Not much to talk about this week, as I mentioned in an earlier entry July and August are the slowest period of the year for SLG.  Today was our scheduled social event for the summer, an outing to the local miniature golf course.  Many folks warned me ahead of time that they couldn't attend, because of various previous commitments to other summer social events, so I wasn't expecting many people to be there.  Sure enough, I was the only one.  Ah well, there are worse things than minigolfing by oneself.  (I got a 39 and a 47, for those keeping score, which I assume is none of you.  >8)  At our business meeting this week I'm going to seriously propose just not scheduling any events between Lughnasadh and Labor Day next year.  (Maybe leave Coffee Hour just in case.  We'll see how many attend this week.)  Plenty of other churches shut down during the summer (my dad's former Unitarian church did) and I'm sure I could be doing something more useful with my time than being the only one at an event.

On the brighter side, or at least the more active side, we've once again had an article published about us in a local magazine!  You may remember my entry on our Summer Solstice rite where I mention a pair of reporters attending the ritual and suffering through the rain alongside the rest of us.  Well, the City Guide was published last week, and our article is indeed the one and only article in the Religion section of the Guide.  (You can see our listing here, under "Neo-Pagan", but the article doesn't appear to be online.)  It's a decent article, which spend more time talking about the details of what actually happened at our rituals than the background behind ADF and our ritual format, but I'm sure that makes a better article anyway.  Intriguingly, there's no mention of the rain at all.  Maybe it wasn't a big deal after all.

If you'd like to see the article, stop by any Coffee Hour between now and next July.  It's a yearly publication, and Borders does carry it all year.  And you know you want to join us at Coffee Hour, unless of course it's August.  >8)

Rev. Rob Henderson
Senior Druid, Shining Lakes Grove, ADF

It's that time of the every-four-years once again.  The time when I'm going to stay up way too late every night for two weeks because there's just so much to see and it never ends, and even if the American station isn't showing anything interesting I can still watch whatever the Canadians are showing instead.  (Living near an international border is great for television watching!)  Yes, the Olympics have returned again.

So what do the Olympics have to do with ancient Indo-European culture?  Wait, I don't really have to answer that, do I?  The Olympics were one of the four quadrennial games of ancient Greece, and while these modern Olympics can't be considered to have an unbroken lineage from those ancient games, well, we in ADF don't claim an unbroken lineage to any of those old cultures either.  But just as we in ADF do our best to learn about the Ancients and adapt their ways into something that is meaningful to us, so the Olympics try to fill the role of those ancient games in the modern world.  Some of the changes would shock the ancients ("What, they're letting women watch the games?  What, they're letting women COMPETE in the games???"), as I'm sure some aspects of our rituals would shock them as well.  ("What, they're inviting the dead and the gods at the SAME TIME???").  But seeing the countries of the civilized world (at least we hope that every country at the games is civilized!) come together in the spirit of unity and competition, I think that they would appreciate our continuation of their tradition, even if we don't explicitly call upon the Greek gods any more.

Of course, being a Hellenic neo-Pagan myself, how can I not love the opening ceremony and the lighting of the Olympic flame?  Yes, yes, I know the running-with-the-torch thing started off as a Nazi propaganda piece, but if the Nazis can steal the ancient pagan symbol of the swastika and make it their own, I say the modern world can take one of their symbols and make it something good.  In Greece, the initial flame is kindled by focusing a mirror onto a torch, using the rays of the sun.  How cool is that?  I'd consider trying to kindle our Grove Flame using a mirror, but very little sunlight reaches our fire circle in May when the leaves are on the trees.  And then the flame is taken around the world and is used to kindle a cauldron at the site of the games.  It's like a pagan ritual is being broadcast on television to billions of people and they don't even realize it!  Or, well, maybe they do and they're not terribly concerned about it.  Which is also cool.

I hope you all get a chance to enjoy some of this year's modern Olympic celebration, at least in the virtual TV-watching sense, and I'll see you here next week.

Rev. Rob Henderson
Senior Druid, Shining Lakes Grove, ADF

Related Reading:
A Tour of Ancient Olympia: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Olympics/site.html
The Olympic Flame and Torch Relay: http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_655.pdf

So I just got back from Lughnasadh, well from visiting Gen's family after Lughnasadh so please do excuse the lateness of the post, as well as the brevity because I really don't want to stay up super late to write this.  >8)

Friday night went well, we had 19 people total who made beeswax candles and ten attended a wonderful first public rite from Cedarsong Protogrove to honor Lugh and Tailtiu.  And I'm thinking, wow, our steadily increasing turnout to High Day rituals is continuing!

Saturday, we had 15 folks on the site throughout the day, most of them had been there on Friday as well.  We started in the afternoon rather than the morning, because I was pretty sure people didn't want to show up in the morning just to here me drone about SLG history.  There were only twelve folks at the main rite itself (and the weather was lovely all weekend, so I'm quite certain it wasn't a fear of rain this time around!) and the ritual itself went well.  The omen itself was a little hard to interpret, Rodney finally decided that Lugh and Ana were asking us to do a guided meditation so we could get in better contact with them.  I'm not big on doing guided meditation of any sort during a large group ritual, but when that's what the omen asks for, that's what we do.  After the meditation we got a much better omen, so that was good.

In the evening Jude did a presentation on labyrinths, and yes I did set up the portable labyrinth I talked about last time, and it was well-loved enough that we'll probably set it up for our next High Day as well.  Then Gen did a workshop on salt dough sculptures, and I made a snake for my home altar, and I'll paint it as soon as I get it back in baked form.  Gen and I then let a Hellenic-style ADF rite for all nine of the folks who were still on the site.  We all made oaths to our gods and asked for their help in completing them.  Some of the folks who worked with salt dough made tablets and wrote their oaths on them and offered them at the herm in our nemeton, a very Greek way to do it!  Well, offering the tablets to the well might have been more traditional, but then the local deer wouldn't have been able to eat them once we left.  Call it a modern adaptation.

And then I came back on Sunday to do a few more workshops and a guided meditation, and…  Nobody came.  Just the folks who had stayed the night before.  After so many people told me last year that they would have attended on Sunday if we had any actual Sunday events, I convinced the Grove leadership council that we should add a day.  Apparently I shouldn't have bothered.  Ah well, Lughnasadh is perhaps the trickiest festival to schedule, with so many other things happening (I myself was invited to a pig roast on Saturday), and I know we're not the absolute top priority for anyone who isn't me.  Even the folks who want to attend our rites only have so much time to devote to them, I can hardly expect everyone to want to spend two or three days there.  We'll call it a learning experience, and next year when we close up the festival on Saturday night, I won't feel even a twinge of worry about people missing out on it.

Rev. Rob Henderson
Senior Druid, Shining Lakes Grove, ADF

Related Reading:
Salt Dough Sculpture: http://www.ancientnile.co.uk/saltdough.php

We ADF Druids all have an interest in ancient artifacts, as part of our study of the ancient cultures that we seek to emulate.  Most of us don't own any ancient artifacts, of course, so we have to make do with museum visits and reading books.  But there's still a lot we can learn from these objects of the past.  (Knowing that the ancient Greeks actually wrote curse tablets to hinder the abilities of athletes they didn't like gives me a perspective on their life that reading their myths could never quite do!)  I've often wondered what it would be like to be on an archaeological dig and make some incredible discovery.  (And then maybe grab it and escape from a bunch of Nazis using my bullwhip, but now I'm just getting my fantasies muddled.)

ADF has only been around for twenty five years now, and while the 1980s may seem like an eternity ago, our own artifacts can't be called "ancient" just yet.  Still, being Senior Druid of a Grove that's nearly fifteen years old, I can sometimes make a mini-expedition of my own to find one of our old ritual objects.  This was the case today when I got our old canvas labyrinth out of storage so we can use it this weekend at our Lughnasadh festival.

Back in February of 2000, when I went to ConVocation (our local area's metaphysical convention), I attended a workshop on labyrinths where the folks running it had put together a portable labyrinth using a large blue tarpaulin and masking tape.  I was so impressed that I told Gen Stoyak I wanted to do something similar, and she suggested using a large canvas sheet instead of a tarp so it would be more durable.  She, being far better at working with fabrics than I will ever be, sewed together several pieces of canvas to make a single 20 foot by 19 foot piece.  (She somehow managed to do this in the hallway of her condo, which was long enough but nowhere near wide enough.  Another mystery of the Producer Caste that I will never understand!)  Meanwhile, I took an image file of a simple seven-circuit labyrinth on my PC and overlaid a 20 by 19 grid onto it.  We took the canvas out to my parent's farm where we could stretch it out properly, and Gen installed several grommets around the edge so we could drive tent stakes through to keep the wind from blowing it out of place.  Then I laid out a 20 by 19 grid with masking tape, and I used my handy little blueprint to paint the image on the canvas.

We took the labyrinth to Wellspring, a local Pagan picnic, and a few of our Lughnasadh festivals, but we haven't used it in several years.  (With my work schedule I haven't been able to travel to a lot of non-Grove events, and I didn't want to overuse it at our own events.)  When Jude Howison told me she wanted to do a workshop on labyrinths at this year's Lughnasadh, I knew it was time to get the old labyrinth out again.  This afternoon, I stretched it out in my back yard.  It was like taking a trip in a time machine – well, a time machine that can only go back five years, but still impressive.  The cloth is still in good shape, there are a few stains but we can probably get those out, and the little drawing of a slug I did in the corner with "5-14-00" was still there.  I walked it once again, and despite the wind trying to blow the pattern out from under me, it felt good.  (Yes, I still have the tent stakes and we'll be using them next weekend.  >8)

I'm glad I had a chance to rediscover something from my Grove's past, and if it proves popular at our festival, maybe we can make it a regular part of our Grove practices one again.  If not, well, I can always put it back into storage an look forward to rediscovering it again.

Rev. Rob Henderson
Senior Druid, Shining Lakes Grove, ADF

Related reading:
The Labyrinth Society: http://www.labyrinthsociety.org/

Every summer, the natives flee as the hordes descend upon our local area, to rampage across the landscape, pillaging and plundering and spending $5 for a small lemonade.  Art Fair returned to Ann Arbor this week, loved by its many visitors and hated by most local residents for the disruption it causes to our lives.  I'm not actually a resident of Ann Arbor, and my apartment in Ypsilanti is far enough away that I don't even notice an increase in car traffic.  But I work downtown, and delivering flowers means I not only have to maneuver around the closed streets, I also have to find creative places to park for those few deliveries I need to take there.  I can appreciate the economic boost it gives our local retailers during the long, slow summer months, though I'd feel better if our flower store saw some of that boost as well.  Nobody comes to art fair to buy a vase of roses.  >8)

Being an ADF Druid, I'm constantly studying the things that happen around me and asking myself if there are any ancient customs that are similar.  In this particular case, I can't help but think of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which happened annually in a small town near Athens for many centuries.  No, I'm not thinking in terms of the mystery rite itself.  Although we still don't know exactly what happened during the climactic part of the weeklong ceremony. It's pretty unlikely that it centered around any kind of artwork.

No, I'm thinking in terms of the massive influx of people who came from all over the Greek-speaking world to take part in it, and the hordes of merchants who got there first to ply their wares.  What must it have been like to live in a small community like that, but to have that many people show up for nine days out of every year?  Did they look forward to it, did they dread it, or a little of both?  If Art Fair is any indication, it probably leaned more toward dread.  Then again, living in a city that was the center of worship for a major Greek goddess certainly must have counted for something in the hearts of the people.  Rather than the scattershot energy of people with too much money wandering the streets looking for ways to get rid of said money, the focus and devotion toward Demeter must have felt different.

We can't know for certain, of course, so this is all in the realm of speculation and Unconfirmed Personal Gnosis, a concept which deserves its own article later.  >8)  For now, I'll just ponder what happened millennia ago and what happened last week, and I'll wonder what it would be like for us modern neo-Pagans to have a similar kind of devotional festival some day.  (Yes, I know about Starwood and other big festivals, but those aren't devoted to one particular religious ceremony.  Festivals with lots of different groups doing lots of different things sound like a very different kind of festival.  Actually, now that I think of it, they sound a lot like Art Fair, and I think I've had as much of that as I can stand for one summer!)  Our Grove's Lughnasadh is like a small step in the direction, but I can only imagine what a Lughnasadh with hundreds in attendance would be like, both it terms of the ritual and the festivities surrounding it.

Anyway, enough rambling from me.  Here are a few links with good information on the Eleusinian Mysteries, if you'd like to read further.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries
http://users.erols.com/nbeach/eleusis.html

Rev. Rob Henderson
Senior Druid, Shining Lakes Grove, ADF