On Worshipping Cthonic Deities
This post is made in partnership with @asklepiad-apollon discussing our own experience in working primarily with Ouranic or Cthonic Greek Gods. I’m honored to work with such an experienced and reputable Hellenic polytheist on a topic so dear to my heart, and I’m even more blessed to be able to call him my friend.
As a disclaimer, most if not all of this post is completely UPG. This is practically all opinion and experience in my devotion and practice. Do not take any of this as fact. If it helps you, wonderful, if it doesn’t sound right to you, that’s perfectly fine.
My experience working with the divine has always centered heavily around why I am here. I have always believed I exist for some purpose, whether it is bestowed to me by a divine force or is a result of the innate abilities of my soul. This has been a belief that has sustained me and driven me to learn and grow throughout my life. I was born into Methodism, which is a branch of Christianity. From there I started to explore Wicca but quickly found it did not fit me. I then turned to popular pagan gods, specifically Norse, Roman, and Greek gods. More time passed and I found that no matter who I attempted to worship or do work with, the one deity I always came back to was Hades.
My focus as a divinator and as a magical practitioner has primarily focused on life lessons, dealing with trauma, spirit work, and accepting the passage of time and death. I firmly believe that death is what gives life meaning. The power of the spirit is beyond measure, our soul is what contains all the lessons we have learned over our life/lives. Learning is what I believe to be everyone’s basic life purpose, without delving into innate talents or soul passions. Hades has always been a deity I have been interested in. I have come to associate him not only with the judgement of souls, but with family, balance, morality, and learning from trauma.
Although I work with Ouranic deities, my practice primarily focuses on working with the earth. Working with spirits. Working with the dead and dying, with spirits from other dimensions, and with the parts of me that live and die throughout each cycle in my life. There are many reasons I think my relationship with Hades is the strongest of any deity I’ve worked with. I think a lot of it comes down to how I perceive the Cthonic gods, as I also work with Persephone and their son Zagreus.
When I look at the Cthonic gods versus the Ouranic gods, I see one major difference. I see a difference in their experience with and comprehension of the weight of mortality. The Ouranic deities live in Olympus, where there is no death. It is not to say that they do not experience grief or loss. But in much of the lore where the Ouranic deities experience grief over death, those deaths occur on Earth. It is foreign to them, and they try to evade it, but they cannot, and it is of great pain to them. The weight of time in the world of humans is not normal for Ouranic deities.
With Cthonic gods it is much different. Their work is of the earth or below it. Everything they do has something to do with the cycle of time, be it with creating new life in the spring, reigning over the harvest, judging the souls of the departed, working with spirits, and even experiencing death themselves. Everything regarding the earth has a level of mortality to it. Fruits, Flowers, People, all finite. The Cthonic gods regularly work with people and things that do not last, that rot and die, they have a very real comprehension about how their work is infinite and yet strangely temporary. Working so closely with the human experience almost requires an understanding of how imperative the usage of time is to human experience. How material items are so valuable because they alter the human experience in such a limited span of time.
Concepts such as balance, morality, death, afterlife, prosperity, life, emotions, all these things are very important when I consider Cthonic deities. Because they are such important concepts to humans. When I make offerings to Hades, I find that when I offer acts that require time, or when I spend time with him, those are the acts he seems to appreciate most. I gander it is because he understands that regardless of whether I get to reincarnate, that is time I have permanently lost. I no longer have that time. I am moving ever closer to my last day on earth.
I have spent time saving a baby vulture. I have spent time tending gardens in the name of Hades, Persephone, and his children. I have spent time asking him for guidance through divination. Spending mealtime quietly speaking with him. Writing prayers and poems for him. Learning about death magic. Researching him. Researching philosophy and trying to better myself in his name. Making a more balanced and fair life that I feel he might be proud of. He knows that this is time I can never get back, and I often feel most satisfied after doing things for him that require even a small amount of time. I feel it is because he understands what it truly means to sacrifice your time to someone else because you adore them.
Worshiping the Gods of Olympus is to shout and revel in the land of the immortals. It is to bask in the glory of infinite light and divinity, to paint our spirits in gold and cry their holy names, never to be forgotten.
Worshiping the Gods of Earth is to hear their whispers in a land we are afraid of being taken from and buried in. It is to cry to them for answers to questions maybe no other god can answer. And they reassure us that even if we can find no light at all, they will always walk with us through the dark.
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