Cape

What I find particularly interesting about this take on Loki is, I think we see it reflected in his parentage. His father Fábauti is Jotun, while his mother Laufey is Æsir. The son of both chaos and order bringing order to things through orchestrated chaos.

I've never considered Loki to be interested in balance, but in movement and change. To be actively (and violently) opposed to the idea of stagnation.

Immortality is stagnation. An endless reign of kings or gods or jotunn is stagnation. People, and gods, need change and challenge and growth to be alive.

Have any of you guys tested the sigils from Witch Hat Atelier?

At first, I couldn’t help but feel the defensiveness rise in my chest. It was this tight feeling that made me want to shun and shame this video. However, I paused when I recognized the feeling and pushed it aside in favor of truly listening to what this guy was saying and honestly, I think he had a good point.

Essentially, the youtuber recognized that a lot of modern pagans treat other deities in the way Christians treat Jesus. There were clips with tiktok posts that would say “daily reminder, Apollo loves you!” and other similar posts.

The Old Gods don’t automatically love the way Jesus does, and I think the reason behind this is because they’re not human.

Jesus was human. He was a real man who connected personally with those around him. He was a highly progressive man who spoke boldly about the shortcomings of the church and the law. Meanwhile, the Old Gods are personifications of what we find in nature.

For example, Posidon is the God of the ocean. The ocean has been around many years before humans and will be there many years after us. We are simply a little blemish in the timeline.

Connection with the Gods needs to be built and the devotees must remember that the Gods don’t feel the way we do. They are detached in a way. A devotee must put in work to build rapport with their chosen deity.

If this makes you feel defensive, I suggest you look within yourself and into the Christian indoctrination you may have endured. Even if you weren’t raised in the church, you are still affected by Christian doctrine, especially if you’re from the West.

And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think Jesus’s teachings are wonderful (his actual ones, not the ones that Christian Nationalists try to push onto everyone) but if you want to be Pagan, then there is a lot of deconstruction that needs to be done.

There’s more to the conversation that is had within the video (such as many modern pagans forgetting that Gods have more to them than just one aspect), however, I wanted to focus mainly on the deconstruction topic.

link to said video:

Celtic Reconstructionism starts with a claim that sounds simple: the gods are real, distinct beings, and the primary way to know them is through the historical record. That claim has practical consequences that separate CR from most modern pagan approaches to the same material.

Lore First

The CR FAQ divides sources into primary, secondary, and tertiary.1 Primary material is the manuscripts and folklore recorded directly from living tradition. Secondary is scholarship: translations, academic analysis, critical editions. Tertiary is books and articles that use on primary and secondary sources.

The hierarchy is about traceability. If you’re working with the Dagda, your understanding of him comes from direct translations of texts like the Cath Maige Tuired and Lebor Gabála Érenn. Secondary scholarship like Gods and Heroes of the Celts by Marie-Louise Sjoestedt is useful for context.

Much of the written record, including Lebor Gabála Érenn, contains internal contradictions. CR treats this as evidence that the tradition was always alive and contested, not a fixed revealed truth.

How CR Differs from Neopagan Approaches

Most modern pagan traditions treat the gods as archetypes: aspects of a larger divine principle, interchangeable across cultures, selectable based on the practitioner’s need. CR rejects this.1 The Dagda and Zeus are not different masks on the same face. The Morrígan is not a stand-in for any other war goddess. These are specific beings with specific relationships to specific places, texts, and expectations.

You can’t build a CR practice by pulling a Celtic deity name from a list and pairing it with Wiccan or ceremonial magic ritual structures. The theological and cultural context is part of what you’re working with.1

CR also resists pan-Celtic practice, treating Irish, Welsh, and Gaulish material as interchangeable because they’re all “Celtic.” The traditions are related but distinct. Irish CR works with Irish sources and Irish context.1

Where UPG Fits

UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis) is spiritual experience that can’t be substantiated by historical sources.1 CR doesn’t dismiss it, but requires that practitioners label it clearly so personal experience doesn’t contaminate the shared record.

The lore takes precedence because it represents the accumulated, tested framework of a tradition. Personal gnosis is individual data. It might be genuine communication from a deity. It might be projection. There’s nothing wrong with having UPG in your own practice, but you shouldn’t expect others to adopt it as well (unless you’re able to back up your position with evidence).

Relationship and Reciprocity

CR practice requires no fixed liturgy and no priestly intermediary. Practitioners develop ongoing relationships with specific deities through prayer, offering, and sustained engagement with the lore.1 The model is closer to a relationship built over time than to a ritual system: you show up consistently, learn what the other party values, and maintain your obligations.

The reciprocity framework comes from Irish culture directly. Altar inscriptions from the early period show offerings made in fulfillment of vows, payment for services rendered.1 Relationship with the divine involves mutual obligation: the gods have responsibilities toward those in relationship with them, and practitioners have responsibilities in return. Hospitality and keeping your word are the structure of the practice, not courtesies layered on top of it.

Offerings in CR are participation in an exchange that sustains the relationship.

Sovereignty Theology as a Practical Lens

The Irish sovereignty goddess concept is usually presented as historical background: a goddess personifies the land, the king marries her symbolically, abundance follows.2 That framing treats it as a political metaphor the medieval Irish used to justify kingship.

CR practice goes further. The theological principle is that legitimate relationship with land requires reciprocity, proper conduct, and acknowledgment of the land’s divine character. A just king produces abundance, a false king produces blight. That causality isn’t limited to Bronze Age political arrangements.2

For practitioners in the diaspora working with Irish tradition outside Ireland, this generates real questions about obligation and place, questions the CR community is still working through.1

Working with Ériu or the Morrígan in their sovereignty aspects means engaging with that framework. The mythology is the record of the theology, and the theology generates the practice.

What Belief Looks Like

Whether the ancient Irish wholly believed their myths the way a modern person believes a news report is unanswerable. Their literary tradition was sophisticated and self-conscious: the filid reworked myths across generations. Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? offers a useful framework for how ancient peoples could hold myth as simultaneously sacred, historical, and poetic without contradiction.

For CR practitioners, the question isn’t whether you accept the Lebor Gabála Érenn as historical fact before approaching the gods. The myths provide a framework for knowing who these beings are, what they value, and what a right relationship with them looks like. That framework is what CR asks you to engage with.

CR FAQ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

forgot to post this oops, first time i had to draw scales in high detail so if anybody has any tips please let me know!

based off of this post!

"Tricksters are inherently transgressive figures who literally embody what it's like to live in a socially unacceptable or taboo way, which is why members of marginalized communities flock to them while more privileged people find them distasteful. They are the personifications of chaos and social unrest, which includes how much strife surrounds people who are deemed socially unacceptable; they are literally the gods of minorities and people who suffer under bigoted unjust systems.

When tricksters do something bad in a myth, marginalized groups see a complex rebellious figure with their own motives while privileged people see a bad person doing bad things. And when tricksters are punished, privileged people just see a bad guy getting their comeuppence while marginalized groups see the harsh realities of living as a socially unacceptable person.

I don’t consider myself a heathen in any way, or part of any organized group. Just a ragged-ended pagan.

I do what feels right. What Loki wants, He gets. Same for any god I follow, or any spirit at all. It doesn’t have to be ~elegant~ or classy food, hell, it can be dollar-store frozen pizza. If He wants it, He’ll get it. And if it’s what I have to offer, and He likes it, then why should any mortal give a fuck what kind of offering it is?

I personally don’t give a shit about trying to act like old Nordic peoples. Hell, I don’t consider Loki a solely Nordic god at all. Yes, the Loki persona comes from that tradition, and it is a good and rich one indeed. But my personal UPG sees Loki as an archetype, and the Norse trickster whose name I use for Him is just one of His many faces.

Even if this was pried from the petrochemical clutches of some heinously cheap, clearance section, plastic grocery store container exactly as we see it, like some magical confection creation that disregards the laws of time and decomposition, it may still hold serious value for the OP. I literally moan when I drink pure cherry juice. Like, I make audible noises without realizing it. It only came to my attention because people were laughing. I would gladly offer cherry juice to any deity regardless of their traditional offerings, because I am saying “This juice. Oh man. This JUICE!!!! I want it. I want it sooo damned bad. But You get it all/first/now. Enjoy!” Maybe this dessert is just as valuable to the OP.

My mother actually hoards a particular kind of pop-tart in her office at work, because she can only find it in the US and doesn’t want us to eat them. She keeps them in a locked drawer in her office. If she were to leave one out as an offering, I would consider it a tremendously more meaningful offering from her than if she lit some incense, or left out a plate of apples and spices. Because she doesn’t give a fuck about those things. These pop-tarts require trips to another country, and she guards them with a freaking lock and key! An offering is a sacrifice; if you are taking something that you could just as easily eat yourself, and enjoy to the point of making audible noises, but instead give it over to the gods, you are sacrificing the physical food, but also your emotional satisfaction in order to please Them.

It's all well and good to Google "spiritual protective herbs" and pick a couple random ones off the list, but do you understand why that herb is protective? Does it align with your intention?

I've always liked to use baking as an analogy for spellwork:

Let's say you want to bake a cake - yummy! You'll need flour for the basic structure, sugar to sweeten, eggs to bind the ingredients, a fat for texture and a leavening agent to make it rise.

So you pop to the shops and you grab bread flour, icing sugar, eggs, shortening and yeast.

Technically, these are all correct: bread flour is a flour, icing sugar is a sugar, yeast is a leavening agent etc. And they all work great for other baked goods! Yeast is great at making bread rise and icing sugar is super sweet on top of a cupcake.

But if you mix all of these together, the final result probably isn't going to be what you wanted. Why? Well because you haven't understood why each ingredient is needed or how a cake works!!

When crafting a spell it's important to understand what your intention is and how the spell is going to work - it can also help to think about how certain ingredients might interact within the spell.

During my talk with Loki today a few personal subjects were brought up in which he told me:

"Jealousy? No... not as your kind see it, anyway. I am not a jealous god on that sense... it would be quite hypocritical of me to be so. But I am a hungry god, a greedy god, I am survival... As bloody, raw and ugly as it is, isn't it also the pure? Beautiful, in a way? The basic instinct of the universe? Entropy itself... without it, there is nothing, and nothing is."

Of course, Loki didn't mean greed and hunger in a human/capitalist sense of the word, but it got me thinking. In one way or another, the most basic characteristics of Loki were either "watered down" or straight up demonized and forgotten (along with his more feral/bestial side) - part due christianization of the sagas (in which Loki is presented as the enemy/adversary), part due the fact that us humans as a group tend to think we are better than 'bestial' or 'animalistic' (and here you can discuss the impact of Illuminism or, again, the idea of desires and basic needs are sins etc). Newsflash: We are not. We are still the same animals we were, we just fake better now.

I feel like no matter the association you make with Loki - a fire god or a water god, I can honestly see both and that's another one of his beautiful contradictions - there will always be eminent greed... fire takes everything on its path without a warning, and so does water (talk about a big flood, christian god...). The same happens when you start to dedicate yourself to him. He takes space, unapologetically - and he pushes you to do the same.

So, I wish people would stop calling it "needy" or "drama queen" or whatever softened version people use now to make Loki look more approachable and call it what it is: greed, hunger, survival.