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radiantbabySo, I am mostly finished up working on my article for the new "He Epistole" called "Things They Never Told About Forming a Hellenic Ritual Group" and it turned out to be not only long, but it seems a bit rambly to me (my brain has been so "mushy" the last few days that I had some trouble being coherant). It certainly doesn't have to be any great work of journalism, but I would at least like it to be somewhat useful.
I need to turn in the final draft tomorrow for the deadline, but before then, I wanted to see what you guys thought and if you think I need to change anything.
Things They Never Told You About Forming a Hellenic Ritual Group
Hellenic Polytheists are generally a pretty solitary lot, but unfortunately in many cases it’s not by choice. Many of us find ourselves going to local pagan-oriented meet-ups or festivals and falling through the cracks a bit. Finding other polytheists in the pagan community can be a real challenge for many and on top of that finding other Hellenic polytheists can be even more challenging. Proving to people that ours is valid religion and not just an antiquated extension of those myths many people read in elementary school can be just as hard with pagans as it is with non-pagans.
So, what do we do? We reach out, be it online or through other means of networking to find to find people of like mind that worship our gods and, hopefully, might worship them with us. Sometimes that virtual world is enough for people, but for others, there is a desire to have some real-life worship as well. It’s not just a vanity thing, religion in Ancient Greece was a community-based and the ritual structures often lend themselves better to group worship over solitary worship.
Finding a local Hellenic ritual group can somewhat easily amend this desire for real-life worship, but what do you do when you can’t find any local groups practicing Hellenismos? Well, if you are really dedicated to the idea, you might want to consider forming one yourself. With national organizations like Neokoroi and Hellenion, you can even form a group that is affiliated with them (i.e. an eranos with Neokoroi or proto-demos or demos with Hellenion).
This might sound easy to some, but there is more to forming one of these groups than maybe getting your group’s name added on a link on one of those national organization’s websites and perhaps setting up a Yahoo! or Google group. I know that when I personally went into it about two years ago, I had a lot of a naïve attitude going for me with a “Make it and they will come” outlook and, while that was true in a way, it also took a lot of hard work and a lot of patience. If you think your group will magically come together over night, I hate to break it to you that it probably will not. Still, if you persevere, I think you will be rewarded.
As I said, I started my own group two years ago called Southeastern Hellenes for networking and socializing and to help bring people together to form local ritual groups around the Southeast (even in my own home town). At the time the only other Hellenic I knew in Georgia was my boyfriend Ben and other than that I knew only a handful of people in the Southeast itself. In fact, I thought we would be lucky to ever get more than 10 people (our first goal was to build a website if we ever got that “many” people) and here we are two years later with about 70 members on our Yahoo! group. Given most of those people are not always active on the list (I will go more into that later), but it was from that group that I was final able to form a local Hellenic ritual group (both an eranos and proto-demos) about a year ago.
The whole journey so far has had its ups and downs and I have been watching a few people starting their own groups recently and going through similar issues and getting frustrated. I hoped that maybe in writing about my experiences that I could give some tips and reassurance to those people who have recently started a group or are considering forming one. Your mileage may vary of course, but here are some stumbling blocks I have encountered and some ideas on how to get past them.
Where to meet and when/how often:
So, you have just started your group and maybe at this point it is just you or, if you are lucky, one or two others. Now you need to use the powers of social networking to bring others together. You might even have some ideas about the networking part (which I will go into more below), but for now you are stuck in the logistics of executing the simple things such as where your group can meet up. This simple stumbling block can stall a lot of groups, but hang in there, for there is hope!
Some of the most common options for meet-up locations are pagan bookstores or cafes. With pagan bookstores, often you can find people who are empathetic to what you are doing, people who are supportive of you being a part of a non-mainstream religion, etc. This is not always a viable option for many reasons. For us, we didn’t take that route as a) the largest local pagan/new age store takes an act of the gods to get an official time slot at and b) its hard to do a meet-up with no real meet-up area (some pagan stores have areas with chairs specifically for social events, but this was not the case locally for us). As always, your mileage may vary.
Cafes are good spots for any sort of social networking in general. I mean, cafes are traditionally bastions of intellectual banter and socializing, so why not use it for your own meet-up proposes? For us, we chose cafés that are connected to the Border’s book chain. These cafes were chosen due to their close proximity to books since many Hellenics are also big book geeks and if no one shows up, you can also just have your own fun looking around the store at/for books yourself. Plus, you can always work in a drink or a snack with your meet-up, which is usually quite nice.
Some other options you could take advantage of are meeting rooms in UU Churches (if one of your group members is a member of said church, though they might still be available otherwise), college campuses (if you are a student, you might be able to use the campus meeting rooms for your benefit), public parks (you can meet up in park pavilions and maybe work in a small ritual and/or cookout – this was what our group did in the very beginning), etc. There are probably also places that rent/lease/lend out their space as well, such as public halls or libraries. I don’t have a lot of experience in those areas personally, but I have heard that libraries can be a challenge. Still, check out some of your local libraries to see what your options are. You might be surprised.
Wherever you chose to meet up, bring some sort of sign or identifying object so that the new members can identify you. This can be an immense help.
Once you found a place, you need to pick a time and frequency. I would suggest whatever is most feasible for you, because oftentimes in the beginning, you might be the only one making it to the meet-ups with any consistency. Most importantly, and I can’t stress this enough, is to pick a time and frequency and stick with it. People are generally busy and while they might be interested in showing up at some point, they might not be able to that month, or until Summer, or whatever the case may be. If you are continually changing the day, time, and/or place, it makes it harder for people to know when to show up and also makes it a challenge for people who might need to schedule in advance for things due to work schedules, babysitting needs, etc. For us, we meet on the second Tuesday evening of each month at the same café and on the second Saturday of each month at the same park for libation rituals. It’s easy enough to remember so that people who might be interested know when to come.
How to network about your group:
Networking can be a tricky game, but thankfully there are a lot of resources at your group’s disposal. You can choose options that either cost money or not, but I would suggest in the beginning to try to stick more to low or no-cost options and then maybe add some options that cost money at a later date if you need.
Some free options to consider are things like putting notices up on websites like Witchvox.com, general pagan message boards or mailing lists and/or Hellenic-specific message boards or mailing lists. You can also network in “the real world” with flyers about your group. Such flyers can be posted in places like new age/pagan shops, bookstores, college campuses, pagan festivals, etc. If you are a distributor of “He Epistole”, it’s even highly recommended to attach a flyer of your group so that anyone interested in worship after reading the newsletter might contact you to join your group. Also, depending on the venue available (such as at a New Age store or Pagan Pride Day celebration), it can be free to run a “Hellenismos 101” or other related Hellenic public education workshop and hand out flyers for your group during or afterward. Some of my own group’s biggest leaps in membership have come from people who went to one of our 101 discussions and wanted to learn more.
If you want to spend some money on networking, you could also do a Hellenic public education workshop at a pagan festival. Most of the time this will cost money and even if you get a discount for presenting, you will still have to pay some sort of admission fee. But, if you are already going to said festival, you might want to take the opportunity to network there with your flyers and/or the workshop (a lot of festival planners are eagerly looking for new people to teach classes at their festivals, so it might be pretty easy to get on their schedule of events). Some other options that cost some money are to take out classified ads in publications like pagan magazines and newsletters or college newspapers. You could also order business cards to give to people as you meet them at related events. This can be expensive or relatively cheap depending on the print house.
You might also consider having some sort of web presence. This will enable to you share your link with many other websites (especially ones your group might be affiliated with, such as Neokoroi or Hellenion) and make your group easier to find for people who might be looking via a search engine for such a group in their hometown. This can cost money for a domain, but there are free website options also available (Geocities, Tripod, etc.) as well as affinity groups (Yahoo, Google, etc.) that you can use as your website as well. The latter two are particularly good if you do not have any web design skills and don’t wish to pay for a service or person to design your site for you.
What to do if no one is coming to your meet-ups/rituals/etc.:
This is a bit of an addendum to figuring out where to meet up, but I think it is certainly worth mentioning as it happens to so many groups. It can be common to be the only attendee at your functions in the beginning until the word of your group really starts to get around and things start to fall into place. Don’t lose heart. I have told many people this, as I know how frustrating it can be when it happens. With my own group, it took a good year and a half before getting to the point that we had any sort of regular attendees (most of the time it was just my boyfriend and I and, if we were lucky, perhaps one other person on rare occasion). You must be patient. I truly believe that if you want your group to work out and you are willing to put the work in, that the Gods will bring you the right people.
Focus on yourself. Set up the meet-ups as most convenient to you in the beginning (unless you are already working with a few people, you might want to work out things amongst yourselves). I always just try and look at it as myself going somewhere and people can join me if they would like. For example, say there is a Greek play going on in town and you think it would be a great way to meet other Hellenics. You mention on mailing lists about a meet-up there and once you are actually there, you seem to be the only person who made it. You can get upset and let it spoil the enjoyment of the play or you can just go on to the play as if you were planning on being there alone. If someone else does show, on the other hand, that’s just a bonus. Obviously you want it to be a case where others join you, but I found when I focused on myself and didn’t build up too many expectations for our group events, things became a lot less stressful. Life happens and it’s possible that certain people actually wanted to make it to the event, but for some reason could not. This is no reason to throw in the towel; it was just a matter of bad timing.
What if it’s been a long time and people are still not showing up? In that case, you might need to look into other forms of advertisement or you might need to look at the time and place of the meet-ups or events and see if that is the culprit. In our case, we had several people on our mailing list that said they were interested, but were not coming due to the inconvenient location. This can be a real issue if you live in a big city and you might need to discuss with prospective members or list members where might be most convenient to them to attend events and go from there.
For example, in our case, in the Atlanta area you have people who will not go outside the perimeter of the city and people who will not go inside the perimeter. Sometimes such a trip only involves about a 10-20 minute drive, but can be a headache if you have prospective members spread out both inside and outside said perimeter. In the beginning, we decided to hold our meet-ups in an area of town called Midtown. This was chosen because it was about equidistant for most of the people in the Atlanta area (hence the name, Midtown, as it is sort of located in the middle of things). We thought this might help bring people together, but after months of people generally not showing, it came to light that the location was equally inconvenient for everyone, so no one came! The people in the north and south side of town that were on our mailing list felt it was too far and it was especially far for myself and my boyfriend Ben (the only regulars) who drove about an hour to get there from the extreme north of town. We finally had to bite the bullet, figure out where the largest concentration of local list members lived, and then pick a new place based on that. For us, of the interested people, there were about 4-5 people interested that lived on the more northern side of town and 1 person who lived in the south side of town. Because of the larger concentration of people in the north, we moved to a café in the north. I hated moving things even farther from our member in the south, but I decided going with the majority was best. After that, we started to finally have regular attendees.
Also, one last important thing to remember is to not expect everyone who shows interest to show up at things or be active in the group. For example, if you run a Yahoo! group for your ritual or networking group and you have 20 members on that group, don’t expect those 20 members to necessarily be active in your events. Some people on such mailing lists are passive members and like to just watch what is going on and not necessarily join in on things. I stress this because I have seen many instances where group owners get angry that not everyone is participating in things. I can tell you from experience that my group, while pretty active compared to most, only has about 4 very active members and a handful of people who attend things on occasion. That is in contrast to the 70 or so members on the list and maybe the 20 or so people who are local to my specific ritual group (as the mailing list is regional). I could get frustrated that not everyone is participating, but I try and not waste my energy on that and instead focus more on those that do. Besides, some of those lurkers might just be waiting until they have a free night or even to see if your group is stable before participating. You never know.
What to do if you have never run a ritual/don't have any rituals:
So, you have managed to finally find a good place for people to meet-up and now you want to try your hand a doing rituals with these people. What do you do if you have never run a ritual or you have no rituals to work with? This was certainly the case for our group.
I was pretty new to Hellenismos when I started my group, but I felt pushed by the Gods to put everything together anyway. I had never really been in rituals before save one or two and I certainly had no idea how to write one. Still, I didn’t let that stop us. In the beginning, we did things very simplistically. As a proto-demos, we followed the Hellenion monthly libation schedule. When we started doing these libation rituals (which at the time consisted of just Ben and I), all we did was read a hymn (usually a Homeric hymn, sometimes an Orphic or other hymn) to the deity we were honoring that day and poured the libation. As we got more confident and got more people down the road, we started adding a more elements and filling out the ritual more. Now our libation rituals have taken on a life of their own.
For libation rituals and many rituals in general, there are also many online resources that have ritual templates and examples that you can use for your own group. For libations specifically, Gitana’s “Hellenion Proto-demos tes Hagnes Persephones” website has ritual scripts that we found very useful in putting together our own rituals (in fact, our first libation with more than Ben and I, we used one of her libations rituals directly). Otherwise, for various festivals and other rituals, many Hellenic websites with post rituals for reference for practitioners. There is also the “Hellenic Ritual” Yahoo! group that I have been personally using to collect all of the various rituals that I find online into one place.
Once you start holding rituals, writing your own rituals should become easier. I was once concerned that I could never write my own rituals, but I have found a great love for composing them now and it seems to get easier and easier with each one I write. In the end though, I have a gut feeling that the Gods are just happy that we are honoring them again and would be content with anything we do in that regard, even if it is just reading a Homeric hymn and pouring them a libation of wine. At least, that is how I feel on things.
Ideas on how to choose the best Hellenic holidays for your group to celebrate:
So, now you have some reference materials on rituals you want to start celebrating some of them and then you realize that the Athenians celebrated a lot of festivals and that was just the Athenians, as the rest of Greece had their own festivals as well! Don’t fret. Just as you probably don’t celebrate every American holiday, you probably don’t need to celebrate every Ancient Greek one either. If you wish to try and celebrate all of the holidays, feel free to try, but my advice in the beginning of your groups is to celebrate just a few and add more as you get more comfortable or get more people involved. Our group has a rule of roughly one festival ritual a quarter, but that is not hard and fast and was only set into place so that we don’t get too carried away and burn ourselves out.
Some other ideas might be to focus on a particular deity or group of deities. Many proto-demoi, demoi, eranoi, and other rituals groups have one of more patron deities for themselves or their group. So, for instance, if you group’s patron is Zeus, your group might just focus on celebrating all or as many of the Zeus related festivals as possible. If your group has two patron deities – say Zeus and Athene – then your group could focus on celebrating all of the Zeus and Athene rituals or alternate between the two. For us, our three most active members’ patron deities dictate our ritual calendar for this year and each of the quarters of the year has a celebration planned for one of our deities with the final quarter being a ritual to all of the Gods. This is flexible and will probably change as we are starting to get more members as this year has progressed, but it was a good start and has worked for us.
Some other ideas for things to do once you get people together:
Rituals can be a great way to spend time with your fellow Hellenics, but Hellenismos is a community-based religion and with that you might want to work in more socially oriented events with your group as well. They can have a spiritual bent themselves or maybe just relate to Greek culture, but I find they are very good for fostering relationships between others in your group.
One idea is altar/shrine craft nights. You can all get together at a public place or a member’s house and create crafts related to the Gods. This can be anything from making a Zeus Ktesios shrine to using modeling clay such as Sculpey to create objects for your altars/shrines (ex. an owl for Athene) to making a deity-themed scrapbook. Get creative!
Another idea is symposia. Again you can all get together in a public place or a member’s house, but this time you can set up a discussion of Ancient Greek topics and have share some wine with each other (and even the Gods with libations if you wish). The topics of discussion can range from philosophy, to religion, to myths. It is a great way to get to know your fellow group members and how they feel about certain topics.
One thing that our own group has recently started is what we call “Lectio Homerica.” It is based on the divine reading of scripture in the act of Lectio Divinia, except in this case we are using the Homeric Hymns instead of the Christian Bible. In the Lectio Homerica practice, your group gathers in a quiet place (a member’s home might be best suited for this), someone reads the hymn(s) you have chosen for the evening, people then silently meditate on the words of the hymn(s) for a set time, and then afterward people can share their thoughts and feelings from their meditation. It’s definitely an interesting alternative to ritual for a spiritual group event.
Some other ideas are Greek-related events going on in your city or town. Things can include things like Greek Festivals (which, while modern in nature, often have shops with Ancient Greek themed items), Ancient Greek plays, Ancient Greek exhibits at local museums, movies about Ancient Greek themes (our group saw the recent “300” together), etc. A lot of these events can include people meeting up for the event and maybe coffee and discussion afterward. The possibilities are endless!
Anyway, I could go on and on about other tips and experiences from running my own group, but I hope this will suffice in answering some of the questions you might have had. If you have more, ask me or ask around the community for advice and tips. Also, you might consider looking at books on group dynamics and conflict resolution because we all know that Hellenics can be a passionate bunch and sometimes that comes out in negative ways. One book I would highly suggest is Amber K’s “Covencraft”. While your group may not have a lot in common with the more witchcraft aspects of the book, I think she has a lot of good information about forming a group, dealing with personality conflicts, networking, etc.
I wish you best of luck in your endeavors if you decide to create your own group or have recently created one. It can be frustrating from time to time, but overall I think having a Hellenic group of my own has really enriched my life in so many ways and there are so many times I feel as if the Gods are opening doors for me now that I have shown them I was truly dedicated to making my group work. I hope things will be the same for all of you.
I need to turn in the final draft tomorrow for the deadline, but before then, I wanted to see what you guys thought and if you think I need to change anything.
Things They Never Told You About Forming a Hellenic Ritual Group
Hellenic Polytheists are generally a pretty solitary lot, but unfortunately in many cases it’s not by choice. Many of us find ourselves going to local pagan-oriented meet-ups or festivals and falling through the cracks a bit. Finding other polytheists in the pagan community can be a real challenge for many and on top of that finding other Hellenic polytheists can be even more challenging. Proving to people that ours is valid religion and not just an antiquated extension of those myths many people read in elementary school can be just as hard with pagans as it is with non-pagans.
So, what do we do? We reach out, be it online or through other means of networking to find to find people of like mind that worship our gods and, hopefully, might worship them with us. Sometimes that virtual world is enough for people, but for others, there is a desire to have some real-life worship as well. It’s not just a vanity thing, religion in Ancient Greece was a community-based and the ritual structures often lend themselves better to group worship over solitary worship.
Finding a local Hellenic ritual group can somewhat easily amend this desire for real-life worship, but what do you do when you can’t find any local groups practicing Hellenismos? Well, if you are really dedicated to the idea, you might want to consider forming one yourself. With national organizations like Neokoroi and Hellenion, you can even form a group that is affiliated with them (i.e. an eranos with Neokoroi or proto-demos or demos with Hellenion).
This might sound easy to some, but there is more to forming one of these groups than maybe getting your group’s name added on a link on one of those national organization’s websites and perhaps setting up a Yahoo! or Google group. I know that when I personally went into it about two years ago, I had a lot of a naïve attitude going for me with a “Make it and they will come” outlook and, while that was true in a way, it also took a lot of hard work and a lot of patience. If you think your group will magically come together over night, I hate to break it to you that it probably will not. Still, if you persevere, I think you will be rewarded.
As I said, I started my own group two years ago called Southeastern Hellenes for networking and socializing and to help bring people together to form local ritual groups around the Southeast (even in my own home town). At the time the only other Hellenic I knew in Georgia was my boyfriend Ben and other than that I knew only a handful of people in the Southeast itself. In fact, I thought we would be lucky to ever get more than 10 people (our first goal was to build a website if we ever got that “many” people) and here we are two years later with about 70 members on our Yahoo! group. Given most of those people are not always active on the list (I will go more into that later), but it was from that group that I was final able to form a local Hellenic ritual group (both an eranos and proto-demos) about a year ago.
The whole journey so far has had its ups and downs and I have been watching a few people starting their own groups recently and going through similar issues and getting frustrated. I hoped that maybe in writing about my experiences that I could give some tips and reassurance to those people who have recently started a group or are considering forming one. Your mileage may vary of course, but here are some stumbling blocks I have encountered and some ideas on how to get past them.
Where to meet and when/how often:
So, you have just started your group and maybe at this point it is just you or, if you are lucky, one or two others. Now you need to use the powers of social networking to bring others together. You might even have some ideas about the networking part (which I will go into more below), but for now you are stuck in the logistics of executing the simple things such as where your group can meet up. This simple stumbling block can stall a lot of groups, but hang in there, for there is hope!
Some of the most common options for meet-up locations are pagan bookstores or cafes. With pagan bookstores, often you can find people who are empathetic to what you are doing, people who are supportive of you being a part of a non-mainstream religion, etc. This is not always a viable option for many reasons. For us, we didn’t take that route as a) the largest local pagan/new age store takes an act of the gods to get an official time slot at and b) its hard to do a meet-up with no real meet-up area (some pagan stores have areas with chairs specifically for social events, but this was not the case locally for us). As always, your mileage may vary.
Cafes are good spots for any sort of social networking in general. I mean, cafes are traditionally bastions of intellectual banter and socializing, so why not use it for your own meet-up proposes? For us, we chose cafés that are connected to the Border’s book chain. These cafes were chosen due to their close proximity to books since many Hellenics are also big book geeks and if no one shows up, you can also just have your own fun looking around the store at/for books yourself. Plus, you can always work in a drink or a snack with your meet-up, which is usually quite nice.
Some other options you could take advantage of are meeting rooms in UU Churches (if one of your group members is a member of said church, though they might still be available otherwise), college campuses (if you are a student, you might be able to use the campus meeting rooms for your benefit), public parks (you can meet up in park pavilions and maybe work in a small ritual and/or cookout – this was what our group did in the very beginning), etc. There are probably also places that rent/lease/lend out their space as well, such as public halls or libraries. I don’t have a lot of experience in those areas personally, but I have heard that libraries can be a challenge. Still, check out some of your local libraries to see what your options are. You might be surprised.
Wherever you chose to meet up, bring some sort of sign or identifying object so that the new members can identify you. This can be an immense help.
Once you found a place, you need to pick a time and frequency. I would suggest whatever is most feasible for you, because oftentimes in the beginning, you might be the only one making it to the meet-ups with any consistency. Most importantly, and I can’t stress this enough, is to pick a time and frequency and stick with it. People are generally busy and while they might be interested in showing up at some point, they might not be able to that month, or until Summer, or whatever the case may be. If you are continually changing the day, time, and/or place, it makes it harder for people to know when to show up and also makes it a challenge for people who might need to schedule in advance for things due to work schedules, babysitting needs, etc. For us, we meet on the second Tuesday evening of each month at the same café and on the second Saturday of each month at the same park for libation rituals. It’s easy enough to remember so that people who might be interested know when to come.
How to network about your group:
Networking can be a tricky game, but thankfully there are a lot of resources at your group’s disposal. You can choose options that either cost money or not, but I would suggest in the beginning to try to stick more to low or no-cost options and then maybe add some options that cost money at a later date if you need.
Some free options to consider are things like putting notices up on websites like Witchvox.com, general pagan message boards or mailing lists and/or Hellenic-specific message boards or mailing lists. You can also network in “the real world” with flyers about your group. Such flyers can be posted in places like new age/pagan shops, bookstores, college campuses, pagan festivals, etc. If you are a distributor of “He Epistole”, it’s even highly recommended to attach a flyer of your group so that anyone interested in worship after reading the newsletter might contact you to join your group. Also, depending on the venue available (such as at a New Age store or Pagan Pride Day celebration), it can be free to run a “Hellenismos 101” or other related Hellenic public education workshop and hand out flyers for your group during or afterward. Some of my own group’s biggest leaps in membership have come from people who went to one of our 101 discussions and wanted to learn more.
If you want to spend some money on networking, you could also do a Hellenic public education workshop at a pagan festival. Most of the time this will cost money and even if you get a discount for presenting, you will still have to pay some sort of admission fee. But, if you are already going to said festival, you might want to take the opportunity to network there with your flyers and/or the workshop (a lot of festival planners are eagerly looking for new people to teach classes at their festivals, so it might be pretty easy to get on their schedule of events). Some other options that cost some money are to take out classified ads in publications like pagan magazines and newsletters or college newspapers. You could also order business cards to give to people as you meet them at related events. This can be expensive or relatively cheap depending on the print house.
You might also consider having some sort of web presence. This will enable to you share your link with many other websites (especially ones your group might be affiliated with, such as Neokoroi or Hellenion) and make your group easier to find for people who might be looking via a search engine for such a group in their hometown. This can cost money for a domain, but there are free website options also available (Geocities, Tripod, etc.) as well as affinity groups (Yahoo, Google, etc.) that you can use as your website as well. The latter two are particularly good if you do not have any web design skills and don’t wish to pay for a service or person to design your site for you.
What to do if no one is coming to your meet-ups/rituals/etc.:
This is a bit of an addendum to figuring out where to meet up, but I think it is certainly worth mentioning as it happens to so many groups. It can be common to be the only attendee at your functions in the beginning until the word of your group really starts to get around and things start to fall into place. Don’t lose heart. I have told many people this, as I know how frustrating it can be when it happens. With my own group, it took a good year and a half before getting to the point that we had any sort of regular attendees (most of the time it was just my boyfriend and I and, if we were lucky, perhaps one other person on rare occasion). You must be patient. I truly believe that if you want your group to work out and you are willing to put the work in, that the Gods will bring you the right people.
Focus on yourself. Set up the meet-ups as most convenient to you in the beginning (unless you are already working with a few people, you might want to work out things amongst yourselves). I always just try and look at it as myself going somewhere and people can join me if they would like. For example, say there is a Greek play going on in town and you think it would be a great way to meet other Hellenics. You mention on mailing lists about a meet-up there and once you are actually there, you seem to be the only person who made it. You can get upset and let it spoil the enjoyment of the play or you can just go on to the play as if you were planning on being there alone. If someone else does show, on the other hand, that’s just a bonus. Obviously you want it to be a case where others join you, but I found when I focused on myself and didn’t build up too many expectations for our group events, things became a lot less stressful. Life happens and it’s possible that certain people actually wanted to make it to the event, but for some reason could not. This is no reason to throw in the towel; it was just a matter of bad timing.
What if it’s been a long time and people are still not showing up? In that case, you might need to look into other forms of advertisement or you might need to look at the time and place of the meet-ups or events and see if that is the culprit. In our case, we had several people on our mailing list that said they were interested, but were not coming due to the inconvenient location. This can be a real issue if you live in a big city and you might need to discuss with prospective members or list members where might be most convenient to them to attend events and go from there.
For example, in our case, in the Atlanta area you have people who will not go outside the perimeter of the city and people who will not go inside the perimeter. Sometimes such a trip only involves about a 10-20 minute drive, but can be a headache if you have prospective members spread out both inside and outside said perimeter. In the beginning, we decided to hold our meet-ups in an area of town called Midtown. This was chosen because it was about equidistant for most of the people in the Atlanta area (hence the name, Midtown, as it is sort of located in the middle of things). We thought this might help bring people together, but after months of people generally not showing, it came to light that the location was equally inconvenient for everyone, so no one came! The people in the north and south side of town that were on our mailing list felt it was too far and it was especially far for myself and my boyfriend Ben (the only regulars) who drove about an hour to get there from the extreme north of town. We finally had to bite the bullet, figure out where the largest concentration of local list members lived, and then pick a new place based on that. For us, of the interested people, there were about 4-5 people interested that lived on the more northern side of town and 1 person who lived in the south side of town. Because of the larger concentration of people in the north, we moved to a café in the north. I hated moving things even farther from our member in the south, but I decided going with the majority was best. After that, we started to finally have regular attendees.
Also, one last important thing to remember is to not expect everyone who shows interest to show up at things or be active in the group. For example, if you run a Yahoo! group for your ritual or networking group and you have 20 members on that group, don’t expect those 20 members to necessarily be active in your events. Some people on such mailing lists are passive members and like to just watch what is going on and not necessarily join in on things. I stress this because I have seen many instances where group owners get angry that not everyone is participating in things. I can tell you from experience that my group, while pretty active compared to most, only has about 4 very active members and a handful of people who attend things on occasion. That is in contrast to the 70 or so members on the list and maybe the 20 or so people who are local to my specific ritual group (as the mailing list is regional). I could get frustrated that not everyone is participating, but I try and not waste my energy on that and instead focus more on those that do. Besides, some of those lurkers might just be waiting until they have a free night or even to see if your group is stable before participating. You never know.
What to do if you have never run a ritual/don't have any rituals:
So, you have managed to finally find a good place for people to meet-up and now you want to try your hand a doing rituals with these people. What do you do if you have never run a ritual or you have no rituals to work with? This was certainly the case for our group.
I was pretty new to Hellenismos when I started my group, but I felt pushed by the Gods to put everything together anyway. I had never really been in rituals before save one or two and I certainly had no idea how to write one. Still, I didn’t let that stop us. In the beginning, we did things very simplistically. As a proto-demos, we followed the Hellenion monthly libation schedule. When we started doing these libation rituals (which at the time consisted of just Ben and I), all we did was read a hymn (usually a Homeric hymn, sometimes an Orphic or other hymn) to the deity we were honoring that day and poured the libation. As we got more confident and got more people down the road, we started adding a more elements and filling out the ritual more. Now our libation rituals have taken on a life of their own.
For libation rituals and many rituals in general, there are also many online resources that have ritual templates and examples that you can use for your own group. For libations specifically, Gitana’s “Hellenion Proto-demos tes Hagnes Persephones” website has ritual scripts that we found very useful in putting together our own rituals (in fact, our first libation with more than Ben and I, we used one of her libations rituals directly). Otherwise, for various festivals and other rituals, many Hellenic websites with post rituals for reference for practitioners. There is also the “Hellenic Ritual” Yahoo! group that I have been personally using to collect all of the various rituals that I find online into one place.
Once you start holding rituals, writing your own rituals should become easier. I was once concerned that I could never write my own rituals, but I have found a great love for composing them now and it seems to get easier and easier with each one I write. In the end though, I have a gut feeling that the Gods are just happy that we are honoring them again and would be content with anything we do in that regard, even if it is just reading a Homeric hymn and pouring them a libation of wine. At least, that is how I feel on things.
Ideas on how to choose the best Hellenic holidays for your group to celebrate:
So, now you have some reference materials on rituals you want to start celebrating some of them and then you realize that the Athenians celebrated a lot of festivals and that was just the Athenians, as the rest of Greece had their own festivals as well! Don’t fret. Just as you probably don’t celebrate every American holiday, you probably don’t need to celebrate every Ancient Greek one either. If you wish to try and celebrate all of the holidays, feel free to try, but my advice in the beginning of your groups is to celebrate just a few and add more as you get more comfortable or get more people involved. Our group has a rule of roughly one festival ritual a quarter, but that is not hard and fast and was only set into place so that we don’t get too carried away and burn ourselves out.
Some other ideas might be to focus on a particular deity or group of deities. Many proto-demoi, demoi, eranoi, and other rituals groups have one of more patron deities for themselves or their group. So, for instance, if you group’s patron is Zeus, your group might just focus on celebrating all or as many of the Zeus related festivals as possible. If your group has two patron deities – say Zeus and Athene – then your group could focus on celebrating all of the Zeus and Athene rituals or alternate between the two. For us, our three most active members’ patron deities dictate our ritual calendar for this year and each of the quarters of the year has a celebration planned for one of our deities with the final quarter being a ritual to all of the Gods. This is flexible and will probably change as we are starting to get more members as this year has progressed, but it was a good start and has worked for us.
Some other ideas for things to do once you get people together:
Rituals can be a great way to spend time with your fellow Hellenics, but Hellenismos is a community-based religion and with that you might want to work in more socially oriented events with your group as well. They can have a spiritual bent themselves or maybe just relate to Greek culture, but I find they are very good for fostering relationships between others in your group.
One idea is altar/shrine craft nights. You can all get together at a public place or a member’s house and create crafts related to the Gods. This can be anything from making a Zeus Ktesios shrine to using modeling clay such as Sculpey to create objects for your altars/shrines (ex. an owl for Athene) to making a deity-themed scrapbook. Get creative!
Another idea is symposia. Again you can all get together in a public place or a member’s house, but this time you can set up a discussion of Ancient Greek topics and have share some wine with each other (and even the Gods with libations if you wish). The topics of discussion can range from philosophy, to religion, to myths. It is a great way to get to know your fellow group members and how they feel about certain topics.
One thing that our own group has recently started is what we call “Lectio Homerica.” It is based on the divine reading of scripture in the act of Lectio Divinia, except in this case we are using the Homeric Hymns instead of the Christian Bible. In the Lectio Homerica practice, your group gathers in a quiet place (a member’s home might be best suited for this), someone reads the hymn(s) you have chosen for the evening, people then silently meditate on the words of the hymn(s) for a set time, and then afterward people can share their thoughts and feelings from their meditation. It’s definitely an interesting alternative to ritual for a spiritual group event.
Some other ideas are Greek-related events going on in your city or town. Things can include things like Greek Festivals (which, while modern in nature, often have shops with Ancient Greek themed items), Ancient Greek plays, Ancient Greek exhibits at local museums, movies about Ancient Greek themes (our group saw the recent “300” together), etc. A lot of these events can include people meeting up for the event and maybe coffee and discussion afterward. The possibilities are endless!
Anyway, I could go on and on about other tips and experiences from running my own group, but I hope this will suffice in answering some of the questions you might have had. If you have more, ask me or ask around the community for advice and tips. Also, you might consider looking at books on group dynamics and conflict resolution because we all know that Hellenics can be a passionate bunch and sometimes that comes out in negative ways. One book I would highly suggest is Amber K’s “Covencraft”. While your group may not have a lot in common with the more witchcraft aspects of the book, I think she has a lot of good information about forming a group, dealing with personality conflicts, networking, etc.
I wish you best of luck in your endeavors if you decide to create your own group or have recently created one. It can be frustrating from time to time, but overall I think having a Hellenic group of my own has really enriched my life in so many ways and there are so many times I feel as if the Gods are opening doors for me now that I have shown them I was truly dedicated to making my group work. I hope things will be the same for all of you.
