Venerable Ones
Geoffrey Stewart, 2020
Standing at the crossroads of despair and determination one must observe the niceties. Offerings of cakes; libations of milk, and honey blended with water.
“For myself, my people, and my nation,
To the Kindly Ones do I call,
To the Erinyes to I direct my cries,
Doom laden ladies, hear my pleas!
Megaira! Alekto! Tisiphone!
Sisters three, blessed be, and hail to Thee!
Once more turn thy cloaks, from white to black.
Sacred Oaths have been broken by those sworn to their service. They have broken their oaths to their God. They have broken their oaths to our Nation. They have placed their interests over the interests of the Nation they are sworn to serve and protect. They have violated the sacred trust of their positions. They have courted and crafted and stirred division and anger and fear in the hearts and minds of the people. They have cast aside all pretense of honor or integrity or decency and spread a blanket of slander and falsehood and suffering across the land.
They have allowed a plague to ravage the nation. They have brought strife and violence and evil intent into the lives of the people they are meant to serve. They have taken food from the mouths of hungry elders. They have ripped children away from their parents, placed them in cages and treated them worse than animals. They have torn the seeds of descendants from the bodies of helpless captive women.
They have rent and tattered and soiled the robes of Themis and Eleutheria and Dice with the savagery of their assaults.
Serpent haired huntresses of the night raise your torches and ready your brass tipped scourges to track and to harry these evildoers into flight and ruination.”
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Someone is bound to freak out over this simple petitionary prayer and accuse me of semi-publicly casting curses; which is of course best done in extremis and in private.
Nothing could be further from the truth here however. This is a petitionary prayer to ancient Goddesses from the ages before the reign of Zeus, whose areas of concern are related to (among other things) the breaking of oaths. Some historians and scholars posit that they are the personification and deification of the curse that befalls an oath-breaker.
Our prayer then is, of course a petition for divine justice and if need be retribution. The canny, or perhaps uncanny, practitioner could derive from today’s poem an effective and therapeutic rite to petition Them. The only real requirement for calling upon Them is that one be a wronged victim of said oath-breaking, and the accused’s other forms of nastiness. They would then examine the matter and determine if Their attention was truly required.
Preferred offerings and a polite tone can work wonders after all.
Chrysalis 