Evil Eye

I went to London at the weekend with my boyfriend. One of the stops we made was to Camden town, and much to his disdain I spent many hours searching through little junk shops for treasure. I came out with this bracelet, featuring evil eye beads (also known as Nazar boncugu. This is one of my favourite symbols, and it is one that is always prudent to have on hand.

The concept of the ‘evil eye’ is a widespread belief found throughout the Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and European worlds even today. A beleif in the evil eye is also found in south America and Africa.

In the Mediterranean, the evil eye is largely believed to be cast unintentionally (though some believe that certain people, or groups of people; can cast intentionally), and is often the result of an envious glance. It can cause sickness and general misfortune; and newborn babies are especially at risk. A number of sources I have read say that babies are at risk of the evil eye from childless women.

During my own trips to Greece I have noted that the evil eye symbol is pretty ubiquitous. Many Greeks do not like to be stared at, and avoid staring in return (allow me to qualify this statement: One of the most disconcerting things for me when I travel to mainland Europe, is peoples propensity to unabashedly stare. It doesn’t seem to be  considered rude as it is here in Britain and no matter how many times I travel to Europe I never get used to it. In Greece and Cyprus, it did not happen.).

Here are some really interesting journal articles about the subject across several cultures. If you put these titles into Google, you may be able to find open source versions:

• Apostolides and Dreyer, 2008. The Greek evil eye, African witchcraft, and Western ethnocentrism.
• Dickie, 1991. Heliodorus and Plutarch on the Evil Eye.
• Taylor, 1993. Evil eye. Folklore. 44(3).

Dark moon goodness!

Firstly, I just want to mention that I have finished work at the hospital for a few months. I really enjoyed my time there and will be sad to leave. I had to present a case study about a patient with bacterial meningitis, and it went really well! I am currently lacking a project title for my dissertation, however. Originally I was going to be trialling some new molecular techniques to test for Norovirus (more poo…yay…), but the hospital decided not to go through with that because any findings I made would be too costly to implement. Hopefully  I’ll get another molecular based project, but with a sample type that isn’t as gross.

Now that I have finished, I have revision to think about (lots and lots of that). The new lunar month coincided very nicely with the end of my time there, and I can now focus on other, more spiritual things.

Last night, instead of my usual format for Hekate’s Deipnon; I did something a little more informal. I cleansed my household and my shrines as usual before presenting offerings to Hekate, Hermes and my ancestors; and then performed some divination for the coming month with my casting collection. The message I got was quite interesting and seemed to strongly stress the need for me to see the spiritual in the mundane.

On Thursday I attended my usual informal divination group. I used my new shadowscapes tarot deck (in addition to the good ol’ casting collection that people just seem to adore) and I can already see that I will have a much better time divining with this deck than my other one. I connect to the images a whole lot more and after only a week, I am hardly consulting the book.

I chose to learn the meaning of each card by looking through the deck and just picking out the cards that called to me at that particular time, instead of reading through in chronological order. This way, even if I pull out the same card for a few days in a row; the impression I get from each card will hopefully be a lasting one.

I hope to be a whole lot more productive this month when it comes to my practice, and as a result, I hope to be posting more here!

Practice makes perfect

I seem to use the term ‘practice’ all the time. I guess it is a subconscious acknowledgement of the fact that I never stop learning and changing and trying to improve in my spiritual work.

This week, I have started to actively practice my tarot reading skills again. Tarot work had taken a back seat since my casting collection reached a point where it could read effectively. I do get something out of the tarot though, and with the help of friends I have been learning some simple techniques that aid in interpreting a reading. I performed a very simple and very accurate spread earlier in the week, and it seems that I am finally getting the hang of it!

As a reward/incentive for further study/’omfg payday’, I bought myself the beautiful Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. I have had my eye on this stunning deck since before I had even learnt how to use the tarot, but I now think I am at a point where I could read these cards without getting confused.

A different worldview

I just received a text from my boyfriend. He is your classic agnostic, nominally Christian British male, but his family are very devout Methodists. He is sitting in church as I type this (texting in a holy place during an Easter Sunday is not something I agree with, and told him so), feeling intensely out of place as people are starting to jump up in the service and speak in tongues. He was just told to be aware of bridges. I can understand his discomfort at being in this service, but I think it shows how radically different out world-view can be sometimes; because if somebody came to me in a trance state and told me that… I’d listen.

He actively takes an interest in my spirituality and asks a whole lot of questions, which I love him for (he even asked to see a ritual last week, but I refused for reasons I wont go into here). As a result, he is fast becoming a lesson to me about how to explain a faith to somebody raised in a radically different world-view with no frame of reference for your practices. He also stands to highlight just how divorced from the mainstream culture’s world-view (if I were to draw a british culture pie chart, he sits squarely in the biggest slice) I have become.

M-’So is there a god for everything?’

Me- ‘They tend to have spheres of influence’

M- *Points to his food* ‘So what is the god of Jelly?’

Me-’I don’t think there is a god of jelly, it doesn’t quite work like that’

M-’Ok so if all your gods are gods of things, where does the Christian god fit? What is he god of to you?’

Me-’He doesn’t really fit the paradigm, and I try not to concern myself with that because he is not part of my pantheon or the culture it is a part of.’

M-’…What’s a pantheon?’

Often, the best way I can describe my religion to others, is that it has a lot in common with Hinduism. This is often not helpful because Hinduism is just as alien to many.

The other thing that made me realise how different I am? I was asked to pray in a group of Christians (I was more than happy to oblige. It was all in context) and I, on autopilot; raised my palms to the sky before realising my mistake and clasping them together. And that isn’t half as bad as the time I inadvertently offended a friend by knocking on the floor when referring to his late grandfather (to him this gesture meant I assumed his relative was in hell, haha).

 

Updates

Not too long after my last post, I completely dismantled my altar save for a few essential items (an incense burner, an offering bowl and my statue of Hermes who I am honouring daily at the moment). If you were to look at all of the photos I have posted of my altar over the last 3 years or so, you will see that very little has changed. However, I have; and the arrangement was no longer working for me at all. It hasn’t been an inspiring space for me for at least a year, but I had somehow got my,’it should all be about the gods’ attitude mixed up with a ‘don’t change anything ever!’ attitude. The set up was inorganic and boring, and far from inspiring me to leap up and worship the gods; I would instead feel roused to do some impromptu ritual, glance over at my altar and fall back to earth with a little bump.

My approach to my religion has changed very drastically over this last year, and yet my altar (and many other aspects of my practice, which has been addressed elsewhere) has not. An altar is a focal point of worship. It is one of the few areas in my tiny home that can be dedicated entirely to the sacred and I have made improper use of it.

And so it is a blank slate once again, and I have to admit that I already feel more positive about my spiritual practice than I have done in years. I am going to build it again from the ground up, making it beautiful and relevant as I go.

–

Lastly, I received a very insightful tarot reading from a friend of mine at the weekend. It suggested that I should be incorporating many more mundane, practical tasks into my religious practice. She used the Deviant Moon Tarot to do my reading, which I adored. I really want a deck for myself!

 

What I was up to

Before my life was taken up by looking at bacteria in blood and faeces (believe it or not, I actually chose this career), I was looking to bring about some important changes in my spiritual practice. For now this has fallen by the wayside and I am just focusing on maintaining a relationship with my gods through basic devotion. I will pick up this work again in earnest in mid April.

My practice needs to change in order to account for the massive paradigm shift I have undergone in the last few months. So many of the things that I do just don’t make sense anymore, nobody is benefiting from those practices and I am stagnating. I want to craft a festival calendar that includes:

• Feast days for my gods
• Periods of fasting and purification
• More days set aside for honouring my ancestors
• Days that honour aspects of the natural world, things like seasonal changes and weather patterns. This is something I have struggled with in the past because they are abstract concepts without a deity specifically attached to them. I have come to understand in recent months that I really don’t have to honour discrete, named entities all of the time in order for a practice to be meaningful and in order to honour the divine.

I also really want to do a complete altar overhaul. It has looked the same for many years and has little aesthetic appeal for me any more. Ideally, I would like space for at least one more large altar and several more shrines (I would love for Hera to have a shrine), but this will likely have to wait.

 

I am alive I promise!

Real life has just eaten me up. I am back working at the hospital, and when I get home I usually have uni and portfolio work to do.

Obviously, I am no longer participating in the PBP, which upsets me because I really enjoyed posting. I have saved all the info I collected with the intention of writing my planned posts anyway!

D is for Deipnon

I didn’t do a pagan blog project post last week as I just didn’t have the time. I technically still don’t have time, and so this post does not go into half as much detail as I would have liked it to! In the future I will write a fully sourced article with more information about this rite, plus some useful primary sources for those who are interested. Consider this a taster based mostly on modern practice!

Hekate’s Deipnon (which translates as supper, but the meal itself is closer to dinner in nature) is celebrated on the last day of the lunar month, before the crescent of the new moon is visible in the sky.

The purpose of this rite was threefold: to purify the household and it’s occupants, to placate   vengeful spirits and to offer a meal to Hekate.

In modern times, many people use this as a time to thoroughly clean their homes and altars, and to ‘take stock’ of the previous month. I cleanse my home with Bay on this day, asking Hekate propylaia to bless and protect it.

Offerings to Hekate include eggs, garlic, leek and the ‘sweepings’ from your cleaning. I had some interesting UPG some time ago, and I now offer Hekate a tithe of all the food I have on hand. I also offer up candle stubs, incense ash, and all those annoying little things that accumulate as part of devotional worship.

I also tend to offer a libation to my ancestors on this day, and offer up a prayer for those less fortunte than I. Some modern Hellenic polytheists like to donate to a homeless shelter on this day, as a nod to the fact that in ancient times people would lay out their offerings to Hekate at her shrine before the gates of their property, and the poor would eat it.

In lieu of a shrine on the boundary of your property, offerings can be left at a crossroads, or  art a place where land, sea and sky meet.

C is for Cleansing

Yet another post as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

Just in case the last few posts have not made this clear, spiritual cleanliness plays a large role in my regular spiritual practice. It ranges from taking a shower after intercourse before approaching any of my shrines, to large rituals designed specifically to cleanse a space of miasma.

Here is a brief outline of one such basic ritual. I usually accompany this with prayers and offerings to my gods.

Firstly, I physically tidy the space I wish to cleanse. This is one of those things that people always tell newbies to do, and honestly, you really should. Trying to cleanse a physically dirty space of miasma will not be as effective and cleansing a clean one! At the very least I vacuum (doing a dorky visualisation at the same time, picturing the hoover sucking up all the bad energy), tidy things away and dispose of all the little bits of paper and tissue that inexplicably accumulate around my living space.

Next, I open up the windows and brew an infusion of Bay. As I have said in a previous post, smoke would be more preferable but I work with what I have. I begin to walk the perimeter of the space, sprinkling the infusion all around me as I go, saying ‘Hekas Hekas Este Bebeloi! Let all that is profane be far from here!’. This is something that I picked up years ago from a ritual I found at www.hellenion.org, and it stuck. For those that are interested, I have researched the phrase and whilst it supposedly has it’s origin in the Eleusinian mysteries, it is most often seen in relation to the golden dawn.

My cleansing rituals almost always involve the cleansing of my altar, and so once I have made my circuit of the room I asperse my altar in the same way, before dismantling it and physically washing all of the items upon it in my infusion. All the time I keep chanting and praying to each god it turn when I pick up an item that belongs to them.

Once I have put everything back into it’s original place, I put some Lavender oil into a diffuser (again, smoke would be preferable) for further purification, and some Rosemary oil into another at the opposite end of the room to banish any remaining bad energy.

This is the most basic large scale purification rite that I perform. I do it at least once a month at the dark moon for Hekate’s Deipnon, and occasionally more often if I feel that my space needs a little boost; or if my shrines somehow get defiled.

A call for books!

Does anybody know of any good books that deal with things like the ancient greek views of the afterlife, treatment and worship of the dead and so forth? Academic texts if possible.

It is becoming apparent that this is something I should be learning about in greater detail.

ETA: If possible, the more specific the book, the better!