State of the Shrines 2020

So it’s that time of year again, and I’m doing my usual State of the Shrines update for this year. I posted a little short room tour to my youtube above, if you want to see how my room’s looking now and where all the shrines are in relation to each other. My window is on the east side of the house.

I really have a very simple set-up this year. I only have two active shrines: my Kemetic altar, and my Hellenic altar. I have a few more passive shrines, though, to Mary, Quan Yin, and Bast. So it’s very pared down right now, but I honestly am appreciating that a lot because I’m tired of having six different things going on. Now, I can focus on my Kemetic stuff, and do my Hellenic work for the full and dark moons, and keep that more household stuff going at the same time.

So, without further preamble, here are my current shrines in all their glory.

Shrine Updates, August 2017

So it’s been a bit of a quiet month, but that’s okay. There’s been a lot of prep work and putting things into place and sorting things out and trying some other things out, too. The last two days have been very Spring-like: warm and sunny and nice. I got into a bit of a cleaning mood, and have spent the time redoing my shrines, and my spaces, doing a little decluttering, and moving a few things around so they work better for me. I think I’ve also decided on at least one piece of fiction to include in the anthology, it will just need some work and editing and world-building first.

There’s a part of me that just wants to ramble on about the shrines, but honestly, I feel like I’ve written too much about them and I’d just be repeating myself. But I made some videos, so take a look at them, and I’ll ramble about them just a little.

30 Days of Sobek: Day 23 – My Own Composition about Sobek

Okay, so this took a while, because I wanted to write something new, rather than post something I’d already written, and I couldn’t think of anything until Sobek suggested SPACE GOD COWBOYS IN SPACE or something like that, so. This is silly and occaisonally serious, and has more Heru in it than I intended, but there you go. That’s Sobek for you.

This is nearly 1600 words of mostly unedited stuff I wrote over the past three hours or so, so don’t expect a brilliantly detailed plot. Sobek, I think, just wanted something fun, and I didn’t want to rewrite the myths again. Because I’ve done that already. So this is a little gem of Sobek’s sense of humour. Enjoy. 😀

30 Days of Sobek: Day 6 – Other Related Deities

This is possibly a bit shorter than I’d have liked, but it’ll do. I’m going to post tomorrow’s now as well, because from next week, my Wednesdays are gonna get busy, so I might as well get Tues and Wed done at the same time. Then that’s one less thing to worry about.

I might actually expand this post at a later date, when I have more brain space to research this with more depth. I really don’t feel like I’ve done this bit justice, but hopefully, it’ll give you some idea of the gods associated with Sobek that aren’t family.

30 Days of Sobek: Day 5 – Members of the Family

Sobek has a very small family, relative to other gods in the pantheon, I think. The only family – aside from consorts – Sobek has is Nit, His mother. This is the most common family given to Him. Whatever else He is, He is always son of Nit. You don’t really get one without the other.

His father is occasionally named as Set, or the more vague and unidentifable ‘Senwy’ (the two brothers) but more often his father is not mentioned. My own UPG from Nit is that She Herself is both father and mother to Sobek, that She did not need a father for Him to bring Sobek into the world.

30 Days of Sobek: Day 4 – Myths about Sobek

As far as I’m aware, there are no surviving myths about Sobek, save for the Roman period Book of the Faiyum, which centred around Sobek-Ra and His journey through the sky. It’s very much Sobek-as-Ra in the Faiyum, and it is a fascinating text, from the snippets I’ve read about it. The book is as much a map of the Faiyum as it is a religious text. It has to explain the sun differently because it sits to the west of the Nile, and the sun rises and falls over the lake, not the Nile. So there’s some fascinating concepts and imagery that I would love to explore more deeply, including Nit as a hippopotamus, protecting Sobek as a crocodile on Her back.

But this is a hard text to study, simply because hardly anyone publishes any research on it (in an accessible-to-me way), and a full translation in English is nowhere to be found. So most of what I know about this text comes from a 51 page article by Horst Beinlich, which seems to have been part of a larger book I can’t find anywhere, that breaks down the text and describes each of the sections and what they contain. What’s in that article from 2013 is literally all I know, and all my google-fu can turn up.

The shrines have settled in

Wesir all wrapped and ready for the Mysteries.

So I wrote a while back about changing the shrines around, but I didn’t want to post about them until they’d settled in. Sometimes, new shrine arrangements need time for me to tweak them, to make sure they are right. Big changes, too, are ones I feel I need to sit with, in case I decide to change them back. So I have given myself a week or so to tweak and sit and practice and figure out what I need to do to make them right, and I think I’m done, for the moment. Shrines always change, they never stay the same, so this is no more permanent than my other shrines. It’s just a reflection of where I am in my path right now.

I’ve also just got around to wrapping my statue of Wesir. It’s a bit later than I normally do it, given there’s only a week to go. But I noticed the lack of His presence once it was done. I do miss Him during this time, but it’s never permanent.

One thing I did achieve today was to go back through the Daybook and pick out all the Mysteries of Wesir-related festivals, and begin compiling something for that. I wanted a more complete picture than the eight-day one I’ve been working with, and going by the dates, I’m actually a few weeks early with mine if I schedule it on May 1, so that’ll be something to think about, whether I keep the May 1 start date, or keep the Kemetic dates instead.

I wouldn’t mind moving it so much. It would give me a bit of breathing space to do a more Hekate-focused May 1 High Day rite without it crashing into the Mysteries. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I would appreciate that, since I wouldn’t need to try to do too many things at once. So that’s definitely on the cards, but nothing’s been decided yet.

Daily and monthly rituals

I feel like I’ve spent the last two months thinking about this, but I think I’ve finally come to a workable schedule after giving myself permission to not worship ALL THE GODS AT ONCE you can do them at different times, please, self, do that. It’s still a bit tentative, and there’s deliberate flexibility and gaps in it just because sometimes, you need that. And I still haven’t got all the household rites done that I wanted to get done. But that’s okay. I’ve had Tiny Niece invading my life this month, and a very busy week, so you can imagine how much I desperately want my schedule back to normal. D:

The current plan is for Sobek and Heru in the morning, Masrai at noon (when I’m not at work), Hekate and/or household rites after dinner (I will handwave that as a convenient ‘Greeks start their days at sunset’ thing), and Constellation gods before bed (that’s Isis, Hekate, Renenutet, Mary, Quanyin, and Tara). I feel like that’s a workable flow that I can work with for the moment. I’m in the process of figuring out a monthly thing, just in terms of making sure everyone gets at least one day to themselves. None of these are going to be very long or complicated rites, either. But short and sweet means I get things done, so.

Because of this, I’ve also put my Constellation goddesses together on the altar table, rather than try to cram them onto the top of a bookshelf. It’s forced me to rearrange my shrines, and how I’m going to do the Mysteries of Wesir, but I’ll post photos of that once all that has settled down. At this stage, I really just need something for Tara, but that’s not an essential thing right now. I’ll leave that until I find one I like, and maybe print out something I can use until then. I want to let this altar settle for a while before I decide it’s done.

State of the Shrines, March 2017

It’s not quite a 3mx3m square room, so you can see how little space I have to work in. But I do make it work hard, so. That’s something, I guess.

So, it’s the Equinox, and this feels like the right time to post about this, given where I am with my #domagick work. I haven’t done any formal rituals for the Equinox just yet, but I’m saving that for Thursday, I think, when I have more brain to sort them out. I also have some videos I need to upload to youtubes, but they are too big, and my internet too slow, to get that done tonight, so. That is another job for Thursday.

If you haven’t been keeping up with my #domagick posts, you can read all about my fire magic experiments over at the Grimoire. I’ve been doing some self-transformation work, and a helluva lot of decluttering, and a lot of that work is starting to come to a close as we enter the week before the Deipnon. I plan to post more about that over here when it’s done, sort of like a summary post, but for now, go read the Grimoire for your day-by-day #domagick posts.

So, since I didn’t get around to this at Wep Ronpet, here’s a belated Equinatorial State of the Shrines for another year.

A List of Heru-sa-Aset festivals

This is what happens on a not-very-exciting day when I have a shiny Ancient Egyptian Daybook to trawl through. I attempt to make a list of just Heru-sa-Aset festivals. This is a somewhat more taxing task than just listing all the Heru ones, because Heru is fkn complicated.

So. I won’t claim this is in any way complete, because sorting out the Heru-sa references from the Heru-Wer references is a job that only ends in a headache for me, so. I have probably missed a few, and included some I probably shouldn’t have, but if you think you can do a better job than me, go for your life.