Music Monday / 23 December 2019
Is your devotional work just the same old song? Try one of the following:
Home Maintenance: Find a playlist of songs that you really enjoy, that remind you of your Gods and Spirits, and that helps motivate you to get stuff done. While you’re playing that music, tackle a few of the places in your living space where stuff just seems to pile up–clothes on the floor, piles of junk mail, dirty dishes, etc. A clean home is more hospitable to the Gods and Spirits, and you can dedicate the act of cleaning up to Them!
Deity Devotion: Write a song for one of your beloved Deities. It can be as simple as giving new words to an older tune, but give it a try and see what comes.
Shrine Improvement: Do you have a playlist of music that you can have going in the background during prayer time and ritual? In Hellenic and Roman religion, background music helps drown out outside noise that could contain bad omens. Try putting a playlist together and experiment with playing it during moments of prayer.
Today in the Hellenic Calendar:
Today is the 26th of the lunar month.
It’s also the date of the Athenian Haloa—see below for more details!
If you like incorporating daily hymns into your prayers, Drew Campbell recommends the following prayers for today: To Leukothea (a mortal woman who became a Goddess; she helped keep ships safe and saved people from drowning); and To Palaimon (the son of Leukothea, also a savior of ships and the drowning).
Kalà Háloa! (Happy Haloa!)
In the Attic (Athenian) calendar, today marks the Haloa, an agricultural festival to Demeter, Dionysos, Kore-Persephone, and Poseidon.
This festival, part of the Eleusinian cycle of festivals, was celebrated by women only. Since men were legally obligated to pay for female family members’ participation, it is a heavily documented festival—but since it was a women-only one, we know very little of what happened in it.
Presumably, this festival honored Demeter as overseer of the final harvest of the year; first-fruits from this harvest were carried to Her sanctuary at Eleusis today. It also honored Dionysos, since it coincided with the proper time of year to prune the grapevines, and featured a procession to Poseidon in His role as a nurturer of plant life.
During the feasts of this festival, we know that cakes shaped like genitalia were served. As with several other Dionysian and Eleusinian festivals, these may have helped to ward ill fortune and malevolent entities away from the rites. (Or it may have helped make grumpy spirits laugh, resulting in them being less likely to bring ill fortune with them!)
If you wish to celebrate the Haloa today, try having a feast of foods that follow Eleusinian prohibitions: heavy on the grains and WITHOUT wine, pomegrantes, and non-poultry meat. (Fish are permitted, though.) And if you can get obscenely-shaped loaves of bread or pastries, more the better!
Since this festival took place at a specific point in Hellas’ agricultural festival–the start of the sowing season–don’t feel like you HAVE to celebrate this festival, or like you have to celebrate this festival at this point in the year. Try celebrating it:
If you have a particularly close devotional relationship with Demeter, Dionsyos, Poseidon, and/or Persephone.
If your agricultural cycle matches up with Hellas’–search online to see what’s growing and being harvested in your area and when those harvests take place!
If you live in an area that relies heavily on agriculture, and want to help ensure the fecundity and safety of the crops this year.
If you want to work with the Gods and Spirits of your place to ward off ill fortune during the “dead time” of your year—whether that’s a cold winter, a barren summer, or a time where the rains don’t fall.
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