At Apollon’s request, I will be offering oracle on the 7th of each month in His honor.
I currently do not use any oracle tools nor do I channel. I simply interpret what I get told. So if you’re looking for someone who uses something more concrete, that is understandable, and I will happily make suggestions on others to go to should you decide you are in need. I reserve the right to use another form of oracle in the future should I be led to it, and in that case I will be sure to let you know what I’ve drawn in the event you wish to interpret it yourself.
I will be taking up to 5 readings during these sessions.
I do ask that you consider a free-will donation in trade for this service should you have an oracle done by me, to be given after. This year I will be using donations to help meet my student loan payments, which by the end of the year will allow me to go back to college in hopes of serving our community. All donations beyond the cost of my payments (which is very low monthly) will be spread out in our community to help others with medical bills.
However, He has made it known to me that He will accept digital copies of art and original prayers, released in creative commons for non-commercial, non-altered usage. All rights of ownership with remain with you, but I will be showcasing your work on this blog and would love to talk more about you as an artist and/or writer. This will be only for the 7th oracles that I offer this.
I will not be answering questions related directly to if Apollon is seeking you as a godspouse. I believe that He is more than capable of making this desire known, and I leave that in His hands. However, if this comes up in my talk with Him, I promise not to leave it out of my message to you.
Finally, occasionally I get nothing as a response to the question. If that is the case, I will simply let you know with my apologies. This is one of the reasons why, in this case, I am asking for the trade of labor (art, prayers, money) afterward.
So with all of that said, if you would like an oracle done, please leave me a message here. I will leave you a message with my email address in it, so that you may contact directly with your question. I will do my best to answer your question by the end of the day on the 7th, but depending on my health and household it may take up to 48 hours beyond the 7th.
The Kalends isn’t over, but we’re taking a moment to rest in our day. For me that means I get to do what seems to be becoming a job, but is still basically a hobby (This is my justification for it today, since I have always tried to not “work” on the Kalends, Nones, and Ides).
My daughter had breakfast, and I had coffee with a few peanuts. I fast for the Kalends, Nones, and Ides from sunset the night before, but my health issues require I don’t do a full fast these days. I don’t feel that 3 is old enough to fast, but I explained why it was I wasn’t having my normal breakfast to her.
After breakfast we went out to find a stick to make our windchimes with. We put it together while I explained that it was to bring good fortune and help protect us.
We went out to our front step. I gave her the little broom she has, and together we swept off the step, making sure it was clean for where we were going to set up our offering. We sat down the offering bowl. Then we carried the tray off offerings out.
I showed her how to cover her head with a veil, and offered her a silk scarf I had picked out for this moment. It’s a smaller one I bought years ago, and it was the perfect size for her. She was so excited to have a veil to wear like mine that she kept it around her shoulders for quite some time afterwards.
I showed her how to hold her hands while praying, upturned to the sky. She didn’t keep them that way, but I’ll be sure to demonstrate this position each time I pray in front of her to reinforce it.
And then came the offerings and prays. I poured a little water into her special pitcher for her to put into the bowl, and she had picked tortilla chips (one of her favorite foods) to give to Janus, Juno, and the Lares today. I offered the prayer and then directed her to pour and place chips into the offering bowl for each.
I admit that I am rarely moved to tears during rituals. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever cried during a formal ritual. But as I sat there watching her pour and offer, her sweet face peaking out under her veil, I felt my heart grow 10 sizes with joy and pride. My eyes welled up with tears.
We hung up our windchimes.
Afterwards we sat on the front step, watching the birds. She asked me while looking around, “Where are the Gods?”
I chuckled. I couldn’t help it. She was clearly disappointed They’d not manifested in a way she could clearly see. So I quietly explained that the Gods show themselves as birds, as the feel of the wind, that They are everywhere. They are in the plants and the flowers. They are inside of us, and They are the love we have for each other.
As I explained this, my arm wrapped around her little body, I understood this on a whole different level than I had before.
Since I’ve decided to publicly share more of what has been going on behind the curtain in my spiritual life. This is the song that popped up when using Pandora as a musical oracle today. Sometimes all I can do is laugh.
The lyrics to the full song:
And there are places we must go to
To bring these hallowed words on back from
You must cross a muddy river
Where love turns to love turns to fear
They say you don’t look
There’s only one way
On back from on back from here
They say you don’t look
They say you don’t look cause it’ll disappear
And our eyes they keep on strainin’
As if to see what lies behind them
Through the shells of empty buildings and great columns of glass
They say you don’t look
They say you don’t look
Cause it’ll drive you mad
And if it drives you mad
If it drives you mad
It’ll prob’ly pass
In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss of God not wanting me — of God not being God — of God not existing. – from Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s journal, 1959
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m in period of what the Christian mystics refer to as the dark night of the soul. For a monotheist, this turns into a period of what appears to be at the very least atheist leanings, as expressed in the quote above from St Teresa of Calcutta (Love her or leave her). For a polytheist mystic, I guess this is taking on a little bit of a weird turn I didn’t see coming…
I believe in the Gods without a doubt. I even believe in Apollon.
This is where it takes a turn and perhaps get a little weird…
While I believe in Apollon, I’m not exactly sure the God I honor and have been married to for years is Apollon. Seven years later and after a vow renewal, I find myself going “I don’t know who You are.”
This has been playing out for months now. Save for 1 or 2 posts, it’s been playing out almost silently except to a few close, patient friends that I’m entirely too thankful for.
Am I married or divorced from this God? Who is He?
Is this God Apollon? Yes/no.
Is this God Odin? Yes/no.
Is this God Freyr? Yes/no.
Is this God Dionysos? Yes/no.
Dis? Yes/no.
Soranus? Yes/no…
This God isn’t an archtype, but He is all of these Gods and none of Them at the same time… That’s what He tells me.
This isn’t a case of an awkward attempt at syncretism. This is a God coming forth to step out of the shadows, which has left me feeling all too raw and wobbly. Who the fuck am I to think a God is talking to me? Who the fuck am I to think some newborn/forgotten God is messing with my brain?
Am I sure I’m not simply unstable?
This, my friends, is decidedly a dark night of the soul. I never thought I’d find myself doubting my faith in my own beliefs, nor did I think that it would play out as a space of doubting every part of myself at the same time. This is deeper than an existential crisis. This darkness is something that I feel down to my bones, and I find myself too choked by the grim reality of it all to put into perfect words. This alone frustrates me. I’m never for a lack of written word.
I’m not alone with this God. I know there are others out there who are experiencing Him, who have even experienced this change and shift. I know, because of the delightful moments of getting personal gnosis confirmed. This space where one God ends and Another begins, I’m not the only one who has experienced it. But is He a God I know? Or am I off in the recesses of my own mind working through some liminality issue that I wasn’t completely aware I had? Perhaps looking for synchronicity of experience and finding it simply because I’m looking for it.
It’s been a strange, painful experience. One of the first lessons this God taught me, as Apollon, was to stop doubting myself. Stop doubting His voice. Just say what it was He was telling me, and slowly over the course of a year I discovered that He was using me as a bit of a mouth piece.
This was a decade ago. This was when I started to listen to the information I was getting constantly, because if I didn’t I was in danger of stepping into the void and never coming back if I didn’t get it under control. A marriage of 7 years was had, and I don’t believe it’s over…
But it was with Apollon. Despite what everyone keeps telling me, I’m not sure this God wants to be called Apollon anymore. Not by me, at least. I’m no longer married to Apollon.
Which seems to not only be throwing people off when I say this, but it seems like my own discernment and judgment of the situation is wrong. Do I trust myself, which is what He taught me to do? Or do I listen to literally everyone else I’ve talked to about this?
I say “Apollon left me.”
I hear from others, who I trust hear Him, say, “He would never leave you, and He wants you to understand that.”
And the words that keep falling into my mind, like leaves from a tree, say, “When the Romans took Apollo’s hand, He swallowed a dozen Gods as he moved through the known world. He became Them. They became Him. But that is never truly the case.”
Syncretism is something a lot of people are talking about these days… And here I am, over in my corner, feeling as if I’m on the brink of un-syncretizing Apollon.
He told me a few years ago to go north. Now He tells me to carve Him from the side of the rocks.
Now I’m slowly getting comfortable with the thought that perhaps this is Something new and different to us. I’ve said for years that He is wanting me to build a new tradition for him, a new cult. I glean images and symbols. I find a way to explain something. I doubt. I distrust. I feel like my insides are filled with glass, and I can’t tell if it’s Truth or not.
That’s hard to understand if you’ve not been there. I hear, over and over again, that I should stop worrying about who He is…
As He whispers in my ear Find me. Create me. Birth me, my bride.
Three evenings ago, on the front of a cold spring rain, He returned into my world in the form I’ve known as Apollon. At first it was a mere hint as I was cooking dinner. I felt the vibration in my lumbar spine that I usually feel when He’s trying to get my attention, a place aligned with the solar plexus (or I’ve been told the Gaster in Plato’s work, though I’ve yet to dig into this). As I cleaned up, He started to talk to me. By bedtime, mid-conversation with a friend online, I had to stop to meditate. I wrote a lot of stuff down that He wanted me to understand and spent some time sitting with the visions I was getting.
I’d been so happy, so relieved He was home that I found myself crying. But His return only brought me more questions and no answers…
I’m admittedly terrified of what stands before me. Not the God, but the implications of what I believe my future holds if I’m on the right track. The weight. The responsibility. It was all there before, but for some reason it was easier when He was Apollon. Safer, somehow…
So I have sent out questions to others who are God-touched. Am I on the right path? Can they untangle what I can only describe as a God-knot?
And underneath it all is this alienation, both from Him and others, who both understand and don’t understand at the same time.
This place is ambiguous and uncomfortable, liminal and immense.
My God is ambiguous and uncomfortable, liminal and immense.
I feel moved to talk about it here if only for the hope that someday this journey will help someone else thrown onto this path.
Welcome home, my Love, welcome home… Whoever You are. Welcome home. I’m angry, but I’m sure we’ll get through this eventually together. (I hope.)
This. I loved this. I was fortunate to grow up in a house of spiritual free-thinkers and allowed to pick my own path, but at the same time I find myself regularly wishing that I’d lived in a home where religious actions were carried out. I find I still wobble when it comes to practicing set times of prayer, for instance. Up until the point where I had my daughter, prayer was silent for me, but now I’m sent to the task of teaching her how to pray. Other concepts, reciprocity for instance, I gained naturally, because that was modeled in my home.
I caught a bit of grief from my mother when I said my daughter would be raised Pagan/Polytheist. But even if a time comes where she steps away from her mother’s spiritual path, she’ll still be carrying the tools to practice her own religion.
In thinking on the last post and the centers Nicholas Haney brought up in God-centric?, is that one of the centers that tends to get left by the wayside in the larger polytheist and Pagan blogs is family, and in specific how we raise our kids in our religions. It is something that has been on mind for a while. There’s a host of questions I will tackle here that I hope will generate deeper dialogue in the Pagan and polytheist blogs and communities. I believe these are really important questions, tied not just to the center of family, but to the health and well-being of all the centers. Without children, all we have are new converts to sustain the traditions and religions. In my view, that is a lot of people coming to understand a whole new way of being, whereas kids raised polytheist do not have that learning curve, or…
Today is Rare Disease Day. I was going to record a video, but ironically my rare diseases got the best of me the last couple days.
In the middle of a dental emergency gone medical, I have been to the dentist, the ER, urgent care, and the cardiologist in a little over a week. By the end of this week I will have been on 3 types of antibiotics, 2 narcotics, had a shot of morphine (or as I like to call it, worthless), and received a new diagnosis or two that I already suspected I had, since it’s related to the other 3 rare diseases I have.
I have dysautonomia and hyperandergenic postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which means that my autonomic nervous system flips out when I not laying down. The autonomic nervous system controls all the things your body does that you don’t have to think about: blood pressure, heart beats, breathing, sweating, digestion, fluid regulation, and so on and so forth. Something about the infection in my jaws and teeth along with the stress of it all set it off this time in an obvious enough manner that got me diagnosed. I’ve gained 10 pounds in the last week due to swelling. I’ve been in a constant state of tachycardia (fast heart beat) and palpitations (noticeable heart rate) along with high blood pressure as well.
I get sweet old lady compression stockings to go with the cane I use to stay upright. My health insurance doesn’t want to pay for them, much like they don’t want to pay for an ultra lightweight wheelchair I’m trying to figure out how to get so going grocery shopping doesn’t take me out of play for 4 days afterwards due to fatigue. Let me tell you, compression stockings that go up the entire leg? Pricey. Like pair of quality jeans expensive. Meanwhile I’m also wrestling with the state over SNAP benefits, because we can’t afford the multiple food allergy and celiac (medically suspected but not diagnosed) diet otherwise that keeps us all healthy… Which is also low in vitamin a while high in potassium and sodium.
So my rare diseases, which all but the pseudotumor cerebri my husband also has… Every day is rare disease day for us. We live with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Hypermobility Type, Dysautonomia/POTS, Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, Pseudotumor Cerebri, multiple food allergies/intolerances, fibromyalgia, and other things I’m too foggy to remember every day.
But we manage and we smile. We have as much joy as sorrow. And we even have some good days.
I’m going to talk more about these conditions this year, because it’s part of my truth and story. I’m a disabled person. I’m not going to stop talking about it… Well, okay, I’ll probably hold off on until recovery after getting 6 teeth removed on the 10th. I don’t plan on blogging while on narcotics (except, you know, today…).
I’m planning on making a video about the rare diseases I live with to put up on the 28th as long as my cardiology appointment turns out to be okay tomorrow. If not, I’ll make it for the following month, since March is Rare Disease Month.
I have gotten some absolutely amazing submissions to the devotional I’m working on for the Beloved Dead. However, I hope to get some more! There just aren’t enough yet to publish a robust anthology. I believe we can get there.
Therefore I’m extending the deadline until September 28th, 2015.
If you email me in the next few weeks, I may take a very long time to reply, but I will get to it. I’m currently in the middle of a jaw and tooth infection that has landed me in both the ER and urgent care this week along with the dentist. I’m on my 2nd round of stronger antibiotics as the 1st didn’t do much good despite the IV administration of a second type. Because of this I’m on heavy duty pain pills, while having learned that morphine apparently does nothing for me. I’m dealing with high blood pressure and tachycardia attacks triggered by the stress and pain. Meanwhile it will be 2 weeks until I have surgery, and I’m terrified that I will be one of the people with Ehlers-Danlos who feels and hears everything but can’t tell the doctor due to anesthesia; Novocaine, Lidocaine, and epidurals decidedly don’t work for me. I’m having 6 teeth removed, because I have 2 wisdom teeth, a baby tooth, and 3 teeth that have fallen apart due to my faulty collagen. At this point, we fortunately have the costs covered, which I’m thankful for, so at least there’s that. If I’m quiet, though, you know why.
Recently, I have been doing an in-depth study of apotheosis. For the Hellenic Pagan (and possibly for others, though I would not know), apotheosis is an interesting topic because it can help us to understand that difference between humans and deities. It is also an extremely difficult concept to tackle from the perspective of Hellenic theology, because the implications of it are difficult to think about.
Difficult Concept 1: Gods are people, and People aren’t so different from gods.
This isn’t just a modern problem. Apotheosis represents a contradiction in ancient Polytheistic Theology also. In ancient times, believing that the difference between a deity and a human has to do with wisdom and virtue (qualities usually hard earned through life experience) was a totally normal thing. In the Hymn to Demeter, for example, Kallidike says to the disguised Demeter:
“Old Mother, we humans endure the gifts the gods give us…
Foxglove & Firmitas 