The Song and the Flame

Struggle: I’m still not finding much on Puanepsia. I’m getting the sense that I’m not finding much because there isn’t much to find. It seems appropriate, at this point, to just take the monthly devotion a step further. Do a bit more, be extra thankful/mindful. Eat beans. What I can do is going to be slightly limited anyway, though; we’ve got a busy day tomorrow. I will make time somewhere, I just have to figure out where. (If I have something on hand to do so with, which I can find tonight and have ready, I can do the libation while Tim’s getting ready in the morning… And of course there’s the tattoo–see below. Any more than that is going to be a challenge. But I’ll make it work.)

Success: I have earned the tattoo. I’ll have it done tomorrow night. (I’d rather have it done during the day, but I’ll take what I can get.) It’s going on my right shoulder. Religion on the right, spirituality on the left; fire and water; the light of reason and the dark depths of creativity. The balance between them feels right to me in a lot of ways. Likely they aren’t ways that would make sense to much of anyone else just by looking at them, but making sense to others isn’t required. My body, my ink, my religion and spirituality, my symbolism.

Yeah, and duh, that day is also Puanepsia.  Not quite sure how or even if that fits in.

I have just passed the halfway mark in earning the tat; see my main blog for more.  As I was writing that post, I realized that I would earn the final credit necessary on 9/29, which is a Friday.  Saturday is my ideal day of the week for getting the tat done.  It worked out well last time, at least.

And Saturday 9/30 happens to be the next day I have marked on my calendar to do my regularly scheduled monthly devotion for Apollo.  How perfect would that be, to have a tattoo in His honor done that day?

Things are falling into place so nicely.

As I’ve been researching Puanepsia, I’ve come across various other rituals written by people who are dedicated to Apollon. Some of them have to do with purification–some are even weekly rituals.

Now, some of these I can get behind. It doesn’t seem like a bad thing to kind of shake off the “dust”, as it were, each week and start fresh. But some of them are really involved. Some of them look really intense. Like visualize the bad stuff coming out and getting shot through and then rotting away… To me, that’s some pretty heavy-duty stuff, especially if you’re visualizing Apollo Himself standing there doing the shooting.

My first thought upon reading this particular ritual was that I didn’t know if I, personally, could stand up to doing that every week! But then I started thinking… I suppose if you did it every week you’d get used to it, and the imagery would become sort of commonplace and it wouldn’t be so intense all the time.

But what does that mean for the purification and the ritual itself? Does it lose its potency if it loses its “specialness”? Possibly not. I don’t think that’s really where I’m trying to go here. My point is slippery and keeps wriggling out of my grasp. There just seems something inherently wrong about taking something so potent, so intense, and making it commonplace. It feels like taking the sacred and making it profane, though I can’t say why. Perhaps I feel as though “sacred” ought to indicate some kind of “specialness”, and that by reducing the emotional impact of the act through overdoing it, that quality is being taken away.

This goes under “percolating”; there is more here, but I don’t know how to articulate it yet.

So if I’m going to give this whole Greek thing a go, I should probably start thinking about holidays. I know that it’s not necessary to observe every single thing on the calendar; no problems there. But probably paying some attention to some of the major festivals might be a good idea.

Festivals honoring my Patron seem like a good place to start. Conveniently, Puanepsia is coming up near the end of this month. So I thought I might start off there. The problem is that there seems to be an incredible lack of information available on it. What I have found so far is that it honors Pythian Apollon, that it is possibly a harvest festival, and that beans are appropriate food for the day.

That’s not true. I’ve found more, but the bits about children with two parents living carrying around a bay branch adorned with fruits and miniature lyres, and giving it away as a blessing to a house where they are greeted properly, doesn’t seem like it would be much help to the modern solitary practitioner. The most I can take from that is to make my own eiresione for my own house… But in a climate where bay will not grow, making one seems less than practical, and sharing a house with someone who does not share my faith makes leaving the thing out for any length of time difficult as well.

As I am new on this path, I’m wondering if it might not be best simply to take this opportunity to learn. Read the appropriate Hymns, investigate the holiday and what the customs associated with it mean. I would be performing a libation on the day itself anyway; perhaps enhance that a little to make it a little extra-special. Burn some incense, take a little more time, say a little more, that kind of thing.

The first fruits/harvest thing has me thinking. Thanking Apollo for a harvest of actual fruit and grain and such make sense. The Sun nourishes these things and helps them grow. But my personal “harvest” is more a monetary one. (I just got a bonus; that seems like a good harvest to be thanking for.) Is there enough of a connection there to be giving thanks for it? Should I just give thanks for the harvest other people have made that I have been able to enjoy through the local coop and the Farmers’ Market?