This is going to be excellent!
Author: Camilla Laurentine
From Cicero’s De Natura Deorum
As for your deriving religion from the sky and stars, do you not see what a long way this takes you? You say that the sun and moon are deities, and the Greeks identify the former with Apollo and the latter with Diana. But if the Moon is a goddess, then Lucifer also and the rest of the planets will have to be counted gods; and if so, then the fixed stars as well. But why should not the glorious Rainbow be included among the gods ? it is beautiful enough, and its marvelous loveliness has given rise to the legend that Iris is the daughter of Thaumas.
And if the rainbow is a divinity, what will you do about the clouds? The rainbow itself is caused by some coloration of the clouds ; and also a cloud is fabled to have given birth to the Centaurs. But if you enroll the clouds among the gods, you will undoubtedly have to enroll the seasons, which have been deified in the national ritual of Rome. If so, then rain and tempest, storm and whirlwind must be deemed divine.
Embracing a Calling: Death Midwifery
In my early 20s, I received that profound moment that others describe where they receive their calling towards ministry – The calling where you find yourself suddenly at complete peace and going “Yes, I can do this. I can help people with their spiritual lives.” I had originally planned to become an Unitarian Universalist minister, but truth be told the thought of being in school for another 8 years of my life and going into extreme life-long debt only to be saddled down with society politics (because I’ve seen congregations explode in my time and out a minister at the turn of a hat) seemed to kind of a dead end to me.
Then I was told to go into agriculture. This is still on my list of things to do. The problem is that we’ve discovered that I am photosensitive. I have many of the symptoms of lupus, but we’re still searching for answers to if it really is lupus or something else. With that, I’m not sure exactly how large-scale I’m going to be able to work on a farm. Not that I wanted to have a huge farm, but I want to cultivate more than food for just my family – This is another topic altogether, so I won’t go into details right now.
With coming to terms with the fact that my plans are, at the very best, up in the air, the thought of ministry that I’ve been avoiding came back into play. Being a chaplain. This isn’t the first time the thought of being a chaplain to prisoners or in a hospice has entered my brain. It was where I left off when I decided I didn’t want to go back to college. I still don’t want to go back to what will end up being 8 years of college for me where I have to take a bunch of classes not directly related to what I want to do with my life.
I started looking at where I really wanted to be when it came to my role as a spiritual support role in our community. I found myself going back over and over again to those who our society turns a blind eye to quite often – The Dying.
Hekate started discussing her role as Torchbearer to me. I sank quietly into the Eleusinian Myth from a different perspective, and that was the role of Hekate – Bringing the mourning and tired mother into the underworld to find her daughter. Such a modest mention in the grander story, but one of the most important roles within the myth.
I started pondering becoming a death midwife/doula and home funeral assistant. I had no real concept that others were doing this work already. I had no clue at the time that there was literature and training available out there for death work. Slowly links and discussions started trickling in on me. Eventually I found a certifying program online that I felt was a good match for me along with a few classes.
I started talking to others about how I was considering walking into this line of work. Most of the conversations I’ve had have been incredibly positive and encouraging.
Then a friend from high school died last week. She didn’t die suddenly. I have watched her slowly die over a two year period on Facebook. She had gone through radiation and chemo for a brain tumor while pregnant. I cried when she had a severe allergic reaction to the chemo drugs and had to stop taking treatment. I cheered when her son was born healthy. We discussed head scarves in that time as her hair started to fall out. I prayed for her. I watched her come into faith with her God and find peace; she was truly graceful in a way I’ve never seen another human being. We were not close despite all of this. Yet something about her passing changed me in a profound way, watching the process from even an impersonal position 2 states away caused me to consider how we as a society view death and what that means to not only the Pagan/Polytheist community but those who feel the need for a different approach to death… Something warmer, kinder, and gentler for those crossing and those left behind.
I have full plans to offer my services on a sliding scale or at no cost to those in need, save for supplies that might need to be bought. Despite the Affordable Care Act, I fear that people dealing with large hospital and healthcare bills still exist, and while I would like to be compensated for this work I also feel it’s imperative that every person be given the dignity they deserve in the final days.
So here I am, putting out the word today that I’m going to attempt doing this. This is part of my Work. This is a piece of the puzzle of how I’m meant to serve our community. It’s not something I would have ever thought I’d find myself doing, but I also didn’t see myself going into farming either. Now I can’t imagine myself not having land to work with one day.
With all of this said, I’m asking for help with this. I could go into the long story about why I’m trying to raise the $700 it takes to get myself trained to a point where I’d feel comfortable starting to work, but the fact is that as much as I’d like to be able to pay for this out of my own pocket I’m unable to do that.
I’ve started a GoFundMe fundraiser in hopes of even getting the smallest amount raised to help me in this journey. I’m offering various levels of rewards from prints to custom art to prayer beads made of stone with hand-fabricated sterling silver filigree made by me. Even the smallest of donations will help me out. If you’re unable to donate, please consider sharing the link to get my story out there.
Thank you so much.
A Return to Art: Cultivating Self
Note: I am behind on my Fasti post for April, and I apologize to anyone looking for it. I got hit with chronic illness after a bout of stomach flu, and this is the first week in almost a month I’ve felt even remotely capable of thought. It will go up in the next couple days. May’s posting will be forthcoming also.
Michael’s recently had a 3-for-the-price-of-1-sale on their art paper. It was about the time I had spent 10 minutes debating size and type aloud to myself while my mother and daughter stood patiently waiting that I should have maybe realized that something was amiss. When Mr. F&F inquired why I had bought so much paper, puzzling over why I needed so 3 pads, and I exclaimed “I’m going to use it!” in an annoyed manner that something was happening.
I should have seen it when I gleefully, albeit slowly, started drawing out graphic design work. I had to have had some inkling when I wanted nothing more than to buy clay to sink my hands into for the first time in ages.
I was stepping back into art in a serious manner after almost a decade.
Somewhere in storage is a giant box of supplies I never got rid of. It wasn’t a “just in case” thing. It wasn’t a “I’ll get to it later” or “when I feel like it” situation. It was hoarding things I had absolutely no plans to ever use again but just couldn’t get rid of. Or so I told myself, even if now I’m currently wondering where that box is exactly. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have known it wasn’t actually done. I wasn’t really finished with it, even if I thought I never wanted to make art again.
A few months ago, I started realizing I felt like I’ve been removing parts of other people that I seemed to absorb. All of these voices filled with judgment. They belong to people I care about, or they belong to people I cared about at the time. Friends. Family. Teachers. I know we all suffer from it, but I sometimes wonder if, because I have been so involved in the group artistic process of critique, that somehow I trained myself to take in what everyone has said and internalize it more than your average… Attempting to make myself better than I already perceived myself to be.
The problem with critiques is that not all advice you get is actually good advice. In a class setting, you find yourself getting advice from peers. Sometimes the teacher isn’t skilled or even remotely interested in the style that you are… Which is where I hit the real wall in Chicago. I internalized those critiques. Critiques I have scars inside my mouth to this day from, trying to keep myself from showing others the weakness and art school crime of feeling too much about your creation… Critiques that eventually hit too hard during the very initial days of my first mystical experiences and the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced.
I remember driving away from Chicago, watching the city’s skyline get smaller and smaller as we drove back to Iowa. I remember the bitterness of a dream I worked years to achieve not being anything like I’d imagined it would be. I remember the promises of returning to visit friends who had supported me the best they could those hard months and understanding at a very gut level that I’d never see them again. Never mind the friends that I’d not gotten to say goodbye to before leaving.
Never mind that a decade later, the voices of my teachers there have grown into the monsters that try to hold me back. I think I’m starting to understand that I internalized these voices as a weapon against myself. I feed them by listening to them.
I don’t think I will ever get rid of them, but I can learn to ignore them. I can grow back the pieces of me that I have tried to keep from growing due to fear of being judged by people I care about. It’s none of my business what other people think about me, and if they really want to be vocal about it then I need to start reconsidering if they really deserve to be a part of my life.
In the garden that is my own life, I am the one who has the final say in what seeds to allow to grow and which sprouts to pull. I have the right to remove anything that threatens to spread to the point of choking out the beauty I have planned. This is what I tell myself. This is a theme that keeps returning this year for me, and amusingly I discovered just last night that according to numerology I’m in the finalizing 9 cycle for the year.
It’s time to let go of things that no longer work for me: Ideas, habits, people.
This isn’t as easy as I would like it to be, but it’s necessary for growth. That’s what Apollon keeps telling me. That is what all the Gods, major and minor, who take the time to speak to me say. If I don’t let go of these things on my own accord, they will be ripped out from me anyway.
But as I work on removing these things, I find old parts of me buried underneath. Here is my art. Here are people who support my work and my Work. Here are pencils and paper and praise. Naysayers I’ll never see again in my life but somehow weaseled their way into my brain be damned. If we rip off the old skin, I can see the woman who has been silently healing underneath all along. Maybe a little scarred and worse for wear but complete all the same.
It’s funny how some things you simply can’t escape. You think you’ve done it, but suddenly you find instead that you’ve come full circle back to something.
Art just happens to be one of those things for me. I have officially given up fighting it.
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Vesta
Vesta, watch over him whose hand tends the Holy Fire.
Live well, fires.
O live, I pray, undying flames.
– Ovid
Coming Out as a Godspouse
Coming up at the beginning of August, I will be celebrating my 8th anniversary with my Lord Apollon. With that, He has requested that He and I revisit and rework the vows we made to each other all of those years ago when our relationship was just really beginning to take form. Despite the fact that these vows were agreed to for only a year, we remained with each other faithfully without much fanfare. We simply were and are, and I have enjoyed constant companionship with Him. I have enjoyed the blessings He has brought into my life.
It feels strange and uncomfortable talking about my relationship with Him on my blog, which on the other side of the coin is hilarious to me. I have to remind myself that it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve even begun to talk about the relationship to those nearest and dearest to me.
But with this renewal of our marriage vows, He has made it clear to me that my Work with Him is about to increase. And with that comes the necessity of being open about who Apollon is to me.
For the last 6 months, I have been attempting to write my history with Apollon. At this point it simply isn’t going to happen. It is too long, convoluted, and honestly I’ve discovered that in those first few years I’ve completely lost track of my own chronological history due to mental illness and/or spiritual emergence as a (still emerging) Spirit Worker.
He doesn’t care if I tell our story at this point, because there are other projects He prefers I work on – Roman Revivalism, building a new shrine in the house, and laying down the plans for His future sacred homestead and temple. Taking on students. Training further as an Oracle. More importantly, working to raise His healing family’s cultus and (re)building a healing modality that lies in the heart of a Mystery tradition that is being built – Not just by me, but others working with Him.
He wants art. He wants me to write more, both fiction and non-fiction, so perhaps in time our history will be told. It’s just not high on my priority list right now.
All that was really requested of me is an easy “Yes, this is me. I am a Wife of Apollon.”
When this relationship started, I realized that I wasn’t the only one. I simply didn’t know other Wives or even that there was a larger community of Godspouses (and all the other shades of relationship) out there. Over the last few years, I’ve found others. Some of us have formed very important friendships to me to the point where I truly do consider them sisters.
I’ve heard stories about how they are treated by some in the larger community. I’ve seen a lot of accusations that fall upon the mental illness stigma our community is rather terrible about. And I think partially I’ve been quiet due to not wanting anyone else having problems since I have been completely open in the past about my struggles with both bipolar disorder and debilitating social anxiety – Both of which Apollon has helped me and is continuing to help me manage. I don’t want others to experience some of the treatment I’ve experienced due to the fact that one Spouse happens to also have the mentally ill label.
But more importantly, I have simply wanted my relationship to be private, because it’s exactly that: A private relationship. I don’t talk about the details of my marriage to my mortal husband. Specifically I don’t divulge very private details: our disagreements, our physical relationship, etc. And yet people feel that, because you are married to a God or Goddess, that it’s okay to ask for information of a private nature. There’s a disconnect for some reason that, because this is a God it is somehow different emotionally than being married to a mortal. It isn’t. It never occurs to people that asking someone in this sort of relationship with a God might be hurt by others demanding to know if their Husband wishes to be in a marriage with them or how to have sex with them.
In the limited openness I’ve had I’ve found this to be true, so I’ve very quietly started coming out about it. I put a link up to The Treasury of Apollon. I mention my work with Apollon more regularly. I state I’m a godspouse on my About page.
But that’s not quite good enough for Him. I’m okay with that, or if I say that enough times perhaps I will be okay with it eventually. He didn’t ask me to tell our story. He just wanted me to be open about who He is in my life.
I will not be responding to others asking questions about if He wants to marry them or how to sleep with Him. Trust me, if He has interest in you, He’ll find away to get that wish communicated to you very clearly. I’m fully okay with Him having relations with others, but I’m much, much less okay with being involved with being part of the organizing of said relations of strangers.
I will, however, talk about my relationship with Him. I will talk about Him in general and our Work together. If you have a question about working with Him in general, I will happily respond to your questions.
So there you have it.
About Roman Revivalism
This is what I’ve been painfully working on lately. This is what has been asked of me, and this is my current main Work under the guidance of my Lord. I will continue to write in this blog from a personal side, but slowly but surely I will be working on birthing a new Roman tradition and welcoming community.
March: A Modern Fasti
This is my attempt at putting down what we practice and celebrate in my household. As one that holds cultus for Apollon, some Hellenic days slip into the mix for both Him and His family. You will also note the incorporation of modern holidays, veneration of historical figures, and personal rites tied to the seasons where I live that embrace the agricultural cycle (as opposed to the solar seasonal).
These will be hyperlinked as soon as they are posted for those who have found this later.
Each of these days will posted on their actual date or shortly thereafter depending on my home schedule.
March (Martius) is considered by most to be the beginning of the Roman religious calender. It is named after Mars, the Father of Rome, and many of the traditional festivals of the month center around Mars and his myth.
- Kalends March 1st– First day of the month, with rites performed for Juno and Janus
- Die natalis of Mars, March 1st – Birthday of Mars
- Matronalia, March 1st – Celebration of mothers and wives, with rites to Juno Lucina
- Nones, March 7th – Honoring Juno, the Lares, and the Penates
- Ides, March 15th – Honoring Jupiter
- Liberalia, March 17th – Festival of Liber Pater and Libera
- Northward Equinox/First Seeds, March 20/21st – Planting the first seeds of the Spring/Summer garden
- Final Day, March 30th – Honoring Hecate
Why My Blog is No Longer I’m Not a Wiccan
After 5 sporadic years of writing on this blog under the name I’m Not a Wiccan, I have decided to change its name. When I started blogging, I had problems finding others like me. It actually has taken me years to search out the pockets of people who believe much like I do. And in 2011 when the major Polytheist versus Pagan linguistic debate started, I decided to continue calling myself a Pagan.
These days I find myself using both terms interchangeably, but since I talk more with self-identifying polytheists, I tend to use that term more and more. Especially since swinging further into a Roman-influenced practice.
I, personally, am bored with the debate. I see a lot of hate being spewed forth by those who are loudest and, for one reason or another, have been allowed to be considered our leaders. These people are not my leaders. These people do not speak for me.
They may use the same terms I lazily use for myself, but they don’t even represent the vast majority of us milling about on the internet – Those of us who are too busy doing the work that so many of them are apt to scream we need to do. These “leaders” are not my people any more than the Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, etc.
Recently I was told by the Gods I serve that it was time for me to speak more on the tradition we’ve been building together, and this is what I plan to do. I am more concerned with my own work and spiritual practice than I am in joining the game of More-Devoted-Than-Thou and whatever general holy roller nonsense that we as a community have allowed to leak in, take control, and poison of our faiths. And this is happening on all sides.
It’s elitism.
I’m not an elitist.
I’m an Apollonian, and I hold the belief that we’re all on our own paths to excellence. I’m no better than the next person. I’m a stone that’s still being polished.
I want temples and social services for our people. I want things to actually change for the better. I don’t have time to sit around debating after this long about polytheism versus paganism, hard versus soft, devotional versus whatever. These debates are typically not even of the thelogical nature, and they’re designed to build a “us versus them” drama that is constantly fueled by ill-concealed hate and the need to be better than someone else. They are the debates that never end. They are debates that take us away from the real issues at hand.
Who cares? What are you doing for the community beyond stirring the pot and making money off of us? Why should I enable your histrionic narcissism?
And so while the address to my blog will still hold the term “Not A Wiccan” in it, I feel it’s time to retire the name. I don’t feel that what I’m not should define me any more than I think what other people do in their private, religious life is any of my business.
There is nothing wrong with being a Wiccan. I have a lot to thank the Wiccan community for, because it’s a lot easier these days to say I’m Pagan and not get my life threatened, which has sadly happened more than once in my nearly 20 years as an open Pagan/Polytheist.
I refuse to add to the nastiness, even with the smallest detail – And so my blogs name must change. Be the change you wish to see, right? Right.
Foxglove & Firmitas 