Purification

Thargelia is coming up next week. It's a festival I've had a difficult time reconstructing since I started celebrating the Hellenic cycle. On the surface, Thargelia is a celebration of the birth of the twins of Leto, Artemis and Apollo. Beneath the surface are darker ancient customs and sacrifice merging into symbolic purification.

On the first day of the two-day festival, two men were chosen from the city. One to bear the miasma of the men of the town, and one to bear the miasma of the women. Both were given feasts and treated like kings, then both were severely beaten with leeks by the townsfolk, driven out of town, and most likely killed as a human sacrifice when the practice first began. The purification through human life is an old custom, even to the Greeks, and later it was replaced by simply driving the men out of town and allowing them to return after the festival.

Hellenismos is no longer a public religion. Gone are the temples, the elected priesthood, and the religious offices. Thargelia as it was before simply cannot be reconstructed, for this reason and for the human maturity past the idea of human sacrifice as a literal practice.

There is still a sacred metaphor behind the concept of purification through death. We see this echoed elsewhere through the apotheosis of Herakles by being burned alive, and through the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. Death becomes a transition from one state of consciousness to another. By giving up that which pollutes us spiritually (miasma), we also make that transition through our own awareness, a death of our previous frame of mind. These are the symbols I get from Thargelia.

While the first day which is devoted to Artemis, deals with purification, the second day is sacred to Apollo and fills in the void left by the miasma with a blessing. A sacred bough is cut and wrapped in wool, and from it hang decorations depicting fruits, bread, and cups for wine and oil. Children gave these branches out door-to-door in exchange for a coin. The branches brought with them a blessing from Apollo for prosperity and abundance.

I have my decorated branch from last year in storage, and I plan to return it to its place by the entrance of my bedroom on the second day of Thargelia. As for the rest, I still have a week to come up with something. I will be spending a lot of time over the next week reflecting on personal spiritual pollution and that which is holding me back from a state of grace with the Gods.