Honouring & Offering: Apollo Edition

Caution when casting spells! ⚠️

When casting spells, you have to be as specific as possible.

You always have to specify what and how you want this to go.

For example: if you want more money, you don’t have to say “i want money” and thats it. Becouse you might get what you wanted, but your husband died and you got his life insurance.

You can say: “i want more money to come to me, with the less harm to me and to others”

Doing this, you are putting your energy in one spot, causing less or any side effects of your magic.

Be safe and protect others from harm 🌙

Hecate hearken to our spell - Kate West

Me: *thinks the gods didn’t come through this time*

The gods: *orchestrate some unbelievable, strange turn of events that coalesces in my prayers being answered*

Me: well alright then, guess I won’t be doubting y’all again...

How to do Church at Home

Get dressed

Put on a Chant or song

Pray to God

Read Bible

You can do sum sort of Ceremony if you wanna.

Put another Song on

Smoke cleanse

(Ps if your in a Group. Install Novena-Perpetual Help cuz it literally shows how to do a Church Service)

I love my name. It's Latin for Warrior. 💗

The Coven: Sha'bat

Aphroditos, the Trans Aphrodite worshipped widely in Amathus and Athens.

This particular pose, where a feminine deity lifts up their skirt or dress to reveal a phallus, is called the Anasyrma or Anasyromenos and was widely regarded as an apotropaic gesture, averting evil influences and bringing forth good fortune.

"There's also a statue of Venus on Cyprus, that's bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditus, and Laevius says: Worshiping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is male or female, just as the Moon is a nurturing goddess. In his Atthis Philochorus, too, states that she is the Moon and that men sacrifice to her in women's dress, women in men's, because she is held to be both male and female."

-Macrobius, Saturnalia (C. 431 BCE)

This combination of masculinity and femininity in the same Deity and their assocition with the moon, both of which were considered to have fertilizing powers, was regarded as having an influence over the entire animal and vegetable creation.

They were often identified with Ermaphroditos (Hermaphroditus), the intersex child of Aphrodite and Hermes

Sources:

Koloski-Ostrow, Ann Olga; Lyons, Claire L. (2000), Naked truths: women, sexuality, and gender in classical art and archaeology, Routledge; pp. 230-231.

^ Freese, John Henry (1911). "Aphrodite" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 166.

Macrobius; Kaster, Robert A. (2011), Saturnalia, Volume 2, Harvard University Press; p. 58

CIRCLE TIP:

I know books from the seventies would have you believe otherwise, but you don't have to mentally hold circle for the whole ritual, and you don't have to physically mark the whole circle boundary, nor do you need a coven member to hold space. You can put regular old rocks at each of the cardinal directions along the walls of your room or along the outer perimeter of the sacred space and use those as anchor points for the energy you lay.

Start by gathering, cleansing, and sanctifying/consecrating/blessing/charging/whatever four stones of any shape and size that suits your needs. Larger stones are good if you want them to be a visible reminder of the boundaries of circle, but smaller ones are good for discretion. Anoint them with a protection oil if you'd like (I only recommend doing this if you are using them indoors with no animals around), and/or pencil protection sigils on them. Cast circle but make sure your energy hits each stone and runs through it. If you call in the quarters, invite them to reside in their respective directional stones. Boom, done, now you have an easily marked sacred space that doesn't need constant maintain.

And, fun fact, circle doesn't HAVE to be round. Round is easiest when you're using mental energy to hold the space, but if you use physical barriers like existing walls then your cast energy resides in that physical block and is held automatically. I especially love doing this as a quasi-permanent marker to sanctify an entire room because any doorways become defacto entrances/exits that spiritually open and close when physically opened and closed.

Okay but isn't this being lazy? NO you rude hypothetical, it's not. It's being resourceful. Using these physical anchors allows a solitary practitioner to put their focus towards other things. I use this method when I'm studying magic texts, or so I can hang out with my ancestors and spirit friends casually for extended periods of time, or if I am going to be attempting astral projection. And by "I use this method," I mean it is one of the permanent protections I have in place in my home.

Has anyone else tried this? Please share any experiences or circle hacks you might have!

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov