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FESTIVAL SUGGESTIONS FOR
SOLITARIES AND SMALL GROUPS
One of the sad facts facing most reconstructionists today – especially those of us who are Greco-Egyptian syncreticists, a minority within two minority faiths - is the solitariness of our worship. We’re lucky if there’s a co-religionist in our state, and even if that proves to be the case it’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to participate in communal worship. After all, they may be too far away to meet regularly, or even if they are close by that doesn’t mean that they’re going to worship the same gods as you, or do so in the same manner since reconstructionism embraces a wide spectrum of personal practice. Reading accounts of ancient worship with lavish rituals and processionals including hundreds of people can be discouraging, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from doing something anyway. After all, true worship is carried out in the heart – and for that you need only yourself and the gods. To that end, we here at Neos Alexandria have put together a series of articles exploring how people can scale back these large communal festivals so that they can be observed privately or within a small group setting. Most of the suggestions that follow consist of simple devotional activities that can be performed throughout the days of a festival. Remember that most festivals consisted of processions, competitions, dances, music, feasting, etc. in addition to whatever formal ritual was to be observed. If you’re looking for a simple fill-in-the-blanks ritual template that can be done in a single setting spanning perhaps twenty minutes, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere. We don’t believe that that kind of thing makes for good ritual under normal circumstances, and that holds doubly true for our festivals, which have a powerful symbolic value embedded in each of the actions that comprise the festival, and further are intended to be things of beauty and joyousness for our gods. Eventually we hope to have these suggestions in place for all of the major festivals of the Neos Alexandria religious calendar.
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