A homily for the New Moon on July 24, 2025. Written, as always, without authority.
Dearly Beloved,
Blessed New Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and the name of the Divine on this, the New Moon in Leo.
Monday—the 28th—is my birthday. Just wanted to let my inner six-year old girl tell you all that before I burst. Wave to the nice people, Little Alice. 👋
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Now that I have that out of the way…let’s talk about family.
Family is a fraught subject for many of us. I love my Father. I honor him and give an incense offering to his spirit every night before I go to bed. But I wasn’t raised by him. The people who raised me, my maternal grandparents, lied to me until I was 12 years old and told me they were my parents. My Father was kept a secret from me and I was kept a secret from him. My Mother went along with it. Things didn’t go well. I ended up homeless at 16.
My wife’s family, on the other hand, took me in like a wounded kitten. When my wife and I both had severe chronic illnesses present themselves within a year of each other, they made clear we were not going to be left to fend for ourselves. My Mother-In-Law knows my favorite color and that I eat banana nut bread and Greek yogurt for breakfast every morning. My Father-In-Law drives for two hours every couple of weeks each year during the fishing season to bring me fresh salmon. I held my 18 year old nephew in my arms as an infant and just helped my 6 year old niece celebrate her birthday last April.
Family is complicated.
Over the last year or so, and especially the last few months, I have had more mystical experiences and encounters with the gods than I have had over the rest of my entire 29 year magickal and mystical career. They have also been extremely varied and complex. Most of the contents of those experiences are for me. I generally don’t share the content of my mystical experiences as such. Despite my respect and admiration for such texts, I will almost assuredly never produce something like Liber 418. Sure, the contents of my mystical experiences show up all through my poetry and I refer to bits and pieces in my pastoral writing, but up until now I have more or less believed that I should keep the content of such experiences to myself and that a great deal of mischief over the course of history has been done by people sharing such experiences with others. But now I have something to say.
All the gods are family.
This family is broken.
This family must be healed.
I know how that sounds. It sounds crazy. Deities are principles of existence. The Neoplatonists and Hermeticists are not wrong. But they don’t tell the whole truth. Deities are also fundamentally people. The testimony of Hesiod’s “Theogony”, for example, shows a clear system of ontological descent from Chaos to the Primordials to the Titans to the Olympians and so on. But each of these deities (except Chaos…we don’t know much about Them or why They did—waves at the world—this) clearly have beliefs, desires, interiority, and projects, the whole personhood kit. Some myths are more vague than others, of course, but, especially as the ontological chain gets closer to us, we see more and more clear indications of personhood, and by the time the chain gets to the Olympians we see a lot of tales of demigods, humans with divine ancestry. The testimony of myth also shows that humans are a part of the ontological chain descending from Chaos in one way or another, with many myths claiming the Titan Prometheus created humanity from clay and Orphic Tradition claiming humans sprang from the combined ashes of Zagreus and the Titans that consumed Him.
And this is just the Greek tradition…the Aesir and the Vanir? People. The Hindu gods? People. The Orisha? People. Yes, yes, they are principles of existence, forces of nature, even sometimes mathematico-logical principles like the sephiroth, but the myths don’t talk about math, they talk about people. Yes, the divine properties are the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, but when we reach out to a deity we are met by a person, Martin Buber’s Thou to our I, not ideas, no matter how those beautiful those ideas may be.
In the same way, the myths are pretty clear that the gods are family. A big, convoluted, and pretty fucked up family. A family where transgressive violence—how this actually took place in physical terms may very well be universal catastrophic events like the Big Bang and the period of intensely energetic expansion immediately after—led to rupture, the creation of a space where a new order could come into existence. Ouranos locks away His children in the underworld. Cronus attacks and deposes His father Ouranos. Zeus, in turn, does the same to His father Cronus. Zeus punishes the Titans Prometheus and Atlas, His uncles, horribly.
These are only a few examples among many. Many—if not most—other polytheistic traditions record similar mythic themes of family connections and violence. Even the ostensibly monotheistic Christian tradition has the myths of the “War For Heaven” and the “Fall Of Lucifer And The Rebel Angels”, which presents a story of family strife and rebellious children that becomes an origin story for the current spiritual situation as reported by mainstream Christianity.
There is also the modern historical and social situation wherein the god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, known by many names, came to dominance in our world through violence. Massive violence sprawled out over millennia. The devotees of this god, of course, consider their deity the only deity, but as a polytheist I believe that their god is just one of many. While I agree that there is a transcendent ground of all being such as the Ain Soph of the Qabalah or Nuit of Thelema, I conclude from the contents of the Tanakh such as passages like Deuteronomy 32:8-9 that the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not that deity. We can also conclude from this passage that the current state of the world is a breach of the ordained world order…the Tanakh says that “YHVH’s portion was his people, [Israel] his allotted inheritance”. Thus this conquest of much of the world by Yahweh and the violent suppression of the worship—or even knowledge—of other deities is another act of violence among the family of the gods that brought about a new world order.
So while I am saying all of this specifically because I had mystical experiences, this is not Unverified Personal Gnosis. This is the testimony of many different religious, magickal, and mystical traditions…and my UPG, too.
I’ve known these things since I was a child, of course. I read both Bulfinch’s and Hamilton’s mythology collections obsessively when I was little because I was already feeling the call of the gods. But right now it feels urgent. It feels like we must finally address these great generational harms, the harms that have been done by human to human, yes, but clearly also by deity to deity and family member to family member. We have allowed bad actors, human, spirit, and deity, to define the rules of the game for far too long and this aching world is suffering so much because of it.
I am not sure what repairing this family looks like yet. Some of it is here in the world and has to be done by humanity. We are part of the great family and we must take responsibility for the power—ethical, political, technological, and magickal—that our divine origins have granted us. We can change the world…we must live up to that responsibility and change the world for the better.
But some of this repair has to happen on the other planes of reality, in the Heavens and the Underworld and all the realms in between. This family must be healed. And that means at least some of our mystical work has to shift accordingly. Theurgy—god-working—must come to include theiatry, a term I am coining right now based upon the Greek θεό/θεά root, meaning “deity”, and the ἰατρεία suffix, meaning “healing”.
In the language of the Greek tradition, I believe that the Titans, the Hecatoncheires, and Cyclopes must be released from their prisons, that Atlas and Prometheus must be freed from their burdens, and whatever Giants survive must be freed. All of this must, of course, be accompanied by the work that actually brings a lasting peace between all parties…the Giants are great and wild powers of raw existence, yes, but they are also people, just like the rest of us, and they must do the work to be reconciled back into the family just like anyone else. Everyone has to do the work.
The realms—which by my reckoning are the Primordial, Ouranic, Faerie, Earthly, and Cthonic—must be reconciled. We have been torn apart for far too long.
I am not saying that this work should replace our normal mystical and devotional practices. We must still do our Work and the gods are still deserving of our love. I am instead reaching out to those of you who might feel resonance with this idea of theiatry to join with me in trying to heal these relationships.
Again:
All the gods are family.
This family is broken.
This family must be healed.
And we are part of that family, dear ones, either as the special creations of the Titan Prometheus or the combined ashes of Zagreus and the Titans. We, too, must be reconciled, one to another and all of us to the gods. We must become a family again.
We must be healed.
So let us reach up, up, up and down, down, down. Let us reach out to the worlds around and within. Let us reconcile the realms and heal the wounds of the past.
Let us be family.
Blessed New Moon, dear ones. Keep an eye out for my special birthday post on the 28th.
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: Giovanni Bellini, Dosso Dossi, and Titian, “The Feast Of The Gods”, (1514)
I hear you loud and clear. I will be implementing this in my practice 🙏🏼 thank you
And thank you for hearing me.
Let the family be healed.
I’ve sensed this too. The ones who walk with me are longing for the repentance of Lucifer, the white man. I think Lucifer is the egregore demiurge of white male narcissism. What most Christians call the “Heavenly Father” is this demiurge. There’s a personal quality to it but it’s more amalgamation of spiritual energy than independent presence. YHWH is the breath of love, not the conqueror projected by narcissists. I think the healing of the gods happens as we smash all our personal mythologies together and see what poetry emerges. My sense is that all of us are fundamentally archetypes playing around in bodies and the archetypes evolve through our play. The path of healing for me is into greater whimsy and art and out of hypervigilance, rigid gravity, suspicion, paranoia, etc.
Interesting insights, though I don’t use the symbolic language you use.
I consider Lucifer/Ha-Satan a sympathetic figure, one of the family of the gods, whose rejection by YHVH, His father, is a rejection of accountability. In Job, we see Ha-Satan hanging out in the Heavens with the rest of the family, and He acts as questioner and accuser. He tries to hold Job accountable and He tries to hold YHVH accountable. I think the “War For Heaven” happened after this, where YHVH basically cast out the exact person who was supposed to keep Him honest and grounded.
We need Ha-Satan. He is essentially the angel/god of accountability. Him being outcast means that YHVH has no one to keep Him honest. Lucifer being cast out of Heaven is equivalent to Prometheus being bound up and tortured by Zeus. An important part of the punishment is that Prometheus is kept from being able to concentrate…He is constantly in agony or anticipation of agony. This makes it impossible for Prometheus—the god of forethought—to do His job.
Have you been reading my essay series “Reclaiming Mysticism”? I think what you call Lucifer is more what I am calling the spirit Empire. I think we are referring to the same problem, of course, but by different names. Part of that is because I come from a fundamentally polytheistic (and mostly Greek pantheon) position, but I am very flexible about such matters.
Yeah I think my mythological frame tends to be an intra-Christian polemic. Because I see in the garden of Eden a representation of what the evangelical narcissist megachurch preacher does: offering the knowledge of good and evil as a fruit that curses humanity under the spell of authoritarianism. Because of my polemical position, I can’t go with a positive divine rebel/whistleblower reading of Satan though I respect it. I also identify myself with Lucifer a lot. Lucifer is the version of me that’s angry and resentful at a Heavenly Father who rejects me. Starchild is the version of me that realizes there is no Heavenly Father but only a divine mother who delights in me. Also my first middle and last name each have six letters which is kind of creepy.
I am sympathetic and empathetic with your position, even if I do not share it.
What do you think of my notion of theiatry as a mystical modality? What I am concerned about is the healing of the family, not the specifics of any given mage/mystic’s particular relationships with particular deities. Whatever else is true of YHVH and Lucifer/Ha-Satan, I believe that it is true that They are family, that we are family with Them, that this family we are in is broken, and that this family must be healed.
Essentially, I feel like a lot of the details of what and who everyone actually is—like wtf deities actually are, how it all works, etc—are just unknowable to us in our current framework. So I think either or both of us could be closer to accurate about the details, but I also think that our accuracy about those theological details is less important than what we do about it. Whatever we are and whatever deities are, it seems to me that a large part of our existence is all about getting into the right kinds of relationships with deities. My recent visions and insights are about doing that, but they are also about us helping the gods get into the right kinds of relationships with each other, too.
Right. I think that theiatry is exactly what I’m trying to do in my mythological framework. Isn’t that wild how close it is to the word theater? Basically my guides are wanting to enact a story of repentance and healing for the white man. And patriarchy in general. So part of the myth is that the goddess of love incarnates into priestess avatars who overthrow the curse of patriarchy and slay all the tight-ass lucifers with the beauty of their art.
This is how I’m seeing theiatry working! I want to write new myths of reconciliation that will then turn into a new set of mystery ritual/plays/stories for people to enact in their personal work or to do as groups (if you look at the other two liturgies I’ve written, they are structured for groups but work solo just fine). I want to tell stories of what happens after Zeus has had a few thousand years to miss His father and tries to mend fences. I want to tell stories of Atlas setting down His burden and returning home. Stories of the five realms being reconciled.
Right. And it makes sense that this would be the original purpose of theater. It was sacred art in a way that modern western aesthetic sensibilities can’t understand. I’ve been dreaming for a long time of creating participatory theatrical improv/dance experiences rooted in mythological stories. I kinda want to create some brand new mythologies too. I really want to see something like the Eleusinian mysteries but perhaps updated to be authentic to our mythological landscape.
Same. Great processions where we act out the Olympians going into Tartarus to free the Titans. Zeus and Cronus working through their trauma and feelings. The freeing and healing of Prometheus. That sort of thing.
Yeah somehow I feel like this is really going to happen. And I want it to also be a rave with EDM and opera and spoken word poetry. I’ve dreamed of having a psychedelic retreat/immersive art experience over the course of Easter weekend to have crucifixion, visiting the underworld, and rebirth on the three days.
this is deeply moving, alice. thank you for letting us sit with this sacred complexity. so much of what you wrote feels like ancestral truth rising through the cracks of empire’s forgetting. i’ll be thinking about theiatry for a long time. blessed new moon to you and little alice both 🕯️
Thank you! This is a big moment for me in my spiritual life…the work of 29 years coming to culmination. The mystical experiences have been ramping up accordingly. So now it’s finally time to share with the class.
what a powerful threshold to arrive at. i’m honored to witness even a glimpse. blessed be, alice.
Excellent essay, Alice. I love the idea of healing the divine family. It reminds a pagan version of tikkun olam, another concept I love. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you! I am familiar with the notion of tikun olam and have been deeply influenced by it. I’ve studied the Hermetic Qabalah and what of the Jewish Kabbalah is appropriate for me to study for most of my life.