At the close of the calendar year, I would like to pause and link you to eight posts that I would like to highlight from this year. (Did these really all come out in 2023? It’s been a long year …) After the list, I have a few other end-of-year things to add.
Scaffolding Platonic Theurgic Practice: A Primer – This is a set of preliminary guidance for people who are looking for structured reading lists with a theurgic-theological bent on the Platonic corpus. This one is probably the most New Year-relevant of the entire set I’m listing today because you could technically use it to outline goals and habit modification infrastructure for 2024.
For Thinking about Seirai (Divine Series) – This is a set of resources about divine series that I compiled here because they are important for developing a grounding in theurgy.
Deity-Focused Compassion Meditation – Here, I engage with Platonic materials on pronoia and related concepts in order to propose a polytheistic way to do compassion meditation and what, in our context, the telos of the meditation is.
Teachers, Students, and Community: A Few Initial Thoughts – This post is a follow-up to a chapter in The Soul’s Inner Statues in which I attempt to be a bit more even. SIS has the lens it does because we have a cult problem in the United States, but healthy community is possible.
Five Points About Polytheism – This plays with the five “laws” of library science as proposed by S. Ranganathan in a polytheistic context.
Beyond That One Coin Replica and the Belvedere: The Diversity of Apollon’s Images and Symbols – Here, I engage with a variety of Apolline iconography that is less commonly referenced in contemporary agalmata.
In the House of Apollon – While we’re talking about Apollon, here is a devotional poem.
Pop Occulture – This is another one of my rants about out-of-control consumerism, but there’s also some room here for us each to think about how we might make the situation better.
The Soul’s Inner Statues has a print version and a free digital version (see the sidebar). The print came out on February 27, 2023. It seems to have had an impact, which makes me happy about the effort that went into creating something and giving it away.
The Village of Strong Branches, a fiction novella, came out on July 29, 2023. It has had fairly positive reviews. Happily for someone who is starting to put prose out there, this style of fiction is niche enough to be AI-proof. AI doesn’t understand how to do OVS grammar because the lack of training data breaks the prediction algorithm (try to talk to it in your conlang, they said. it’ll be fun, they said! 😵), and based on that experience, I know that it’s too biased to be culturally literate for my worldbuilding setting and the way I structure plots. So that’s an accomplishment.
As I mentioned when I said that I wanted to end 2023 early, a lot happened this year, and it left me feeling like I hadn’t accomplished as much as I wanted. There is so much to do, and it is sometimes difficult to triage all of it, even before life complications and stressors happen. But I’m working on it.
KALLISTI 