On Friday, the English translation of poet Tuệ Sỹ’s Dreaming the Mountain came in. As per usual, I opened up to a random page.
In those moments, just after arriving home and greeting the cats, I read:
I live in a sky of boundless space
A Zen landscape of nothingness
No things, no people, no busyness,
Just flowers strewn by the Goddess.
What struck me about the short poem was the dual image in my mind of Persephone/Kore — the idea of fleeting flowers, what is swallowed up by Hades as he takes her down — and the boundlessness that reminds me of the divine womb that all of generation lies within, even the fleeting and illusory and barely-real bits that we call the physical world.
I’ve been slowly and gently ramping up my prayer routines and thinking about the best ways to move forward now that my shrine is open again. Last night, I prayed to several Gods with the shrine candle lit. The cats and I went off to bed.
Something nagged at me in the morning, though. I had seen something about cosmos flowers in an unlikely place yesterday. While looking at information I had received about an area nonprofit that does urban apiary work, I noticed that they had a flower share. Cosmos flowers were available. It was so striking because I had only ever heard of the flowers once before, on the Nippon Kodo website when I bought the incense that would end up being part of my practice for the Elevating Triad (read the primer on Platonizing devotional practice if you want more info). I haven’t done that long and involved prayer sequence since covering my shrines for Yoyo’s passing, partly due to weekend timing.
This morning, I went to the Nippon Kodo website. The cosmos flower incense had been out-of-stock for months. And now it was there, unannounced. Or obliquely-announced through serendipity. I was delighted both to be able to restock and for the clear sign that it was time to come back to that practice.
I cleaned my apartment, read some Proclus, and headed out for a full moon yoga class. During the class, we made candles to release and to bring something in. The instructor had drawn a mantra and a rune. The rune was ᚱ, Raido, and the mantra was something about how there is nothing to release and we need to realize that so we can move on. I selected a green candle for love/family/community because that’s what has been most in need of cleansing for me, the various losses and the wounds from them. And then there was the question of what to bring in. I added rosemary, cypress, and wild orange oil and dried roses, white peony root, and mustard seeds. We carved ᚱ around the wick.
It’s easy to pray for what we think we need. But I think that the best type of Socratic prayer — praying for the best good possible while leaving the specifics up to the Gods — in the context of the candle is a prayer for belonging. It leaves everything open. It could be Ms. Right, or a solid local community, or deepening online face-to-face-things, or any number of things. But belonging is about psychological safety, both in the sense of one’s embodied well-being and in the sense of the psyche (soul) being in a state of wellness. It’s being able to relax and breathe, like what I had as a kid at Circle that anchored me through turbulent times and that set me up for a lifetime of religious faith, and the aspiration and hope that something suitable could happen that was similar. Many people wax poetical about how great social media is for polytheists and pagans for visibility and connection. Visibility, yes. Connection … we had more vibrant communities in 2004 before social media started, back when I was a minor. The people who are now posting vibe content on their socials are the kinds of people who would’ve been attending in-person open rituals on a Friday night twenty years ago.
Silently, as I held the candle, I prayed. I prayed to Frigg and her Handmaidens. I prayed to Apollon. I prayed to Hera and Aphrodite. Iamblichus is quite clear on beginning with the Gods in all things. Without consciously connecting to the Gods, it’s all left up to fatal artistry. I’m not sure how many others in the room were praying.
During our first yin yoga pose, when the instructor lit my candle, the entire top of the candle burst into flames. From a materials standpoint, I had probably overdone the rosemary oil. Purify everything, clean it up now, had been my vibe while adding that to the candle. The amicable breakup hurt. Yoyo’s death hurt. Family stuff hurt. Non-clinical social anxiety hurt. Up in flames went the roses and the mustard seeds and the tiny sliver of white peony root. Up in flames went the rosemary and cypress and the wild orange oil. The top of the candle turned black from the ash. (I’d seen the black candle at the front of the room and had decided that it was probably best for someone else to have that one. How amusing that the green one ended up with a quarter-inch black layer at the top.) It was still fragrant.
I watched the flames lick several inches into the air from pigeon pose, on my right side that’s always tighter than my left because I tend to carry things on my right to keep my left hand free for fine motor coordination. It took a few minutes for the candle to calm down. And then the rest of the practice was calm and slow.
People — including the instructor — often call a practice like this witchy or even use the term “candle magic(k).” I don’t — partly because of how I approach practices like this, partly due to having read Iamblichus, and partly because I don’t understand candle magic and am often confused about how candle spells qualify as such. (Maybe the ones that aren’t actively engaged with Gods qualify? Sometimes one’s head is too clouded/close to what is going on or the issue is so complex that it really makes sense for a third party to do it or emotions are hard, and that’s where specialists come in. I still think of it as spicy prayer.) Prayers that use candles are employing specific tokens and traces to make the prayer effective, often based on color and the correspondences of any additional materials used. These tokens/traces link back up to the Gods. In a prayer like this, we connect the physical — the timing of the lunar cycle, the oils and herbs and candle color and so on — to our mental focus and to (ideally) the prayers, which I did silently.
And the tokens have many layers. Cypress oil, according to the yoga instructor, is energizing. It moves things forward. Cypress, when we connect it to Orphic motifs and symbols, is Chthonic, as in the tree that signifies where to drink after one’s arrival in Hades, and it is often planted around cemeteries. Death, life, death. Life, death, life.
Which brings us back full circle to the short poem I read in that freshly-arrived book yesterday, with its Kore-like motif, and to the mantra connected to the yoga practice. To the idea of surrendering to the Gods, of letting belonging start there, with the psychological safety of knowing that they will take us to whatever is best for us, like a lighthouse guiding a ship through foggy uncertainty towards shore.
Happy Full Moon.
KALLISTI 