Types Of “restless” Dead, Relatively Active Ghosts Likely To Manifest Themselves (and Convenient

Did Persephone willingly walk into the Underworld?

There is no story in Greek mythology about Persephone leaving her mother in which Hades was not part of the story. 

There is no story in Greek mythology in which Persephone willingly walked into the Underworld out of compassion for the souls of the dead. 

There is no  “pre-Hellenic original” version of any myth, and that includes myths about Persephone.

However, there is a modern story claiming to be a “pre-Hellenic” myth about Persephone. It was written by Charlene Spretnak around 1978 and it’s found in her book Lost Goddesses of Ancient Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. (Google preview here, e-book available here) 

Charlene Spretnak’s M.A. is in English and American literature. In her introduction to Lost Goddesses, she records that she re-imagined some myths for her young daughter because didn’t think the versions by Homer and Hesiod were appropriate to read to a 4-year-old. Her stories are feminist-inspired fiction based on mythology that she presented as rediscovered “pre-Hellenic” myths.

Marjorie Graham retold and created splendid illustrations of Spretnak’s version of the myth in The Archetypal Myth of Demeter & Persephone: A Story for Mother & Daughter Celebrations. An addendum in recent copies of the book credits Spretnak’s inspiration.

No one knows for certain what stories pre-Hellenic peoples told, or the specifics things they believed about their deities, because there was no written language in Greece at that time. The earliest Greek script yet deciphered is Linear B, a Mycenaean language that dates to around 1450 BCE and was used mainly to record commodities and transactions. Greek literature - and “literature” means  “written works” - began in the 7th century BCE. The  Homeric Hymn to Demeter (X and X) was  composed in the late 7th or early 6th century BCE. It is the earliest version known of the myth of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. 

There is a difference between a myth told long ago, and a modern work of fiction based on myth. The former distills cultural and religious beliefs of an ancient society, and the latter contains the creative imaginings and values of an individual from a modern culture, with 2000 years or so of monotheist and secularist bias filtering the original myth, its culture, and its religion.

I’m not here to enforce religious orthodoxy. If the story told by Spretnak and Graham resonates with you, that’s okay with me. If you want to base your practice on it, that’s fine, too. If you want to call that practice “Hellenic  polytheism”, we will disagree, because HP is based on ancient religious beliefs, not on modern fiction. 

I’m going to take this one step farther.

There is no ancient version of the myth of Persephone and Hades in which Persephone was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. This is a false impression created by translation of the ancient word for “to be carried away” as the word meaning “sexual assault”.

The story of Persephone reflects ancient Greek marriage customs. Marriages were arranged with the father of the bride, often when the woman was a teenager, usually without consulting her. After a ceremony at her home, the bride was carried off in the groom’s chariot to live at his home. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter confirms that this was the case with Persephone: “… cloud-gathering Zeus… gave her to Hades, her father’s brother, to be called his buxom wife.”

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hades is shown to treat Persephone with great respect. He tells her: 

“Go now, Persephone, to your dark-robed mother, go, and feel kindly in your heart towards me: be not so exceedingly cast down; for I shall be no unfitting husband for you among the deathless gods, that am own brother to father Zeus. And while you are here, you shall rule all that lives and moves and shall have the greatest rights among the deathless gods: those who defraud you and do not appease your power with offerings, reverently performing rites and paying fit gifts, shall be punished for evermore.” 

In fact, their marriage was regarded as an ideal model for human marriages among the Greeks in southern Italy.

Please don’t take my word for this. If you’re interested in learning more, read Spretnak’s book and consult the academic resources - a list of some of those can be found here.

Please love Persephone enough to separate the modern fiction about her from ancient belief.

EDIT: To read my reply to comments on this post by @metvmorqhoses, who avers the existence of a myth in which Persephone entered the Underworld willingly  please click here:  https://honorthegods.tumblr.com/post/188435396046/did-persephone-willingly-walk-into-the-underworld

Hades and/or Persephone Follower Discord Group

If you are someone who:

-works with Hades and/or Persephone

-worships Hades and/or Persephone

-is a devotee of Hades and/or Persephone

-is on a priesthood path with Hades and/or Persephone

And you want to have people with similar views, values, and experiences as you, come join the discord!

Just send me a message/ask or comment on this post and I'll send you the link :)

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Please read before sending asks:

Updated 8 January 2022

I will post prayer requests, but please keep in mind that prayer compliments professional healthcare, it’s not a replacement for it. 

- For all medical emergencies, please call your local emergency number.

- If you are struggling with an eating disorder, depression, self harm, suicidal thoughts, or just need to talk to someone, please contact a local, licensed mental health provider, reach out to counselors at Counseling and Prevention Resources or visit  www.suicidestop.com for online chats, worldwide hotlines and emergency numbers, interactive media, useful information and helpful tips.

Before sending me an ask:

- Is your question related to ancient Mediterranean religion, mythology, history or art, or about modern Hellenic and Roman polytheism/paganism? 

- Have you already tried googling your question, or checked Wikipedia or  theoi.com for an answer?

- Have you already searched my blog or checked tags - especially #Hellenic Polytheism 101 or #Roman Polytheism 101?

- If your question is about a post, have you already checked to see if I’ve recently edited or updated a particular post?

- Have you checked my sidebar, Welcome Page, and Masterpost of Hellenic and Roman Polytheism Resources?

If so, go ahead and ask!

If your question is about religion, please include your practice (Hellenic, Roman, Graeco-Roman, Graeco-Roman-Egyptian, etc.) so I can better answer your ask! 

Signed asks will always be answered privately unless otherwise requested.

If you find a typo, broken link, or something else that needs correcting, please dm with a link to the post and explain the problem.

I view as cowardly and/or trolling all anon asks “warning” or “informing” or “calling out” a blogger, a group, or some “new” turn of events. I expect any such information to be sent by dm or signed ask, accompanied by verifiable evidence and no, a screen shot of an email is not verifiable evidence because it can so easily be faked, but not easily verified. 

If you’re a fan of this blog and enjoy my content and creations, send a message to let me know! 

If you want to do something extra-special to show how much you love this blog, please volunteer with or make a donation to an environmental/hunger/ refugee/or animal welfare non-profut - and let me know! 

May your path be blessed!

General Etiquette for Working with the Dead

These are some of the guidelines I follow when working with the dead:

When entering a graveyard, be sure to greet and leave something for the guardian of the graveyard.

Never walk on the graves of the deceased.

Never take anything out of the graveyard without permission of the guardian or a specific grave’s resident.

Never take items people have left for their loved ones off the graves.

Only gather graveyard dirt from the perimeter of the graveyard, never from the graves themselves.

Upon leaving the graveyard, say farewell to the dead you encountered, and the guardian.

Never force the dead to work for you, if they are unwilling or unable to aid you try again later or try another spirit.

Be mindful of the dead’s beliefs in life, not all will be friendly to those who practice magic.

Give the dead the same respect and thought that you yourself would wish to be given.

Obey your local laws and ordinances regarding the dead and graveyards/burial sites.

Herbs & Their Magickal Powers

(How to use herbs in spell work)

Mugwort: Clairvoyance, protection, prophetic dreams, purification, ward off evil, astral projection, consecration of divinatory tools.

Rose Hips: Healing heartbreak, calming anxiety, ritual baths, luck, abundance, protection, psychic powers, peace, knowledge.

Rose Petals: Attraction, banishing bad habits, love, healing, romance, casting circles, offerings to the divine.

Chamomile: Prosperity, growth, confidence, money, luck, love, relaxation.

Myrrh: Meditation, connecting with spirits, healing sorrow, sexuality, cleansing, love.

Frankincense: Consecration, rituals, purification, luck, spirituality, aura cleansing, divination, visions, meditation.

Patchouli: Money, fertility, love, list, prosperity, wealth, abundance.

Bay Leaves: Prophecy, divination, wishes, prosperity, curse reversal, wealth, money.

Mandrake: Protection, fertility, prosperity, apply to third eye for scrying.

Lemongrass: Balance, calm, love, uplifted mood, psychic ability

How to Organize Your Book of Shadows/Grimoire

ー

A great recommendation on how to do so! Remember, though, this is only an opinion: always follow your intuition and include what feels right! There may be topics on this list that are not applicable to your practice and/or don't interest you, and that is okay. Each book of shadows/grimoire is unique item that should be personal to you and you alone.

Stormy's Spellbook

How to Organize Your Grimoire

Have you ever bought a journal with plans to turn it into a beautiful grimoire? Something directly out of the 90s show “Charmed”? But you ha

Hades Devotional Poem #2

Ἁιδης Suffering floods and bursts in moments I weep into the soil beneath my  grasping fingers I question purpose, I beg for reason And in my choking state as I dig and dig Trying to find an answer You grasp my shoulder You stay my hand And with a gentle sigh “You are with me” When all have turned their back I know  you will always remain Humble and Prosperous Quiet and Knowing

Tips for when you’re considering Paganism

For my lovely friend @whoooooisthis!! I hope this helps love!

First things first, learn the basics. Cleansing, Warding, Banishing and Protection. 

Cleansing: You should cleanse when you’re having a bad day, are/were sick, after a breakup or loss, after arguments, during a major transition in life (graduation, birth, etc) and when you feel you need to. Cleansing cleans up the energy around you and keeps you safe. You can cleanse by lighting incense and passing the smoke around an object or room, bathing yourself or an object, burying an object, with salt (just don’t put it near dirt and plants!!), setting something in moonlight or sunlight (Make sure you keep track of which moon phase to cleanse on), with sound like bells or singing bowls, clapping, cleaning, burning sage or candles, using holy water or a protection spray, and touching each corner of a room and saying a prayer for each one. 

Warding: Wards are spiritual shields that keep you safe. There’s two types of wards - spacial (for spaces and rooms) and personal (for objects and the self). You will need to maintain wards by charging and clearing them. You can ward by using enchanted jewelry or objects, sigils (magical symbols with purposeful energy), energy shields, magic circles, spells, protective crystals, protection spell bottles, anointing the corners of a room and window and door sills with holy water or another warding substance. I personally like to drill holes in peach pits to wear as necklaces, they work quite well for warding. 

Banishing. There are tons of spells online that will teach you how to banish negative entities. If an entity is fucking with you, bad things keep happening or things just feel off, don’t be afraid to banish. Letting spirits know you’re not to be fucked with is incredibly important.

Protection. Light a black candle. Use salt and pepper for warding. Learn banishing and warding spells. Use protective sigils. Protection is incredibly important when concerning spirits, so educate yourself on this thoroughly. 

Now onto the fun stuff…

- Talk to things! Your house, your trees and plants, your spirit guides. You can do this out loud or in your head. And remember, even if they don’t respond, they’re probably still there. Just trust me on that

- It’s alright to forge your own unique path. I personally am Autistic and have terrible memory, so it’s important for me to forge my own craft. If something doesn’t work for you, don’t be afraid to change it. Substitutions can always be made.

- Meditate. Everyone says this, but it’s very true. Meditation not only calms the mind and body, but it opens you and your intuition/senses up to new forces

- Don’t ask for things without giving something in return. I lost my pillbox once and couldn’t find it anywhere. I walked out of my room, politely asked for it to be returned, and a few minutes later it was right there on my desk in plain sight. I left a little dish of honey out for whoever (or whatever) returned it. It’s always polite to approach with an offering and give one either before or after asking for something. You can do this with something as simple as picking a flower, always ask permission.

-  Make it an everyday thing. That doesn’t mean you have to do daily rituals or meditation sessions. Simply talking (again, in your head or out loud) to your spirit guides, practicing mindfulness and doing little spiritual things here and there are enough. This could be meditation, interpreting a potential sign you got today, saying good morning to the spirits you work with, leaving an offering (especially if you’re asking for something or something has already been done for you) and plain researching to expand your craft and knowledge. 

- Write it down. In witchcraft/paganism, almost everybody is journaling. It’s the best way to keep track of signs, experiences, feelings, omens, knowledge that may pertain to your craft, dreams, anything that might seem important. Many witches have a grimoire or book of shadows where they keep their witchy knowledge stored. These are often very personal, can be online or written by hand, and are entirely unique to you. You don’t need a 50 dollar designer spellbook. My grimoire is almost entirely online and printed out into a binder. You don’t have to be fancy. - Research!! Keep finding white feathers? Look up what that means! You want to give an offering? Look up what nature spirits and specific deities prefer! Make sure you’re knowledgeable about what you do.

- Incorporate what you know and what you’re used to. I grew up in a Polish family in an Eastern Orthodox church. Many of the practices I learned from my family and culture have carried on into my craft. Such as knocking on wood to prevent jinxes, wearing clothes backwards to see spirits and keep them from messing with you, and little cultural tricks like stepping out of a room and asking for lost items to be returned when you can’t find something. Keep it familiar.

That's really all I can think of for now, love. If you have any more questions, just let me know in a relog!!

Beginner Tips for Interpreting Tarot (with Real Examples)

There’s this game called Powerpoint Karaoke. In the game, someone makes up a short series of powerpoint presentation slides. They will give the whole presentation a title, and then pick related or unrelated images to go on the slides. Another person has to give the presentation to the audience - basically improvising along the way the best they can to turn a random topic plus random images into a coherent presentation.  Reading tarot is a lot like doing Powerpoint Karaoke. The title of the presentation is the question you ask, and the cards are the slides. The better you are at stringing disparate images into a coherent narrative on the fly, the better you will be at making sense of tarot spreads.  For each of these tips, I will illustrate it with a real question that I am genuinely asking my tarot, the card I pull, and how I interpret it. 1. Ask clear questions. It is ten times harder to interpret an answer when the question was muddled in the first place. Your questions can be general, or specific, but it’s best to only ask one question at a time. I think about the wording of my question for a while before I actually answer it. I might think at first, “How is this new creative project thing going to go? Should I start it on the New Moon, or am I going to be an unproductive mess this week? Is it a bad month to start it? Why have I been so unproductive?” I’ll take that and cut it down - for instance, removing my own speculations about myself and how it will go and all of the different options. If that stuff is relevant, it will come up in the cards. I end up with a straight-forward question that is open to lots of different answers: “Is it a good move to start working on my new creative project at the New Moon?“ Example: Is it a good move to start working on my new creative project at the New Moon? Ace of Pentacles. Ooh. This seems like a good omen to me. It is not particularly hard to interpret because it feels very on the nose, because Aces are about beginnings. And it indicates that whatever I do could eventually become profitable, even though that’s not explicitly my intention.  2. Get rid of any preconceived notion of what the answer will be. Sometimes you turn over the exact card you are anticipating - like me the time I flippantly asked my tarot deck what my persistent headache might be from and thought, “I’m probably just dehydrated and it’s going to be Temperance or some shit like that.” But other times the card you get will not fit into the mold of what you are expecting. The answer you get is not always going to be the answer you want. Sometimes you are just looking for a “Should I keep going with this story or scrap it and start something new?” but that assumes that one of those options is the correct answer. Your cards may think that you should keep going with the story, but change it in some way. Or maybe you should scrap it and not start on something new right away. If you are expecting a purely yes-or-no type of answer, you may feel confused by the result you get. I often ask questions that could have a whole range of answers, instead of expecting a specific type of answer, so instead I might say, “What should I write about?” Example: What should I write about? The Chariot. This card is about overcoming obstacles, and maintaining control. It’s not really at all what I was starting to write about recently. This is definitely a card where the interpretation isn’t obvious to me. I’ve just been sitting here and had flash of realization that I think maybe I was asking the wrong question - ironic for an example about having preconceived notions. But this actually illustrates the “having preconceived notions” thing perfectly. I asked it what I should write about, and the flash of realization I just had about the message of the Chariot is, “You worry too much about what you should write about, when you will only succeed by actually putting in the effort of writing. Stop worrying about the content - write about anything as long as you are actually writing instead of pacing and contemplating.” So yeah - sometimes the answer you need is not the answer you want.  3. Read interpretations of the cards online. Yes, this is obvious. But it needs to be said because a lot of people have strong, contrary ideas about how tarot should be done. You don’t have to read only the pictures, or have a list of associations memorized, or expect the answer to come purely from your intuition. Lots of sites online offer long and detailed explanations for each tarot card upright and reversed. Often cards can have several meanings, and while reading on a few different interpretations a meaning may jump out at you as obvious.  Example: What’s going to happen this week?  The Moon. This card always seems hazy to me, so it’s a good one to look up. This site says, “On the New Moon, set your intentions and plant the seeds of opportunity so they can grow,” which feels relevant given that the New Moon is this week. This site says, “The towers on the opposing ends represent the forces of good and evil, and their similarity in appearance can allude to the difficulties that we face in distinguishing between them,” which frankly sounds like America to me right now. It also says, “the negative energies must be released and turned into something constructive.” I wouldn’t necessarily gather all of that just from relying on my own ideas about what this card means, but seeing it written here feels very apt for what Americans are going through - both last week and I guess maybe the upcoming week. 

4. Generate a bunch of different ideas for what the cards might mean. If the answer doesn’t seem obvious or immediate, write down three or four things you think it could be saying. Write down all of the associations that spring to mind, even if they seem stupid, and then whittle them down later. You may have some intuitive sense of which interpretation is correct, or one interpretation will grow on you the longer you sit with it. Sometimes the answer may have shades of all of the interpretations you came up with.  Example: What is the best way to spend my Sunday? Three of Pentacles. For me, this could go a few different ways. I asked my deck once what someone thought of me and got this card. So I associate this card with that person. It is that person’s birthday today, so it may be indicating that I should actually reach out to them. I have some good reasons for not doing that though. Or it may be a much less personal interpretation, telling me to do something collaborative. The more that I think about it, the more I think it may also relate to the first card. I’m drawing a connection here because the suit is the same. I’ve kept my ideas about my new creative project entirely to myself, but maybe before embarking on it I should get feedback from someone else on the aspects of it I’ve been struggling with. I think that’s the interpretation I’m going to go with.  5. Ask your cards silly, simple, or non-consequential questions. If you only ask serious questions where you really need an answer, you may feel way more pressure to interpret the cards correctly. As practice, it can help just to ask casual questions like “What should I eat for dinner?” and see what it says. In fact, I’ll do that right now just to show how I would interpret it. Example: What should I eat for dinner tomorrow? Six of Wands. The meaning of this card is ‘success’ and ‘praise’ and things like that, so it kind of reminds me of how I would always choose lobster on birthdays, or after my choir concerts, or middle school graduation and those types of events when I got to pick what to eat. It is definitely a celebration food for me. This is actually a card that is like ‘the answer I want but not the answer I need,” because I don’t know where I’m going to get lobster for dinner tomorrow. Maybe seafood in general will do, because I have salmon I could make. Overall - interpretations are very personal. In the examples I’ve included, someone else may not draw the same conclusion just from the card and the question because they don’t have all of that background knowledge about me to draw from. One of the best things to do when interpreting tarot readings for yourself is just to know yourself - and be able to look at yourself honestly.