My Saturnian Altar

My Saturnian altar

I’ve been thinking a lot about antinomian praxes… the turning wheel of Apollo and Dionysus, the changing of Delphi at Anthesteria and Oskophoria.  I’ve been a devotee of Dionysus for almost 20 years now — really my entire adult life, and most of the last of my teens.  I’m wondering now about over-expression, over-compensation, over-identification.  Even Dionysus gave himself over to the world of his opposites from time to time, as an establishment of balance.

So I find myself thinking again, as I have various times in the last two troubled years, of making an altar to Saturn.

Not Apollo, for me, that’s just another ideal to escape into.  Music, intellect, civilization, law, order.  That was my childhood and youth, what I turned away from in embracing Dionysus that moonlit night in 1993.  Going back to the primal gardens of youth doesn’t help, that’s not how the mythology works.  No, it has to be Saturn.  My Shadow.  Everything I’ve turned from, shied from, fled from, argued against, raged against, denied.  It has to be embraced now, or the ecstasy of Dionysus is made thin, watery, feeble, inbred.

Saturnus.  Cronos.  Relentless time, each moment marching unstoppably on like invisible heartless soldiers.  Lead, and iron, and stone, hard and unyielding, heavy and dead.  Scythe and blade, cutting, separating, harvesting, calculating, merciless, ruthless.  The Conqueror, the Father, the Grandfather — authority, paternity, dominion, stern control.  Boundaries, limitations, definitions, obstacles.  Death, release, austerity, being deprived.  Pentacles, coins, money, contracted value, obligations, bondage, chains.  So much the opposite of Dionysus, all looseness and freedom and warmth, all softness and beauty and mercy of one kind or another.

I’ve always shunned what I saw as an over-concern with time.  Much the same with money, and status, and career, all Saturn elements.  I shrugged them off as materialistic, hard, cold, mean.  I’ve let my boundaries become too loose, too porous.  I’ve spent too much time lost in the fog of the senses, the now, the zen fool’s path of liberty.  I’ve gone too far over, stayed too long.

So my new Saturn altar will be low, close to the earth.  It will be draped in gold and gray and indigo.  It may have any or all of the following items: A clock.  A bird’s skull.  A metal chain.  A blade.  A stone slab.  A leaden Saturn symbol.  A dish of coins.  A sheaf of wheat.  A list of self-imposed disciplinary vows.  A pentacled disc that I’ve made, inscribed also with sigils of wealth, craft, success, focus, and cunning.  A small drum.  A metronome.

This is the beginning.  The seed of the start.  This is something I need, a tonic for the soul, for the life.  Dionysus has come to the underworld now, to the realms of the dead.  Now he sets himself to await new life, to be rekindled from his remnant heart.  While he waits, I must work.  I must work to prepare his way and his temple, for they are disheveled and in disrepair, left to nature by one who has relied too long on the Jovial luck of his father, one who has lost touch with the stern valuable labor of his grandfather.  This is a new journey, a road though dark shadowed lands, wherein I suspect I will lose my paunch, my padding, my roundness, and regain my leanness and hardness and edges once more.

Benefact me now, I ask, all you fathers and uncles and brothers and nephews and sons, all you ancient grandmothers and lost mothers and impassioned wives and wild daughters.  Grandfather, I come seeking you again, and I bear your sign.  I strive to make myself ready.

FHELIE NA MARBH - THE FEAST OF THE DEAD

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Sketch - My God by *UnicaGem Puanepsia, a Dionysian festival honoring Apollo, begins today. Sweet cakes, figs, and mellow wine. =)

So it's the Dionysian festival known as the Theseia, honoring Theseus.  I don't know about the rest of you Dionysians, or the rest of you in general, but I have to say that it's more than a little hard for me to really get into honoring this guy.  Theseus always seemed to me like that absurdly muscled, inanely confident, self-absorbed charmed-life guys we've all known a few of in our lives -- the narcissistic quarterback class president, the one wracked with flaws and failures and insufficiencies that no one in the world seems able to see, and in fact they all adore and worship him for them.  But he's a strong part of the Dionysian mythos and tradition, and all these years of counting myself a part of the Propompoi, I've had to reconcile myself however uneasily to that fact.

I put it up to the embrace of shadow, the dance and balance, akin to the close twinlike relationship of exchange and replacement between Dionysus and Apollo at Delphi.  I've spent many a Theseia delving, trying to find something in hero-boy that's worth a Dionysian festival, or a festival at all.  But I've never fully managed it.

So, failing all else, here's to Theseus -- that shallow primping jock, that buffoon in love with his own quads and biceps and deltoids, that over-hyped hero who dumped the woman who loved him and saved him, ditching her on some remote island because he'd lost interest.  Here's to the pumped-up man-boys who make the rest of us look good, once they've been fathomed for what they are.  Here's to the little ego part of man finally realizing his insufficiency upon his disastrous return (the white minotaur chuckles at the appropriateness of the term "disastrous") and establishing the Oskophoria to honor the God.  Here's to the wild divine forces that bend even and especially the prettiest and proudest of men.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Theseus and Ariadne, 18th century