing to demonstrate it through tangible acts as opposed to simply thinking nice thoughts about them. It also affirms the social bonds between us, and provides a chance for us to come together, much the way that families in modern America do at Thanksgiving and Christmas. These offerings consist of three basic categories:

* Libations or liquid offerings such as wine, milk, water, honey, oil, etc
* First fruits which consist of meat, grain, fruit and other edible things
* And votive gifts such as flowers, statues, vessels, things that you buy or make with your own hands, and anything else you wish to give to them.

For a more detailed discussion of what to give, how to give it, and how to properly dispose of your offerings afterwards, please consult my essays A Compendium of the Gods, After the Smoke Clears, and A Feast of the Senses which can be adapted for use with any deity (the Compendium is not printed in this book but can be found on my website, Sannion’s Sanctuary).

Sacrifices of this sort can be made at any time and anywhere. For instance, when I lived in Las Vegas I had a two hour commute to work, with a fifty minute layover between buses. I used this opportunity to do a great deal of my worship, stopping at a nearby 7-Eleven to pick up little one-shot bottles of wine, sticks of incense, and trail-mix, all of which I offered to the gods in an abandoned lot near the bus-stop. I’m sure that the little old Mexican ladies who rode the bus with me raised their eyebrows at the strange gringo who would whisper to himself and then pour out perfectly good bottles of wine, but it didn’t matter – these were some of the times that I’ve felt the closest to my gods through that regular, repeated act of simple devotion.

Now, of course, a much better place to make these offerings would be at your own personal shrine, which I encourage everyone to make unless your current living arrangements prohibit it. (If that happens to be the case for you, check out my article Hellenism On the Go (on the Sannion’s Sanctuary website) for suggestions on the sort of things you can do to get around that. Just ignore the whole 7-Eleven story, as I have a tendency to repeat myself like an old man too fond of his cups.) But there is nothing quite like walking through your room and spotting your shrine full of images of the gods and laden with offerings for them to drive home that the gods are fully present in all aspects of your life, especially here in your own home.

The shrine has a double quality. On the one had it belongs entirely to the gods. It is something we set aside and maintain solely for them. We do not permit outside influences to intrude, never let clutter and dirt build up on it, and must keep it safe from strangers, pets, and children who do not understand and might accidentally damage it. All of the things on the shrine, and the space itself, belong to the gods. We go there to be in their presence much as the ancients traveled to visit temples which were thought of as the home of the gods away from Olympos. On the other hand they are a very personal expression of our relationship with our gods, and each of the items we place on there or use to worship them there have deep personal meaning. So in that sense they become just as much filled with our personality and presence as they are of the gods’. In fact, the shrine is a place where the mortal and immortal realms blur together and unite, a nexus between the worlds.

For that reason no two shrines will ever be exactly alike, for each of us understand and experience the gods in our own special way. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling you how to set up your altar and shrine. That’s something that you’ll figure out gradually, over time, as your relationship with the god deepens.

There are some things you’ll probably want on there: an image of the god to focus on during worship, bowls or plates for offerings, a cup for libations, some incense and an incense burner, candles of an appropriate color and so forth. Some like to keep their shrines very clear and simple, others like to pile them up and keep their votive gifts on it as a constant memorial to their relationship with the god, much as the ancients did in the temple courtyards (some ancient travelers even complained of the clutter of trophies and votive gifts left at Delphi) but this is entirely up to you. My only suggestion is don’t let ashes, dirt, and other things build up, and remove any food offerings before they start to go bad. That strikes me as bad etiquette and possibly a defilement of the shrine to boot.

One final note about shrines: in my opinion they should be devoted to one god only – or to gods who have a long-standing and deep relationship with each other. The things consecrated to that god should only be used in service to him or her, and I would also avoid setting up shrines of gods who have an ambivalent relationship with each other too closely together. No sense in asking for trouble when simple etiquette can avoid it! The exception to all of the above are shrines that you consecrate to all of the gods collectively, a practice that certainly has precedent in antiquity as we see from the altars to the Twelve Gods that were set up in Attica and Olympia and structures such as the Pantheon in Rome.

Now, if you’re doing all of the things that I’ve mentioned so far I’m pretty satisfied that you are practicing Hellenismos properly, and further that it is something that has become fully integrated into your life.

“But,” you may be interjecting at this point, “you haven’t mentioned anything about figuring out a proper calendar of holy days and festivals, the right words to recite in prayer or what to do when you sacrifice – things I see discussed all the time on other sites and lists!”

Right. I’ve intentionally avoided covering those topics because I think they are secondary to living Hellenismos. Which, of course, isn’t to imply that these things aren’t important – because they are. Very much so in fact. But the thing is, festivals are special occasions which come around infrequently. And if that’s the only time that you’re thinking about and interacting with your gods, something is very wrong there. You don’t do nice things for your spouse just on Valentine’s Day and your anniversary – and if you do you’ll probably find yourself with an ex before too long – and in the same way I think the emphasis should be placed on the day to day relationships we have with our gods. Formal ritual is nice – but it’s never going to be a replacement for heartfelt prayer or sacrifice.

Additionally, that’s a very personal subject. Hellenismos is not a single, unified, cohesive entity. Not now, and certainly not in antiquity where Greece was broken up into a hundred-odd different poleis, with each polis or city-state having its own customs, laws, political systems, regional dialect and even religious traditions. There were some very broad commonalities among them, a few Panhellenic festivals that pretty much everyone had in common, but beyond that people pretty much stuck to the traditions of the area where they lived, accepted that their neighbors were going to do likewise, and didn’t worry about the contradictions and variations which could be quite numerous when looked at collectively.

And that spirit persists in the modern Hellenic Polytheist community. We have strict Reconstructionists and Wiccans and plenty who dwell in some middle ground between the two poles. We have folks who look to the whole history of Greek religion for inspiration – including its revival during the Renaissance – and people who stick to a single polis and even a particular time-frame. We have Greek-only folk and people who blend traditions and worship gods from other cultures alongside the Olympians. We have Orphics and Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists, animists and pantheists and a million shades of polytheist, and even people who identify as agnostics who nevertheless find beauty in the myths and rituals and the culture of the ancient Greeks. Nothing I say is going to apply equally to all of these different groups and individuals, and hopefully by now you’ve gotten the point that there’s no One Right True and Only Way in Hellenismos. Everything in this essay is presented solely to suggest things and make you think about them. I don’t expect you to take my word on it, or adopt a practice simply because I tell you to. Figure out what works best for you: after all, this is your religion we’re talking about here, not mine.

That little caveat out of the way, let’s jump back into things. The first thing you need to do is settle on which gods you want to worship. Many of us start out with the nice sentiment that we’re going to worship every god in the pantheon, soon to discover just how impractical that is. Not only is it impossible time-wise – I mean, if the Hindus are right then there are over 30,000 deities – but I also think it’s not necessarily desirable to do this either. Certainly we should respect all the gods, because they are after all gods and even the least of them is still vastly superior to the greatest mortal. And what’s more, myth is pretty clear about what happens to mortals who disrespect the gods (Hippolytos, Pentheus and Niobe spring foremost to mind) but that doesn’t mean that we’re expected to have the same types of feelings about them, any more than we have the same kind of relationship with everyone we know. It would diminish the feelings I have for my girlfriend to say that I thought no differently about her than I do about some bum I passed on the street. In the same way there are some gods with whom we have very intense relationships that last all of our lives. Other gods come into our lives for a short period, for what reason we may never know, only to pass out of it again, and there are some gods that we will never develop a relationship with, however much we may want this. The gods have personalities, and like and dislike what they will. Some can even be downright hostile towards us. So do not think of them as the equivalent of Buddy Jesus who must always love you no matter what a jerk everyone else thinks you are, nor that you must have total equality in all of your relationships. Be open to them and respond when they make overtures to you – it is a very, very, very bad idea to ignore the call of a god, trust me on this – and be willing to change your practice as your relationships change, but in the beginning your best bet is to start off with the gods you feel the closest to and then work your way up from there. If you don’t feel close to any of them you might want to try something I call “The God of the Month Club.” Basically you put the names of the gods in a box, or use some other method of divination, and each month a new god is chosen for you to learn about and to spend time with in ritual. This can really help us work through any prejudices we might have about a particular deity. (It certainly changed my perception of Hera!)

Once you have your gods figured out, choose a regular routine of worship. It doesn’t matter what it is, provided you stick to it and don’t let yourself miss a devotion for any but the most important of reasons. You may choose a day that you feel is connected with the god – Wednesday for Hermes, Friday for Aphrodite, or Sunday for Apollon are some modern examples of this – or you may look to ancient sources for this. Hesiod in his Works and Days lists a number of days which were sacred to the gods in Boiotia and we have sacrificial calendars from the demes or rural districts in Attica which provide many people today with options for working out a regular routine for themselves. What you do as part of this regular routine is up to you. Some perform a full sacrificial rite, others just offer incense and libations, and some choose to do the kinds of intimate god-only time activities I mentioned earlier.

Next I would suggest creating your own personal festivals. These will be much more meaningful to you than simply taking something from a book – something for which you know only the approximate date, who it was for, and maybe a line or two of commentary, none of which applies to your current situation – and “observing” that. This is how festivals originally developed in ancient Greece. They were localized and commemorated special events in the lives of the community. So think about your own life. When did you first start to feel the call of a god? Did they do something special in your life on a particular date? Is there some aspect of them which you wish to honor or a mythological story you want to commemorate? What is the agricultural cycle like in your area? (What’s the point of celebrating the grape harvest when they’re not even ripe on the vine yet, or a feast of flowers when your yard is still covered in two feet of snow?) You can use the ancient Hellenic festivals as models for creating your own. What was done during them? What did these actions communicate symbolically? How can you do the same, even when you’re likely to be celebrating alone and thus won’t have hundreds of people to parade down main street with, a hecatomb of oxen to sacrifice on Zeus’ altar, a sixty foot statue of Athene to weave a peplos for, or a harbor to race boats in?

Use your imagination here. There are plenty of things you can do no matter how limited your resources may be. And also remember that festivals are not simply twenty-minute rituals you perform and then forget about the rest of the day. Festivals were large, extravagant things that consisted of sacrifice, games, dances, singing, feasting and countless other activities interspersed throughout the day. Do the same with yours. From the moment you wake up until you go to sleep give the whole day over to the gods. Make things for them – appropriate arts and crafts, big meals with lots of food and wine – play competitive games, even if it’s just checkers and rummy, run races, make offerings and prayers throughout the day, listen to good music and watch movies relevant to the festival and its themes, spend time just focused on them – and all sorts of other things, small and random, perhaps, but collectively they will contribute to the festive spirit of the day. And then, to top it all off, you can do the twenty-minute formalized ritual which so many think constitutes “observing a festival.” Start out small with these personal festivals and then build on them, observing them each year and before long you’ll find that you’ve got your own well-established tradition going on.

From there widen your observances to include the ancient festivals as well, the ones which speak the loudest to you, the ones which most fully express the nature of your god and celebrate him or her. Read everything you can about them, try to understand what was done and why it was done – the symbolic language embedded in the actions. It is okay to adapt these for modern use – but be honest about it! If you have adapted them so much that they cease to resemble the original in any meaningful way save that you are calling it by that name – why not carry it a step further and just admit that you are doing something entirely new? Nothing irks me more than seeing people falsely claim to be doing a festival just for the prestige of having said that they observed it. The spirit is totally different, the meaning and even the actions are changed, nothing resembles what it should – when that much has changed, it’s not the original festival just because you say it is! It’d be like claiming that you celebrate Christmas by hiding eggs, eating hollow chocolate bunnies, wearing hideous pastels and announcing that a 2,000 year old Jewish vampire has risen. Now, if you can make changes that are consistent with the spirit of the ancient festival – that’s wonderful, and there is a real power in performing a ritual that others performed two thousand five hundred years ago.

As far as ritual details – those you can find on any of a dozen other Hellenic sites, most of them with cookie-cutter ritual templates you can adapt for your own use. But you know what? I don’t think they’re necessary. All of my rituals follow the basic Hellenic formula but those things are easy enough to remember. Splash everything with khernips, process around the room, sprinkle barley on the altar and in the fire, say some prayers, make some offerings, etc. You don’t need elaborate scripts for this kind of thing – no magic words that have to be pronounced accent-perfect or complicated mudras and asanas to twist your body into, no bells rung at just the right time or cones of power to be released. And honestly, I think that reading stuff off of a script seriously detracts from the spirit of the celebration. Your prayers should come from the heart, passionately spilling forth in praise of your gods. And if you repeat a couple phrases or stumble over some words – so what? Do you think that the gods would rather hear you read off some crappy poetry in a lifeless monotone or have you so focused on what part comes next that you miss out on everything that’s going on around you? Worship is an organic experience that involves all of our senses. That’s why we light the fire, burn the incense, drink the wine, move around in processions and dances, set up pretty pictures, play or perform music. If you’re just indifferently going through the motions and aren’t enflamed with devotion, what’s the point? You’re just wasting your time, and what’s worse, wasting theirs too. It’d be far more pious for you to sit on your ass and watch some trashy television shows than to worship by half-measures.

So, that’s my advice, friend. All these many, many words on getting started, and yet it occurs to me that the only thing you really need to know can be expressed in three simple words: live your faith. Ours are living gods and they demand no less from us.

© 2009 H. Jeremiah Lewis