Monthly Devotions to Eros in 2023

Whether you are a devotee of Eros, just beginning to connect with Him, or just curious about Eros, devotion is the most basic and powerful practice you can do. In most current magical paths it is common to practice devotion to the divinities according to the passage of the moons and the seasons; with Eros you can do it in the same way, depending on the area in which you live, according to the rhythms that you observe in nature and the sacred times that mark the tradition that you follow, if you follow one, although here we will only give you the dates and the basics so you can adapt it to your needs.

Monthly Devotions to Eros 2023

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The work of a Priest of Eros

You may have noticed for a while that the social networks of the Shrine of Eros have had very little activity. It is mainly due to the fact that both my devotion to Eros and my priestly work have ended on a more mundane plane because that is how I have felt that Eros was asking me, or that it was the most appropriate way at this time to honor him. I have always believed that the work and the title of priest only make sense in a community. A priest is the one who consecrates his life to one or more divinities, but he is also the one who consecrates his life in a community, bringing that divinity closer to the rest in multiple ways.

Rev. Roble Tormenta during the Pride protests in 2021 in his city

Activism as sacred labor

This year I felt the need to get more actively involved in the LGBTIQ+ community in my city and that is why I joined the LGBTIQ+ association in my city and assumed roles of responsibility. For me, part of my devotion and my service to Eros consists in bringing the sacred closer to LGBTIQ+ people but as a member of the community and with everything I did focused on him, I felt that something was missing.

In a fairly fluid way I ended up in contact with the association and in no time was helping to organize protest marchs and activities during the Pride that was held this year. Later, I ended up creating safe spaces so that people of all sexual orientations and gender identities could express themselves freely, I put myself in the front row demanding rights and that measures be taken to end the growing wave of LGBTIQphobic crimes that has occurred in Spain during 2021, I counseled and accompanied people who needed some guidance, created informational material and spent hours in fundraising activities so that we could continue doing more activities.

All of that is what activism is, because not everything has to do with going out and demonstrating, and each and every one of those things has been a sacred work dedicated to Eros. I may not be physically close to a community that feels a devotion to Eros, but I do have very close to people who can benefit from that work even if they don’t share those beliefs. This also ties in with what it means to be a priest for the Fellowship of Isis, a priesthood which I am now studying, since accepting that priesthood implies accepting voluntary work done to help develop the divine plan of the deities. At the Fellowship of Isis, the priesthood involves commitment and daily service that can translate among other things into human rights activism, including LGBTIQ+ activism.

A priest does much more than ritual labor

A priest not only has to dedicate himself to guiding rituals and prayers, he also has to be in some way the vehicle of the divine energy to which he has dedicated himself. This can be translated in many ways depending on the deity; In the case of Eros, it implies work to re-sacralize and naturalize everything that has to do with sex and gender, work for a more peaceful, loving and tolerant society, educate in sexual health and teach about Eros and related divinities.

I still remember something that Jana de Madrid used to say, a priestess of the Goddess Tradition in Iberia whom we lost a little over a year ago, and that is that the less beautiful aspects of being a priest or a priestess are not always valued since cleaning, stocking the temple and take care for your community are far less flashy but just as or more necessary than leading rituals or becoming a charismatic teacher who teaches about divine mysteries. I always agreed with what Jana said and now I realize that in reality the priestly work is something much bigger and that few people are truly willing to take on.

Being a priest of any divinity does not have to imply being a leader or the center of attention, which, unfortunately, is what we most often see as many people aspire to. We can look at larger religions and see that not everyone who exercises the priesthood does so from the most public position and works for their communities without seeking any fame. I also do not believe that people’s work should not be recognized and some tasks require more recognition than others for the time and effort spent on them, but the pursuit of fame or notoriety is not the purpose of the priesthood.

For me, being a priest implies working in the fields that this deity governs both spiritually and in the mundane. He requires knowing how to offer spiritual advice and tools but also everyday actions and ordinary solutions to ordinary problems. With the passage of time I have understood that today being a priest of Eros implies both teaching and guiding in spiritual things for those who share the devotion and going out to the streets and making the world a more dignified place where the worship of Eros can exist anywhere and for the latter it is necessary to fix a lot of things that go wrong in the system in which we live. Working in the mundane also has repercussions in the spiritual, not only because it makes your connection with that deity closer but because it gives you a deeper vision of what you should work spiritually seeing by seeing the areas of the ordinary world where the presence of that deity is most needed. divinity.

Where are the lesbian goddesses?

When we delve into the myths and stories of the different cultures, lesbianism does not seem to have almost any kind of prominence. There are goddesses who can have some relationship with beings of the same sex, but this is usually somewhat anecdotical in their stories and more than lesbians they would be considered bisexual or pansexual since they usually also have relationships with men. If we know that homosexual relationships in both sexes are as old as humanity, where are the lesbian goddesses?

Detail of "Diana en el Baño" by Francisco Reigón (1858)
Detail of Diana en el Baño by Francisco Reigón (1858)

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How to bottle love, brew desire, even put a stopper on a heartbreak

Love Spells

One of the most common requests that people who dedicate themselves to witchcraft or magic in some way are usually related to love. Since the Shrine was founded, we have received a large number of messages and requests about recovering an ex, making someone feel or stop feeling something for another person, amarres (mooring love spells), sweetening spells… All these requests tend to seek only love and happiness of those who do them and do not take into account or do not know how the magic they are requesting will work.

Conjuring love: how “love spells” work

There are many people who advertise promising to recover lost loves or that someone will miraculously fall in love with you, usually with amarres (mooring/tie love spells) or sweetening spells. These types of spells are often sold as enhancers of feelings that already exist between the two people to “restore harmony” between them. The truth is that they don’t restore any harmony or balance, but rather subjugate the will and feelings of the other person in favor of the desire or whim of the person requesting the magic.

Sweetening spells supposedly work by nullifying or minimizing negative feelings, and amarres create a kind of obsession about a person. Those who do this type of thing assure that there has to be some kind of feeling for the magic to work but as they act, any minimally positive feeling would work, even a friendship without romantic interest, because the person under its influence will be deprived of the rest of emotions towards whoever requests these spells and will only have a single feeling.

The will is actually overridden and deprives someone of their emotions just because of someone else’s desire or whim. The emotions of a person are their and they belong only to that person, wanting to control the emotions of others for own benefit is selfish and more than showing love shows the need for control as if that person were an object. Amarres and sweetening spells are a hijacking of emotions and are built on the same logic of the abuser that forces you to be with him even if you don’t want to.

Love Potions: From Emotional Toxic to Medical Toxic

Another of the most popular requests are the preparations of agua de calzón (literally panty water) and other types of “love” potions. For those who do not know, the agua de calzón is a type of potion that could be classified as a amarre that consists of boiling, together with other ingredients, the used underwear of the person who wants to attract with the one who requests the magic and is given drink the first one. Like the spells that we describe before, they are governed by exactly the same patterns of control and domination over the other, in addition, the freedom and free will of the person to whom the potion is directed will continue to be restricted.

But the agua de calzón has another problem, perhaps even more immediate: it is unhealthy. No matter how much the two pieces of underwear are boiled together, the bacteria, residues and other things can remain on them after being used still pose a health risk. Also other potions that use plants can be quite harmful, either because of the quantities of the recipes that are usually found or because they directly use poisonous plants or ingredients that are not suitable for consumption. It would not be the first time that someone comes saying that they asked to a supposed witch for a love potion and they believe that the witch has cursed them because they are physically ill, the fact it is that they have been intoxicated with what they believed to be a love potion.

The “love” created by magic will never be real love

Another of the great disadvantages of this type of magic usually comes as a warning by those who sell it: it is not permanent. Along with the expiration date, they usually remind their clients that this type of magic needs to be renewed from time to time if it is to continue working since if not to do so when its power dissipates the person could develop totally opposite feelings, what would we expect if we have forced someone to be by our side against their will?

Just as an abuser or a sect would do, this type of spells, rituals and potions nullify the will and convince the other person of what they are feeling. The moment the spell ends or is not renewed, the person is free from the influence of magic and can return to theyself realizing all the things that have been done to they during all that time because if they wanted to leave they would really do it for some reason. In addition, amarres, sweetening spells, agua de calzón and similar magic create an obsession, an addiction for a person, and the addiction can be dangerous and if you don’t how dangerous can be ask anyone who has had problems with drugs or alcohol.

How to get over a broken heart

Almost all the people who go to this type of magic usually do it after a break or when it is next. What they are living is, as the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said, the third stage of mourning: negotiation, that is to say, all possible means are used to reverse the situation that is causing us pain.

The pain of a broken heart, like the pain caused by death, is pain that affects all areas of our life. As the psychotherapist Cate Masheder, specialized in trauma and grief, said in the BBC series Like Minds: “In the past we thought that over time this pain would get smaller and disappear. But the focus now is that this pain it remains as it is, but our life grows around it.” There is no magic that can prevent us from pain, not in a healthy way, but if we can resort to magic that brings us new joys, that helps us to grow and develop our lives, so that we can heal naturally.

The magic of real love

So if all that they sell us as magic of love does not attract real love, does the magic of love exist? Yes, but don’t create love out of nothing. The magic of love has a different character, it has less to do with romantic love and more with self-love. If we want someone to notice us, we can make a spell that highlights our qualities and virtues, in that process we can not only make that person see us, but we will also be boosting our self-esteem by valuing who we are.

We all have good qualities that can be attractive to others but normally we do not take advantage of them because we do not value ourselves enough, the magic of love usually works at that level, in helping us to enhance those qualities. Even the true magic of love that involves others aims to reinforce, in a consensual way, the link that already exists, not to try to mend something that is clearly already broken.

Using magic to make someone fall in love with us usually means that we are seeking approval from others when we deny ourselves, that is not healthy. As the drag queen RuPaul would say: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”; this does not mean that if you don’t love yourself unconditionally you don’t deserve to be loved, that means that love must be disinterested and no one can give you what self love can give you.

Eros is not Cupid: differences and similarities

Eros is not Cupid: differences and similaritiesOne of the most common problems when someone wants to get close to Eros is that the information they can find is limited and when they find it, it doesn’t even get to be all about Eros. The simplification and didactics to bring mythology to people of all kinds has made that when the figures of Eros and Cupid are explained they are equivalent and that the attributes of one and the other are interchangeable when they were not originally. But there is also a historical reason that to this day we continue to drag this error, an error that many people within paganism and witchcraft, when they enter the worship of any of these gods, fail to recognize because most of the more habitual sources usually repeat it.

Read moreEros is not Cupid: differences and similarities

Freedom ritual with Eros Eleuterio

Freedom ritual with Eros Eleuterio

We live in a time when we need to reclaim freedom and our rights in the face of oppression that does not seem backwards, but on the contrary it seems that every day wants to get bigger and stronger again every day. We need to counteract the efforts of those who want to undermine our freedom or who don’t move a finger because things get better. We must claim our freedom and our rights by all possible means such as demonstrations, protests, activism of all kinds, etc., but as pagans and withces we can also resort to our spirituality to give an extra boost to all this.  This rite is intended within LGBTIQ + Pride week but can be used to support other movements such as Black Lives Matter, the feminist movement or any other movement that fights against oppression and deprivation of rights and freedoms.

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Eros Eleutherios: the god of freedom

Eros Eleutherio

As much as we search we will not find a goddess of freedom in the Hellenic pantheon as we find Libertas in the Roman pantheon, although we do find Eleuteria as a personification of freedom without worship or temples. And it is not that the Greeks did not have a concept of freedom, but it seems that they associated freedom with different gods and worshiped each of them because regardless of their main domain they had power over freedom. That is why we can find the epithet Eluterios or Eleuterias in different divinities, Eros is one of them and under this epithet the influence of Eros is extremely special.

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Time doesn’t heal everything

Time doesn't heal everything

The people usually say that time heals everything, but I know that’s not true. Pain does not disappear over time, you have to accept it, you have to integrate it and work to heal it, only time is not capable to heal anything just as time is not capable to heal an open wound, if we don’t treat the wound, the wound will never heal. Time is essential in recovery, but if we do nothing to treat the problem as we do with a physical ailment the emotional ailments will only worsen.

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Cast and find a safe space

Cast and find a safe space

Detail of “The Magic Circle” by John William Waterhouse.

A few weeks ago a trans man wrote to me because in an LGBTQ + group he joined, they began to try him crazy and insult him only for his transsexual status. The group in question was created to create community and support among the members of the collective but what community and what support can we expect from someone who discriminates against others because they are different? The answer is no so much. Just a few days ago, something similar happened in a witchcraft group where comments first came up against sexual and gender diversity and second against Wiccans, although fortunately the moderators and the administrator cut those comments down. Now, imagine that you are an LGBTQ + person and that you also belong to Wicca. How would you feel if they question and attack two parts of your identity as important as your sexual orientation or gender identity and your beliefs?

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We are a Correllian Formal Shrine

Santuario de Eros Correllian Wicca

When this Shrine was founded on August 18, 2015 one of its objectives was to be recognized by the Correllian Nativist Tradition of Wicca as a Formal Shrine. This recognition is only granted to priests and priestesses who request it within the Tradition and after being initiated as a priest of first degree our guardian, the Rev. Roble Tormenta, requested the recognition of Formal Shrine being granted this only a few days later.

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