Prayer

First, Honor the Immortal Gods

Pythagoras

What is Prayer?

Simply put, prayer is raising our hearts and minds to God. By offering our thoughts, attention, time, and focus toward the Gods, we are moved into a closer union with them.

God and the Gods do not need our prayers, honors, and sacrifices. It is we who need them. By praying, we focus our minds and souls on the divine and are raised as a result.

The Gods need nothing; the honors we pay them are for our benefit… From all these things, the Gods gain nothing (what is there for a God to gain?), but we gain union with them.

Sallustius, XV

While ritual prayer is formal and structured, mental prayer is how we plainly communicate with the Gods. While we pray privately, it is essential to remember that Jove is the Father of Gods and men, and we should speak to him as a Father. He knows our hearts before we reveal them, so we should speak to him truthfully and plainly. He sees and knows all.

Why is Prayer important?

Prayer leads us to virtue

The benchmark for spiritual growth is virtue. As we become more spiritually mature, we will increasingly exhibit the virtues in our daily lives. We cannot cultivate virtue through philosophical reasoning alone. Reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics may teach us about the virtues but cannot imbue them into our souls. That is done through spiritual practice, namely, prayer and meditation. Prayer leads us to virtue by focusing our attention on the divine and receiving the blessings and grace of the Gods. By our continued concentration and contemplation on the Gods, we move closer into union with them. One of the blessings of this union is the cultivation of virtue. Virtues are traits that are most like God; thus, as we become closer to God, we become closer to virtue. For this reason, prayer is the battleground between virtue and vice in our spiritual lives.

Prayer Increases Faith

For the theologians call the contact and union with the One faith.

Proclus

Prayer improves our relationship with Jove and the Gods. Through acts of devotion, gratitude, and love, we come to know the Gods on a spiritual level. It is possible to learn about the Gods and never once move toward union with them. The act of prayer begins the relationship with the Gods and eventually leads to union. This state of moving toward union with the Gods is faith. Faith is difficult for some modern people to cultivate. We live in a world dominated by science and materialistic outlooks on the world. The consensus of many is that only the material stuff of the universe is real and everything immaterial is fantasy. This doubt eats away our faith and, by extension, our ability to commune with the Gods. Fortunately, prayer can restore this faith and reestablish a relationship with the divine.

the blessing of the Gods

Prayer is where we can receive the blessings of the Gods. The myths show many examples of a prayer being heard by the Gods and fulfilled. The Gods will not always intercede in our lives due to our prayers. Fate or the will of Jove may intervene, but the Gods look after the devout lovingly and will always bless the prayerful with what is truly good for them. It is important to remember that the Gods can see all ends and know if we are praying for something foolish or harmful for us. Part of the hope of prayer is knowing that the Gods give us what is owed according to justice; Nothing more, nothing less. In this way, prayer aligns us with the divine justice of the Gods and orders our lives and the world around us.

We must ask for what we need but respect the blessings the Gods give us in response to our wishes. We may not always know the ends of all things, but the Gods do and move the world toward their divine justice.

Forms of Prayer

The two Primary forms of prayer are vocal prayer and mental prayer.

Vocal Prayer

Invoking the Gods and Heroes

Invoking the Gods in ritual is what brings the presence of the Gods to our sacred space. Understanding the Gods’ domains and aspects can help us invoke the correct God in our rituals and petitions. However, it is essential to remember that all the Gods live within the Father, Jove. If we doubt who to call on, we may call on Jove and know our prayer will reach the right end.

By calling on specific Gods and heroes, we invoke a particular aspect of Jove by name, which can help direct our prayers. This is not for God’s benefit but for ours. By understanding the different aspects held within the Father, we know the nature of God more clearly and come into closer union with Him.

Ritual Prayer

Prayers in ritual are an offering of devotion, gratitude, and love for the Gods. By our words and actions, we show our respect and our subservience to them. The Gods do not need our offerings, but we need their blessings and grace.

Ritual prayer also ties us to the community of devotees that have given themselves over to the Gods and taken their place in the Divine Cosmos. The Cosmos is a hierarchy reaching from Jove down to inert matter. We have a place within his Divine Kingdom and the Rituals we share bind us to a Divine community under his command. We submit to his will as King of the Cosmos and are joined together.

Family Prayer

Similarly, family prayer has the same unitive effect on the family. Families that pray together are stronger than those that don’t.

Ultimately, the bond of the family is a spiritual one first and a biological one second. The Spirit is always superior to the material. In ancient times, to be a family member was to be initiated into the family religion. The word religion means to bind together. A strong family is bound together by their faith and shared ritual prayer, so they should always attend to the daily rituals and bind themselves with the will of the Gods.

Mental Prayer

An important reason why there is so little about prayer in the Enneads of Plotinus is that so much of what he writes simply is prayer, understood according to its admirable catechism definition as “lifting up the head and mind to God.

A.H. Armstrong

Active Meditation

Active meditation differs from philosophical meditation. While we engage in active meditation or mental prayer, we take maxims and stories from the Sacred texts and hold them in our minds for contemplation and further illumination.

For example, we can take the Delphic maxim, “Know Thyself,” and make it the focus of our meditation.

• Silently invoke Hermes or Apollo to guide you in your meditation.
• Then ask yourself, what does it mean to know thyself? Do I know who I am? If I don’t know myself already, who am I? How could I be deceived in knowing my true nature?
• Allow a space in your questioning to listen for an answer.
• Ask the Gods for further understanding and thank them for anything you receive

Adoration

Mental prayer can also take the form of silent adoration of the Gods. Hold the Image of Jove, the Father, in your mind. Focus all your attention on filling your heart and mind with his presence. Try to imagine the greatness and immensity of Jove in all his glory. Using the focuses of prayer will help strengthen your adoration. Begin by thanking Jove for all he has done. Thank him for giving us Life, our Intellect and soul. Thank him for his blessings, and feel the deep and abiding love he shares for you as one of his children. Dwell in this focused state of adoration for as long as you can.

Focus of Prayer

Love

The core of all prayer is based on love for Jove and the Gods. Love is an attractive force that brings disparate parts into union. By increasing our adoration and love of the Gods, we raise ourselves to their nature and fill our souls with their divine light.

Gratitude

Gratitude is appreciation for what the Gods give to us every day. The Gods have created all the things in our world and hold the order of the cosmos together. By cultivating gratitude for the Gods, we better understand our place in the cosmos. We are not the center of the universe; we are under the Gods. They are not our friends or coworkers. Nobody “works” with the Gods. The Gods are our superiors in every way. By thanking them, we place ourselves correctly in the divine hierarchy. We look up to them as glorious perfections and appreciate their power and unfailing grace.

This gratitude humbles us, which brings us toward virtue and the divine. It also erodes the sickness of our narcissism and self-importance. Without this gratitude, we cannot fully love the Gods because we will fail to appreciate their higher nature in relation to our confused ignorance.

Blessing

Blessings do not just mean asking favors of the Gods. However, we should ask the Jove and the Gods for favors and blessings. We are not alone in the Cosmos, we are Children of Father Jove, and like any of his children, we have the right to ask him favors. The myths are full of petitions to the Father, and he grants those favors to those who come to him.

More than favors, we receive blessings from the Gods in return for our earnest practice and faith. We mustn’t spend all our time in prayer talking at the Gods. We must cultivate the space in between to receive their blessings as well. Prayer is communication with the Gods, and any good communication requires talking and listening. We listen to the Gods by leaving space for blessings in our prayers.

Atonement

Repentance is the beginning of philosophy.

Hierocles

Repenting our sins is an essential function of prayer. It is impossible to move from vice to virtue without recognizing and paying attention to when we sin against the peace of the Gods. When we do this, there may be requisite sacrifices to be made to restore the peace. However, sins come in many sizes. There are grave sins, and then there are more minor daily sins we commit. We should keep track of these daily sins and ask for the Gods’ forgiveness in our prayers. But, like our offerings and sacrifices, the Gods do not need us to refrain from evil; rather, we need to do it so that we do not destroy ourselves and violate the peace and order of the Cosmos.

By tracking our sins and vices, we take an inventory of where we are on the ladder of virtue that leads us to the Gods. Repenting and asking for atonement is asking the Gods to make our soul whole and pure again from the damage we have inflicted.

The very essence of the soul is only in danger when swerving from the good, it plunges itself into what is contrary to its nature; and then when it returns to what is consonant to its nature, it finds again its Being, and recovers its original purity.

Hierocles

To ask for atonement, we confess our sins to Father Jove in silent mental prayer and beg for his forgiveness. More importantly, we ask to be guided toward virtue and away from the vice that afflicts us. Excessive shame is its own vice; we should not dwell on our evil acts and make them worse. To err in vice is a part of our mortal nature and difficult to overcome. Have compassion for your faults but seek tirelessly to perfect yourself.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

Plotinus