melián

Weird thing growing out of the letter “n.” (Page 65, Allen & Unwin fifth impression of “The Silmarillion” by Tolkien, 1997

I saw one of those "Valhalla does not discriminate against the type of battle you lost" posts go by my dash. I really want to say something but the notes are full of people grieving and saying how much comfort this re-interpretation gave them and I'm not that much of a bastard.

This story of the littlest cancer patient going to Valhalla is kind of upsetting but I struggle to articulate why. It's like Christianity wearing my faith like a costume.

I don't want to call it cultural appropriation because, you know, Norse Paganism/Heathenry/Ásatru is a reconstruction of a dead faith - a (more or less) historically-informed best guess based on scanty surviving evidence (much, if not all, of that Christianised). It's public domain mythology, reuse and remix as you like, etc, etc.

But...

Valhalla is not and has never been a place of rest and healing, and to say it is is to fundamentally misunderstand the mythology. Valhalla is where Odinn is building an army to fight the war at the end of the world. It is not a place for children or victims of domestic violence or cancer patients or anyone like that.

If you're drawn to Norse mythology, if you're grieving and you want to believe that your loved ones are in a better place, let me give you a different story.

It starts with a little girl, a child whom the gods deemed monstrous. Her name is Hela and she's the daughter of Loki, so she every right to claim a home in Ásgard. But, as I said, she was called monstrous for her appearance and her heritage and all but cast out. She was given her own realm, far away from the gods, and tasked with caring for the dead that Odinn (etc) have no use for.

The charge that the gods give this outcast child was considered shit-work. Un-honourable, if not actually dishonourable. An insult for a goddess.

But Hela took that duty with solemnity and made Helheim a home for her wards. It's not a hall full of warriors feasting and drinking and fighting. It's quiet; a rest at the end of a hard life. A place full of children and grandparents, mothers and fathers, farmers and shepherds. You and me.

Helheim, like its mistress, is misunderstood and maligned. When we, who have no place in war, die, Hela will accept us into her hall, care for us, and let us to rest, instead of demanding we keep fighting forever.

Hail to the Shining Goddess

Hail to her wonderful warmth

Mundilfari's bright daughter

Máni's radiant sister

Bringer of light

The famous verse from Hávamál which inspired Declaration 127 actually does not have a universally accepted reading, and the two possible interpretations do have some impact on the meaning.

The better-established reading in the English-speaking world is:

hvars þú bǫl kannt, kveð þú þat bǫlvi at ok gefat þínum fjándum frið.

‘Where you know of misfortune/evil declare it to be misfortune/evil and don’t give your enemies peace.’

However, the word þat ‘it’ in the second line is abbreviated in the manuscript in a way that some philologists have preferred a reading þér ‘[to] you’ (dative). This changes the meaning to:

‘Where you know of misfortune/evil declare it to be directed against you and don’t give your enemies peace.’

These lines in GKS 2365 4to 6v, lines 7 and 8, from https://handrit.is/. The first character in the second image is the symbol in question. Compare the second word in the first line, which is securely þér.

The second reading, which has been accepted in no shortage of editions and translations, has important implications. A person is to react to any injustice as if they themselves have been the recipient. The perpetrators of oppression – even if I personally am not directly affected by their oppression – are my enemies, and I am not to show them mercy.

Personally, I’m tentatively inclined to read the symbol in the second line as an abbreviation for þat. However, the þér reading makes more sense to me because it better explains the identity of fjándum ‘[to] enemies’ in relation to the situation just described.

you pet your dog and the atoms that are you brush up against the atoms that are him, and the electrons that are you press into the electrons that are him, and both of them change their movement.

electrons of course are not really particles and do not really move.

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.

My frustration isn't personal. It comes from the fact I can't seem to get across what I'm trying to argue for here.

I'm not arguing we should have authorities that tell us what to do or believe. If this is what people think of when they think of a "spiritual leader," then I must ask them to redirect their attention to entertaining a possibility where spiritual leadership can come in the form of ethical guidance.

Think instead of the archetypal wizard who stands at the crossroads. He knows how to give advice in a way that allows you to make an informed choice about which direction to go in, but he'll never tell you which road to take. If we conceive of our practices as "paths," then pagan spiritual leaders are ones who can show us routes and maps.

But showing us maps requires understanding the landscape of a given spirituality. Archaeologists, etc. are not trained to be spiritual "cartographers" in the way trained spiritual leaders are. And again, this isn't to say laypeople are incapable of doing this themselves; it's to say Heathenry on a global level would benefit from having these kinds of experts included in the reconstruction process, the same way it benefits from having professional archaeologists, linguists, and so on. But having high-quality leaders within our global environment requires us to take advantage of modern structures that we use to teach leadership. This may not be an M.Div in other countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar concept.

My community actively benefits from having an M.Div we can talk to. We can go to her for grief counseling, for mediating between members, for developing advanced rituals, for cleansing the energy of a space, for psychopomping ghosts, for spell-work, for deconstructing Christian thinking and conditioning, for reconstructing Heathen paradigms based on all she knows about history, cultural studies, and religious development, and for answering questions about things like ethics, animism, the nature of the soul, philosophies around transcendence, death, the afterlife, rebirth, and more.

She doesn't tell us what to do or believe, nor will she even talk to gods or spirits on our behalf. Instead, she teaches us how to use the advanced tools she uses for herself, and gives us language to describe the more complicated processes of our spirituality.

While not the only reason, she's a very big reason why I personally know so much about Heathenry and know how to describe it to people. If she exists, the more people like her also exist. They are currently rare, but my argument is that they don't have to be.

When the winds rise and the path grows tangled, we do not turn away. We are heathens. We walk forward not because the way is easy, but because it is ours.

In the Norse worldview, life is not a straight line but a web, Wyrd, spun by the Norns, woven with every choice, every consequence, every breath. Challenges are not interruptions to our path; they are part of its weaving. To face hardship is to meet the loom of fate with steady hands.

Odin hung on the tree not for comfort, but for wisdom. He sacrificed certainty for insight, and in doing so, taught us that growth often demands discomfort. Eir heals not by avoiding pain, but by tending to it with care and courage. Loki, ever the shapeshifter, reminds us that transformation often comes through chaos, and that even disruption can be a doorway.

To live heathen is to live with intention. We do not ask for ease we ask for strength, for clarity, for the will to act. Our rituals ground us. Our ancestors walk with us. Our altars remind us that we are part of something vast and enduring.

So when the storm comes, we light the candle. We speak the name of a god who knows our struggle. We offer to the land, to the spirits, to the unseen. We remember that we are not alone. And then we take the next step.

Because the path forward is not always clear. But it is always ours to walk.

He who walks Between;

He who moves effortlessly between realms.

Let me give my thanks to the god most Cunning;

To Flame Hair,

Scar-lip.

Hail be to Loki,

Who walks the crooked path; the path few dare to tread.

Hail be to Loki;

He who is the End of the World and ushers in a new beginning.

Praise him that is both chaos and order; for one could not exist without the other.

LOOK AT THIS BEAR