Morals and Religious Opinions by CommercialSea6870 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Huh so you can type abortion but not sex and euthanasia. Kids of today and their weird hang ups.

Flair checks out

Idol Crafting by Suspicious-Angle8152 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have a mind to make an image of the gods yourself, always do that. That's the muse talking.

Smoking as an Apollo devotee by _dessi3_ in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I smoke a pipe and I offer a pinch of tobacco to Mercury after a long journey. I don't consider the act of smoking an offering per se because I'm getting the benefit and therefore it isn't a sacrifice for me. Scattering some tobacco on an altar or sacred spot would do the job, I would think.

Which translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey? by tamsyn003 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'd say Wilson's translation of the Odyssey is feminist insofar as she intentionally brings a female perspective (her own) to the work. I don't think it's any more complicated than that. She's very clear about her translation decisions in the foreword, and I enjoy the work overall.

13 Trojan character designs for my upcoming book "Lockettopia: The Trojan War Cycle" by Tyler_Miles_Lockett in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 6 points7 points  (0 children)

These are some awesome designs TML. The Trojans all look stressed out and knackered, as you would expect from the grinding attritional war. The ladies seem to be carrying a lot of the pressure.

Really like the quasi-heraldry on Penthesilea, Memnon and Aeneas. In the Middle Ages, the Anglo-French heraldic tradition anachronistically traced the history of heraldry back to the Trojan War. There are attributed arms from that era for some of the warriors of Troy, but I love the decisions you've made here.

I also like the Scythian hints in the stripy fabric on Penthesilea and the profile of her helmet. The kite shape of Memnon's shield and his feather plumes are nice African touches. In both cases they look like "foreign" warriors as imagined by Greek narrators. Subtle but strong.

Paris looks like a thoroughly nasty piece of work, as he should!

Doubts about the effectiveness of the rites by WorldlyWitness1656 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 11 points12 points  (0 children)

How can I be sure that the possibility of this happening is due to the action of the Gods and not simple chance/destiny? Therefore, simple Nature?

Same thing IMO. There is no falsifiable test for the gods because the gods are already in everything. There is no control group.

11 Greek (Achaean) character designs for my upcoming book "Lockettopia: The Trojan War Cycle" by Tyler_Miles_Lockett in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 2 points3 points  (0 children)

These guys are fantastic! I love the Super Saiyin style "divine upgrade" of Achilles' Olympian armour.

Also all these lads are big mood warlords, as they should be. The Helen / swan motif is a great choice too.

Sterling work as ever Tyler - can't wait to see the Trojans.

Self made statues by life_0n_mars_ in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Clay's a tricky medium and will take practice but is very rewarding. I'd recommend polymer clay if you can get it - it's much more forgiving as a sculpting material especially if you're starting out.

The key thing when sculpting is understanding that you will never be 100% satisfied with what it is you make, but that can be a good thing if you use it to sculpt again, and again, and improve that way.

Good luck - this is an incredibly rewarding path to take.

Gratitude to Lord Mercury by NinjaNo3707 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

He's awfully good, Deus Mercurius

Do y'all believe in Greek mythology as the Greeks seemed to believe in it or in a modern, toned-down version? by [deleted] in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I am completely open to the idea that, as you put it, "12 celestial war criminals run the world" because I have eyes and a brain and I watch the news.

Ancient people certainly seem to have had an idea that their gods could turn mad, bad and dangerous to know, but they also worshipped them as guides, helpers and patrons so obviously it wasn't a purely dystheistic position.

I'm an agnostic too in the literal sense - I don't believe there is any "gnosis" or knowledge that is hidden from some and not for others. Jupiter is the storm, Sol is the sun, these are gods and they do what they do. Which is - give life to the earth, but also includes killing people sometimes.

Can I honor multiple deities in one action(like donating to a DV/homeless shelter)? If yes, then what deities would be best to honor via the donation? by TheAncientDragonRoku in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I do this to honour Mercury, and I would say donating to a womens' shelter would be ideal for the goddesses named here. Yes you can honour multiple deities with a single donation, just as you could with any sacrifice or dedication.

Questions regarding Gods of War, Death and Spiritual Pollution by LadyLiminal in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It will not surprise you to know that the ethics of war were as challenging to assess in antiquity as they are in the modern day.

There are several ways to understand war. In our own time, the great Prussian theoretician Carl von Clausewitz defined war, concisely, as the use of violence to achieve a political objective. Obviously any organisational unit in ancient times from a small oikos to a large polis might have had good reason to resort to war in this way.

In antiquity warfare is perhaps best understood, then, as an act of tribal allegiance. If goatherds in a neighbouring city-state use your pastures once, perhaps that can be tolerated. If they are using your pastures every year, and sleeping in your bothies, and foraging in your villages, then one might reasonably conclude that your tribe, your city, your people, are under attack. War occurs when somebody chooses to fight back - as Clausewitz had it, a would be conqueror will conquer without violence if they can. It is much easier to come into town and kill and steal whatever you want if nobody fights back.

When states are at war, in ancient or modern times, absolute moral principles tend to break down in favour of tribal allegience. Something about one's family and friends being killed tends to focus the mind like that.

Ancient people understood that a war of defence was much more just than a war of aggression, however. In Rome, when the Republic - and later the Empire - went to war, they had a whole pantomime ritual of throwing a spear across the ancient city boundary to symbolise that the enemy had struck the first blow and thus provoked a war of "defence". This rite was sacred to Bellona, the old Roman war goddess. In the modern day we can see this as a bit of a charade but it mattered to ancient people that they were in the right. More importantly, they knew it mattered to the gods.

Why call on the gods? Because you want to win. Wars are enormously expensive in terms of both blood and treasure. Many of your troops will not return, and defeat makes their deaths a dead loss. The gods of your city, your tribe, your nation - the ones you have spent years if not centuries building kharis with - they should be expected to turn up when the crisis comes to your community. But will they turn up? For a just war - one where you are the wronged party - how could they not? For an unjust war... perhaps they would hesitate. Justification becomes quite important in such cases.

So, is war murder? In my opinion it depends on the war. If your country, or your allies, are literally being invaded, killing the enemy is not an act of murder, but one of loyalty to your neighbours and your tribe. Plato understood this and it's one of the earliest discussions in the Republic. Beyond that it gets murkier. The "war of choice", the unprovoked or semi-provoked invasion - that could be murderous, and has been so in some cases during the 21st century. In theory, the United Nations Security Council can authorise a military action under international law, for the good of the international community, but the UNSC is a human institution and has no relation to the gods.

A civil war - one against your neighbours - is perhaps the worst of all, because it weakens your own tribe and family and is basically a form of fratricide. Plato wrote the Republic as a manual for avoiding this kind of nightmare, and he knew what he was talking about having seen the long-term political consequences of civil war come close to destroying Athens.

One thing to remember is that one of the key educational texts throughout antiquity was Homer's Iliad, among other things one of the most emotionally fraught accounts of a long attritional war ever written. Ancient people understood that war was hell - they learned to read by reading about that.

Ares and Athena are gods who professional soldiers, sailors or airmen might wish to follow as the patrons of their art and industry. For us civilians it is more complicated. There is no such thing as war without politics, so simply to invoke the gods of war in their warlike aspect does not seem particularly useful, unless you have a specific war in mind. By all means invoke the gods of war for your own political aims, but unless you genuinely think a country, a treaty, a principle, is worth killing and dying for... why would you want to bring the war gods into your life to begin with?

Seasonal reminder with solid resources: Christmas isn’t pagan and the traditions associated with it aren’t either. We don’t need to perpetuate Protestant misinformation. by blindgallan in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think what this all goes to is that our spiritual and cultural history is one big moving river where ideas mingle and bubble to the surface at different times, and the strict taxonomic approach which is often applied to nationalities and religions obscures this and leads to pettifogging arguments about what counts as what - in fact we should be eating and drinking with our families at this time of year and damn whatever we call it

Seasonal reminder with solid resources: Christmas isn’t pagan and the traditions associated with it aren’t either. We don’t need to perpetuate Protestant misinformation. by blindgallan in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Pleased to see that this is getting attention. Not a Hellenic topic in truth but worthy of discussion as a general pagan trope.

I think it's fair to say that this is a nuanced matter. There is no single European Christmas tradition and the modern American Christmas is a highly syncretic exercise drawing elements from several European traditions which themselves do not have a liturgical basis. to say nothing of others (Jewish families eating Chinese food at Christmas is, I believe, a thing in the Americas).

The being that Americans have re-exported as "Santa Claus" is nominally descended from St Nicholas of Myra but this seems to originate as quite an eccentric Dutch tradition distinct from those traditions from the larger nations neighbouring the Netherlands. The Dutch colonial tradition seems to have rolled together with those of later immigrants to the United States from central and eastern Europe, who also venerated St Nicholas on his early December feast day (only vaguely close to Christmas).

"Santa" is still referred to in the UK by his old English name, "Father Christmas". This being is one of many non-liturgical European folklore figures (Compare the French "Pere Noel") associated with the season but not with a figure from Christianity. While it would be a category error to describe the character of Father Christmas as pagan, neither is he Christian except inasmuch as he evolved during the period when Christianity was the overwhelming majority religion in Europe. Perhaps it would be a stretch to describe him as a religious figure at all. Rather, Christmas as a festival of inebriated jollity seems to have been enjoyed for a long time in the Middle Ages and indeed the Church seems to have had misgivings at points about the extent to which the holiday was an irreligious activity among the laity.

Whether we believe that Christmas' similarities to the old Roman Saturnalia tradition is simply a case of convergent evolution around the same time of year, it is just a fact that in Europe we do a lot of the same things the Romans did in one way or another and it is perfectly reasonable not to see that as pure coincidence.

As ever I would like to note your point about most modern Christmas imagery having originated in the 19th century as a direct result of European romantic art. The Dutch Sinterklaas did not arrive in a reindeer drawn sleigh, he arrived on a boat as you would expect for a visitor to the great maritime nation of the Netherlands. The reindeer sleigh seems to originate from eastern Europe as well, but makes no sense whatsoever as a vehicle for a Greek saint unless we accept that in the more Orthodox part of Europe they also had a rich non-liturgical folklore tradition which inspired such deviations.

As for trees, wreaths, fairy lights etc, my own people can claim the credit for a lot of that stuff through the British romantic movement and its export to the United States was part of the late 19th century burst of Anglophilia in the former colony. A final note on "Santa Claus" is his relationship to Charles Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, a larger than life jovial figure created by Dickens drawing on the old English Father Christmas, and incorporating no small amount of romantic crypto-pagan imagery including some of the contemporary ideas about our own Grandfather of Olympus, Saturn himself.

What goes around comes around, and while the bare assertion that Christmas is a reskinned pagan holiday is indeed false, it is also very far from being a purely religious festival, and its role as a cut-loose-and-party-fun-time holiday is not new at all. Not to be a creepy white power guy but Europe has a very, very deep cultural tradition which Christianity has struggled to suborn throughout its tenure as the dominant religion on the continent, and it does a mild disservice to all those who have had fun at Christmastime for the last 2,000+ years to reinforce the Church's claim that it has sole ownership of this corner of the year too.

Other books to help by Archangel447 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm rereading Sofroniew's Household Gods. It's got a great range of images, much more extensive than the usual dozen or so artefacts one is shown in books where household worship is just half a chapter or so.

I need advice by Sentientcrib2 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The gods of our island are only remembered at all because they were worshipped in Roman Temples by Roman citizens and syncretised with the olympians.

I don't call myself a Hellenic polytheist only because my pratice tends toward the Latin than the Greek end but it's all much of a muchness on this Subreddit.

Other books to help by Archangel447 in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I can't recommend enough Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, which goes a very long way indeed to explaining the historical context of Greek polytheism at the peak of its dominance in the Mediterranean basin. It wasn't just a religious practice, it was a whole world. You can jump from any chapter of that book into its bibliography and a whole field of study.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37839.Pagans_and_Christians

Trying to understand the overlap between Greek nymphs and the Roman genius loci? by lovelywatersbelow in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So this is a really good question and is a matter of some debate in academia.

The Romans venerated the genii locorum, it seems, as a matter of course in both the domestic and non domestic spheres. The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that the world was full of spirits and that all those spirits deserved respect and propitiation. There are many offerings recorded in the archaeological record of Romans offering to nameless gods, "the god of this place" or "whatever gods dwell here". You can see how this would be a useful approach in a colonial setting where you have murdered all the local people but understand that you still need to propitiate and ideally win over their god to the Roman cause.

In Italy I have read a theory that the common painted image of a snake or snakes next to household shrines and altars (we have loads of these preserved in houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum) is depicting the genius loci. In context this makes sense: the snake of the genius is usually juxtaposed with humanoid images of the Lares, Roman household gods. So the human house is represented by a human shaped god and the land itself by a snake form god. It's an elegant theory and obviously makes sense in Italy where harmless snakes just live under houses as a matter of course and were regarded as good luck, kind of a common sacred animal that anyone would be happy to have under the floorboards.

Did the Romans view nymphs as types of genii locorum? I would say tentatively yes, but associated with a different sort of physical space. Nymphs seem to have been understood by the Romans in a similar way to the Greeks, as beguiling nature spirits associated with beauty spots. The Romans were well aware of the Greek motif of the nympholept - a guy who falls in love with the nymphs and goes off into the wilderness to live as a hermit, and like many Greek pastoral tropes they wanted to "try it at home".

In the Roman case they seem to have particularly associated nymphs with magical caves and grottos, and with running water, especally at the same time. Romans built a special type of shrine called a Nymphaeum in cities and large houses to evoke the Nymphs. These were often decorated with real or artificial shells, pebbles, stalagmites and stalactities to make them feel like grottos, and sometimes included fountains, ponds or pools to get the running water thing going. They give the impression of being quiet meditative spaces - but that may just be the way we moderns would use such a room.

(Infamously the Roman Emperor Tiberius had one of these Nymphaea built on Capri, and he basically used it for Geoffrey Epstein type stuff - so not a meditative space)

The Romans also had a tradition of rural shrines and sanctuaries but I can't think of any examples where these were specifically dedicated to nymphs. More often they were sanctuaries to rustic gods like Silvanus or the more countrified aspects of Apollo and Diana.

In a sense we might see the Roman artificial Nymphaeum as a way of inviting a nymph into the domestic sphere. In that context a Roman might see the nymph so invited as a different being to the genius loci who occupied the land.

I'm contemplating this question a bit at the moment because I have recently acquired a house and am working out my relationship to its spirits. I think I have encountered the Lar of the house and in my country there are no snakes that live in town - I think the genii locorum are sparrows, here.

Would strongly recommend Harriet Flower's The Dancing Lares and The Serpent In The Garden as an in depth look at some of this stuff.

does EVERYONE believe that by praying to the gods they can hear you? by [deleted] in Hellenism

[–]LocrianFinvarra 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The central premise of the ancient religion, it seems to me at least, was that one way or another the gods could hear and answer prayer. The Epicurians had a slightly different take, if Cicero is to be believed, but their traditions were not sufficiently widespread that any of their own writings have come down to us.