Hair offerings: historical context, purpose and uses

Offerings of hair, locks of hair or ritual hair-cutting is quite a regular occurrence in ancient sources and textbooks discussing various religious customs of the ancient Greek world. It also seems to be a fairly forgotten offering in a modern context, which is why I wanted to delve back in and write this post. I

The Adeia – a modern festival to Demeter

Historically, it’s often during times of hardships and crisis that new cults would be established and religious innovations would appear. This one is no different. It’s through discussion with @iliosflower that the idea of creating a new festival, one that would more accurately respond to modern problematics, came to fruition. This is what we’d like

Making a festival from scratch: the Priapeia

Whoever worships “minor deities” knows the struggle: historical information is scarce, tends to be fragmentary and/or scattered across centuries and locations, and just overall badly documented. Priapus is one of those, who, having joined the pantheon later than most (not before the 3rd century BC) and having had several different forms of worship, albeit all

Aphrodite Epitragia: beyond Aphrodite Pandemos

Often, when one finds this epithet of Aphrodite, it is in reference to the many iconographical depictions of her riding a goat. Such depictions seem to appear towards the end of the Classical era and refer to her role as Pandemos, especially in Athens, which Plutarch explains in Theseus, 18: “When the lot was cast,

Local Cultus 3: Dionysus without grapes

Same disclaimer as my previous post on local cultus: This will not be informative unless you’re interested in how I approach the issues I’m trying to solve. Note that obviously this is stuffed with UPG. The grapevine (vitis vinifera) doesn’t naturally grow in this northern part of the world. While there is some wine production

Attempting to set up a “holiday decoration” box

For hellenic reconstructionists, the question of “what do the festivals mean and how did people celebrate?” is very real, especially when the information is fragmentary and doesn’t do justice to the religious diversity of the Ancient World. One of the things that make holidays feel like holidays is symbolic decor. There’s a reason why, when

Festivals we know (almost) nothing about – Part 1

Once in a while, it’s good to remember that none of our calendars are complete. This is much more obvious with non-Attic/Athenian calendars, and anyone who decides to jump into attempting to reconstruct the cultic calendar of Delphi, Delos, Sparta, Argos etc. will know exactly what I mean, as they are painfully fragmentary (not to

Children in Ancient (Athenian) Festivals

Religion was an integral part of ancient Greek life, and certainly was not kept away from children. If anything, children were important participants in city, household and mystery cult. The introduction of children in city cult also contributed to their integration in the life of the polis. Meanwhile, private cult seems to have been one

Hera the Blossoming

For the last post of this Hera series, I will be focusing on her Antheia epithet. This will be a rather short post, as information is limited, but I hope to cover the bases. Antheia means “blooming” or “blossoming” and is a word obviously closely linked to vegetation, and flowers in particular. While, as an

An updated list of Silenus epithet

Remember when I was bitching about Priapus having only 5 epithets on theoi.com? Well, Silenus has got one (1). This is honestly even more surprising since Silenus does have a known hymn, at least from the Orphic side. Taking this into account, I made up a few epithets for him, some are inspired by the