Public Service Announcement
Are you experiencing the following symptoms?:
• Depression that won’t go away
• Emotional responses that are massively out of proportion to the situation at hand
• Compromised immune system
• Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
• Feeling of isolation
• Feeling people don’t care
• Highly critical to the point that you think your work is meaningless and crap
• Frustration to the point of wanting to quit and throw everything away
• Terrible despair that doesn’t seem to respond to anything
• Thoughts and such that get you questioning and doubting everything especially your practices and whether the Gods care for you at all
• Possible suicidal ideation
Well, this seems to be going around right now. You are not at all alone. There’s resistance to what we do, and you see that in every account of shamans, saints, devout people (laity and specialists alike) – the more they progress, there’s resistance, shit, obstacles that rear up and have to be reined in. You’re not alone in this. Stay the course, my friends. Go to your Gods and ancestors even if it’s the last thing you want to do. They sustain and that which is lashing out at us all wants to isolate us from the very Powers that nourish our souls.
When it gets really, really bad, I suggest doing the Oration of Aristides. Even if you don’t have a devotion to Dionysos, make a small offering and ask Him to help you. This oration clears away miasma like nothing else. It works fine in English but it’s even more powerful in Greek:
The Oration of Aristides
Nothing can be so firmly bound, by illness, wrath, or fortune, that cannot be released by the Lord Dionysos.
Oὐδέν ἄρᾶ οὕτως βεβαίως δεδήσεται οὐ νόσῳ οὐκ ὀργῇ οὐ τύχῃ οὐδεμίᾳ, ὁ μή οἷον τ᾽ ἐσται λῦσαι τῷ Διονύσῳ.
(Aelius Aristides II, 331 K)
Sit and say this over and over again for ten-fifteen minutes. Even if you are resistant to any type of cleansing work, even if you think you have your practices already set (and normally they work), please try this. It will help. If what you have is not working right now, it’s time to try something new.
When this hit me hard, I prayed to Freya and asked for Her help and it was immediate. Consider Her, if you cannot invoke Dionysos for some reason (if you’re uncomfortable invoking a Hellenic God).
This does not mean that you shouldn’t seek out therapy if things are really, really bad. Our healing professionals are there for a reason, but don’t neglect the spiritual causes as well.
This does not make you a bad polytheist. It doesn’t make you bad at devotion. Quite the contrary. It’s a sign you’re doing something good, holy, and important. You’re not weak because you’re suffering. You’re strong because you’re persevering. If your work didn’t matter, if you didn’t matter, this wouldn’t be happening. One of the most important things you can do is reach out to people. If you can help reach out. If you don’t know what to say, just listen, and maybe pray for us all. Pray for each other. If you’re in need reach out. This is isolating people and we’re stronger together.
One thing that everybody, regardless of level of devotion or what you’re going through can do is to pray. Pray for people suffering. Pray for people helping them. Pray for the community. Pray that we can keep this out so that it’s not hurting our people because this is a broad spectrum spiritual attack. These are the times when community comes together to protect itself and its most vulnerable members. When you’re suffering like this, no matter how good you are, you’re vulnerable and there’s too few of us to lose anyone.
(Dionysos in the Underworld by G. Krasskova)
Posted on December 5, 2017, in community, devotional work, Uncategorized and tagged PSA. Bookmark the permalink. 34 Comments.
Gangleri's Grove 
I really needed to read something like this so my thanks for posting it. I’ve been making an effort to cleanse a lot more often as I find it makes such an amazing difference, which I wouldn’t have thought before doing it more often as I had nothing to compare with before.
Thanks for sharing this, I’ll keep this in mind – I don’t have a relationship with Dionysos or the Hellenic gods, but it’s always good to make new introductions, so to speak.
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Thank you for posting this today. It was needed!
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Thank you.
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Thank you thank you thank you. I needed this more than I can express right now
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Once again, thankyou
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Does anyone have a guess as to what is causing this? This season is hard on many inherently, but the impression given here is of some actively malignant force. Is this an attack by the Nameless or something else?
Thank you for this Galina.
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I have my own suspicions about this…I don’t think it is “just” seasonal, or political, or anything else…and it certainly isn’t just the general trend of anti-devotionalism and anti-polytheism (both from the overcultures worldwide as well as within paganism) that seem to be swelling as they have been recently. Something larger is afoot, and we all need to start recognizing it is there, not in a paranoid fashion, but in the sense that there really are things that are actively wishing us and our Deities harm, and the agents of them in the living world are near-entirely unaware of being used as such. But that’s only my own (admittedly biased) view.
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Is it paranoid if they (possibly with a capital T?) are really out to get you? The warning is valuable and I for one will dig deeper into my practices for it.
On an unrelated note, I very much miss your writing P.S.V.L. is there someplace these days one could find it? Apologies if this is an inappropriate place to ask but I’ve no other contact means at present.
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I appreciate the vote of confidence on your part re: my writings! As of now (as of last year, actually!), the blog went down because Antinous ordered it such–it was for Him that I did it, and He no longer wanted me to spend my time in that way, so that was the end of that.
The only regular public outlet I’ve been writing in regularly is Walking the Worlds. I’m getting some books together, and am hoping to make progress on a few of them when the college quarter finishes up next week…we shall see.
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BTW, your blog writings are still archived on your Goodreads author profile. I know I’m gonna regret saying this because I irregularly use Google-fu to get at them in order to find something I’m pretty sure you said at x point in the past, but it’s probably more ethical for me to say this than to stay silent. I’m really thrilled that you’ll be getting some books together, especially if some of them will include things that had been on the blog.
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Yes…I am aware of that, and have notified them that they are in violation of my consent and copyright in having it there, but they have still not taken them down. I’m going to do that again in the coming weeks…It’s such bullshit that they just do that, and then don’t let the actual identified author have any say in whether it is done or not. I think a C&D order might be in their future…
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Do you have the Terms of Service that you agreed to (or the current ToS, if the Terms indicate that changes to them impact your agreement)? It’s possible that part of the agreement included this kind of use. (We have to read a lot of terms/licenses in Libraryland when we negotiate e-resources.) However, there should be some provision for removing content without having to delete your account.
I am sorry this is happening to you.
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I never signed up to have my books on there, so there is no ToS that I’m aware of involved…I receive their e-mails every few days on two different e-mail addresses, but they seem to have refused to link my PSVL e-mail address (which I obtained in order to make the complaint about my blog being on there!) to my actual status on there as an author rather than as just a user. So…?!?
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Hmmm, you know? You don’t have a Goodreads starburst next to your profile name. It’s possible that the only way to sign up is to claim your profile (which I’m murky on) so you can take control of it. Galina has a claimed profile; she can probably tell you if deleting blog posts/feeds is an option from within the interface.
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I am pondering if it is the Monotheistic Filter, who I see as an aspect of the Monotheistic God. He has been losing power overall and seems to want to regain it. I know when I have been writing about the Filter, I was attacked several times – physically thrown out of bed, for one.
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While I suspect it may be connected to the Filter, the really important thing to remember is this: there is no “Monotheistic God.” There is the Hebrew God (Himself an amalgamated syncretism of at least three Gods–Yahweh, El, and one of the Ba’als), there is Jesus and the Holy Spirit (the former more of a Hero, the latter more of a deified abstraction), there is Allah, and then there’s what many monotheists “believe” is the “same God” that supposedly slams all of these together…they’re all only one if one is either a Muslim, certain types of Christian, or a very historically-ignorant interfaith advocate who has bought that bullshit and is probably a monist. If anything, the “monotheistic God” is an egregore…but, not a Deity in any conventional sense any more than Batman or Kylo Ren is.
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I never thought of it in those terms. But there is some sort of reality that is working on people’s mind. There are people who consider Batman and Kylo Ren to be Deities of some sort. I guess it is something to ponder and see if it can be parsed out.
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Indeed…
My approach for the last 10+ years has been one of “why accept the terms of the monotheists’ theological argument when that is not my religion’s theological terms?” Part of the pernicious nature of these things is that no one does (or, rather, too few people do) question those terms, and their definitions for things like “religion” (which tend to make all indigenous and non-monotheistic religions “not real religions”), as well as their definitions for certain terms that existed before Christianity and Islam but have been appropriated by them (including what they’ve appropriated from Judaism, which is henotheistic and has only become “monotheistic” over the last few centuries in an attempt to assimilate and make concessions to Christianity and Islam).
Anyway…when their Deities and divine beings are then approached in that fashion rather than as “Then Abrahamic/Monotheistic God,” better things can occur from a polytheist perspective, in my view and experience.
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I have a personal theory as to why this is all going on…and I feel it’s the result of roughly two thousand years of impiety and ignorance of the Gods (no matter which land they hail from) and ignoring the thousands upon thousands of Ancestors over said period of years that (if you will excuse the gross analogy), it’s like a large boil that has been festering for so long and is in dire need of bursting. All this you see going on in the world is the end result of Miasma on a Global Scale.
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The question then would be how to lance it…preferably without bringing about the end times.
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Wyrd Things are so cool. Here’s a story for you:
I’ve been feeling this disconnection for weeks. Plan A was to Center and Ground more often. I found that Centering was somewhat successful, Grounding was not – it was painful. When I asked my Gods what was up, Their answer was to work on my Shields.
I use a layered Shield system – Air, Water, Ice, Fire (no Earth…interesting since Grounding was so painful). As I worked on these Shields, I became aware that I was essentially an Ice Crystal riding a Tide…then the song ‘Riders on the Storm’ kept playing in my head (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-SpyO6bcwc) and I felt Ice-Crystal-Me riding the storm like the Rune Hagalaz.
But wait – there’s more…’Riders on the Storm’ is a song by the Doors…Jim Morrison…a Dionysian…and you recommend reciting an oration to Dionysos….circles, something is coming full circle here.
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Thank you so much for writing this, Galina. I’ve been feeling this way too lately. This is an excellent post. Yes, we should all pray for one another and fight whatever the hell this thing is together.
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Excellent post. I would also share something here to the same effect. For people of Celtic descent (who make up the vast majority of whites in America, Australia, Britain and New Zealand, together with France, West Spain, and large parts of central Europe–see Halstatt culture) prayers to Sirona, a Celtic Goddess of healing and fertility, would be greatly worthwhile. I have a Celtic friend who was going through much distress and despair lately, but Sirona saved her. To be as and original and traditional as possible, she and I reconstructed, by means of a book and lexicon, a prayer in ancient Gaulish–the extinct, yet beautiful Celtic language of ancient Gaul (France) that goes “O Sirona Uerama, yakkitom moi ernate adbertī wergousī swūs berūyo!”
Translation:
O Great Sirona, grant me health by means of this chosen offering!
This prayer could be rendered in other surviving Celtic languages easily, but Gaulish is the only reconstructed language for continental Celts. The most important thing, however, is the “offering” mentioned in the prayer. The Celts were known for their offerings in water (which survives today as a custom of throwing coins in a river or lake for good luck). There is archaeological evidence that offerings of eggs, snakes, or puppies were made to this Celtic Goddess. Remember that offerings were not necessarily live beings (though I’d imagine they sometimes were), but often figurines made of wood or bronze. In any case, my friend took a trip lately to her favorite lake and made an offering of chicken eggs into the water after reciting the simple prayer above. She is now, praise the Goddess, very well!
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I just also want to add that counselling really helps if you are feeling a lot of stress in your personal life. There is no shame getting counselling. And, meditation and exercise are excellent for dealing with stress too.
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The next few days are days of purification in the Hellenic calendar, so this is a very timely post. Thank you.
(By necessity, I’m going to plug praying to the Erinyes/Eumenides after one completes a ritual purification. They’re very important goddesses to remember.)
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We all need to be Shielding, Warding & Cleansing like never before. Layers, keep it simple as not to overwhelm. If you can afford it, Sophie Reichers “Spiritual Protection” is well worth the $!
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Thank you very much for providing this, Galina. I was surprised by how many of these fit my own situation… here I thought it was just me alone! It’s extremely helpful to be reminded that I am far from alone.
For what it’s worth, for those of us whose focus is heavily or exclusively Germanic, I’ve been praying to Hella. I have heard that, in times of doubt and pain, one can call to Her. Perhaps what happens is that, instead of that pain simply furthering the miasma, it becomes a sanctified offering and instead purifies the soul. I don’t know for certain, but I will try to be more like all of you who persist.
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Thank you for this. I needed it. I needed it more than you could ever know. Thank you.
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Thank you for this, Galina. I’m grateful to know I’m not alone in how I’ve been feeling.
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You may have just saved my life. No hyperbole.
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I am so very sorry to learn that so many of you are being hit hard. let us pray for each other, that we persevere and come through.
cleanse, ground, center, shield but reach out to each other too and go to the Gods, and your ancestors. i know when this hit me the hardest — a couple of nights last week–i could in retrospect feel my Gods and ancestors gathered around waiting for me to call upon Them. I had to reach out to Them but once I did, Their help was inestimable. I’ve been starting and ending my days with prayer since because it is so easy to fall back into the really dark places. So hold on, folks, and pray and post here if it helps, and know that you’re not alone.
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“Know that you’re not alone.”
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Hopefully, this works:
https://pin.it/4hcv3ixwcwy2ur
In the silver foil are two pieces of very fine dark chocolate. The candles are two of Reginnleif’s hearth colors. The whiskey is Irish, the beer is a special Jul blend. The incense is bergamot and lavender. Since I’m traveling, I don’t have even a proper portable altar, but the table was washed with blessed salt water and powdered milk thistle.
And so I recited the Oration. Prayers to Hodur Friggasson also helped. And I can breathe again, and I haven’t dreamt of my gruesome suicide in two days, praise Nuin. Thank you.
P.S. This photo is pinned under my legal name. Please respect my privacy and continue to acknowledge me here only as Selena.
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Super relevant and useful, thank you.
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