The Festival Psalms: The 8 Psalms of the Zevist Year

The Festival Psalms are the Temple's own liturgy for its 8 festivals: 1 Psalm for each night of the Zevist year, composed by the Temple in Ancient Greek and given with a transliteration and an English rendering, so that every Zevist can sing them, whether or not he reads Greek yet.

They stand in the tradition of the Homeric Hymns, the Orphic Hymns, the paeans of Delphi and the hymns of Kallimachos and Proklos, which the Temple keeps in its Ancient Hymn Library; they use the same forms, the vocative, the epithet, the catalogue of names and places, the formulas of hear and hail, and they add to them what the ancient hymns couldn't contain, the Rituals of the Gods of the Temple, the history of each festival as the sources preserve it, and the restoration itself.

Where a line is quoted from antiquity it's quoted exactly and its source is given; everything else is composed in the same tongue.

Each Psalm belongs to its festival and is sung within the Rite at the points the festival page marks, with its first third shown on that page and the whole on its own. It may also be read on its own on the day, before the altar or under the sky, as a complete prayer; 72 passages take about 40 minutes spoken. The Psalms are the Temple's, and are published under the terms of its legal notice: they may be sung, read, cited and taught; they may not be taken.

Every Psalm holds 72 passages in 6 movements of 12, and every passage is 3 or 4 lines in the Greek with the English beside it. 72 is the number of the fifths of the circle, 72 × 5° = 360°, the wheel of the year drawn whole; 72 years are 1 degree of the precession of the equinoxes, 1 day of the Great Year of 25,920 years; and 72 is the number of the names in the book of spirits under which the Gods were hidden, and which the Temple's Rituals restore 1 by 1 to their owners. 12 is the number of the months and of the Olympians.

Where the festival has 2 Gods the 72 are divided between them, 36 and 36; where it has 3, as at Samhain, 24 to each, as the hours of a day. The isopsephy of the Greek names and of the titles of the movements is counted and given on every Psalm page; the ancients counted their names, and the Temple counts its own.

Each passage stands in 3 columns, read down the page: the Ancient Greek, the transliteration and the English. The Ancient Greek is the text itself. The transliteration carries the sound, in the Modern Greek liturgical reading used throughout the Temple's rituals and its hymn library: ee as in see, oo as in moon, th as in thin, kh as in loch, v for beta, f for phi, every consonant sounded.

The English carries the sense. In a gathering the Chorus carries the Greek and the assembly answers the last line of every passage in English; alone, the Zevist reads it through without hurry.

Every Psalm speaks in 2 voices at once. The first is the plain voice of praise, which anyone may sing, and which carries the festival whole: its God, its date, its history, its Rite, its meaning. The second is a veiled voice, which names the stations of the inner rite of the festival in the order in which they're passed, in the words the sources allow and no more.

The second voice isn't explained on any page. Those who have passed the stations will read it without help; those who haven't, lose nothing by singing the first, and the Psalm was written so that the first voice is complete in itself.

72 passages, 6 movements, 2 voices: the one that anyone may sing, and the one that is heard by those who have walked where it points.

The 48 movements of the 8 Psalms, read in order, are the year itself told in 48 titles. The table gives them so that the Zevist sees the whole wheel at once: from the Greatest Night to the Weighing of the Heart, and round again.

The Psalms are written in the Homeric-Ionic hymnic register, the Greek of the Homeric Hymns and of the Orphic Hymns as the Temple's hymn library gives them: the epic forms where the register asks for them, the Attic where the sense asks for clarity, the vocative and the epithet throughout. The orthography is polytonic throughout, with the breathings and the 3 accents, as the ancients wrote and as the Temple's hymn library prints.

The transliteration follows the Temple's liturgical reading, which is the reading of the Greek Church and of every Greek alive, and not the reconstructed Erasmian of the universities; a Zevist who has heard the Temple's rituals pronounced has heard this reading. Where a Psalm quotes an ancient line, the line is given as the manuscripts give it, and its source stands in the table at the end of the Psalm page; the Temple's own lines are marked by having no source but the Temple.

A Zevist who doesn't yet read Greek is asked to learn to read it, not for the Psalms' sake only, and the Psalms are a good place to begin: each line's sound is written beside it, each line's sense beside that, and the names of the Gods are the first words a Zevist learns in any tongue.

1. The Homeric Hymns (ed. Allen, Halliday and Sikes, 1936); the Orphic Hymns (ed. Quandt, 1955; Ricciardelli, 2000); Kallimachos, Hymns (ed. Pfeiffer, 1953); Proklos, Hymns (ed. Vogt, 1957; van den Berg, 2001); the Delphic paeans (Pöhlmann and West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music, 2001); Mesomedes (Heitsch, Die griechischen Dichterfragmente, 1963); Aristonoos (Furley and Bremer, Greek Hymns, 2001).
2. The Ancient Hymn Library of the Temple on its ritual site, with its reading guide and its pronunciation; the Rituals of the Gods on the same site, from which each Psalm draws its names and its structure.
3. W. D. Furley and J. M. Bremer, Greek Hymns, 2 vols. (2001); J. M. Bremer, “Greek Hymns,” in Versnel, ed., Faith, Hope and Worship (1981) 193 to 215; M. L. West, Greek Metre (1982); A. Athanassakis and B. Wolkow, The Orphic Hymns (2013); the 8 festival pages, each with its own sources.