This month Star Club invites you to our Lammas celebration with a ritual inspired by the ancient festivals of Aphrodisia and Adonia. Led by Dr. Halo Quin, this will be an exciting event honouring Aphrodite and Adonis. All levels of magical practitioners are welcome.
Lammas is one of the 4 fire festivals of the Celtic calendar, and important to magicians and pagans of all denominations. It is associated with the harvest and cleansing, and Star Club will perform an Open Ritual involving release, cleansing, and renewal.
“The Aphrodisia festival (Ancient Greek: Ἀφροδίσια) was an annual festival held in Ancient Greece in honor of the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite (Ancient Greek: Ἀφροδίτη Πάνδημος). It took place in several Ancient Greek towns, but was especially important in Attica and on the island of Cyprus, where Aphrodite was venerated with a magnificent celebration.
The festival occurred during the month of Hekatombaion, which modern scholars recognize as starting from the third week in July to the third week of August on the Gregorian calendar. Aphrodite was worshipped in most towns of Cyprus, as well as in Cythera, Sparta, Thebes, Delos, and Elis, and her most ancient temple was at Paphos. Textual sources explicitly mention Aphrodisia festivals in Corinth and in Athens, where the many prostitutes that resided in the city celebrated the festival as a means of worshipping their patron goddess.
The Aphrodisia festival was one of the most important ceremonies in Delos, though we do not know much about the details of the celebration. The inscriptions merely indicate that the festival required the purchase of ropes, torches and wood, which were customary expenses of all Delian festivals.”
