I have decided to celebrate Samhainn–opening my year as a Druid Apprentice–with a rite honoring Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. It seems appropriate since not only is Samhainn traditionally a time to celebrate the dead, when the gates of the underworlds are thrown open and the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead are thinner, but it is also a celebration of the harvest (the final harvest!). And coincidentally, it also can be conceptualized as the threshold between fall and winter, which in Greek Mythology is the time when Persephone leaves her mother Demeter and goes to reign in the underworld with her husband, Hades. Demeter’s grief at the loss of her daughter inaugurates winter, when plants turn brown and die and the earth goes cold, and it stays that way until Persephone returns in the spring, bringing with her the rebirth of the living world.

Unfortunately one of my main resources for prayers honoring the Hellenic gods is now lost for all time thanks to the death of Geocities, so I don’t really have a prayer honoring Hades, and I am having a hard time writing one. I’m sure this bottle of Jaegermeister next to me isn’t helping, but I just don’t know enough about Hades to write a decent prayer to him.
So I’m stuck, and cranky. And tipsy, I guess. I think I’m going to play video games online with my brother and worry about this tomorrow. Of course, the problem with that attitude is that I plan on celebrating Samhainn on Sunday, and Sunday keeps getting closer. I mean, if all else fails, I guess I can always just come up with a sort of impromptu invocation, and that’s probably what nI’m going to wind up doing. So the whole thing isn’t foiled; I’m just feeling irritatingly uncreative. Maybe I should try to pray to Hades before Sunday, and ask for a bit of his dread underworld inspiration. I mean, if anyone knows how Hades wants to be honored, it would probably be Hades, right?

I do have a lot of other cool stuff planned for the holiday, but this rite is sort of supposed to be the fulcrum of the whole thing, and celebrating the Wheel of the Year is supposed to be a part of my AODA First-Degree Druid curriculum, so it is kind of important to me.

On the other hand, I did manage to be creative to write a New Eleusinian Mystery Rite. It’s fairly awesome, and contains the secrets of life, death, and immortality, but I don’t know anyone who I can initiate who can then turn around and initiate me. And what’s the point of having initiatory mysteries that nobody gets initiated into? And it’s not really the kind of thing you can initiate yourself into, either.