Sitting still is a challenge.\u00a0 I’m a pacer, a fidgeter.\u00a0 I tap.\u00a0 I draw.\u00a0 I stim.\u00a0 Stillness makes my skin itch.\u00a0 My mind whirls in spirals of rage and anxiety.\u00a0 When I sit down to write, I have to have music or movies going in the background to occupy my monkey brain.\u00a0 For September’s challenge, I set myself to meditating 30 minutes a day by the end … I didn’t make it.\u00a0 I capped out at 15, though my previous practice had made it as high as 20.<\/p>\n
Prayer is alien.\u00a0 I was raised with a television sort of Christianity, where prayer was like a desperate bargain, or the sort of thing that puts the “psycho” in psychodrama.\u00a0 It was an identity marker with no action – as a child, no one I knew personally went to church; as I grew older, the churchgoers I met did not obey they teachings.\u00a0 My pursuit of magic began in rebellion against that vision of Christianity, of any conception of god or gods which was compatible with such hypocrisy and inaction.\u00a0 When I eventually began to hear the call of the gods, I had no framework from which to begin that exploration, no context with which to process the experiences I had in seeking them.<\/p>\n
For the December challenge, I will be confronting those issues together.\u00a0 I will be spending the 30 minutes of daily meditation in devotional prayer. I will light a candle, burn incense, pour libations, and say a prayer (or three).\u00a0 Then I will sit quietly and listen.<\/p>\n
As I approach December, I am going back to the Classical Studies section of my research library.\u00a0 I am beginning by re-reading Dionysos at Large<\/em>, by Marcel Detienne and Dionysus: Myth and Cult<\/em> by Walter F Otto. \u00a0(Note that both these books have translators.\u00a0 What is it the Anglophone world has against good Dionysiac research?)\u00a0 Burkert’s Greek Religion<\/em> will also feature prominently.\u00a0 I will post some results from that research in the coming days.<\/p>\n Week 1 – Dionysos, Bakchos, Zagreus, Iachos, Eleutherion<\/strong><\/p>\n My first love among gods, I literally wrote my undergraduate thesis on Dionysos.\u00a0 He was there for me at my initiation, and has blessed my drinking and my brewing in abundance.\u00a0 I have found solace in him when madness took me, his presence grounding me when I was adrift.<\/p>\n And yet, for all that, I have too often felt that he was … aloof from me.\u00a0 I have never felt the ecstasy that so many feel in his worship.\u00a0 And this saddens me.\u00a0 So I will begin my month of devotional meditation with the god who convinced me that gods were cool.\u00a0 I will devote the week to Dionysos.<\/p>\n I will read ancient hymns.\u00a0 I will read modern hymns.\u00a0 I will drink wine.\u00a0 I will breathe frankincense and myrrh.\u00a0 And I will sit.\u00a0 And I will listen.<\/p>\n Week 2 – Baphomet Thanateros<\/strong><\/p>\n I have been drawn to the image of Baphomet since very early in my magical practice.\u00a0 The first magical book I ever bought was Eliphas Levi’s Transcendental Magic<\/em>, with his iconic image of Baphomet on the cover and frontspiece.\u00a0 I found him in occult-themed art on the internet, was drawn to the implicit bisexuality of his hermaphroditism.\u00a0 I met him again, more formally, when I began studying Chaos Magick and performed the Rite of Chaos B.\u00a0 He calls to me.\u00a0 Sometimes I know how to answer.<\/p>\n It’s worth noting that I say “he” as a matter of grammatical convenience.\u00a0 I see myself in Baphomet: a combination of genders and a rejection of them.\u00a0 He.\u00a0 She.\u00a0 Xie.\u00a0 All of the above and none of the above.<\/p>\n As far as research for this section goes, I don’t know what there is to be done in that direction, really.\u00a0 Baphomet is … sort of a new god.\u00a0 Half-formed.\u00a0 Or perhaps re-emerging with a new face and name.\u00a0 I will be digging up modern prayers to him, of course, including my own.\u00a0 And art.<\/p>\n I will begin my devotions by returning to the Mass of Chaos B, re-dedicating the mask that has served as his idol on my alter, and awakening the statue I have just purchased.\u00a0 Then I will continue with devotional candles and libations and fumigations.\u00a0 And listening.\u00a0 So much listening.<\/p>\n Week 3 – Whoever is calling me from that Luciferian current<\/strong><\/p>\n Like most of us who got our start in eclectic Wicca, I swallowed a double dose of respectability politics and was always leery of anything that smacked of Satanism.\u00a0 And yet … sometimes I hear that call.\u00a0 One year, while I was away at college and keeping the Sunrise Temple, I got a song stuck in my head.\u00a0 That doesn’t happen to me.\u00a0 Except there it was, for a fucking month.<\/p>\n