Athenian New Year Festival
Jul. 15th, 2018 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
child_of_the_airYesterday afternoon, I got to attend a Hellenic pagan group ritual for the first time ever. It was a Hellenion ritual organized and led by alexseanchai, who is also the person who made me aware that Hellenion existed, and even has an organized group in my area (for sufficiently broad definitions of area, anyway).
The experience really made an impression on me, and I hope that I'll be able to attend more Hellenion rituals in the future, especially since they seem to have a decent amount of presence in Maryland. Trying to explain why it moved me so much is trickier, but I think it helped a lot that it was actually focused on the gods I try to worship, rather than the usual vaguely-Wiccan-inspired ecclectic Pagan rituals which focus on a cosmology that doesn't work for me, and require a lot of mental mapping to make them seem relevant.
The other thing that I think was important to me was how much of the ritual was focused on hymns and prayers: most of the time was spent taking turns reciting hymns--ancient, modern, and written by participants--and that's something that I think is really missing from a lot of pagan rituals I've seen. It's also part of why I really want to finish that calendar of readings I want to write to try to restart my daily practice, which I think would be a good thing to do.
alexseanchai, who is also the person who made me aware that Hellenion existed, and even has an organized group in my area (for sufficiently broad definitions of area, anyway).The experience really made an impression on me, and I hope that I'll be able to attend more Hellenion rituals in the future, especially since they seem to have a decent amount of presence in Maryland. Trying to explain why it moved me so much is trickier, but I think it helped a lot that it was actually focused on the gods I try to worship, rather than the usual vaguely-Wiccan-inspired ecclectic Pagan rituals which focus on a cosmology that doesn't work for me, and require a lot of mental mapping to make them seem relevant.
The other thing that I think was important to me was how much of the ritual was focused on hymns and prayers: most of the time was spent taking turns reciting hymns--ancient, modern, and written by participants--and that's something that I think is really missing from a lot of pagan rituals I've seen. It's also part of why I really want to finish that calendar of readings I want to write to try to restart my daily practice, which I think would be a good thing to do.
