How we came up with the thiasos Hekatesia

PSVL asked a question which I’m sure is on the minds of a lot of a people, “Why was August 13th chosen for the Hekatesia?”

We went into that a little bit in the chat (which you can read the log of here) but I figure it’s worth teasing out a bit more.

As I mentioned recently in the interview I did for AREN, the thiasos of the Starry Bull is an emergent Bacchic Orphic religious association and mystery tradition. We draw heavily on ancient primary sources and the best contemporary scholarship available on them (such as can be found in this recommended reading list) but we do not limit ourselves only to the reconstructionist methodology. Our tradition is equally shaped by direct personal experience with the gods and spirits of our pantheon, which is producing a body of lore and shared practice that in time will become its own lineaged tradition.

A good example of that is the pantheon itself. Initially I came up with a list of gods and spirits who had been centrally involved in the series of mysteries I underwent from roughly 2003 to 2012 and which, over the last couple years, I have been shown how to take others through.

There were several other beings who had been peripherally involved in this process but I figured that was something unique to my own experience of these mysteries and thus did not need to be officially incorporated into the tradition. Then I announced the formation of the thiasos and invited others to join and a couple people asked, “What about Hekate and Aphrodite?” People then shared some experiences they had had with these goddesses which dovetailed very specifically with my own, so I figured that was a pretty clear sign that their omission had been a serious oversight. This was further confirmed when a ton of connections to other members of the pantheon subsequently came to light the deeper we looked into ancient Southern Italian material.

Later on a bunch of signs indicated that Apollon should be included in the pantheon under the specific form of Apollo Soranos which resulted in people having experiences with this deity even though they never had in the past or had even been profoundly resistant to him up to then.

Thus our pantheon is far from a closed system – in fact I have a hunch that at some future date we may be including Mother Hybla and Artemis, though at present there has been no push for this, either from the deities or members of the thiasos, and since ours is not an exclusive tradition and nothing prohibits one from honoring other divine beings outside or alongside the thiasos, there is no reason to rush things as far as I’m concerned, especially since inclusion carries with it certain collective obligations.

In the case of Hekate, it was determined through divination that she wanted a festival added to our official calendar – which is not necessarily something everyone gets.

I did a cursory examination of her cultus in Southern Italy and found nothing that seemed appropriate, so that left us with essentially two options:

* Borrow something from another region of ancient Greece
* Incorporate something modern

The first of these was problematic considering the incredible diversity with which she had shown herself to our predecessors. Are we talking the Hekate of Hesiod or of the Chaldaean Oracles, the Hekate of the Peloponnesos or of Anatolia? Whatever we chose, we would be privileging some traditions while ignoring others (none of which are grounded in the specific weltanschauung of Magna Graecia) and it would require a great deal of adaptation in order to make it viable for our members who are scattered across the globe and often worship alone. As such we would essentially be creating something new, however loosely based in antiquity it was.

So that left the second option. Most of what I found on modern Hekatean cultus didn’t really jive with her role in the thiasos or the types of experiences our members have described having with this goddess. So I figured our best bet was to come up with something completely from scratch.

Or not entirely completely.

If you do a search for “Hekate festival” August 13th comes up on a lot of neopagan sites. None of them are entirely sure why, and the information they do provide is often confused and contradictory. This gave us something that was more meaningful than just tossing a dart (since from what I can tell this date has about thirty years’ worth of history behind it and several thousand people across the globe currently observing it) but was enough of a blank slate that it was not weighted down by traditions and associations that were problematic for us.

And instead of coming up with a rough template for the festival, as I have done with certain others on our calendar, I invited members of the thiasos to discuss what the goddess meant to them, share experiences they had had with her, and brainstorm things we could do to celebrate this occasion and integrate it into the tapestry of our festal year. Indeed none of our observances are random or isolated – they lead one into another and tell a complex story about our gods and spirits which we, through our ritual acts, help narrate and embody collectively.

This both emphasizes the lived nature of our religious tradition and shows how one goes about doing that. Once people get past the phase of their practice where they uncritically copy what the ancients did, regardless of how much or little it makes sense in the modern setting, they often find themselves in over their heads. They realize it doesn’t make sense to celebrate the return of spring when there’s still two feet of snow on the ground or commemorate some obscure naval battle that means nothing to them just because it appears on some fragmentary ancient calendar – but what’s the next step? Well, the members of the thiasos of the Starry Bull showed one way of going about that in our chat last night. And I, for one, am looking forward to celebrating the festival they came up with.