Musings of a Greco-Roman pagan

Middle-aged bisexual Caucasian male living in the American Midwest.

Nerd, intellectual, geek. An INTJ, if you believe in that MBTI personality stuff. Probably "on the spectrum" but never cared to get an official diagnosis.

I've got a professional degree and I work 50 hours a week. Don't expect me to be on here 24-7.

I was raised nominally Protestant Christian in a very religious, rural area. By the time I was in college, I had given up all pretense of being Christian. In the last 25 years, have tried Wicca, Druidry, Satanism, Buddhism, and various forms of paganism and the occult. Eventually, I settled on Greco-Roman paganism.

This is my spiritual journal. I am here to network with pagans and occultists. I blather at length about my spirituality. Feel free to follow along - or not.

I got three main requirements if you want to be chummy with me:

1) no Nazis or fascists or Trumpsters

2) be an adult (over 18).

Some pagans and witches from the younger generation act like they can't function without getting an instant answer on anything from chatgpt. And some of them are getting their rituals and spells from chatgpt?

I can't comprehend being that intellectually lazy. What's it like having a robot tell you how to think every step of the way?

- "Ok. That's reasonable."

-"Wash your hands before you pray. The Hellenic gods don't want to deal with your miasma.'

I have gotten into a bit of an Orphic strain where I see Dionysus as the avatar of an earlier god called Zagreus, who was the son of Zeus and Persephone. What does this mean? Well, I am still sussing it out.

But if Dionysus is the god of wine and drama, he is also the god of afterlife mysteries and an underworld god in his own right. And he is the reincarnated son of Persephone, queen of the shades.

I am developing a relationship with Persephone. Did you know in Magna Graeca she was seen as protecting married women and women in child birth, areas which on the Greek mainland were traditionally given to Hera and Artemis? In Magna Graeca, Persephone was not necessarily honored alongside her mother Demeter or even alongside Hades. She seems to have been regarded as a power in her own right.

I am also honoring Hecate and Hermes as guides to the underworld.

Chthonic = of the earth. In practice meaning, "of the underworld."

Some people out there have internalized bad Victorian-era scholarship that proclaimed there were gods who were exclusively Chthonic, and these gods were in opposition to gods who were exclusively Ouranic (Heavenly). This is mistaken. Most gods have aspects of both, they merely perform different functions at different times.

Nonetheless, it's true enough some deities are more closely associated with the Underworld than others. And that's where I have been lately.

Why you ask? Well, as I said in my last post I'm getting older and thinking more about the afterlife. But moreso, it's just my personality. Some people are like rays of light and streams of rainbow ... or at least they pretend to be. I'm not, and have never pretended to be. Some of us just have a darker soul.

(Please note, dark doesn't mean "evil". Although my personality often clashes with "light and rainbow" people.)

Anyway... I have set up a shrine to Hecate Chthonia, Hermes Chthonius, Hades and Persephone. And Dionysus has his own shrine. But these are my underworld gods.

I have also been honoring the ancestors a lot. Some Hellenes honor their ancestors once a month, per the Athenian calendar. Others never or rarely do so if they have antipathy to their ancestors. I prefer to check in once a week with mine.

I haven't posted in a while. I got really busy over the holidays with work and personal life.

Today I'm going to wrap up my Dionysus lecture series. I want to talk about Dionysus as an afterlife god.

Most of you are probably aware that ancient Hellenic religion was, by and large, a communal religion. There was the religion of the household (oikus) a religion of the clan (phatry), and a religion of the city-state (polis).

But there were private associations, too (thiasoi). In these private associations, the individual could find room to explore individual religious concerns. Probably the highest expression of individual concern was anxiety over one's own mortality and a hope for what lay behind the veil of death.

The Greeks were in contact with Semitic peoples who had their dying-and-rising god myths. They also were in contact with the Egyptians who had the very popular Osiris myth.

At some point, perhaps inspired by some of these foreign cults, Dionysus became an afterlife god, at least to some of his followers. And why not? He was a vegetation god where the vine returned to produce grapes every year.

There were traveling mystics in the Greek world who taught private initiations. Many of these individuals belonged to Orphism, a mystical sect whose theology was somewhat at odds with the theology laid down by Homer and Hesiod. In this theology Dionysus was the son of Persephone, queen of the underworld.

Dionysian mysteries soon flourished. Those who were initiated into secret rites of Dionysus were thought to have a better afterlife than the usual "pass into Hades and become a shade" scenario that awaited most people. Dionysus played a part in the mysteries of Demeter and Kore.

The Dionysian mysteries were mobile and could be practiced anywhere. The frescos in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii show a scene of initiations.

In the Roman Empire, many sarcophagi have Dionysian scenes. Clearly Dionysian (or, rather, Bacchus) was an afterlife god as much as a god of revelry to the ancient Romans.

Most of you reading this seem to be in your late teens and early twenties. You presumably have your whole lives ahead of you. I'm middle aged. Half my life is gone. Many of my relatives are dead. Thinking about the afterlife has become more than a mere intellectual exercise.

I'm still sussing out what I believe in regards to the afterlife. As of late though I have become keenly interested in Dionysus as an afterlife god. And that's where I will leave Dionysus.

The Dithyrambs were cultic processions of Dionysus who sung and danced for the god. They were dressed as Satyrs or otherwise wore masks. Their content was the celebration of Dionysian myth and of wine and fertility.

Out of these eventually grew a new art form. In the Dithyrambs, there seems to have been a lead singer/actor who interacted with a chorus. In time a second actor was added, the role of the chorus was reduced in favor of two actors interacting, and background scenery came in. The subject material was no longer confined specifically to Dionysus even if he was still revered as the patron. Thus was Western drama born.

While various places in Greece claimed to be the birthplace of drama, it was in Athens where the art was refined. Athenian democracy and theater reinforced each other. The theater plays often dealt with political issues, while the theater itself was used for civic events like parading the war trophies of the Athenian empire.

The City Dionysia held in spring was a major theatrical festival in Athens. The priest of Dionysus held the seat of honor, and the god's statue was brought from the temple to watch.

In time there came to be two institutions that defined Greekness wherever Greeks lived. One was the gymnasium, dedicated to Hermes and Herakles, where young men trained naked. But the other was a theater, dedicated to Dionysus.

The theater is a form of madness, of a person stepping outside their normal personalities and roles. The actors assume a different persona for each performance. The audience loses themselves in the performance and frequently identify themselves with the characters.

I would like to interject here how I interact with Dionysus.

I use intoxicants (alcohol and sometimes weed) but not to excess. Intoxicants were the subject of our last two posts. And I am interested in after life mysteries, which will be the subject of our next post. But Dionysus is for me, above all, the god of theater.

I can remember my first "religious" experience. It wasn't at Church. Or any of the other modern day religions. I was a young teen and was blown away by professional Shakespearen actors performing a play. Ever since then I have been an amateur theater geek, and particularly when it comes to Shakespeare.

In watching a great performance of a great play, I step outside of myself. My personality dissolves. I am one with something outside of me.

Heck, even a good TV show or movie can do this. Many others feel the same way. And it's no surprise why cinema has been the paramount Western art for the last century.

Dionysus is the god who, in myth at least, brings madness and upsets social order. He is really not like any other Greek deity.

For a long time, scholars thought he was a foreign deity. But some form of Dionysus is known to the early Greeks as evidenced by the Linear B tablets. His cult nonetheless seems influenced by Near Eastern cults - the ecstatic dancing of the Phyrgian Cybele, the notion of dying and reborn vegetation gods that exist in Semetic cultures and (most especially) the Osiris cult from Ancient Egypt.

It has been said Dionysus is a native Hellenic god in whom The Foreign or The Other is embodied. In myth, his presence inspires people to step outside their normal selves and their normal roles. The most extreme example of this is his group of female followers, the Maenads. They frolicked in the countryside and in the mountains, and were said to tear animals apart (and sometimes humans) with their bare hands while they were in a frenzy.

I'm not an expert scholar on the Maenads and I am not sure how much evidence there is of supernaturally charged women actually doing that sort of thing. Regardless, that's not what this post is about.

What is true is that Dionysus by his very nature appealed to areas of life and to areas of society not sanctioned by normative society. His cult did appeal to foreigners, to women, and to those seeking escape of social constraints. If the authorities of Ancient Greece sometimes viewed his cult with suspicion, in later times the authorities of the Roman Republic would have a severe reaction to this sort of thing. (Ah, but we're getting ahead of the story...)

There are a few avenues of "madness" we need to discuss.

The first is the most well known. Wine, and intoxication. Dionysus is the god of wine - and by extension all alcohol. Mead was probably known before wine, but it wasn't extremely widespread in Greece. And the Greeks knew that fermenting cereal grain produced beer (the Sumerians had been doing this for centuries), but they generally considered this a barbarian drink.

Dionysus was the god of grape and wine. And became the patron of those who cultivated the vine. The Greeks created a heavy wine syrup which they then mixed with water to dilute the alcohol. The grape grew very well in the Ancient Mediterranean and wine quickly became the staple to drink.

Drunken parties were certainly known, then as now. There is more than enough art work showing young males having drunken orgies. And yet, in polite society, habitual drunkenness was frowned on, as I alluded to in my first post on Dionysus. But nonetheless we can say that wine, in moderation or otherwise, certainly inspired a person to step outside of their normal selves.

The second method was ecstatic dance and music.

The cultists of Dionysus formed processions called dithyrambs. These processions told the mythology of Dionysus and particularly his tragic birth (of which there were several versions). They seemed to be a somewhat riotous affair of dance and music and perhaps inspired by the processions of the Anatolian Cybele.

These cultic processions would soon produce a new art form - theater. Theater soon captured the imagination of the Greeks and in particular the Athenians. Theater became a new art form in which both performer and audience can safely experience a form of madness, a stepping outside of oneself.

Dionysus is the most complex deity in the pantheon. I cannot do him justice in one post. So begins a series of posts.

I wish to start by addressing the proverbial elephant in the room.

Dionysus is the god of wine, and by extension alcohol and inebriation in general. He is a god of madness and intoxication. Dionysus is a god of _many other things_ but a lot of people stop here. And a lot of people seemingly don't care to move beyond these few qualities.

If you go to Reddit and Discord, you'll find individuals who merrily treat Dionysus as the "party god" of booze and weed (and, sometimes, hard drugs as well). A lot of these individuals are young and are experimenting with sensory experiences, as most of us do in our youth. And that goes double for kids who were raised by Puritanical parents.

So, to them, Dionysus becomes the god of hedonistic rebellion against social constraints regarding substances, or a god of youth rebellion against a Puritanical upbringing of overly Christian parents.

Hey, I'm not saying this is wrong per se. I just find it extremely limited. There is _so much more_to Dionysian myth and cult than intoxication, which I hope to document in subsequent posts.

Anyway, the cultural standard for Ancient Greece was always always moderation. There was a saying that three cups of wine led to happiness and ten cups of wine led to madness. The ancient Greeks had no more use for habitual drunkenness than we do. Christian society didn't invent temperance, it inherited it from Classical society.

In any case, I'm not your Puritanical mommy and I'm not going to tell you what to do with yourself. But I am a prosecutor, and I can tell you a lifestyle that glorifies intoxicants leads a lot of people into jail, or at least court supervised probation.

I just want to say, the pagans on Tumblr are infinitely better than the pagans of Reddit.

On Reddit I was frustrated by endless waves of neophytes who seemed like they were scared of their own shadow. They needed constant reassurance that the gods weren't demonic beings who were going to smite them for the slightest misstep.

I get at least some of that is religious trauma from people who have just left Monotheistic brainwashing. I am not without sympathy. But I don't have the time to sit there and hold someone's hand and give them constant reassurance the gods are not evil creatures who want to harm everyone.

No, Zeus is not going to kill you because you farted in the middle of a ritual. No, Athena is not going to kill you because your cat jumped up on the altar. Please stop hiding under the bed. You can stop shaking in fear. Really.

Look, either you're in this religion or not. You can not be in a religion and be afraid of doing religious stuff because of trauma with past religion. You cannot be in a faith that demands reverence of supernatural entities if you're constantly too terrified to propitiate the supernatural. You cannot forever cower in the shadows when the path forward demands you come out of hiding and join with the community who are standing together in the light.

Anyway, pagans on Tumblr seem like they're actually religious and they actually want to get close to the gods who are the main subject of the religion. It's a stark contrast from Reddit

(Nota Bene: I am largely a Hellenic pagan, but I will take Roman paganism into account where it seems relevant. For a deeper analysis, go here:)

Apollon seems to have been one of the most widely worshipped deities - possibly THE most widely worshipped deity - in the Hellenic world. He was a god with a temple cult, and his temples spread across the Hellenistic world from Anatolia to Magna Graeca. He was also a god honored in private, in the home and on the street, represented by an aniconic cone thought to ward off pestilence and harm.

His widespread cult is surprising given that he wasn't originally a Greek deity. He has certain things in common with Hittite and Semetic deities, so a Near Eastern origin is probable. He is not found in the linear B tablets of the earlier Mycenean era, though one of his epithets regarding healing is, so it seems likely the earlier Greeks had a healing deity that was absorbed into the cult of Apollon.

Apollon is leader of the Muses. He presides over music, poetry, dance and graceful athletics. These things would have all blended together into the curriculum of a young Greek, and particularly those males about to enter military training. Jennifer Larson of _Ancient Greek Cults_ points out there wasn't a specific cult of Apollon as the god of music and poetry, but music and poetry are a conspicuous feature of his worship.

Apollon is god of Oracles and Healing/Purification. These two things go together because disease and impurity were often thought to have divine origin, and an oracle was needed to discern the supernatural cause and thus the supernatural solution of the problem. Apollon has numerous oracles, with Delphi being internationally famous. In myth Apollon often prophecies the future, but in cult the individuals and governments who consulted Apollon were often looking for answers to pressing daily problems.

Flowing from his oracular powers, Apollo was the god who laid out the civil constitutions of new cities. And so, he can be regarded as the god of law, or at least _a_ god of law for Zeus and Athena also share some power in the civic realm.

Flowing from his sponsorship of the arts, Apollon is the god of Architecture. Myth speaks of how he designed his own temple at Pythia.

Finally, I've come across some scholarship that notes Apollo had many sacred groves. He just wasn't a god of temples or the household. He had tree lined sanctuaries on the outskirts of cities.

Apollo was known to Romans as both a god of prophecy and healing. He was brought into Rome in the latter capacity, but was initially not an exceedingly important deity in the state cult. This changed when August, the first Emperor, came to see Apollo as his patron deity and built him a glorious new temple. Apollo became the patron of the poets of the early Roman Empire.

Apollon retains his popularity in modern Hellenic paganism. Music and poetry draws the artistic types. His Oracular powers attract mystics. And his healing powers invite those who need healing or who take up healing arts. Finally, those inspired by the Athenian household religion pray to him to ward off disease and harm from the oikus and its inhabitants.

Let me tell you how I relate to him. I have little talent in music and poetry, but like most thoughtful people I enjoy these things nonetheless. And I perform divinations before him, and I entreat him to ward off disease.

Apollon is a god to me who seems intimately connected to civic life. He is a god of law (and I am a lawyer, by the way). He is a god of the architecture of the city skyline. He is a god of the finer arts that flourish within the city. And he is the god of healing and medicine, for in crowded cities, disease breaks out often.

But he is also a god of sacred groves. So many people in Hellenic paganism want to build grand temples. I'm thinking it would be a lot easier to build a grove to Apollon with a small shrine. Perhaps some day I will.

Overall, I'm a Hellenic pagan. I worship the deities of Hellas, with a special focus on the time and place of Classical Athens as that is the part of Hellas which has left us the most historical texts to work with. Of course, we have at least some information in the wider Hellenic world stretching from the Black Sea in the East, to Magna Graeca in the West.

And the Hellenistic era - from the collapse of classical Athens to the conquest of Greece by Rome - has left us with significant updates to Classical polytheism. That Hellenistic influence bleeds over into Rome as Rome expanded and incorporated the Hellenistic East. I take that Hellenistic-Roman expansion of classical Greek religion "under advisement."

More specifically, I am in interested in two things. One is the cult of Apollo that was imported into Rome and which reached its heights under Augustus Caesar. The second would be the Bacchic cults that were repressed by the Roman Republic but returned in full force after Julius Caesar.

I really don't wish to get into an argument as to whether or not every Roman Deity is exactly equivalent to their Greek counterpart. But Apollo came in directly, and "Bacchus" is simply a cultic name for Dionysus. Thus, I concentrate on those two deities when it comes to the Roman experience.

I have absolutely no interest in specifically Italic deities. Nor do I have any interest in the Roman state religion or the groups out there that seem hyper focused on recreating that state religion. I do not wish to alienate Roman pagans - you do you, I'll do me. I'm just letting you know where I come from.

In 25 years of paganism, the exact set of deities I honor has been fluid. Gods can come and go. But Hermes has been with me, more or less, for those 25 years.

In myth, he is the herald of the gods and also the Psychopompos who leads the souls of the departed to Charon.

In the daily lives of the average person, he was a god who brought protection and good fortune to the traveler, who increased the abundance of livestock and domestic resources, and who guarded the boundaries of the homestead and fields.

He was also a god of divination and Oracles of chance (as opposed to the grander Oracles of Apollo). He was a god some prayed to before sleep to bring good dreams. He is a god associated with magic, and was invoked in curse tablets (even moreso than Hecate).

Finally, he was a god of chance and athletic contests, and in the Hellenistic era he (along with Heracles) became the god of the gymnasium.

He has a few temples in Greece, but was more properly honored as a private god within the home and market place. By all accounts he was dearly loved even if gods like Zeus, Athena and Apollo had all the formal glory of the temple cults.

Now, fast forward 2500 years. Hermes, as we have seen, is associated with travel, commercial and financial abundance, and communication. This is all the more true because these are the aspects of Hermes that the Romans emphasized in their equivalent deity, Mercury.

Modern economies essentially revolve around travel, trade and finance, and communication. I feel Hermes is extremely at home in the modern world. We moderns are creatures of modern international economies (whether we want to be or not). To the degree we must be so, Hermes is a good friend to have.

Hermes is my "go to" god in daily life whom I invoke precisely for protection in travel, good luck and financial gain, and clarity in communication.

(And, truth be told, I might have had an occasion or two to invoke him in curse tablets. But that is a subject for another time).

Some people are exceedingly mystical and modern in their approach to pagan religion, and have little use for history or academics. And that's ok.

Many people blend personal mysticism and academic inquiry in varying degrees when it comes to pagan religion. And that's ok.

I just hope, whatever you're doing or not doing, you've put some thought into it. I hope you have examined your reasons for what you're doing, you've considered the alternatives, and you have made INFORMED CHOICES that led you to your path. This is a religion with gods, after all, and those gods deserve respect, however you go about it.

When I was on Reddit, I got the sense some of the kids hadn't put any thought into it. It wasn't a religion to them. It was some fad they saw on the Internet. Or just another subculture with an aesthetic to show off.

And while I consider myself tolerant and forgiving, one thing that I have always held in contempt are people who just mindlessly follow along in order to fit into a group.

So, be an academic-driven reconstructionist. Be a woo-seeking witch. Be a little of both, or something completely different. But don't be some unthinking, passive drone who is mindlessly aping the superficial aesthetics of a religion without any thought or feeling just because it gives you a place to belong.

A lot of modern paganism basically calls back to that era. Leave the cities and industrial technology, it says. Find your spirituality in the forests and gardens, it says. Tear down the concrete and put up green spaces, it says.

Hey, I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm not arguing against the idea that Mother Nature is beautiful or that you can find spirituality in undeveloped areas. I'm not arguing that some undeveloped areas should remain undeveloped to protect wildlife and the global ecosystem.

But Greece and Rome were urban civilizations. In the Minoan-Mycenean era, palaces and citadels were the center of religious life. In the Classical era and beyond, temples and sanctuaries in the polis were the center of religious life. And, for the Romans, religion began with a house shrine (lararia).

I'm a city dweller. I'll probably never see grand pagan temples rise in my lifetime. But my job and sense of culture is tied to the city and its institutions. And my gods guard my home where I live downtown.

The Hellenic gods are at home in the city. Take Dionysus, for instance. If Dionysus is sometimes known for frenzied women running about in the countryside, he is perhaps better known for theaters who were intimately tied to the civic and political institutions of the city.

Hey, I'm not trying to quash anyone's fun. And I'm certainly not a prude when it comes to human sexuality.