a heathen's journeys

Here's why.

Price is an archaeologist. Based on the way he describes his own field, archaeology is a bit like historical forensics. It tries to ascertain a general sense of “what happened here?” based on evidence left behind.

However, whenever anyone describes “what happened,” they’re telling a story. No matter how objective their descriptions are, they’re always going to be framed through the perspectives and worldviews of whoever’s telling the story. It’s unavoidable.

This book goes into the explicit sexual nature of seiðr, discusses human sacrifices, and talks about gender roles and the fraught position of women in viking-age society. Price explains all of these things well, but he’s not suggesting these behaviors are in any way representations of Heathenry, past or present.

The way archaeologists deliberate about a culture isn’t a reflection of how a culture would have understood itself. For all we know, the vikings might have pointed to their food, their music, their stories, and their lived experiences as the principal things that defined them. It’s also possible they wouldn’t have considered their behaviors around magic, sex, sacrifices, etc. to be what defined their polytheism.

The only academics we can rely on to interpret viking spiritual behaviors for use in contemporary Heathenry are Masters of Divinity and, potentially, religious studies academics—not archaeologists, linguists, philologists, or historians (though they certainly would be collaborative forces).

Reconstructionism is a useful tool of inquiry and important for understanding the growth and development of a religion. But it doesn’t mean the past exists as an orthodoxy to follow in the absence of a Bible—especially since the vikings themselves never used the past in this way.

What I mean by that is that any information we have on spirituality that has come from archaeological artefacts has to come from archaeologists themselves. For example, you get a brooch with a depiction of Odin on, which has been excavated, cleaned, recorded, conserved then published about. More often it will be a much more mundane thing; a piece of comb etc. Without an archaeologist flagging that this might have spiritual meaning that information would be completely inaccessible to basically anyone but someone who physically handles the assemblage.

Further, to gain an understanding of what might be a ritual, or a ritual assemblage or landscape, an artefact or artefacts like this will have had to have been flagged during that investigation. To go back to my piece of comb example, if it had been cleaned, possibly identified as a ritual item and then a similar one was found nearby, that particular feature might then have all of the soil from it taken and sieved for artefacts so that nothing gets missed. Ritual/spiritual interpretations are therefore being made as an ongoing process that dictates how sites are investigated and how the post excavation processes etc is undertaken.

A particular example that I quite like is that one of my old lecturers was doing some analysis on Anglo-Saxon cremation urns and found that the urns had been used for brewing beer prior to being used for holding the cremated remains, but not holding anything else. They were pretty large vessels, so could have made a lot of beer. This information pushes the funerary ritual to include sourcing the materials for the pots and beer, which suggests a whole community being involved in the process. This can then be adapted into a modern funeral to include a community community together, brewing of beer and the ritual preparation of an urn in the community, not just buying it from a funeral home. Because of this a layer of meaning is already coming from modern interpretations of the past and how people in our current society react to that.

My argument here is that we need M.Divs in addition to archaeologists, because archaeologists—and correct me if I’m wrong—don’t always know how to address problems related to ethics. Something like a beer ritual is pretty morally-uncomplicated and therefore pretty straightforward to adapt...but what about more problematic stuff, like ritual animal sacrifice?

Let’s take an example Price uses in his book about an archaeological site somewhere in Scandinavia (I forget where). This site is now home to a church and a graveyard, but underneath this church is a badly-decayed tree stump and root-system. Scattered about this tree were animal remains. Archaeologists found the bones of horses, cows, bears, rabbits, squirrels, and others. We know from historical accounts that ancient Scandinavians would ritually kill and hang animals on trees in sacred groves as sacrifices to divine powers, so archaeologists have concluded that this site was likely once a sacred grove where such rituals occurred. This is solid evidence that "animal sacrifice" was an actual pagan observance.

Now the question is: How do you reconstruct this ritual for use in modern Heathenry?

The answers given by Heathens will probably vary according to their morals and feelings about it. This is fine, but it doesn’t make for good reconstruction methodology. There’s also another problem here: Even if we disregard the question of ethics and performed this ritual exactly how it was once performed, it wouldn't actually reconstruct the ritual itself, only reenact what was done during it.

Rituals get their meanings, functions, and purposes from more than just the actions being performed. They also get these things from the time-periods and social environments that contextualize them. These environments have changed dramatically since the time of the vikings, which means a ritual performed hundreds of years ago will have different metaphysical properties if performed the exact same way today.

This is where M.Divs come in. M.Divs are not just people who officiate over services and weddings. They’re also trained in theology, metaphysics, cosmology, ritual composition, history, ethics, and social-working. Ideally, we’d have a Heathen M.Div—several, in fact—looking at this ancient ritual. They’d deliberate and do research to get a sense of what legitimized the ritual back then. Once they understand the ritual’s architecture, they could then offer a restructured version of the ritual, or provide a general formula so people can restructure it themselves.

I couldn’t begin to tell you what an updated, ethical version of this ritual would look like since I’m not an M.Div, but this is the sort of thing they address.

(I also want to clarify that I’m not saying the average Heathen isn't qualified to adapt this ritual into a sensible modern practice—I’m simply highlighting what kind of research field specializes in addressing deeper questions of religious reconstruction, ethics, metaphysics, and a religion’s continued legacy, specifically when it comes to meeting the spiritual needs of modern practitioners and the powers they venerate.)

I guess I can see why many people feel the need to ask someone they believe to be an authority for permission, but in my opinion heathenry has never been and should never be turned into a religious practice that is too abstract to be understood and accessible to everyone. And I really mean everyone. Archeological findings and surviving traditions strongly suggest that paganism is the very definition of "folk beliefs", that these practices and beliefs can be understood intuitively and passed on with simple instructions. If you need someone with an academic degree to interpret it for you, it's too opaque. Question it. Look for guidance not in the authority of other people but in the divine that surrounds you at all times in your daily life.

It may be difficult to accept that the practices of the past that may seem "barbaric" to those who live in a modern, urbanized society with modern, urbanized values were an expression and lived reality of the same paganism that we are participating in nowadays, but at the time that it happened, it obviously was simply what people felt was the best way to practice their faith. The idea of an animal being sacrificed may make you uncomfortable, but I can easily see how to a farmer who slaughters his animals to put food on the tables, it would just occur intuitively to "share one" with the gods to put a meal on their table too. Like you said yourself, if you could travel back in time and ask a random heathen how they view their practices, they'd most likely just shrug and tell you it's how they do things. And the same person would most likely tell you that what their great-grandparents or even just their parents did is kind of no longer how they do things.

History and the present too clearly show that there is no one single "correct" way to practice this faith, and the fact that some ways in which it was practiced in the past is morally objectionable to modern values doesn't mean there's a need to deny the past or completely reinvent the faith. You may even disagree with how certain people practice it nowadays, but paganism isn't a monolithic group of people who all follow some sort of shared values and doctrine; never was. It cannot be by virtue of being a folk belief even in the present, and by how vastly different cultures are around the globe.

Also, and maybe this is the most important part of my whole rambling reply actually, in my opinion it would hugely benefit a vast number of modern heathens to abandon the idea of the idolize-able, always agreeable gods. People will happily state that pagan gods aren't infallible and that they can also do things that are unfair, cruel, and so on. Okay, now don't just say this but fully understand it and believe it. No one has to worship gods they disagree with, but it almost feels like many people have made up some idealized version of whichever favorite deity they picked and try to worship that fictional entity while denying or ignoring any aspect of that deity that they feel uncomfortable with. That is pointless in my opinion. You might as well dedicate your worship to Obi Wan...

Here's a hard pill to swallow for many modern pagans: Maybe the god you decided to worship wants to be worshipped in a way that you're not personally comfortable with. Maybe you only realized that after having a certain encounter with them, and now you're in this kinda awkward spot where you suddenly get the feeling that your entire worship of them up until this point was based on an inaccurate idea/depiction.

I get being concerned about “religious leaders telling us what to do and believe,” but I’m not arguing we should have Heathen leaders create a centralized orthodoxy for us to follow. That’s absurd. I’m well aware Heathenry’s decentralized, and any Heathen M.Div worth half their salt would know it far better than I do.

I’m saying we need pagan M.Divs because they’d be trained in religious reconstruction, not merely historical reconstruction. I’ve already explained above what that looks like. M.Divs are also especially important for places like the US, where there’s a lot of diaspora, a lot of different cultures, and a lot of opportunities to misrepresent Heathenry because we don’t have direct access to its oral traditions. If we don’t have pagan M.Divs to guide us, then Heathens will instead be guided by the loving hands of marketers, con artists, self-help gurus, and “guys who are way too interested in vikings, the Roman Empire, and WWII.”

Also, have you considered that Heathenry IS complex, but the reason why you might not know it is because we don’t have good teachers to teach us? It’s true that much of its practices are built on human instinctual behavior (like sharing the spoils of the hunt), but much of Heathenry also incorporates swaths of oral traditions that preserve an entire culture’s concepts of how the world works and its underlying metaphysical structures. Most people aren’t going to need to know these complicated bits to develop a practice, but if we want quality, reliable, trustworthy teachers to learn the basics from, then pagans need to stop bitching about the fact we need to modernize how those teachers are educated.

You also got me all wrong with offerings. I’m not uncomfortable with giving meat to the gods, bloody or otherwise. What I’m saying is that animal sacrifices literally, ritually, and socially do not have the same meaning they used to have, and here’s why:

Animals were regarded as capital back in the viking ages and earlier, hence the name “livestock.” Because animals represented literal financial wealth, sacrificing them was a literal financial transaction. It was like writing a check to the gods for their services rendered to humanity. But then Scandinavian societies stopped using animals as their main form of capital, which meant peoples’ relationship with animals changed; today we view them as companions, food, and/or producers of product, and just like we don’t expect to be paid in cows anymore, neither do the gods.

Today, any meat sacrifices we give to deities is in the capacity of food, not capital, and usually it’s a portion of what we intend to use for ourselves. Our current relationship with animals and money means most people would deem it cruel, wasteful, and senseless to give deities whole goat carcasses.

This kind of stuff would be common knowledge if we had pagan M.Divs teaching us. So would the idea that the gods change with time just like humans do. This doesn’t mean they’ve all developed cuddly personalities, it means they’ve lived through the history of the world since the Iron Ages and understand we don’t barter using thralls and sheep anymore.

For me, making the professional discussion on heathen topic more nuanced and multi-angled, while also accessible, would be to have various specialists take part in it, and doing it with awareness that's it's for modern use as well. Cultural and religious science, also sociology, esp people from these fields who acknowledge and respect modern practitioners (this is actually a discussion that's taking place in academic circles in relevant fields, even in my stupid country. It's gonna be uphill all the way, but I'm glad it's happening). There are heathens in these fields, I know them, and I think that outreach to general public and heathen communities will help create enviroment in academic field that will be more encouraing to heathens and pagans of all sorts to engage in professional studies on related topics.

Here’s my point:

Disciplines like history, archaeology, mythology, linguistics, literature, sociology, and anthropology are all important for understanding Heathenry. But we’re missing the input of another important discipline, which I will informally describe as the discipline of “Divinity.”

Studying Divinity is different from studying religion. While Religious Studies is the study of different belief-systems, Divinity is the study of the divine itself from the perspective of one’s religion. It involves learning about worldview, philosophy, metaphysics, the structures of cosmology, divine experience, destiny, ritual composition, mystery traditions, esoterics, and whatever else comprises your religion’s specific paradigm.

In the US, Masters of Divinity are those who are trained as spiritual caretakers in this field, whereas Theologians are more like the researchers. Perhaps “Theologian” would have been a better and more globally-relevant term to use in my examples above, rather than “M.Div,” but the fact remains that we still need people qualified in this field. M.Divs would be a way to prevent people from falling for fake gurus and bigots, because then we’d actually have a recognizable standard for trained spiritual leaders.

My question is this: Why are people so apprehensive about incorporating forms of divinity studies into the reconstruction and use of Heathenry? Everyone’s super confident about studying things related to Heathenry, but not studying the metaphysics itself.

I'm not from the US, so I don't know every single degree that one can get over there. I never heard of a Master of Divinity before you brought them up. Now that you've explained to me what that is, I assume I fulfill your criteria for being "allowed" to criticize them?

So: my criticism remains the same as I said initially.

Unless their field of study is something that has quantifiable and objective criteria for their degree earning them any sort of expertise, I don't see how their word is more important or true than anyone else's. What are they studying that gives them insight that a layman could not have about a belief system that is that of the laymen? Old Norse paganism, just like all the other germanic pagan belief systems, was a complex and varied accumulation of folk religion. The daily lives and practices and traditions and beliefs and tales that weren't in need of some scholar telling them what to believe and how to practice that belief. You cannot reconstruct this by taking the folk out of the folk belief.

Archeology and sociology and other reputable fields of science have studied all of this and we know what we know because of these. What research and studies have these Masters of Divinity contributed to get us to this point? Or is it a promise of some sort of future enlightenment?

I'm willing to listen to a case being made for what positive change or contributions they can make or have made. Maybe in your local community there's a heavy presence of them that has a positive impact. But in their absence, all history and the present have shown that a community can survive and thrive just as well.

But I'm not going to wait for one of them to show up and tell me how to practice my faith. That's a ridiculous idea.

Here's why.

Price is an archaeologist. Based on the way he describes his own field, archaeology is a bit like historical forensics. It tries to ascertain a general sense of “what happened here?” based on evidence left behind.

However, whenever anyone describes “what happened,” they’re telling a story. No matter how objective their descriptions are, they’re always going to be framed through the perspectives and worldviews of whoever’s telling the story. It’s unavoidable.

This book goes into the explicit sexual nature of seiðr, discusses human sacrifices, and talks about gender roles and the fraught position of women in viking-age society. Price explains all of these things well, but he’s not suggesting these behaviors are in any way representations of Heathenry, past or present.

The way archaeologists deliberate about a culture isn’t a reflection of how a culture would have understood itself. For all we know, the vikings might have pointed to their food, their music, their stories, and their lived experiences as the principal things that defined them. It’s also possible they wouldn’t have considered their behaviors around magic, sex, sacrifices, etc. to be what defined their polytheism.

The only academics we can rely on to interpret viking spiritual behaviors for use in contemporary Heathenry are Masters of Divinity and, potentially, religious studies academics—not archaeologists, linguists, philologists, or historians (though they certainly would be collaborative forces).

Reconstructionism is a useful tool of inquiry and important for understanding the growth and development of a religion. But it doesn’t mean the past exists as an orthodoxy to follow in the absence of a Bible—especially since the vikings themselves never used the past in this way.

What I mean by that is that any information we have on spirituality that has come from archaeological artefacts has to come from archaeologists themselves. For example, you get a brooch with a depiction of Odin on, which has been excavated, cleaned, recorded, conserved then published about. More often it will be a much more mundane thing; a piece of comb etc. Without an archaeologist flagging that this might have spiritual meaning that information would be completely inaccessible to basically anyone but someone who physically handles the assemblage.

Further, to gain an understanding of what might be a ritual, or a ritual assemblage or landscape, an artefact or artefacts like this will have had to have been flagged during that investigation. To go back to my piece of comb example, if it had been cleaned, possibly identified as a ritual item and then a similar one was found nearby, that particular feature might then have all of the soil from it taken and sieved for artefacts so that nothing gets missed. Ritual/spiritual interpretations are therefore being made as an ongoing process that dictates how sites are investigated and how the post excavation processes etc is undertaken.

A particular example that I quite like is that one of my old lecturers was doing some analysis on Anglo-Saxon cremation urns and found that the urns had been used for brewing beer prior to being used for holding the cremated remains, but not holding anything else. They were pretty large vessels, so could have made a lot of beer. This information pushes the funerary ritual to include sourcing the materials for the pots and beer, which suggests a whole community being involved in the process. This can then be adapted into a modern funeral to include a community community together, brewing of beer and the ritual preparation of an urn in the community, not just buying it from a funeral home. Because of this a layer of meaning is already coming from modern interpretations of the past and how people in our current society react to that.

My argument here is that we need M.Divs in addition to archaeologists, because archaeologists—and correct me if I’m wrong—don’t always know how to address problems related to ethics. Something like a beer ritual is pretty morally-uncomplicated and therefore pretty straightforward to adapt...but what about more problematic stuff, like ritual animal sacrifice?

Let’s take an example Price uses in his book about an archaeological site somewhere in Scandinavia (I forget where). This site is now home to a church and a graveyard, but underneath this church is a badly-decayed tree stump and root-system. Scattered about this tree were animal remains. Archaeologists found the bones of horses, cows, bears, rabbits, squirrels, and others. We know from historical accounts that ancient Scandinavians would ritually kill and hang animals on trees in sacred groves as sacrifices to divine powers, so archaeologists have concluded that this site was likely once a sacred grove where such rituals occurred. This is solid evidence that "animal sacrifice" was an actual pagan observance.

Now the question is: How do you reconstruct this ritual for use in modern Heathenry?

The answers given by Heathens will probably vary according to their morals and feelings about it. This is fine, but it doesn’t make for good reconstruction methodology. There’s also another problem here: Even if we disregard the question of ethics and performed this ritual exactly how it was once performed, it wouldn't actually reconstruct the ritual itself, only reenact what was done during it.

Rituals get their meanings, functions, and purposes from more than just the actions being performed. They also get these things from the time-periods and social environments that contextualize them. These environments have changed dramatically since the time of the vikings, which means a ritual performed hundreds of years ago will have different metaphysical properties if performed the exact same way today.

This is where M.Divs come in. M.Divs are not just people who officiate over services and weddings. They’re also trained in theology, metaphysics, cosmology, ritual composition, history, ethics, and social-working. Ideally, we’d have a Heathen M.Div—several, in fact—looking at this ancient ritual. They’d deliberate and do research to get a sense of what legitimized the ritual back then. Once they understand the ritual’s architecture, they could then offer a restructured version of the ritual, or provide a general formula so people can restructure it themselves.

I couldn’t begin to tell you what an updated, ethical version of this ritual would look like since I’m not an M.Div, but this is the sort of thing they address.

(I also want to clarify that I’m not saying the average Heathen isn't qualified to adapt this ritual into a sensible modern practice—I’m simply highlighting what kind of research field specializes in addressing deeper questions of religious reconstruction, ethics, metaphysics, and a religion’s continued legacy, specifically when it comes to meeting the spiritual needs of modern practitioners and the powers they venerate.)

I guess I can see why many people feel the need to ask someone they believe to be an authority for permission, but in my opinion heathenry has never been and should never be turned into a religious practice that is too abstract to be understood and accessible to everyone. And I really mean everyone. Archeological findings and surviving traditions strongly suggest that paganism is the very definition of "folk beliefs", that these practices and beliefs can be understood intuitively and passed on with simple instructions. If you need someone with an academic degree to interpret it for you, it's too opaque. Question it. Look for guidance not in the authority of other people but in the divine that surrounds you at all times in your daily life.

It may be difficult to accept that the practices of the past that may seem "barbaric" to those who live in a modern, urbanized society with modern, urbanized values were an expression and lived reality of the same paganism that we are participating in nowadays, but at the time that it happened, it obviously was simply what people felt was the best way to practice their faith. The idea of an animal being sacrificed may make you uncomfortable, but I can easily see how to a farmer who slaughters his animals to put food on the tables, it would just occur intuitively to "share one" with the gods to put a meal on their table too. Like you said yourself, if you could travel back in time and ask a random heathen how they view their practices, they'd most likely just shrug and tell you it's how they do things. And the same person would most likely tell you that what their great-grandparents or even just their parents did is kind of no longer how they do things.

History and the present too clearly show that there is no one single "correct" way to practice this faith, and the fact that some ways in which it was practiced in the past is morally objectionable to modern values doesn't mean there's a need to deny the past or completely reinvent the faith. You may even disagree with how certain people practice it nowadays, but paganism isn't a monolithic group of people who all follow some sort of shared values and doctrine; never was. It cannot be by virtue of being a folk belief even in the present, and by how vastly different cultures are around the globe.

Also, and maybe this is the most important part of my whole rambling reply actually, in my opinion it would hugely benefit a vast number of modern heathens to abandon the idea of the idolize-able, always agreeable gods. People will happily state that pagan gods aren't infallible and that they can also do things that are unfair, cruel, and so on. Okay, now don't just say this but fully understand it and believe it. No one has to worship gods they disagree with, but it almost feels like many people have made up some idealized version of whichever favorite deity they picked and try to worship that fictional entity while denying or ignoring any aspect of that deity that they feel uncomfortable with. That is pointless in my opinion. You might as well dedicate your worship to Obi Wan...

Here's a hard pill to swallow for many modern pagans: Maybe the god you decided to worship wants to be worshipped in a way that you're not personally comfortable with. Maybe you only realized that after having a certain encounter with them, and now you're in this kinda awkward spot where you suddenly get the feeling that your entire worship of them up until this point was based on an inaccurate idea/depiction.

I re-read the section of the Hávamál where Odin talks about carving, coloring, reading, and “sending” the runes, and I understand he’s probably not talking about the rune-tokens we use for runic divination today (especially since those were invented in the 70’s). But that got me wondering what he is actually referring to, so I must ask:

Is he talking about carving runes on wooden sticks or poles instead?

Right now I’m thinking about an episode I saw of Hilda. In one scene, she walks into a graveyard carrying a stick covered in runes. She rolls it against the ground, evoking the dead, in order to raise them from their graves.

I remember something similar from the Norse myths as well: When Freyr falls in love with the giantess Gerdr, he sends his man Skirnir to Jötunheim to bring her to him. But Gerdr refuses to accompany him back to Asgard, so Skirnir pulls out a stick, carves runes it, and uses it to curse Gerdr to never find love unless it’s with ugly giants or Freyr himself.

I did a little digging just now and discovered there’s archaeological evidence for rune-poles: The “Bryggen inscriptions,” which are a collection of medieval-era poles found in Bergen, many of which have runic charms carved on them.

If making rune-poles is what the Hávamál is actually referring to, then do we know how they work and how they’re used? Is there any folklore about it? I’m guessing there must be something, given the scene in Hilda.

I also have some additional thoughts that I don't know where to put but relate to my general inquiry: What I know about runes leaves me with the impression that ancient Scandinavians thought about very differently. Today we use it as a medium for storing and transmitting stories (interpret this word in the broadest possible sense here; I'm talking about things ranging from fantasy narratives, to personal anecdotes, to factual reporting). But I’m wondering—and this is just me hypothesizing—if people used runic writing more like musical notation or computer code, in which it represented something that was supposed to be played. This would make “knowing how to read the runes” more analogous to “knowing how to read sheet music” or “knowing how to read JavaScript.” It would also make the concept of “sending runes” similar to the concepts of “playing music” or “running software.” This makes perfect sense in principle...but if this were all true, then the questions remain: How were they sent, for what purpose were they sent, and through what kind of framework were they sent? How does it all work?

I'm not a runologist but work on early medieval religious practices in Europe and how those function, so I'm in spitting distance of that.

The answer is that we have very little evidence to even investigate the questions you're posing. Some runic inscriptions are definitely just writing and convey language in the same way other letter systems do (for example, there are those rune sticks from the woman asking her husband to come home, there are runes carved in monuments which relay stories or poetry, etc). We also have runica manuscripta, entire manuscripts written in runes (eg codex runicus). There are also runic inscriptions which are just names and/or labels (for example, there's a comb that just says 'comb' on it, if I recall correctly). These may or may not have some kind of magical use, but we don't know. However,we do know fairly certainly that the usual way to use runes was to scratch them into wooden sticks. That's why the elder rune-rows are composed of straight lines. Curved lines are hard to carve in wood.

The references to runes being used for magical purposes occur only in literature (another one that exists is how runes are used in Grettissaga to curse him or hex him). There is some likelihood that people did use runes for magic, but we don't know how this worked and can only speculate.

However, in nearly all examples of runes we have that we can interpret, the runes are either a: used like letters, so basically just a different writing system or b: used as ideograms (but this is done inside of texts written in the Latin alphabet and the ideogram aspect is usually alliterative with the rune itself). There are also objects with runic nonsense on them. We don't know if they did that for magic reasons or if the carver was just rune illiterate. We just.... Don't know. It's impossible to be sure, and because all of the literary etc. sources we have are late, we can't assume that they are accurate witnesses to how people used runes.

...

...Though when I think about it, there might be a reason why this happens with a lot of Heathen writers. The Norse gods and their mythology don't makes sense without the context of Scandinavia's geography, and unfortunately it's the kind of context can only be understood through bodily experience. I kid you not when I say I only put Heathenry together after I visited the Nordic countries.

Even with the benefit of this experience, it's difficult figuring out how to make it make sense to people who don't know the fjords are like that or that the mountains do that or that the rocks are that kind of way. This understanding sits in a place older than language and therefore escapes articulation.

This may be why so many American writers try to put a philosophy behind Heathenry instead, because a philosophy is context we can carry around in our brains regardless of the environment we're in. But it's not a tidy solution by any means, just a convenient one.

To take a bit of a detour to my own experiences, I believe there was a pretty distinct moment that made me seek out resources on paganism/heathenry. I didn't know much about it yet (had only a very vague idea of what it was supposed to be and didn't even consider it to be a possible answer to my questions), or where to really start looking, but found it soon enough. (One could say, as if by fate waving it in front of my face until I finally got the broad hint!) It was just a couple years ago, but seeing lighting bolts dance behind the ridge of a mountain as the sun had just fully set, knowing I was about to have to cross that mountain and its brewing storm in the cab of a locomotive, either fight the whole way or try and make myself, the machine, and the elements work together to get myself and our passengers across safely... Well, it did leave a lasting impression on me and made me feel like I had to find an explanation for what I felt when seeing it and the many other things that I've been surrounded by all my life without paying proper attention.

It was a pivotal time of my life and I felt like I was given a challenge. Can I overcome it? Am I humble enough to know that humans are merely trespassers to this domain, or am I arrogant enough to think the mountain's ancient body is just lifeless rocks beneath me? Do I treat the vehicle that will take me through that storm like it's just an old pile of wires and gears, am I trying to bend its 80 tons to my will no matter if it breaks down in the process, or do I recognize it is the product of hundreds of hours of humans having put their work and care into building and maintaining it, that it contains the breaths and heartbeats and voices of the countless operators that guided its immense power on its tracks since long before I was even born? Do I understand that it's not just a tool, but a loyal mount that wants to help me along this difficult path and do I treat it accordingly?

(Despite the heavy rain on the climb and descent and the snow storm at the peak of the pass, and the way we had to fight through slipping wheels, failing circuits, and visibility of about five meters in front of us, we did make it across safely and swiftly. Even now, years later, I am still grateful to that engine like I am to any other that I work with.)

No amount of reading books or watching video essays could have given me this experience. No one could convince me that it's just a meaningless passing of time in an uncaring empty void of a universe. But even if it's something less "dramatic", like feeling a certain way as you take a moment to sit on a wooden bench somewhere in a park and let yourself experience your surroundings, or if you walk into a room and see the sunlight shine through your window in a particular way, there's endless opportunities to connect with the spirit that surrounds us if we keep an open mind for it.

And so to me, the core beliefs of paganism and especially its animism weren't something I really had to make myself believe in or grapple with like I'd have to memorize a school textbook, instead the resources on it that I found offered possible explanations for the experiences and put them into a historical and spiritual context, helping me put them into my own words and interpret them in a way that I could use to improve my understanding of the world and our connection to it... and equipped with that understanding, I can work out ways to strenghten that connection, and to receive strength from it in return.

I think when creating resources for fellow pagans, it is important to be aware what parts of what you're writing about is anecdotes or musings, and what parts are "hard facts" based on academic research and historical findings. I'm doing some amateur research myself about how locations, traditions, and customs (or even holidays) in my geographic area may have remnant ties to pre-christian pagans and their practices. There are very little written records available. I try to piece together what I can in any way I can scrounge together by visiting places, reading up on their history while I'm there, talking to people, taking pictures. So even though I don't even have to travel far from home to get first-hand or second-hand information, it's still definitely difficult to find reliable resources of how things "really" were in the past, especially with how humans are always going to practice and pass down even the same traditions in a hugely diverse way, and how historically they just relied on people always passing them on so they didn't really feel the need to explain or write them down. If that is something you want to focus on or build your resource upon, there's very little room for personal musings and interpretations except for the margins and footnotes.

Basically, I think it depends on what kind of resource you want to create. Are you hoping to "synthesize" new practices and traditions while only loosely basing them on the way they used to be? (Essentially, "going off vibes".) Are you trying to inspire people to work out such new ways on their own by providing them with historical examples? Are you hoping to scrutinize the past and find answers for how to shape the future that way? Or any of the many other possible ways you could provide resources. As long as you yourself are aware of which approach you're taking and it's clearly communicated to readers and as long as you don't willingly misrepresent facts to shoehorn some kind of agenda in (though someone like you having ulterior motives like that would surprise me based on what I've seen of you posting), I think there's very few ways to do it "wrong". Mixing up different kinds of information can happen to anyone, though I'm glad you were able to catch it in your case.

Always helps to get more eyes on one's writings so people can point out these things. Always a good idea to bring in people from different parts of the world and different "branches" of the vast tree of modern heathen practices to get insights on what your blind spots may be.

The Great Lakes aren't haunted. No matter what anyone says, the Lakes aren't haunted. They are the memory-eaters, the old dark painted over with charming blue, and what sinks does not rise, not even the dead. What you feel when the Lake raises goosebumps isn't the bodies in the depths. It's just the Lake, reminding you that you are mostly water and water calls to its own.

The oceans, the old saltwater womb, warn you with every breaker that they are dangerous. The oceans never let you forget that you crawled from their hold, with your saltwater veins, but not all of your ancestors did, and there are things beneath the ocean tides, waiting with teeth to spill the blood you stole. The oceans with their shawls of hurricanes, their steady beating, make it impossible to forget the threat of them.

But the Great Lakes? The Lakes will lie to you. The Lakes will not gift you the buoyancy of saltwater, will tempt you with still surfaces and cool drinkable freshwater. The Lakes will promise that there is nothing with teeth waiting below, as though the Lake itself is not the maw of something hungry. The Lakes are new to the world, in the scale of epochs, and they play games. They lap at your knees like they are tamed, but if you swim long enough there will be a moment where the Lake throws you sideways, pulls you under, and you remember that this is a wild thing, with teeth of ice and nothing but water in its belly. They hold the last breath of every foolish swimmer that lowered their guard for a second too long, and the carcasses of their shipwrecks, and they do not surrender what they take. No, the Lakes are not haunted. The Lakes are not cursed. There is no monster waiting in the depths, only the depths themselves, and that is enough.

I don't know what makes people think that you need any special preparation or education or training in order to do all this stuff. There's nothing secret about it, and nothing complicated. And unless you engage in behaviors that physically/mentally harm you, I don't see what dangers could possibly be involved.

But also I think people overcomplicate the whole thing. You don't need any sort of special tools. You don't need to spend money on any of this. Literally all you need is the knowledge of what you're trying to achieve and a clear idea of what you are trying to practice. And please, let's stop acting like "trivial" activities are excluded from this. The same goes for what you desire to achieve with these activities. Nothing is too trivial of a need/desire. You are hoping for the bus to arrive on time tomorrow? That's a perfectly fine thing to want out of whatever you're about to practice!

I think as a whole, the pagan community needs to get their heads out of the clouds a bit and ground themselves and their practices. As cliche as it sounds, y'all need to touch more grass again. It's a hands-on spirituality, after all.

And genuinely, the gatekeeping and mystification of it all has to stop. There's no secrets, no exclusivity, no sacrilege, no entry barriers in paganism, no scholars, and no knowledge is off-limits.

@actualblanketgremlin Yeah, you get it! That's basically what I am talking about. What do we need spirituality and beliefs for if not to fill our daily life with joy, interesting experiences, comfort, and convenience, and to share those with others around us? I'm gonna keep saying it cause it's something people really need to understand: the mundane realities of your daily life and the divine world of the spiritual around you are one and the same. There's no point in treating them like separate things that require different approaches.

I don't know what makes people think that you need any special preparation or education or training in order to do all this stuff. There's nothing secret about it, and nothing complicated. And unless you engage in behaviors that physically/mentally harm you, I don't see what dangers could possibly be involved.

But also I think people overcomplicate the whole thing. You don't need any sort of special tools. You don't need to spend money on any of this. Literally all you need is the knowledge of what you're trying to achieve and a clear idea of what you are trying to practice. And please, let's stop acting like "trivial" activities are excluded from this. The same goes for what you desire to achieve with these activities. Nothing is too trivial of a need/desire. You are hoping for the bus to arrive on time tomorrow? That's a perfectly fine thing to want out of whatever you're about to practice!

I think as a whole, the pagan community needs to get their heads out of the clouds a bit and ground themselves and their practices. As cliche as it sounds, y'all need to touch more grass again. It's a hands-on spirituality, after all.

And genuinely, the gatekeeping and mystification of it all has to stop. There's no secrets, no exclusivity, no sacrilege, no entry barriers in paganism, no scholars, and no knowledge is off-limits.

@limelocked That's pretty much exactly what I was trying to express in my post. When people talk about magic here on tumblr (only place where I am able to interact with other pagans currently until I finally manage to locate even a single other pagan in my area or even state), they seem to have this very specific idea of a system with hard rules and specific applications that are removed from ordinary everyday life.

And that's what kinda bothers me about the whole thing? Why is it being decoupled from the routines of daily life and daily experiences of living? And are there "facts" that people simply take for granted because they're being repeated by everyone or is there actual historical evidence? And even if there is, especially if you have written records, who is the author of those records and what is their biases/privileges/personal experiences/intentions of writing down these records? Do they apply to my life? Are we ignoring oral and cultural traditions that are still alive and well after surviving forced christianization of our home and people, in favor of trying to vaguely emulate something that someone wrote down somewhere?

I think it unfairly tints the modern pagans' perception of daily life and practice as a pagan towards what was written down, while all the other aspects are ignored or forgotten about. I understand that it can be very difficult depending on where you live to experience and discover surviving examples of folk religion and folk magic/traditions/practices, but it seems like many pagans nowadays (especially those converting from Christian beliefs, with the US American flavors of Christianity being especially prone to this, seemingly) feel a strange empty void in their spirituality and can't figure out how to fill it.

Well, I have the very bold theory that focusing even more on deity worship and emulating rituals that someone else came up with won't fill this hole. It's the absence of the religious practices and traditions of the common folk's daily lives that left behind this hole, in my opinion. (There's been people much more eloquent than me with more in-depth knowledge about Christianity explaining this phenomenon, I'll edit in the link to that post here after I found it again. It's a really good read and can be eye-opening for some.) The animism, the crafts, sense of community, and enrichment of our daily lives is falling by the wayside. And it's something people feel but struggle to really comprehend, I think, if they've grown up in a very rigidly orthodox system. It's easy to say that you see the pagan world as something whole, and the pagan practice as something that is involved in every aspect of your life by default, but it's another thing to really understand it and actually put the theory into practice.

So basically, there's really no need to go out of one's way to conduct elaborate magic rituals if you're not trying to do something very specific and sophisticated with it. A little casual magic can be involved in everything you do. But then again I don't consider myself asatru or any of the nordic pagan groups really, since as my blog's url already suggests I'm trying to carve out some distinction and niche for the unfortunately very universally ignored (but admittedly elusive) alpine paganism. That's where I find it difficult to have a proper unbiased discussion with nordic pagans about this topic, since I'm not able to tell with confidence whether this is just how nordic pagans Are and comparing it to alpine paganism is pointless in these major aspects especially...or if this is something that does actually exist as different schools of thought (so to speak) in nordic pagan circles as well. These two are not completely different types of spirituality, at least that's the impression I was getting from my first interactions here, but I also don't have enough alpine pagans (or people from similar groups in the geographical middle Europe) that I can ask for their opinions and discuss this with.

All things have limitations. Even magic, even gods. So, not everything can be instantaneous or even work for others or ourselves all the time. Just as much as some things in nature may be more effective depending on our personal biology.

For example, maybe when you groom yourself you could thank Freyja or Idunn or Eir; maybe when you walk you could invite Odin or Heimdall to walk alongside you; when you unwind at the end of the day you could invoke Thor, Frey, or Loki--etc.

By that I mean, don't just go and buy any new necklace, or even the same one again. Take your time with this, listen to what's within you and around you, and settle for something that feels like it's calling back to you. Maybe even consider making something yourself according to what seems suitable.

Since the spreading of Icelandic literature, the nordic gods became subject to a revamped and distorted pre-existing interpretation like.... Carl Michael Bellman's (1700s swedish poet and composer) songs of Freyja as a one-dimensional hypersexualized goddess (Fredmans Epistel N° 28, 1771).

You've got Folklorist Ella Odstedt collecting accounts of the age long tradition of shapeshifting (wolf:odinic, and bear) in several regions throughout Scandinavia. (Varulven i Svensk Folktradition, 1943), re-released by Bengt af Klintberg in 2012. Revisited in Kaliff & Østigård's Werewolves, Warriors and Winter Sacrifices: Unmasking Kivik and Indo-European Cosmology in Bronze Age Scandinavia in 2016.

Let's get into some more specific post-viking age heathen lore.

In 1863 and 1868 Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius wrote a two volume book called Wärend och Wirdane (a place and its people in south Småland, previously accounted for as early as Jordanes Getica) and gives several accounts of heathen practices local to this place. In this book he writes how the old gods never went away at all and were held in high reverence well into the 19th century.

And I think this^ book is where you'll find a bulk of interestingly precisely transitional co-existing practices post-viking age, in a limited space in south-central Sweden.

§ 45. As should already be clear from the foregoing, the transition from heathen cult to Christian cult in Wärend took place extremely slowly. The new Christian teachers themselves shared for the most part the ways of thinking of the time whose children they were, and wisely avoided offending the prevailing habits, customs and ways of thinking of their countrymen. The old heathenry therefore survived an independent life by the side of Christianity, for several centuries, and drew its last breaths only well into more recent times. Our entire Middle Ages thereby acquires its general character of a breaking or transitional stage; but the break was less violent in our country than one might expect because of the different nature of the sidelined cults, and, after perfect educational work, the whole of our newer Swedish cultivation still rests on a generally deeper heathen foundation than is generally used to percieve.

With accounts in Wärend court judgement of the late 1600s telling of many heathen flat out refusing to even acknowledge the new god over Odin, still leading traditional blots in hallowed groves. With other accounts of old temples servicing both heathen offerings/blots aswell as makeshift soft-Christian mass. As is the case predominately throughout Scandinavia, there was usually just the one main god per place.

In 1610, a local völva by the name Elin of Horsnäs was "tried by water", as she did float she attributed the success to her heathen god.

Christians in opposition to the longevity of Odin would, tongue-in-cheek, liken him to the devil and how one could sell into his servitude for favors. A man Börge was owed merchant Jöns money to which Jöns told him »Give into Odhan's power, and you will get enough money!»

Horses were sacred, sacrificed, consumed. Odin's steed was in these parts known to be a massive black steed. Odin was around the same time called upon by a farmer to cure a plague among horses, Hyltén-Cavallius wrote in anecdotal verse:

Odin stands on the mountains, he inquires after his foal; he's got the flight. The spit in your hand and in his mouth; he shall receive penance at the same time. in name,

All birds of the corvid family were Odin's and thus sacred among the peasantry.

§ 49. The guise under which Odin most often appears in Wīrës folk beliefs and folktales, and in which, even in our days, he sometimes appears to the inhabitants of Wīrës who travel at night over desolate regions, is as a nocturnal revenant. Many people still alive now have thus seen him wandering between the autumn mists on Ulfsboda-marshes, in Wislanda parish, and in several other places. He is then either on foot, with a side and [at hat on his head (ɔ: Oden Sidhöttur), or on horseback, riding a tall, black strider, whose shoes are commonly mentioned in folklore as being forged of clear silver. A horseshoe of Odin's strider, however not of silver, but of iron, is still kept at the Wexiö Art Gallery. The nights during which Odin makes these solitary walks or journeys mainly fall on the old pagan holidays, such as Yule night and Holy Thursday night. He then does not willingly suffer people to get in his way; for the night, and above all these nights "belong to him", Sometimes, however, he also speaks kindly to the lonely and frightened wanderer, who on Christmas Eve did not reach his distant home, and the legend even knows how to tell how he let this sit up behind him on the horse's back, after which the journey has passed through the air, over sea and land and over mountain and valley, like the midnight storm. If someone asks the mysterious rider who he is, he briefly replies that he "is a Desert Wanderer".

He then travels either on foot or on horseback, carrying at his side a large hunting horn and in his hand a spear, or, in the younger legend, a gun. The wildebeest he hunts is invariably a forest nymph or a mountain troll, who flees for him through the air, with her hair disheveled and her long, pendulous breasts flung over her shoulders. The hunt goes over forest and mountains, as when the bird flies or the wind blows. At some point Odin has been met returning from his nocturnal hunt, with the slain forest nymph hanging across his horse's back. Odin in this guise is, according to the younger folklore, an ancient king, who in this way is allowed to go and hunt as long as the world stands.

Odin, as a nocturnal hunter, always has before him two black, shaggy dogs, which in younger folklore appear with fiery red tongues and burning eyes.

The latter description of his dogs clearly indicative of biblical imagery of hellhounds.

Odin is to my knowledge a reasonable contender for the nightly rider one would encounter on the 7th and final year of performing the Yearwalk ritual. And you snatch a runestick from his mouth to hopefully attain clarity and farsight from that moment on.

A know rune master and local-colloquially called a (plural)Kloka/(singular)Klok gubbe (from:Wise old men an women, I remember @thoughts-of-a-heathen considered it to be a closed practice) from the bordering Niudung, Kettil Runske, obtained such farsight and hidden knowledge of the runes by snatching a total of three runesticks from Odin's mouth on that final 7th year day. Odin in this story went in the guise and personhood of Hill-Man (Berga-gubben) from Ufvelaberg.

There's so much nuance to it all! And I'm sad because Americans don't have any literature that accurately portrays the nature of the Norse deities and their stories.

"In German folklore, a Wolpertinger (also called Wolperdinger or Woiperdinger) is an animal said to inhabit the alpine forests of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany.

It has a body comprising various animal parts – generally wings, antlers, a tail, and fangs; all attached to the body of a small mammal. The most widespread description portrays the Wolpertinger as having the head of a rabbit, the body of a squirrel, the antlers of a deer, and the wings and occasionally the legs of a pheasant.

Stuffed "Wolpertingers", composed of parts of actual stuffed animals, are often displayed in inns or sold to tourists as souvenirs in the animal's "native regions". The Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum in Munich, Germany features a permanent exhibit on the creature.

It resembles other creatures from German folklore, such as the Rasselbock of the Thuringian Forest, the Dilldapp of the Alemannic region, and the Elwedritsche of the Palatinate region, which accounts describe as a chicken-like creature with antlers; additionally the American Jackalope as well as the Swedish Skvader somewhat resemble the wolpertinger. The Austrian counterpart of the Wolpertinger is the Raurakl.

According to folklore, Wolpertingers can be found in the forests of Bavaria. Variant regional spellings of the name include Wolperdinger, Woipertingers, and Volpertinger. They are part of a larger family of horned mammals that exist throughout the Germanic regions of Europe, such as the Austrian Raurackl, which is nearly identical to the German Wolpertinger."

A number of people were saying that all human fluids were impure. No praying if you had an open wound or anything. No sneezing during a ritual. But like...by their logic, you would be considered unable to worship if you wore a colostomy bag, because feces are impure. Which seems bad to me?

I’m sorry for being ignorant, by the way. I didn’t mean to anger or upset anyone. I’m new to this all, and I’m trying to learn.

You're welcome. The concept of "impurity" doesn't exist in Heathenry.

There's a few reasons why you might be seeing people claim such a thing though.

1. People want structure.

First of all, Heathenry lacks anything in the way of scriptures and doctrines. However, a lot of Heathens (specifically American ones) coming from a doctrine-based religious background, view this is a flaw rather than a feature. If anything, the lack of doctrines means they don't know what to DO to be Heathen, which can be anxiety-inducing for people who have never experienced any other paradigm.

Paradigm shifts take a while, so the way most people facilitate this is by creating their own practice observances. This provides them with a framework for being Heathen, but it's also something they understand as being for them, and is not something everyone needs to observe.

But some people try to force their ideas on others by selling it to them as "the way you do things." I can only guess why. Maybe it's because they don't feel like their own practice is valid unless other people agree with it. Maybe they came from a high-control religious environment and "converting others" is how they understand "doing religion." Or maybe they heard it from someone else, and because they're new at this and insecure they're going to repeat what they heard in order to feel like they're doing things "right." The reasons are endless, and people's minds are enigmas even to themselves.

The point is, if ANYONE's trying to tell you that there's things you HAVE to observe in Norse Heathenry, they're either lying, grossly misinformed, or simply ignorant of alternatives. Whatever the reason, it's still false.

2. The vikings were very clean compared to the rest of Europe, and many Heathens emulate this.

For lack of any scripture or doctrines, many Heathens develop personal orthopraxy by looking at what the pre-Christian Norse people (with the assumption Norse Heathenry died out with the introduction of Christianity, which we're only now figuring out isn't true. But I digress.)

One of the things people commonly incorporate into their praxis, is personal cleanliness. The pre-Christian Norse people supposedly had remarkable personal hygiene compared to members of other European societies, so it's pretty common for contemporary Heathens to adopt personal cleanliness into their practice in some way.

"Staying clean of bodily fluids for ritual" is something I've only seen practiced by folks running The Longship, and they presented it as an option because it's something they made up for themselves that made sense to them. To keep their ritual spaces remain clean of bodily fluids is something they chose to adopt after establishing a working understanding of Heathenry in their minds.

It's my understanding that was supposed to be an example of praxis, but unfortunately the nature of what it pertains to lends itself to skeevy interpretations.

(This is one of those circumstances where experienced practitioners mistake "having experience" with "knowing how to teach it." Many folks don't realize that pedagogy is its own unique skill. As a rule-of-thumb, you don't teach people exceptions to the norm until they are proficient with the norm, otherwise it creates this exact problem.

But in the Longship's defense, it was one of the first non-Folkish public-facing Heathen education websites to exist, so this is very much a situation where something was needed and they had the means to do it.)

Anyways, this misunderstanding could be a reason why you're seeing people claim this is something you HAVE to do.

(I also know the Longship also runs r/Heathenry, so take that as you will.)

3. Heathenry has a white nationalist problem

If something looks suspicious, treat it as such, because Heathenry has a white nationalist problem. Heathen white nationalists refer to themselves as "Folkish" which is a reference to the Volkisch movement of Germany, which was the social precursor to what eventually became the Nazi Party. Today's iteration is referred to as the neo-Volkisch movement, and its ideologies overlap with a number of alt-right and Hate Groups, including TERFs/RadFems for pastoral tradwife reasons.

Some of the talking points these bad actors like using involve encouraging people towards ideas or behavior that already exist in the world, but just so happens to benefit the spread of their ideologies.

For example, if people already observe "maintaining good hygiene" as part of Heathen practice, they might try to push that idea hard, so that people will see hygiene as so valuable that they would be more likely to apply it to things like "genetic hygiene" later (read: "Racial purity").

This doesn't make it unsafe or bad to be heathen. It just means you need to keep a discerning eye out, and to keep your distance from people spreading information in ways that seem very uncompromising, authoritative, and polarizing.

Remember: Heathenry is beholden to people. People are not beholden to it.