Entries tagged with aeonism

On Saturday, for Martinmas, I went to Mass at my local Catholic church (which turned out not to make any mention of St. Martin since it was the Sunday vigil service.), and then did a ritual to Hermes, who I associate with St. Martin of Tours. Both the Mass and my ritual--which involved reading the entirety of the nearly five-hundred-line Homeric Hymn to Hermes--went well.

One thing that particularly struck me during Mass was the second verse of one of the hymns we sung, "The Church's One Foundation," which went:

She is from every nation,

Yet one o’er all the earth;

Her charter of salvation,

One Lord, one faith, one birth;

One holy Name she blesses,

Partakes one Holy Food,

And to one Hope she presses,

With every grace endued.

Although the hymn was written by an Anglican, it certainly seems Catholic in spirit, with its focus on the universality of the Church and the centrality of the Eucharist as a unifying factor for all Christians. By eating the body and blood of their god in common, they are symbolically and perhaps literally united by the unity of this god.

I have never taken Communion, and never will--I am not a baptized Christian and do not intend to ever become so, given my deep theological differences with Christianity--but this image speaks to me strongly, and the absence of anything similar is, I think, one of the difficulties I have with many pagan theologies and practices.

How to implement something similar in my own theology and ritual practice is something I'm not quite certain of, but it's something I've been thinking about and would appreciate anyone's thoughts on. One thing I've been trying to focus on in both is the Ocean as an eternal and universal that links humanity. After all "everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin" or, as I put it in my liturgy, "From broth we came, and to brine we shall return." Optimally, I might pray with one hand in seawater, but since that's not practical where I live, I decided to buy sea salt and dissolve it in tap water to produce reconstituted seawater for ritual purposes.

I've been thinking a little about short discussion of the Aeonist gods, or some of them, on pages 191-192 of Winter Tide.

The most obviously notable---because Aphra ruminates on it, is Shub-Nigaroth, with her epithet of "Mother of Fear." Aphra says that she'd always assumed it was a joke when her Mother explained that "children are terrifying," but that seeing her Grandfather's grief at her mother's death helped her understand it more seriously. Given that the creation myth given on page 343 seems to particularly associate Shub-Nigaroth with the creation of the first life, I feel like the best interpretation of this epithet may be as a dark mirror of her as being the "Mother of Hope" as well. Because the two are tied: if she created life, and thus the hope of a future for living things, she also created fear of the loss of that future...

Cthulhu's epithets of "bringer of life and death" and "ever patient" seem worth thinking about in part because of Aphra's short description of Cthulhu as always listening and never promising. This seems to fit well with a concept that has found its way deep into my psyche, even if I don't have a clear place for it in my theology: the Universal Observer. Some property of the universe that simply observes everything, and by observing makes it real.

This role for Cthulhu, I think, might also explain why eir rising from the sea would drive humanity mad. Not because ey is destructive, or horrible to behold, or because ey eats souls, but because releasing the awareness of humanity's own memories would simply be too much for us. Our survival and sanity depends on our ability to forget, and to not know the horrors we ourselves have made. I am less sure what to make of the "bringer of life and death" title, other than in the sense that the universe exists because it is observed, and Cthulhu is there, sleeping and observing?'

It strikes me as odd that Aphra refers to Nyarlathotep, "herald of knowledge," as a psychopomp, given that Aeonists don't believe in an afterlife. I suppose she means it in a symbolic sense, if he guides souls to hidden knowledge? I would be interested to know more about him...

Communion and "The Church's One Foundation"

Thoughts on the Cognomens of Aeonist Gods