I was checking out the Tapestry of Bronze website to see which Olympian god their current poetry contest is dedicated, and wouldn’t you know, it’s Apollo. (For anyone interested, the deadline is April 30th- I know, so soon!) I may try to write something, or submit one that I’ve written in the past. a

But anyway, on their site was linked this interview: Apollo on Trial Investigating Mass Murder in Greece (I tried to embed the file into this post, but failed several times.)

I wish this was in Podcast form so that I could actually download it and give it a really good listen while I’m not wanting to be doing other things, but this will have to do.  It talks about a historical basis for the myth of Apollo and Artemis killing the family of Niobe for her insult of their mother, Leto.  Now, I’ve listened to it once so far, but I was also in the midst of remembering my old addiction for podcasts and combing the iTunes store and iTunes U for podcasts on topics of interest- such as the gods- so I was only really half paying attention and therefore, cannot offer commentary at this point on the quality of the information.

I find this especially interesting in the exploration of the idea of there being some sort of literality to mythology- or some of it, at least. I have no problem with the idea that some of the myths may be stories that were made up or inspired by the gods with no historical basis whatsoever. But as many stories as there are, I have a very hard time accepting the idea that none of them have any real history to them. After all, as it is pointed out in this interview, it was once upon a time thought that the city of Troy was a mythical city that never really existed. It has since been proven otherwise.

Should anyone else give this a listen and have any opinions to share, please do!

I have found some other podcasts that, once I get a chance to listen to them, and assuming I think that they’re worth the ones and zeros of which they’re comprised, I will post more about.

Because she describes her handiwork far better than I could, here is the description from her site:

Handsewn cotton flannel doll, approximately 9 inches tall with clothing handsewn and designed by yours truly. Apollo is not a god I deal with a lot personally, but His persona came across to me as a curious mixture of teen punk rock star and college professor, and his outfit demonstrates this: he wears linen slacks with a black tee shirt trimmed with snakeskin-printed fabric (a reminder of Delphi) and a professorial-looking courdoroy jacket with leather collar and pocket. His necklace is hand-crocheted nettle yarn and goldtone wire with a bee pendant. (The Homeric hymn to Apollo alleges that the god’s gift of prophecy first came to him from three bee maidens.) His hair is a mixture of natural fawn-shaded alpaca and dyed mohair in shades of bronze accented with shots of bright yellow-green; I was definitely going for a flame effect here! His wings, made from dyed feathers attached to felt using acid-free, archival quality craft glue, attach at the shoulders via sewn-on snaps.

Heart contents: a bay laurel leaf, iolite, and bay laurel and cypress essential oils.

As I do not currently have my shrine for Apollo set up, (I have reasons for this, I an thinking about discussing a bit in an upcoming post. That’s right, folks, I plan to start making real posts again.)  He is temporarily residing on my girfriend’s Hermes shrine- next to….a Hermes doll, also commissioned from Beth last fall.  I commissioned Hermes as a gift for her, and loved him so much that I had to have one of my own, and here they are.  So exclaim how much you love them and then get thee over and get one 9or more!) of your very own.

First up, we have a little “necklace” that I made for my statue. A while back, I had gotten the idea that shrink plastic (you remember Shrinky-Dinks from the 80′s? Same idea but without the pre-printed designs.)  would be great for making shrine items and jewelry. Earlier this week, I grabbed a pack and some colored pencils at a craft store. My first piece here is a tracing of the design on the front of Fritz Graf’s Apollo, with my own color scheme instead of black and white. It shrunk to about the size of a quarter and is strung with some beads that I love but  if I use them for jewelry, the color wears right off.  I figured that strung around a statue where it’s not going to come into contact with water, skin oils et cetera would be a good use.

The other thigns that I (and Gavin- it was her idea, actually) have done is to fimd some embroidery floss in appropriate colors for our gods and do a hair wrap (you know, like the ones that every girl who ever went to the beah in the late 90′s did) and add some little charms for them. I found some embroidery floss in a variegated gold/tan color and made a little charm from some stone beads. There are seven stones which I associate with Apollo:  rutilated quartz, blue tourmaline, larvikite, citrine, iolite, sunstone and garnet (which is, incidentally, the same order in which the beads appear below, from left to right with aquamarine standing in for the tourmaline. Blue tourmaline is ridiculously expensive, and I only have a couple of miniscule chip beads right now. Apollo has water associations, aquamarine works- and it was immediately on hand.

The last picture is just yours truly, looking like an evil teenager.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2010) — A rare bronze signet ring with the impression of the face of the Greek sun god, Apollo, has been discovered at Tel Dor, in northern Israel, by University of Haifa diggers.

“A piece of high-quality art such as this, doubtlessly created by a top-of-the-line artist, indicates that local elites developing a taste for fine art and the ability to afford it were also living in provincial towns, and not only in the capital cities of the Hellenistic kingdoms,” explains Dr. Ayelet Gilboa, Head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who headed the excavations at Dor along with Dr. Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

When the ring was recovered from a waste pit near Hellenistic structures, it was covered with layers of earth and corrosion, and the archaeologists had no indication whatsoever that it would reveal the shape of a legendary figure. Only after the ring was cleaned up at the Restoration and Conservation laboratory at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology, was the profile of a beardless young male with long hair, clean shaven and adorned with a laurel wreath, revealed. The ring was examined by Dr. Jessica Nitschke, professor of classical archaeology at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and by Dr. Rebecca Martin, assistant professor of art at Southeast Missouri State University, both of whom are partners in the Tel Dor excavations. Both confirmed that the image is that of Apollo — one of the most important of the Olympian gods in Greek mythology, god of the sun, of light, music and song.

Read the rest of the story (including a picture of the ring!) here.

Often winged, with a sword when not wielding a bow. Think of statues of Michael the Archangel.

There is no one real image in my mind that *is* Apollo. His image changes constantly. Even as I see him in my mind, it’s changing, it’s never static. Sometimes it’s like a slide show of pictures, other times, my mental image is just constantly melding and morphing from one appearance to the next. I have no idea what color his eyes are for sure- I’ve either never seen the color, or never remembered it, but if I were to pick a color, it would be dark steel blue, like dark blue tourmaline. His hair is long, but the length varies from shoulder-length to longer. Sometimes it’s golden, but more often it’s bronze. He’s always clothed but I never remember his clothing, only get the impression that they’re more often than not modern, and I think he’s often not wearing a shirt.

His hands are sometimes covered in flames. Sometimes, he’s bright and blinding, other times, he’s dark and shadowy. He can be gentle and serene and soft-focus, slightly blurry or harsh, terrifying, hard-edged and sharp.

But always, one thing never changes- he is beautiful. Painfully, transfixingly so.

I’m sorry, there just is no one good image that I can describe to you.

I think I can work this out into something a little more complete…

I have also added a link for anyone who is interested to add my blog RSS feed to their Dreamwidth reading page (I have had such a link for Livejournal for quite some time now.)

I’ve also started to rewrite my “about” page, but it’s not finished just yet.

That’s all for now.

(Okay, this last one was taken on my old phone with its far inferior camera.)

Last night, in a fit of being unable to sleep, I spent a brief few minutes poking around forums for something to do for a short bit that didn’t require a lot of thought on my part. I found a post over at Hellenistai forums where someone was inquiring about the Delphic hymns, the second of which was composed for the Pythian games,  which are dated 138 and 128 BC

I remember hearing about these hymns a couple of years ago, and at the time, spending a night at work googling them, hoping to find a translation of the text into English. At the time, I found a Wikipedia article, complete with photos of the stone containing the surviving fragments and a um, translation, of the music of the first Delphic hymn into modern musical notation…but no translation of the text.

So last night, I decided to give it another quick whirl and within a minute or two, I found this page of a musician promoting his CD of ancient lyre music played on a modern replica of a ten-stringed Lyre of the Ancient Hebrews. The musician, Michael Levy, also has his official website here- looks like an interesting resource for anyone interested in all things having to do with the lyre, including building your own and some online lessons. (Note: I don’t know anything about the guy, I’m getting nothing for promoting his site, I just thought that since I was mentioning the other page, and because the lyre is Apollo’s instrument, that it was relevant and possibly of interest to some of my readers.  speaking of interest to some of my readers, some of his recordings are of ancient Egyptian and Syrian songs, you can see more about them on the linked pages. )

Anyway…this was particularly cool because he provides an English translation of the text of the first hymn. (He does not indicate who the translator is)

“Hear me, you who posses deep-wooded Helicon,
fair-armed daughters of Zeus the magnificent!
Fly to beguile with your accents your brother,
golden-tressed Phoebus who, on the twin peak of this rock of Parnassus,
escorted by illustrious maidens of Delphi,
sets out for the limpid streams of Castalia, traversing,
on the Delphic promontory, the prophetic pinnacle.
Behold glorious Attica, nation of the great city which,
thanks to the prayers of the Tritonid warrior,
occupies a hillside sheltered from all harm.
On the holy alters Hephaestos consumes the thighs of young bullocks,
mingled with the flames, the Arabian vapor rises towards Olympos.
The shrill rustling lotus murmurs its swelling song, and the golden kithara,
the sweet-sounding kithara, answers the voice of men.
And all the host of poets, dwellers in Attica, sing your glory, God,
famed for playing the kithara, son of great Zeus,
beside this snow-crowned peak, oh you who reveal to all mortals
the eternal and infallible oracles.
They sing how you conquered the prophetic tripod
guarded by a fierce dragon when, with your darts
you pierced the gaudy, tortuously coiling monster,
so that, uttering many fearful hisses, the beast expired.
They sing too, . . . .”

He also provides a translation of the text of another surviving fragment of a hymn (titled here as Hymn to the Muse)

‘Sing for me, dear Muse, begin my tuneful strain; a breeze blow from your groves to stir my listless brain…Skillful Calliope, leader of the delightful Muses, and you, skillful priest of our rites, son of Leto, Paean of Delos, be at my side’. (translation by J. G. Landels).

There is a lot of information on these historical hymns within this page- the Delphic hymns and the Hymn to the Muse, of course, are the most interesting to me- and relevant to this blog- and so I will not go into detail about the other pieces but anyone interested should certainly go and check out the sites linked.

As his tracks are available for purchase online on several sites, I think I might have to acquire the ones I mentioned here.

I’m talking about my girlfriend, Gavin, who keeps the Liminal Realm blog. I love you, and I couldn’t do this withouth you!

With respect to this blog, I’ve got some ideas for posts I’d like to make. I plan to start doing some research and get to working on some of the suggested writings from when I solicited idea from you readers many many moons ago. I’d like to start writing some more poetry and I need to redo my “about” page.

So much has changed in the last couple of years I’ve had varying degrees of difficulty with things spiritual since the fall of 2007 (wow…has it really been that long?) and now I am hoping that I can start finding my way out of that. I’ve had to say this so many times, had so many false starts. Hoping that a change of scenery and 3,000 miles between me ad what’s troubled me for so long will be good for that

On Thursday night, I was talking to a friend about the passing of Isaac Bonewits. This eventually lead tot talking about my departure from Cedarlight Grove and ADF. As there were a lot of details that he had forgotten or was unclear about, I had to fill in the blanks. Long, tangled mess of a story that it is, it’s a lucky thing that I had written so much out on Livejournal and could just go and locate posts and link to them. This meant that I was also rereading a lot of this for myself, remembering what I was thinking when I wrote them, seeing how things were connected and realizing that I didn’t fully understand until now just how far a few early events went to unravel several years of my life. I see now just how sweeping the scope of these events. Now that I’ve had some distance, temporally and physically, I am looking back and I can see Apollo’s hand in it all. Though I always knew, I didn’t really understand. and even if I had, I was so upset at how much I’d lost that I’m not sure how much it would have mattered.

What’s different now from all the previous times that I thought I had gained a foothold was that I see so much more clearly how this is all His doing, this all came from Him. And now that I see so much more clearly, for the first time, I can say that I’m okay with that.

Last night, I was typing this post and WordPress ate it. At that point, I was ready to go to sleep, so I waited until today to do it again. and now, despite the fact that WordPress once again ate my post- at the same place: almost completely finished, I’m glad that I had to wait to redo it because I came to another realization last night.

I now believe that the reason for all of this is simple. The reason that I suddenly could no longer participate in clergy training, could no longer remain a part of Cedarlight Grove or ADF. when I dedicated myself to Apollo, everything belonged to Him. Even though I believe this to have been true before, that was the point where it was solidified, where I acknowledged it. The point was that instead of being based on Him, my religion was that of a whole other framework and I was trying to find a way to place him into it. I had to lose everything to start over again with Apollo as my base.

When everything else has been stripped away, when time and space make everything clear, I am left with the knowledge that He is all I need to start again. Left with that knowledge, and the memories of pain and light.