Hearthfire Handworks

I was reading the internet the other day (seems like I'll never get through that thing!) and came across a post about Zeus. I won't specify the post, I've seen a lot of them over the years, but the gist is that Zeus' mythos makes him unworthy of worship. And sometimes this is tongue-in-cheek, things like "95% of the problems in Greek mythology could have been avoided if Zeus could keep it in his pants." Which is kind of funny and arguably not a wholly inaccurate statement when you think about it--Leda, Io, Europa? And of course you don't have...

Where I live, the flowers are far from blooming, the trees nowhere near budding. The only ploughs we might be charming would be the snowplows, and really that should have been done back in October. (Winter is long in these parts. :))So for me the traditional associations of February 2 have always been distant ones, symbolic only, something that will happen at some point in the near(ish) future. The new-growth energies still lie buried and will for some months. What that means is that, here, seasonally-based Imbolc rituals have always felt a little weak. The connection isn't quite there yet....

First off, this is not a post about the history of prayer beads in paganism, because the use of prayer beads is not a historically attested practice in any of the pagan traditions I am familiar with. It's about how to use them. There are various official formats associated with the use of prayer beads in other faiths; there are many different ways to pray the Catholic rosary, for example, depending on which sort of rosary you happen to have. Buddhist or Hindu malas can also be used to keep count of various meditative or prayerful things, most notably mantras....

There is a long, long history of equating the Greek and Roman deities. And it’s not without reason–the Romans did, in fact, take great parts of Greek myth and deity attribute and apply them to their own gods. Many if not most people think of the two pantheons as the same gods under different names. But the Roman gods existed, and were honored, before this. While it is often difficult to work out just where and how the conflation occurred, and why the two pantheons are so similar in the first place, it’s an interesting and worthwhile study. Short answer:...

Asklepios, god of healing and patron of medicine, is among the kindest of the Greek gods. Historically he would accept any offering, no matter how small, and his temples were filled with […]