Great! Spring! Ceremony!

It has been a very gods-filled day…and, week, for that matter (even independent of the Megalensia)…

I’ve been on a bit of a dry-spell the last few days as far as writing poetry and such is concerned; I’ve been doing some of the footwork for Academia Antinoi, but the “creative” side of that has not been too free-flowing just yet–it’s been more the “administrative” and logistical side of things. However, today seems to have changed that. I have had some dreams over the last few days that have had relevance to the Serpent Path, and to a particular figure especially: Acheloös, a river-god who was known to turn into both a bull and a snake, and who once fought Herakles (and, of course, the latter won). So, once I was on the road this morning (at 7 AM, where I was dropped off in Everett for the day), I got to a coffee place, had my beverage, and wrote two poems: one on Herakles and Acheloös, and another on Demeter’s Arcadian form as Demeter Melaina/Demeter Erinyes. I was pretty satisfied with those…

From there, I went on foot to the house of a good friend, (multiple!) co-religionist and Mystes Antínoou to rendezvous for something we would be proceeding to shortly. In the meantime, my friend gifted me with the above image of Ogmios, based on a Gaulish coin, which can be purchased from here. Ogmios, of course, is syncretized to Herakles in the one work that details him: Lukian of Samosata’s Herakles–so, it was fitting to get him after completing that poem! Many thanks to my dear friend, who may or may not wish to identify themselves in the comments here!

From there, after hanging out a bit and chatting on various things, we went out to the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America for the Shyunki Taisai or “Great Spring Ceremony.” It’s one of the most formal, stately, and lengthiest Shinto rituals of the year, and yet also the most primal and basic, and pre-dates shrine buildings themselves. But, what always fascinates me about these rituals is not just how formal and similar they are, but the little differences that inevitably occur in them based on who is performing them (particularly the shrine assistant involved and how experienced they are with these rituals) and who else is present, etc. Not unlike the process of nature itself, where the broad cycles are generally the same but the individual manifestations within that cycle are different, I suppose…!

This year, it took 7 repetitions of the “weird OOOOOH-ing sound” for the kami to ride in on the wave and inhabit the inner shrine. This is merely a function of how long the shrine assistant can hold out the sound without taking a breath, and how long it takes the priest to open the inner shrine doors and situate them. As this was going on, I looked up slightly while bowing, and this time, my vision got seriously jumbled and mixed up as the sound was being made…and, apparently I wasn’t the only thing in the room having that experience, as it sounded like the two beaters for the large taiko drum at the front of the shrine also became displaced from where they usually rest and rolled around somewhere! So, something very definite was moving through the place there…

During that part of the ceremony–or, at least starting then–I got a rather large download that was, in essence, a detailed and almost fully-footnoted outline for an essay on Shinto, Japan, and Antinous that will be part of the second volume of The Doctor’s Notes, which will be titled Studium Antinoi (“Studies of Antinous”). So, that was interesting and unexpected, but quite useful! (I may not get to writing it until mid-May, however, depending on a few things…I don’t personally own a few of the books that were referred to, but can get them relatively easily from my friend that brought me there.)

The usual “buffet of the gods” followed without incident, nor flopping down of fish nor rolling away of oranges…thankfully! After the ceremony, I caught up with a few friends, and we all went out to the Inari shrine together to make our offerings after spending a bit of time by the river and also rubbing the giant singular ball of Sarutahiko-no-Okami.

We returned from the shrine and Granite Falls to Everett, where I spent the afternoon with my friend and another friend, talking about everything under the sun, including the exclusive politics of certain aspects of the queer community when it comes to bisexuality, and I was given a short primer on music involving the various different Pythagorean “modes” of music. In the course of this, I suggested that the Ionian mode (which is basically the C Major scale) should perhaps be used for a musical setting of a hymn of Julia Balbilla, since she wrote in the Ionic dialect in imitation of Sappho! And, I finally heard the Locrian mode, which is quite interesting, and I suspect I will be playing more with it in the future in some projects…I also threw around some ideas about dance in relation to certain ceremonies I’d like to create for Antinoan purposes in the near future (before October, if all goes well).

And, I also finally made some “headway” on a deity who showed up rather unexpectedly earlier this week: Endovellicus, who seems to be the “head” of the Celtiberian (or perhaps just Lusitanian) pantheon of Celtic and Celto-Semitic deities. I was speaking earlier in the day about working with the Ephesia Grammata as a divination system, as that was done in the ancient world, and then suggested as a weird possibility the use of the Celtiberian script (which is a syllabary, not an alphabet) as a sortilege-based divinatory system. And, I think it can work…but, I’ll have to do bit more research first–much of which is seeing how large the vocabulary of Celtiberian (outside of names) happens to be. We shall see…

So–gods, I can haz them.