Heathen Ranter

On Wizards

2012-02-02T03:55:00.000-08:00

A wizard goes beneath and beyond. A wizard has penetrating sight, and sees through. A wizard assimilates and grasps learning(s) at a much deeper and less literal level than most. A wizard is comfortable with contradictions and riddles.

For these reasons, most people can't trust or understand wizards. They are strange to them. They may love them, if they feel their benefit, but they don't essentially "get" them. A wizard remains inscrutable.

It is a different kind of path, one that trusts dreams, one that reads at the dream level and thus experiences texts at a richer depth and breadth. Part scholar, part philosopher, part naturalist, part oneiromancer, part riddler, part poet, part necromancer, and part conjurer, they ponder, they posit, they interconnect their intuition and their intellect, coming to trust the wisdom of the former and the brilliant intensity of the latter, and the rich intergrowth between them. A wizard lingers after dreams in the dark and coming light, pausing before the day's demands to let the wisdom of dreams have at least its half-sway. The wizard has less certain knowledge than illuminating puzzles in which a deepening confidence develops, akin to knowledge. In fact, it is a kind of knowledge. A wizard often pores through books, surrounded by them, even immersed in them. Books layer the complexity, giving the mind grasping-points from which to bring up insights from the depth into articulation.

Most people who get involved in a belief system expect loyalty to it at its literal level, for that is what they grasp. A wizard grasps its wisdom and thus can enter into it with passion and erudition, and yet never be fully "of" it. Wizards have this mercurial quality of betweenness. They are thus suspect to those caught in literality and particularly superficiality. Their betweenness gives them a liminal quality that can evoke projection on the part of others regarding all their fears of liminal spaces, including traumas that have occurred in this space. The wizard must carefully sidestep these inevitable projections, never identify with them (ie be caught or caught up in their spell), and instead, allow each person to dispel their own bad enchantments in time. Needless to say, a wizard must aim at the highest integrity, willing even ascesis in its service, but all along with the savvy to remember that "no good deed goes unpunished", in the sense that that which people do not understand, they fear, and that which they fear, they actually misunderstand.

The wizard fails to conform not out of rebellion but out of a deeper loyalty and service to holy powers generally unrecognized, and as such, simply can't be bothered with much of the ordinary drivel. A wizard must be willing to intellectually explore dangerous places to gain knowledge. This "Faustian" imperative is balanced by its loyalty to the deep that keeps it attuned, rather than seeking the vainglory or manipulation of the surface-world. A wizard is a free thinker and a free spirit, whose thoughts can go anywhere, wandering the universe with the mind, even descending into the dark dales beneath the mountains to retrieve the mead absconded by monsters. The search is for wisdom, whose wells of bright, deep sadness refresh the world, and the wizard seeks to refresh the world through such conjuring.

Because of all this, the wizard must declare allegiance to powers deeper than those acknowledged by the usual loyalty-politics, which the wizard, however sympathetic, stands outside of. A good folk recognizes, however it may spook them, that a wizard serves deeper imperatives, and stand aside, out of the wizard's way, letting the work be done, glad when they can get benefit. But much is obvious to the wizard's eye that is not to the ordinary, and the wizard ought become accustomed to the bafflement and misunderstanding that will often result. Some will confuse the wizard, because of the conjuring, with wizardry's close counterfeit, the con artist. Sometimes there seems but a hair's difference, but the wizard is always in service, to something awesome and wise, that is sought for benefit, for general refreshment, while the con man is only in service to himself, utilizing illusions not to riddle and illuminate, but to manipulate. The wizard uses tricks as devices to evoke deeper truths (and sometimes to evade the dangerous projections and prejudices of the uninitiated), not to defraud. The integrity a wizard represents is mandatory, even if it is an inscrutable one, even if at times it partakes of the tricksterish.

A wizard can hold positions that seem contradictory but are not because the wizard either knows their deeper connection, or trusts it will unfold with time and further investigation. This trust of hunches, though not infallible, becomes a good guide for the wizard. The wizard because of all this is transideological, transcultural, transsystematic, and this slipping in and slipping out quality of transcendence can be quite unnerving to those secure in one worldview and paradigm alone. The wizard juggles paradigms at will.

A wizard gives strength to what serves life, to the degree and for the time that it does serve life, and thus may have many irons in the fire and several horses in the race. Many partial systems bring out truths more whole than they can fathom, and thus are useful (in the beneficial sense) articulators and movers.

Only a culture that has a word, unweird, which means unlucky, as the Anglo Saxons did, can fully understand and appreciate the importance and significance of having wizards, who are riddlers, shamans, poets, mystics, druids, and philosophers all mixed into one, without entirely being any of them. A wizard is very special, but a wizardless culture might not know it.

Wizards are likely to be characters, slightly eccentric, erudite, arcane, baffling, good natured with a strange edge of the sinister, which is simply the echo of the peril the wizard risks for knowledge, perhaps with a dash of the curmudgeonly or crabby, yet generous, filled with good will, and a genuine, careful, non-naive love for all creatures in their special faults.

What good is a wizard, you may ask? Someday you might have the joy of knowing that, if you build milieu welcoming to them. When you grow that flower, the wizards will come to taste the nectar, and your culture will then feel rich, flavored, grounded, and suffuse with the magic of the ordinary, whereby the miraculous beauty hidden in all things unfolds its grey garments in exquisite indulgence for all to see. Then the spirits will dance, the spirits in trees and rocks and meadows, and the ordinary at last will achieve its fitting synthesis with the extraordinary. This could be yours.

See also this on wizards.

Urd Offers Choices

2012-01-11T02:41:00.000-08:00

Let the world teach you how to be old ; let death teach you how to be inevitable, unstoppable, inextricably woven into the heart of things. Life is a frightening adventure of peeling back fear to reveal treasure and grandeur, if we will dare to step out from our petty, little hovels from time to time and listen to what the widelands say in their breadth and depth. This world was shaped by divine hands out of the remains of monsters. All reduces to formidable miracle. The tough places are the learning places : stop to listen, for hints whisper in the cracks. We begin pimpled geeks struggling to learn maturity from a world of elders. Let the world peel your geekdom and age you into a masterpiece, a sculpture of time, with all inessentials carved away. An opportunity awaits. Urd offers choices.

Inevitability

2012-01-11T02:11:00.001-08:00

There is a certain bleak inevitability to the Northern way that superficially has gloominess and grimness to it. But beneath this is great joy, and endless faith in life's powers. The hands of Urd the Great hold us all, and this is a deep, loving inevitability mediated by the Gods and our gambles. Beneath the flavor of bleakness lies the hope. There are smiles hiding in hidden crevices.

Inevitability, which at first seems so bleak, is an embrace that holds one close, a level of deep being one approaches, and if a heathen, then with panache and flair.

Bleakness may just be the roar of the distant ocean singing a world-song far more profound, and thus more alien and at times more cold, more ancient, than a human tune. The great is-ness of the objects in their grandeur of old, old being, having found themselves long ago, and not at all new to world, is formidable and steep and strong, full of very deep comfort, if you can feel it. But it sings a drone, a hum, a didgeridoo so ancient it is strange, and wisdom is in part accommodating oneself to the strangeness of the world, to sing with the coldness of rocks, and dance in the bleak beyond the human pale, and there in the cold, to affirm your own human warmth, as an addition to the song.

The grimness, in the end, is just a shield, like the ice that keeps the greening earth intact in winter's grip. There is great warmth beneath the surface. There is an awesome party raging in Hel : hear the horns clink and the sounds of baritone laughter, and the honey of the dwarf's yeast upon rhythmic lips and wooed, wondering ears.

Folk foreign to this way do not imagine the simmering mirth beneath the dour, Stoic face, the endless fund of faith in life that lies beneath the grizzled grimace at a world gone cynical, that studies the bleak for signs of endless power, hints on how to become eternal. The angels, one might say, sing strange and potent surf-spells. Hear them roar.

Bring the Gods Together in Your Heart

2012-01-11T01:50:00.000-08:00

You must find the Gods and bring them together. They have left their traces deep within the sinews of the world, but within the world, to surface-eyes, and minds scarred by the axe, they appear to be in contradiction in the tangle of complexity. To have faith in them, you must find them, every one, within the world, and bring them together as a pantheon in your mind and heart and soul. They are already pantheoned in the macrocosm ; to find faith, you must bring them together beyond contradiction in the microcosm.

Remember that the Abrahamists and Puritans are half-atheists : they have emptied the world of the traces of divinity, and see all immanence as empty materiality, their deity existing alone in transcendence.

Ea ch God holds high very pure principles, principles so polyvalent and potent, they manifest as complexity in this world. Each one represents a complete and ample vision of deity, and one would suspect, from externals, that these are incompatible, and yet we know they are coordinated and richly interstrewn. Yet for us, it is as if they are lost in the tangle, and our journey is to find them, and bring them together so they may fund and multiply our possibilities for bringing life alive again in our lives and those around us.

These are reflective Gods ; they appear upon reflection and not naive realism. It takes depth to perceive their movements. Often in the midst of things we do not perceive them, and only upon reverie or dream do we catch the traces of their movements.

Understand you are holding together forces and principles that assembled together in the world of appearance and seeming would seem in complete contradiction. The pantheon presented by the myths should appear counterintuitive, and is only the result of deep, Hegelian synthesis of meditation, contemplation, and gambles tested over hundreds and hundreds of generations. You are bringing together something bold and impossible in your heart, and asserting to the world that there are higher solutions to what seem contradictions, which may never fully resolve themselves in time, but which are transcended through perceptions of wisdom and wyrd, and there the Gods are. You are asserting great faith, audaciously, that some mystery guided by higher powers is riddling itself out beyond our powers to fully grasp, yes, in this world, in this world so deeply touched already by corruption that it has become opaque to the light of the Gods. Yet that is but the depth of the surface. Faith says beneath, the deep movements of the Gods still endow foundations, if they can be found. The goblins, for all their might, allowed for a time to have their illusion of reign, are but spooks, whom the Gods in time will mop up and literally wring out of this world.

You do not need to divide yourself and choose a single vision ; you only need choose good over evil, yet when you do, you find goods so diverse, so seemingly contradictory, so calling for risk and gamble, that they are truly alive. The vision of unity, of high Asgard on high, is not a simple one, simply attained, through throwing all together in a mush. It is a pinnacle of epiphany achieved in the spiritual struggle of the soul with a difficult world, and wrestling to untangle the divinity wrapped inherent in its great complexity. Dream bold.

Fanaticism

2011-12-25T17:06:00.001-08:00

We are taught to fear fanatics, as if our own cynicism were not as deadly, as if passion and determination and stubborn steadfastness, not to mention force at times, were not necessary to break through inertia and stagnation and achieve progress. As if thinking bold and acting audaciously did not please our Gods. As if thinking small could sustain us, as if dwelling in the remains of disappointment could nourish us. As if there could be heroism without high ideals, and without sacrifices for those high ideals. As if drive and direction were not necessary to transcend, and fully enter becoming.

I do not fear the passion nor the drive of fanatics ; I fear alone one-sidedness that is not the point of the advancing wedge of wholeness. It is lack of wholeness I fear, and many cynics lack it. It is lack of wholeness I fear, and most of the jaded perpetuate it. It is lack of wholeness I fear, and sometimes the fanatically unfanatical are more fanatical in their unwholeness than those who drive forward.

Question the standard equations, the easy formulas that could rob you of the best in life by urging emotional acquiescence to ill-considered slogans. Wholeness says, passion and well-roundedness, idealism and common sense, audacity as well as ability to roll with the punches. The undogmatic know that sometimes a taskmaster and a whip are necessary to get us off our butts, if nothing else in dialectical protest that at last activates us. And we also know, sometimes, don't tread on me, I'm evolving at my own speed (as long as that speed is not zero). Both are necessary. The fanatic has something to teach you. Something about your complacency, your slumbering potential, your surrender to defeat, even to the point of redefining defeat as the only, everyday reality. The fanatic says, rightfully so, fuck that!

Yule Offering

2011-12-25T17:04:00.000-08:00

Out by the sands, shore-swept wash, tonight I threw five pebbles one year ago I collected by the shore. I had asked then, what offering would Njord want? What would a coin really mean? It came to me : collect several stones and live with them for a while. Let them become acquainted with my life, absorb a little of its ample flavor, witness my routine and all my struggles, and collect into themselves the lessons and boons of this exchange program. Then they might be returned to their home, the waves, with the profit or interest of what I was able to share, and glowing with that little bit of life force, restore to the waves a new spirit of giving, to keep the gift exchange alive. And in that spirit tonight, I walked to the waves' edge, and hurling my pebbles into the receding wash with great intention, gave to Njord and all the Gods, completing one cycle of countless myriads to come of the great Circle of Gifts. And it felt good and strong, and appropriate on Yule, to give back. What an honor.

Good Yule!

2011-12-25T02:58:00.000-08:00

Good Yule! Good Yule!

I write to you beneath a blanket on the beach outside Ventura. The night is crisp, the stars are bright, the tide thrums on, its baritone thump along the shores holding, forgiving, strengthening. I roll about on the sand, ask Jord, ask Njord for healing. My heart has been sad. I look up at the Milky Way. Gods, this is a beautiful world. In every way, beyond gorgeous. Heimdall lounges on his sparkling, silver-golden spackled bridge, sipping warm mead from a horn. I am cradled between Frey and Freya's parents. I seek the old wisdom of Fjollnir, the Wise One, the All-Father. I see how far Urd's wide hand stretches, weaving meaning, deep significance, even where we see none, where we see sorrow and tragedy. It is a riddle, but beyond a riddle, it is a mystery. It doesn't always make sense to us, and yet the truer we are to our being and all the call therein, the more we will see we are taken care of. Urd is very gentle in her large, unfathomable tides, crashing, overwhelming, and uncanny as they may seem to us.

I roll about, I hold my ribs, I breathe, I shake, I sob. I do not know what or why i do, but I trust the body and spirit. I need no reasons. I am an animal, and the earth knows what to do with me. All I need do is surrender, and trust the rhythm and the gentle madness. Ah, there, I sink into soul, soul, yes, find my pattern, feel my melancholy and my luck ; O joy, were they ever different? How lucky to have the sadness we have! I am deeply sad, and I am deeply happy. This messed up world is all it should be. It is just right, even though it ought to be better, and I will participate in my own humble way in making it better. Mainly by being myself, by fruiting every capacity within me, and giving my all.

That is the spirit of Yule. Giving your all to all you love. And friends, despite your petty quarrels and your serious strivings, I hope that circle of love ripples outward to finally touch all the children of the Gods, because if it does, then your love is truly strong enough to nourish you, and may you prove worthy of it.

Gratuity. That is Yule. The pure Gift of Being. Gods who are tough on you because Gods who love you, Gods who know you are worthy of a tough and fibrous world that you can meet. And you can make enough to share. There is abundance here, even in the cold.

The cold time of year comes. The sun is shrouded in veil, as a widow in mourning. Even she must take the time to be still, and heal sorrowed times by donning the black veil and doing homage to the melancholy of existence, so in time, through this toil, to release its inner joy. So it is good in this dawn of cold and dark to hail the light and effervesce in the warmth of each other's company, giving from the heart, raising cheer, and building morale for the slower, colder, more contemplative days to come. Spring has been promised to us -- as a gratuity. Life is all giving. Never let Gullveig blind you to that. A gift calls for a gift. That does not mean tit for tat. It means total giving. Life, friends, whether 'tis popular to say or no, is communist. On Yule we remind ourselves of this, so that the world of commerce inaugurated by Heid's distrust and greed does not engulf our entire being. This is practice for when Baldur returns. Sol's brief sojourn through cloudy veils of darkness is a yearly liturgy reminding us that when the larger year is over, just as Springtime will now come in a few months, so Baldur will return to rule a bold world of peace, freedom, adventure, and full giving, where trust is the rule and not the exception. Those are times to live towards, and in our holy tides, they are times we can live in seed right now. Frodi is ready to teach us that festive, communist spirit of giving today in the mirth of kith and kin ; and someday, someday as we evolve, we will naturally, as extensions of our stronger, more enlightened beings, stretch Yule out until that giving at last covers the whole year long, and then we will at last have exiled Gullveig for good! May that day come sooner than later, this holy tide promises, if we will heed its call in our hearts!

Dare to be an idealist today, if no other day. Peace on earth and good will towards men is a heathen value. Frodi's Frith is alive at Yule. Retouch that idealism underneath your grizzled self. Laugh, and remember it is one of the sources of your strength. Dare on this day to think large and imagine a world where the Mill once again churns out peace and plenty for all, a world where the Gift has returned to its rightful, central place, and all that mistrust poisoned into us in the dawn of time by Heid dissolves, banished with all her curses, for all time. That day may be long in coming, but friends, let that day live in your hearts today, and all the long fortnight of Yule! Here dreaming may begin again, renewing the year to come with blessfully needed spirit.

Beneath Night's cloak, on the milled flesh of Ymir that Frigga has lifted up into soul of Jord, by the crashing waves of Njord, I greet you and your kin this Yule, and wish all a good day, and good night!

Every parent knows, we have the honor of becoming Santa. Herein lies a great mystery and a truth. May we incarnate his great and mighty wisdom. Good night!

Everything Happens For the Dream-Reasons of Wyrd

2011-12-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

a follow-up to "Everything Does Not Happen For A Reason"

Urd, the Well of Wyrd's keeper, dreams, and her dream-weaves web upon the tapestry of life. It makes no sense to logic-eyes of wordlock, but in the end, her benevolence cups and holds events, even nightmares, in a stranger logos, one that makes no sense to bodies locked in time's excruciating struggles, but to soul, to soul, a story lurks and hides, awaiting eyes to see. Urd is a grandmotherly poet dreaming sagas in the dark of Night, her daughter, Odin's sister. The wind blows, be it mild, even in Mimir's realm ; from such breeze the slightest droplets from his well are carried on the wind. Out beyond the meadows in a romp within the wondrous woods, an ancestor of yours in open-mouthed awe may taste that droplet, and the veils pull down, and see the saga in the chaos of your wondering-why of tale. And then if you give pray to depths to reach your roots towards forefathers, that he or she who tasted droplets lending sense to senselessness, revealing saga, may give sense to you of what before seemed merest mayhem, and then you may find some peace. Such peace ancestors sipping honeydew from meadowflowers' cups in philosophic strolls bestow if we will hear. And Wyrd dreams on, in odd, fluent benevolence. Look hard in the face of what hard faces you : Wyrd is winking ; secret blessings hide within the hard. O sleep and find the dream-reasons daily-mind is dull to ; only dreams sometimes restore the threads of frayed and weary wyrd. She sips her cup of tea and winks ; a wink is luck within the hint of time, to souls alive to riddling puns of smiling Urd.

The Hobbit

2011-12-22T07:47:00.000-08:00

O say that Northern spirit still divine within our Western Walls resides! For there is hope within the embers not yet passed that we may light the hearths again! And that is food for toasts! Let lift the wine, in silver-rimmèd horn, to lips, and spill the words of praise that honor Gods of wizards, One-eyed’s scions sleek and oaken-strong! I hear the baritonéd voices of my forebears chant their galdurs! Raise they rhythms, luck-bestrong, from holy hel’s deep doors of dawn, where they may share, from meadows’ blossoms, all their treasures’ broadest heartsong! Tales spun gossamer by fairy’s flight in flit through skull-song, quill-bedreaming, summon all the buried hopes, and let the soul be sung again by men! This lore is spell, may spellbound be the sons of ash and elm, to feel their roots and raise their branches high to sun’s encrystal-shellèd cobblestones! From heavens high to hel below and all between in middle earth, may what is whole and holy live again, and take rule of this world forevermore!

Broken Chains

2011-11-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

The chain is broken, the tie to the deep past lost. Heathenism is a path for which we strive, yet I, like so many of you, am a detribalized descendant of tribesmen thrown flotsam into the Roman world. It is those moments I seek, epiphanies where one can feel coherence pulling together a dissipated world into a sense of meaning that is present, that is now, that is ever and has been. Is that what a sym-bol once was, not a mere glyph, not just a sign, but a vision that threw together and glued in a knot of coherence what so much conspired to keep separated and fragmented?

Look at us, surrounded by fossils, bits of lore, the crushed glass and stone of temples. And how we cling to these pieces, hoping to sing the spirit out of the stone. But it takes a tribe to sing the spirit from the stones and make it live in flesh, on earth.

Drowning in a sea of atheism, apathy, anomie, looked upon as quaint, strangely attached to old fairy tales, as perhaps missing a bolt or two, and gorgeous upwellings of drum-beating vision are given blank stares, and fade in the wilting eyes of willfully misunderstanding strangers, strangers who call themselves my friends, call themselves my family.

When a genuine moment was found in old days, how it echoed, how it trilled and choired and swirled about the tribe. How it hummed in days to come beneath the surface. How it was recognized and seen and heads nodded in worth.

Not annihilating eyes, that look on and turn to dust, and scatter dust to wind. Not dessicating eyes, that dry and shrivel, and turn away from ancient beauty.

We are thirsty sojourners with pierced water-skins. Nothing holds. The hands lift water, and the toes are wet ; the hands hold nothing.

I am a creature running on automatic. It takes faith to live amongst the apathy and keep one's troth. Lost in the banality, one often feels nothing, cannot smell the ancestral scents, cannot feel the presence of the holy Gods. One posits. One lives as if in suspense, in the hopes of, in the projection beyond nothing, in the absurd stance of reaching towards what all deny. And sometimes one feels nothing, yet one hopes to feel.

I am sent out into a strange world. I know it well, but it has not lost its strangeness. Estranged. Not a tribe in sight to hold things together. The freeways rip my local soul away and toss it to the smoggy winds. I struggle to find a word that will hold. That word is weighed on the moneychangers' scales, who shake their heads and shrug. A word is air. Cheap, smoggy air. Yet a word was once wyrd ...

I have seen the numb eyes. Numb, electrocuted eyes. Eyes that can no longer believe. Eyes that are weary, heads that sadly shake no at any talk of magic, ears that are deaf to poetry. Ringed by people for whom soul is a word, worthless air itself, and no treasure. Language that wells from Anglish tribesmyn but it cannot bridge the gap at all. I speak words but no one understands.

Is it genocide to have flattened masses of the same bloodline bleached of their common root? Or to sing of ancestors who are always gone, because culturally, their descendants have disappeared? If their descendants were swallowed by the Roman wolf, and became bleached, stripped soldiers, do they have descendants at all? Or what does it mean to have a heritage that is all nostalgia, with few hands to carry it forward?

I walk into a hall, but the hall is empty. No cheers to greet me, no fires burn in braziers, no feast in hall. What is a vision quest when you return with a vision and everyone yawns and simply talks about the ballgame?

Broken chains.

Up to Speed

2011-10-05T01:31:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I ever even entertained people who think that feuds are a good thing.

Of course, I've argued against that logically here.

But I can't even fathom at this point why I even bothered to argue it logically.

It's so clear that the feuding mindstate is simply the ethics of the mafioso : you bumped off someone I love, so I'll bump off someone you love, and maybe throw in a couple of others as well.

Sorry, that might be human, but it's barbaric nonsense. And all it does is set the grounds for the war of all against all.

Anyone who has studied history and anthropology knows that societies that live like this can end up having intergenerational feuds that last for centuries. It's just idiocy.

And the stories say so, if anyone were listening. At least the religious stories. Maybe not the Icelandic Sagas (although in a sense, they do, too, if you read them right), but the religious stories are all about portraying what idiocy feuds lead to. The world basically splits apart.

But again ... why would I even entertain such idiocy?

It's like entertaining racism.

Dude ... if you ran from Christianity because it was too progressive for you, what a fucking loser you are. Christianity is about one of the most reactionary religions you can find, and the Church, in general, has stood for reaction at just about every turn. Sure, the Church has "liberalled up" in the past 100 years (to some degree), but that's only to come up to speed, ie., to live in the 20th and 21st centuries. If the religion of reaction is not reactionary enough for you, oh, dude, I don't give a fucking shit whether you "worship the same Gods" as me ... I have no interest in talking with you, I have no interest in proving anything to you, and really, truly, sorry, no, we are not practicing the same religion.

See, I worship this guy named "Odin". His very name is about getting on top of the evolutionary learning curve. His very name bespeaks the opposite of reaction, because he is the master of the anti-stagnation force that drives on evolution. The slogan of Odin is "come up to speed", not "stay in the past". In fact, two of his names speak to this : Fjolsvinn,"Fully Swift", and Svipal, "Changeable, Dynamic, Mercurial".

Oh, from Urd's perspective, sure, there certainly may be nothing new under the sun. But this is Urd we're talking about. She has seen the world through multiple eons and knows what is hidden in the depths. If it's true that from her perspective, everything new is merely a new expression of old archetypes, from our perspective that means there is much to be discovered indeed, for wyrd does not mean "the past". It means "the mysterious past". So sorry, no using wyrd as an excuse for being reactionary, as if the past were all that mattered. No, nope, that's not how it works. Our ancestors by no means thought that the world was going to remain confined to what they could historically remember. They knew that the past included, particularly as one moved backwards into the mists of mythic time, much that was unknown, and these unknowns had great portent as they developed into the future. It's true that as we invent unseen-before gadgets and contraptions that these may be unfoldings of potentials laid down billions of years ago, but from our perspective, they're innovations, and they may very well be worth-while.

Our song-smiths wrote tales about all that can go wrong with feuding so their dope-headed peers, and us, could learn a thing or two from their heightened state of inspiration. Let's come up to speed.

Mani Calls the Elfin Boy

2011-09-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

Boy! O child! O child wind-whipped hair in forlorn night, O boy! Sweet boy, O elfin youth, how silver-sheen your eyes, like mine! Yes, me, here up above! Hollow sounds my voice? I think in ivory on the wind, in pewter tones the moonbeam’s strings beharp into the lonely air below! With smooth and honeyed wine matured in months and months of ticking moon, with sliver sickle-turning tusk to fullest pearl, I lunar serenade, and sing the soft of evening’s glow to down below, the sleeping creatures! Yet seen you once, I’ve seen you twice, for second sight was gift of mine from long ago the crone and keeper of the hollow cavern’s well! For I have strolled and sailed the black-bay silent seas below, and know, O friend, a thing or two, a secret, something craved by you ...

You seek the up-above, a maiden spider-dew embroidered veil, with crepe-enpetalled blooms a crown atop her flaxen mane! But down-below, O child, you must go, for closing eyes of mine, I see through yours, what salt has burned upon your iris, knots and tangles thick within her amber, flowing locks, and these cannot be cut without a sharpened edge, without a sword so swift and subtle, wool thrown on the waves, and wandered towards its blade would cleave the yarny threads between! For one whose grain of headlands is a’knotted cannot love, nor see, but pine away in tangled dreams! And how to cut those knots, let loose the griping tangles, lest a sweeping swish of subtle fire-from-the-forge of ore-made-ice with tongs and hammers? How?

Clasped and locked in woody branches, viny gnarls nine-leagues thick, it lies, this wonder iron-of-the-shiny-tongue-of-silver, deep within a hollow housed beneath the hanging roots of hoary tree. They say a sorceror insidious sated blade with hate of fiery ice, and slipping starlight from the darkness, stolen shafts of light, he mallet-hammered into edge of awe the sweeping strike of thunder’s fire fast within its tortured ore! And subtle things, unlikely things, at edge of world’s horizon stalked, he caught, and fleeting, nimble, forced mercurial spirits in damascine steel upon his anvil! All his wicked, wild hate, a winter’s windstorm never sated, frost-enbreathèd sparkle blew into the blade! Till spirits chilled in fright! I lit the way in darkness, dwarves of deep reflecting subtle splendor mine upon their shields, to let the nether-king reconnoiter, and seize this banshee-besom of the iron bogs! For stout and doughty smiths beneath the earth, mere rumor of its edge upon the chilling wind, had woven clasps of living leather, thick, enwoven ring-mail, might of adamantine roots the mountains hold within their bosoms, so to hold it close and clasp it tight to tree, where none might free it, fell the world on falter of the fleet yet deadly sorceror-enwhisp’ring blade! A peril poured in steel, a whirring rush adrenaline-bemetalled! Yet, my lad, O youngish elf, a spell indeed in hilted ore! O hoard’s so secret sword might swift and once-for-all with scissor’s nip untangle locks florette of lovely maiden, slip between the gnarled knots, and win your prize!

O why with eyes of coiled vertigo wonder upwards towards me, lad? What will you say? How may a blade so deep and tied titanium to a trusty tree be won? Why, wonder not, observe this scythe I carry, shadowed! Bright its polished claw so curved. It cuts the cords of tangled fate, when tragic knots have formed, and so is ever sought by sires of the wyrdless ones, who wander, hovering, o’er abyss, the fall of fate to which their tangles tie! O wish is swiftly strong to attain this ghostly scimitar, a gift the daubing giant-crones below once yore-days gave to me for deeds of valor former days had seldom seen! A blade above, with bend of bow, that cuts the tangles down below, to give for blade below that may the tangles up above undo with flash of flourished sweep! For keepers of the clasps below have secret weep, a sorrow sad that burns their bones and churns their gnawed and gnashing bellies! The nether-king a daughter has, O maiden of the wondrous night, whose belly’s bud the sorceror enseeded with his seething, frosty hate, and what has blossomed is a son, whom second-sight reveals might follow fast the father’s fevered craze! And such a shadow son’d is sun enshadowed, so they weep behind a wall of frozen face. A’pace to whip the reins of antlered deer, my lad, and pull thy sleigh through northern caverns, winding down, and find thy prize below! For up above, thy prize awaits!

And why? Why, gracious me, to give you scythe of polished quicksilver? For what? A single hope, my hope-forlornèd elf : that you might bring this blade beclasped in leather still, yet sheathed, to homes of heaven where your maiden waits. Delay thee not, nor tarry : fast, as if the earth were fire feet might burn, escape, and flee, towards where the rain’s enshimmered ebb does bow, and there, I’ll lift you, lad, and give you lift upon my silver ship, to ride along the rainbow bridge to where your love in chests of ruby rims ensconces kisses for thy lips alone! But let the whispered sorrow of the sword’s enbladed shriek beguile thee not! For siren of the smith, the edge seduces men to vengeance seek, and if you falter, all might fall within your soul, and how you’ll reel, and who knows what this madness might engender in your latter days, O friend! The cycle of the feckless feud is fueled by foolish rashness, and, enswirled to might, becomes a cyclone, as a scythe or blade betwirled, that severs heads of many sires’ sons! Beware! And let thy feet be swift, boy! Better days beckon ; heed the haunts below, and keep my rede.

Svipdag Cries The Moon

2011-09-25T04:59:00.001-07:00

I will never be anyone's beloved again, it feels. I'm banished from the places of true glamor and shining light. My words, long practiced, long polished, are for dung, so it seems. Hacks and mediocretins gain their multiple accolades, but wondrous beings won't even look my way. Cursed, cursed, cursed. I howl at the moon. I am tied in place by Halfdan's bonds. I rescued her for nothing. Nothing! The wind is more giving than her words! How its blue lips blow ice-kisses upon me more freely! What? What do you mean there's a sword in the underworld? And how would I, a wretch roped ‘round an oak, be concerned with such trivia?

O moon, if I could be as crazy as you, I might not go mad, but as it is, I stare, and my eyes lie the darkness before me, for even light is darkness without her immortal spark bespeaking blessings on my worthless charade of a life. Are these tears? Ice falls from my eyes in this blizzard, crashes, falling dust in the snow. Therein a multiple hundred times in fragments I see your shining face, O moon, see you, and wish I might fly so high and smooth like gliding white against the small pin-pointed-broken black. Your words fall out as snow crystals, strange letters, twisted, falling. I see strange patterns in the sentence-blizzard. Are you speaking to me, O moon? What strange adventures you call me on!

Who said I was an elf? Mine own glow seems to shade, self-swallowed by shame and grief, a mere mortal in the eyes of a swallowing world, engulfed. Why not implore me fall within the depths, O moon, why not? For I am there already. If you asked me how much lower I could go, why I could not begin to answer. Thus, indeed, I take your charge, and downwards thence shall go. A blade? What cuts more than this pain? A blade? The wind is sword the more for frozen slash! And mere suggestion that this blade delivered -- though how to heavens high above I'll heave I cannot fathom -- might enwoo me single kiss of she who holds the world's enchantments in her charm, the blossoms woven in her starlit hair of awesome might, pours magma, embers hot from smithy's forge, within these bones-made-ice and melts my stillness. A thousand blades I'd buy with track and tread of feet to win that single kiss -- if sole she would, if sole she'd give to me a single glance, most blossom-bosomed bursting lovely maiden of the heaven's hills!

Yet fetters, mere flax before, now woven, plaited into binding hands of twine that let their grip go not install me, frozen, to this tree. How shall I free myself? Yegads, what say ye, moon? What will and wish within, what say ye? Song within my breast? A song to dash the fetters? Yes! O yes, I say! Within my breast! Indeed! O sorrow had forgotten me this special spell implanted there so long ago by fallen mother! Then what shall say we? Flaxen fetters, or sorrow much the more? For sorrow, seems, was fetters more than flaxen plaited ever was! What binds or blinds me from my memoire, glade of silken, silver songs and dreams, is bondage deeper than a rope or iron manacle! I shall sing, and singing, flee! Flee this wretched place, adieu ... Exeunt.

Spirituality : Beyond the Superficial-World

2011-09-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

The task of spirituality is to construct and maintain a doorway between the realm harbinged by dreams, and this surface-world. It is an enormously difficult task, because this surface-world has a tendency to reify itself, to declare the film that forms upon its surface as the only reality, and a narrow materialism or empiricism, which only affirms that reality which appears to the senses, rather than to the intuition and dreams, dangerously denies any depth at all to experience and the world.

The surface-world, as a reification, as a self-declaring-of-onlyness, as therefore a totalitarian superficiality, tries to domesticate spirituality, and reify it as well, to turn its symbols into something that can either merely reflect the dilly-dally offhanded mayhem of the surface-social world, or which is cleverly neutralized, either by being ignored (a strong and effective strategy), or by being, let us say, "Sunday-enacted", in such a way that it is in fact parodied as it is being oblated. In any case, the surface-world does everything in its power to keep the door shut. You can paint the door, you can sprinkle holy water on the door, you can bow down and worship the door, but the last thing the reified social-surface-world wants you to do is to actually open the door and peek through.

But genuine spirituality must maintain its doorkeeper position, and this is difficult on both sides, because it must gain a genuine footing within the social-surface-world, if it is to have any effectiveness, if it is to be listened to at all, if it is to avoid total irrelevance, and yet, it must struggle to be true to that deeper reality which wells up from the door. Yet the tangled contradiction is that in order to gain a genuine footing within the social-surface-world, it must placate that world, and speak to it on its own terms, yielding the peril of becoming neutralized in the process. Spirituality must allow the surface-world its smug sensation of having domesticated the doorkeepers, while inside maintaining the resolve to continue to struggle to domesticate the surface-world.

Spirituality knows that this surface-world is a surface world, while the surface-world does not, thinking itself the only-world. Spirituality knows that the world of the senses, with all its history, is but a welling up from the depths, that is continually refreshed from the depths, and which would be impossible without that refreshment. It trusts and stays true to the phenomena that emerge from dream and from trance. This does not mean that it declares these phenomena to be real in the same sense that the surface-reality is real, but rather, having an alternative and valid reality of their own that must not be subordinated or made derivative to, or annihilated by, the surface-world.

Spirituality comes to remind a soul that has become socialized and domesticated within a sophisticated primate tribe that it is far more than the sociological reality the tribe can affirm with its own eyes. As important as kinship is within indigenous-heathen systems, there are deeper kinships that must also be affirmed. Even your own relatives cannot exhaust in their knowledge who you are. Only dreams, trance, and the meditative place in front of the altars can speak to your marvelousness, which you came here to unfold and foster. You did not come here to be molded entirely by the imprinting process of the surface-world. You did not come here to be superficialized. There are deeper imprints which must be spoken, and must be made manifest. These manifestations of the deep and primal must then be defended against superficialization.

For example : at one point, jewelry was no doubt a connection to dream, a connection to animal-spirits, a connection to nature and the elfin world. It was a way of adorning the body that said to the tribe, look, I am more than this. Look, I belong to elfin powers. (Not in a dominated way, but in the sense of belonging.) Look, I place this sign of greater, vaster kinship upon my body, in such a way as to affirm that marvelousness which wells up from within me and is greater than my tribal self. In other words, jewelry were talismans. And yet, over time, this became superficialized. From something surreal and awe-inspiring, they became trinkets, mere "bling". Freya wears Brinsingamen as an affirmation of connection to deep, dwarvish powers, and the beauty they can create, and thus affirms the marvelousness of craft, but all Heid can see is what glitters, and its value is as a social prize of prestige, and what can be won with that glamor. Glamour, which was originally a fairy-power bespeaking the shamanically deep, is stepped-down and lessened into hollywood-style glamor, subordinated to social hierarchies, and diminished by becoming a tool of manipulation, becoming a narcissistic, rather than a spiritual, power. Fortunately, even the retaining of a doorway as a neutralized cliche is an ambivalent victory of reification, because any glamor, even a domesticated kind, can sometimes open the door for people, and enable them to sense something beneath the reality. Sometimes, the vulgar materialism of gold and glitter can suddenly open out onto the marvelous depths of golden beauty and tremendous, eerie and awe-inspiring glamour.

Jewelry, tattoos, talismans, various flourishes and embroiderings on traditional costume can be testaments to loyalties beyond the surface-world, if they do not become completely domesticated to the latter, which they often do. Once again they become subordinated to subcultural brandings, herd-markers, barcode-stampings of the cult.

Without a strong spirituality standing up to domestication and struggling with it, so as to hold the line for the doorway, culture too often degenerates into cult, in all of the twisted, Jim Jonesian, Mansonian connotations that word has taken on in the modern world. Family can become a cult. The cultural "supposed-to's" can become a cult. Yet remember in relation to these superficial-should's that Skuld is a Norn, and not a subordinate official of a primate hierarchy. Her job is to scold the surface-social-world with shoulds that emerge from far deeper places. There are obligations you have that you don't even know you have, because you aren't paying attention to the message from the depths. These imperatives are the pressure of the future reaching back to demand its roots in the potential of the past, through the critical importance of your loyalty to commit to blooming that potential into blossom. You are not here just to ape the spectacle of the superficial, to find your place in the army of the social hierarchy and march lockstep to its monotonous beat. Rather, there is an imperative to attend to what is unmanifest and make it manifest. This is spirituality.

A culture where spirituality has succeeded in its diplomatic but dogged struggle of domesticating culture becomes a deep and spiritual culture, where the doorway is kept open. A culture where spirituality itself has become domesticated has closed all the doors, even though it may have painted them in dazzling colors. In the first kind of culture, the social will be able, with a little application and a little struggle, to find a place for your marvelousness, because generations of dedicated adepts have worked hard to forge understandings that allow for recognition of the value of the surreal, the wyrd, and give it a place. You will be able to discover yourself in the social world as a being who transcends the surface-world's definitions, and thus, the skein of the surface-world is pierced by the bubbling effervescence of the seething deep, and, at least to some degree, the surface-social-world recognizes itself as a surface, as the waves upon a deeper ocean. But in the second kind of culture, you will have to work hard just to keep that sense of sacredness and calling within you from being annihilated by the outside world. These cultures create polarized opposition between inside and outside, with a demand that the inside subordinate itself to the outside. They are thus cultures of conformity rather than cultures of spirituality. In cultures of conformity, you must struggle hard and fiercely, and must continue to struggle, because the battle is not yet won, to stand up for the marvelousness within you. You may have to maintain offices or vocations which seem "merely imaginary" to those around you, while persisting in your diplomacy, knowing you are not "just" a dreamer, but profoundly a dreamer, an ambassador from another realm harbinged by the imagination, but not subordinated to the imagination as it is imagined in bad faith by a culture of conformity and superficiality as "mere fantasy". Blake's genius, for which he suffered immensely, was to hold out as a warrior, in an almost singularly brave manner, in an outpost of conformity that had long lost its deeper, bardic connections, for the reality of the imagination, a position that would earn him little more than the scorn of being an eccentric, if not mad ; but Blake responded, with the kind of iron determination that only a benevolent tyrant can (and let the superficial 'democrats' of the reified surface-social-world be aware that sometimes this kind of tyranny is refreshingly necessary to break through the imposition of reification --- in other words, sometimes imposition is necessary to counter imposition), with a supremacism of the imagination to counter and indeed lord it over the supremacism of the superficial. He did this, because he understood that the superficial was but the welling up from the depths of that which was accessible to the mind through what we call the imagination.

When you wake up from dream, you are unwrapping a gift crafted for you by lower powers, granted to you by your fylgia, fairy-wrapped by norns and beloved hamingja who reveal the deeper prayers of the Gods through their dwarf-smithed dream-symbols. Weaving, as all norns do, from the intricate neural net of your mind, the detritus of the day is caught and spun up into something more marvelous, utilized as an alphabet to detourne the sensory impressions of the day, and allow them to speak something deeper. In fact, the sensory impressions themselves are implicit and weighty with far deeper impressions than our conscious minds notice. This is due to several reasons : a) the conscious mind is far less clever than it would like to give itself credit, b) the conscious mind can only attend to so many details in life, and c) the superficial-social-world does not give us the cues and signs by which we might recognize and consciously take-up these deeper impressions. For the world itself is deep. It is only our superficial-empirical attitudes that transform it into "only" surface. The phenomena themselves are true to their depths if we know how to listen to them. The deeper powers do, and wrap their messages within the warp of our neural net, and deliver us dream. These are gifts, and the uncanny feelings of awe and dread which emerge from dream, and which can influence us the entire day, are strong indicators from our soul of the importance of these messages. They are confusing, because it is difficult to find a way to relate them to the world. Often as we attempt to do so, they seem to fade like cobwebs in the sun, and may be accompanied by a faint sense of embarrassment that we ever put such importance on them. The more conformist and less spiritual the culture, the stronger that sense of embarrassment will be. Only "eccentrics" persist in inserting their dream-sensings and dream-imagery into everyday life. And yet such surrealism is the heart of genuine spirituality.

If you trust your dreams, you will know that you are more than this. Of course the flesh will doubt, because the flesh is a vulnerable creature in this jungle of a world, and it feels its peril. But its peril is in fact not its superficiality as a mere epiphenomenon of a material momentum, that is washed away as dust by the breeze (though it shall be washed away, and restored to its place in the Tree), but the risk that it, the flesh, shall not enflesh the dreams it came to live. Lest this seem like an opposition where only the dream-realm matters, manifestation itself is marvelous, if it stays true to itself as manifestation. We come into the alchemy of this world not only to bless the world, but to be blessed by it. The conditions of this world, with all its peril, are such that they may allow us to create a soul. As Keats said, "Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making", and his understanding, though he does not state it as such, is that the world is a kind of crucible or forge where the ore that was picked from the tree, a fruit of stars, a star-sliver, our soul-in-potential, is heated, pounded, and shaped into a genuine and realized soul. Our tradition tells us that the odr is a traveller, and only through travelling through this world does it find its true vocation. The odr or soul stands in the middle, between the purely spiritual realms of the heavens (the ond-realms) and the purely physical realms of the manifest-world (the la and laeti), partaking of both, shuttling between both. To fully realize itself, it must go beneath and above the manifest-world. It must stretch and reach for the heights, and there find its love, and it must go below to find its treasure.

It must be emphasized again and again, as a mantra, and even as a droning imperative, that Odin has one eye on the manifest world, and one eye in the depths. If we would be true to him and his troop, we must imitate him in this regard. We are more than this which we can see. Our eyes of dream invite us to be true to that beyond within us.

Elegy for Arthur Evans

2011-09-15T15:58:00.000-07:00

Arthur Evans, 1942 - 2011, author of 'The God of Ecstasy' and 'Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture', gay activist, and scholar.

Arthur Evans, Radical Faery, English'd lyric-lover of Euripides, fallen bard! Alas, the last days of Castro's gadfly-stinging praise-bestower! Bold bestowing scrolls of yellowed scratch their spell-endowing grimoire-might, to sight the air-enfleeing maids of broom-shaft swift, the midnight's minions, man to man in maidens' liv'ry long-enchanting kisses on the incantated winds! O horned and holy linen-of-the-lass enwraptured gasp divine in sips of wine enswooning sage! O age of flowered love-restored that flaming folk might kiss with whistful bliss again! Hail hero of the horned and Pentheus-enflaming freedom-lord! Alas!

May he sip champagne with the vine-entwined, dressed-in-petals patron of the over-ripe grape, giddy salon-sache'ing in beneath-the-feet caverned colonnade-halled lyceums, soothed by Socrates' lashing, long-enspirited tongue! Let wreathe the still-singing feathered flock of morn about his now-boa'd neck with soft and wind-tossed tufted garland! And welcomed, warm, with brim on lips of purple bubbled goblet-on-the-gold in gilded etch of hex's sweet hexameters, singing home beneath the waters, home adored beneath the sands and soil, where the sons of sons of heroes gather and converse, and there partake the honey-harvest lip-dipped luscious of their full communion. Boons! The earth hath husk, but deep beneath, a grain hath sprouted! Seek, O sprout, thy underworlded sun and let thy song, unfolded, echo wide in wishful plains, where fragrance air becomes, and meadows waves of torch's tribes on bended stalk enmock with reverent kiss the passing wheels of fire's escort! Held, within the hollow, hall engnarled root and vine, beneath the hallowed, arms-are-limbs of stellar-spiralled foilage trunk of old! Behold and hold thy limbs-of-Laerad cradled wisdom! And take rest with ribald, dithyramb-strumming spiral-dancers, rose and morning-glory mazes strolling, lilt and skip with hands entwined like tendriled limbs of Dionysos! Frith, and fullness of the bursting, lavender-fermented fruit be thine!

Giving the Devil His Due

2011-09-14T22:29:00.001-07:00

Even the devil, as the old folk saying goes, probably incorporating archaic, heathen understandings about Loki, must be given his due. Loki and Heid are the sacred carriers of the baed, that which is not quite good, but not yet quite evil. Not yet …

Of course, the problem is that Loki and Heid, particularly when put together, tend to go too far. Evil is nothing but that which goes overboard and for too long, undoing the good proportions of life. Being too baed is not a good thing.

But on the other hand … not being baed enough can also be a problem, too. A little mischief is good for the soul.

We’ve all met those people who are just a little too goody-good. Such does no justice to the defiance inherent in our souls, the overwelling will-force native to wild beings like ourselves. There’s times you need to step outside the rules, and see how life is beyond the well-beaten paths,

Loki can be an excellent psychopomp in this regard, the bad-boy troublemaker who can entice those so stuck on doing things right that they lose the fun in life. And look how popular he was amongst the Goddesses! Everyone loves a bad-boy! In Volundarkvida, he is the only one who can entice Idunn, Sif, and Alveig back from the wolf-spell Volund and his brothers have cast over them.

And indeed, in Lokatattur, it is Loki, and not Odin nor Hoenir, who ends up really helping the boy chased and threatened by the giant. Oh, Odin and Hoenir help, but in the end, it is Loki who finishes the job. We all know that Loki is a favorite of little children, who have a little bit of the devil in them, and this is needed. You don’t want to invite Loki and Heid home with you, but you just might enjoy watching them … from a distance.

Odin is the protégé of Mimir, who lives in the space between Wyrd’s Well and Hvergelmir, between Muspelheim and Niflhel. He occupies and runs the dynamic engine that collides and integrates the opposites. Hot and cold intermix and create something good. But if we were to equate good with either the hot or the cold, we would miss out on what good actually is. Those who try to be too “good”, in the relatively new Christian sense, have lost the balance of hot and cold within themselves. They need a little baed to evoke that ambivalence that can get life moving again. Under Odin’s wing, Loki can serve wod, the dynamic force of evolution.

The mischief in us, if it goes too far, can sabotage us. This is clearly told in the myths. There is a time when Loki’s trouble-making is in balance, yet that soon spirals out of control. There is a reason both he and Heid are assigned ultimately to the jotnar, and this is because they are indeed untamed forces, despite the incessant work of the Aesir and Vanir to tame them with their firm and loving friendship. All this must be understood in its proper balance if we are not to fall into an overly moralistic stance. Loki and Heid ultimately are dangerous, and frankly, their seeds planted too firmly within us for us to allow the plant to grow rampant, because we are each, if we are honest with ourselves, already too much the liar, too much the cheat, too much the hypnotized drones of greed and dupes of fearmongering. Playing with them is like playing with fire.

But a little pyromania never hurt anyone … too much. One man’s poison is another man’s medicine. Dosage is everything. Some people, impulsive, unable to control themselves, liable to fall right into trouble, need to avoid Loki and Heid like the plague. For these folk, a good portion of humanity, they live up to the name of Saboteurs.

But there is a remnant of humanity who became too domesticated, too closed off, who are just a little bit too kneejerk “law and order”. It’s not that Loki and Heid are needed per se once one has been opened up beyond the mask of domestication. No, no, then the other Gods, quite wild in a wonderfully beneficent way, take over. Yet sometimes an initiation is needed, and under these circumstances, those who bring mischief may bring valuable gifts. Anyone who has read the stories of Loki, whose madcap shenanigans, as much as we must ultimately condemn them, delight us, knows that.

Ambition on its own, as part of a well-balanced life, is something encouraged and implanted by the Gods as part of our evolutionary imperative. Heid, on the other hand, takes this to the point of “the devil take the hindmost”. This part of ourselves wants to get ahead so badly, wants to get rich so quickly, wants to be surrounded by jewels and gold and maybe even servants, that we will do anything in our power to do so, and step on anyone necessary to climb the ladder. And it ultimately is not governed by a healthy impulse, but rather a fear of scarcity, a kind of primal anxiety driving us onward to consume, like the cursed Erisichthon of Greek myths.

But on the other hand, for those women who are just a little too demure, a little too submissive, who fail to put one foot forward for too much courtesy, Heid might prove a good fire-starter. Her strong bitch-energy (one of her names is Hyndla, the Bitch) could knock one out of her complacency. She was, after all, always the favorite of ill women. This can lead to trouble, as Loki can, but on the other hand, there is always something attractive about these kinds of wicked women. They know exactly what they want, and they go for it, and nothing is going to stop them. Their charm is endless. Who can’t help but be tempted by such a woman? There is a strong feminist thrust to such, and if the impulse can be tempered, the initiate will discover that the Goddesses and Gods want such strength for all women (and men). Heid’s magic is, after all, but a perversion of Freya’s witchcraft, and the Goddesses are strong, and will always foster the strength of women (and men).

I distrust anyone who doesn’t have a little Loki and Heid in them. It’s where we begin, and their archetypal perspective allows us to gain a little salacious glee out of the terrible malarkey human beings are capable of, particularly in a decaying age. By staying true to the Gods, we refine them, and complete their journey to transcendence within ourselves. For Loki and Heid stumbled, and then committed to that error, until it undid them, and threatened to undo the world. But we recreate their story within ourselves, and can complete their integration into the realm of the Gods inside our own souls, if we will listen to the strong advice and discipline of the Holy Gods.

I don’t recommend too much playing with fire. But being a friend of Burning Man folks and other freaks, who doesn’t like a little fire twirling?

Just don’t get burned. It’s all too easy.

Shipping Out

2011-09-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

Sweet pine, callous hands caress your curves, carved to upsweep rough, then polished smooth, to prows with fierce faces ... Floorboards, the dipping deck, the swaying sea in dock ... A ship, shoresmen-built to meet the other side, to dare the waves, to touch the long expanse of solitude and find oneself, alive, alien, in the cold breeze. A heart scarred on land cured in the cut of cold upon the waters. I am shipping out. The fleet may take me. This sailor's livery asks embrace of the wide open, the brine, let me skim and dip above the fishes' bed. For I would fiercely ribbon o'er the rolling roads the whales ride. I have need. Love came out the sea, I return to sea, to find my source in alien hands, strange creatures, fins, unknown coastlines. The sea seemed better than suicide : a venture, a dare, the great beyond. One might be swallowed. And yet ... one might find precisely what one was looking for, in strange form. Do I escape? The sea is merciful, his masculine arms welcome my human impulse, full of rough love and beckoning. I hear the call. Some kiss of a forbidden woman, beyond my tribe, strange eyes, a soothing hand, a never-seen port, perhaps never to see again. Spices uncanny, hidden sacks of gold, customs uncouth from my cruel kithsmen. Smooth bosom of wood, knotted, gnarled beams within you, many man-hands made, manhandled, thrown upon the salt and drear, made to ride. Sweet whale of woody oak and pine, be mine, extend thy cotton, billowed hands, and give me leave to come on board. The soles of these shoes shall kiss you with every step. Eyes long so lacrymal to bold behold how far beyond horizons rolling fountains, briny, fall. They say you are stormy, sea, yet no more so than those held icy in breast-coffers, the sour treasures false hearts share. Allure my saline-burnéd eyes with prizes true and unexpected : full is the hoard-heap of the deep. Let me give vow to my mates and be crew-collected : my rough and vulgar brothers, sons of ocean's lure, shall be my kin upon this billowed, wind-blown house. A better house than most. Fine, for trees have never had a better grave, an honored tombstone made of very own woodflesh, formed to float and taste the wild bracken of the shark-yards. I have heard their teeth are sharp, the sharks. A sailor showed me once a polished one. O let me twine the retted fibre, writhed from flax and unsmooth jute, to web the twisted strands whose hands shall grasp and hold the fish below. I'll pull it up to harvest us the cheese-like flesh of fish for breakfast. Oil painting on the waves : the dash of hurled hue of flame upon the all-surrounding, warbling mirror : sunrise. Have you seen her golden hands stretch out above the waves as rise to slow-ascend the glassy bridge above? A thousand thank-you's shimmer smiles of light upon the dancing waters. These far-away eyes say I am yours, O sea, for I belong alone where no one e'er belongs, the long and lonely tossing track of starfish. Steed of stocky fir, accept this sailor's saddle, I have need for hooves that touch the gentle, stirréd foam. I have need for home beyond the shores, where floors are shaking looking glasses showing me the skies and sparkling stars beyond. O merciful lord of Noah's town, the fluid, lovely flood, alive me wake upon thy decks of holy ark. I'm shipping out.

Heathenism and the New Atheism

2011-08-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

The new atheism is sweeping the planet, powerful, like a broom, cleaning out the old dust. Like every new thing it has spark and life and innovations to share, and yet like many new things, it is not yet fully mature, and what it experiences as a healthy confidence (certainly healthy in the face of tyrannical religions) may overspill into an arrogance which tramples the marvelous. Minds sharpened I admire ; hearts dulled I do not.

Atheism encourages an intellectual approach to the world, which is partial, and tends to exclude the mystical. The poetic expressions of my ancestors' worship may be metaphros, but they are metaphors for real,divine forces in the world that call out for authentic connection and whole-hearted devotion, without which one does not show the commitment necessary to be fully alive. The conventions by which one has faith in love, in strength, in wisdom, in mother earth, may be arbitrary and differ from culture to culture, but that faith itself makes a difference in a life. The automatic exclusion of that fullhearted poetic experience of divinity, for reasons of intellect alone, can become a narrow intellectual supremacy, robbing one of intuitive powers nad existential engagement with the truly mystical aspects of this wondrous, uncanny reality in which we find ourselves.

This is not to disclude the intellect and its grandeur within the scheme of wholeness, but as a separated function that attacks the other functions with an eye to annihilate them, it is unbalanced. Unless we engage with our heart, we become heartless. Unless we approach the future with the history of the ancestors, we become rootless. A simplistic eye ridicules ; a deeper eye seeks to understand. It is easy at times to laugh at the colorful forms of our ancestors, to treat mythology as "nothing but" myths, and simply enjoy the stories as stories. It's fine, of course, to treat the stories as stories, but if that is the only dimension one can appreciate about them, one is losing out on multidimensional treasures the stories can open out.

To open one's heart to the Gods, and give oneself over fully to the poetry of the Holy Powers, is a transformative discipline. It requires discipline. It's not as easy as refusing to believe in anything. Refusal to be mindlessly indoctrinated is wise ; refusal to fall in love (be-lief) is foolish. Heathenism teaches there is so much to fall in love with, and that love can change your life. If you remain solely on the intellectual side of life, and miss out on the transformationally devotional, you may remain secure in your intellectual fortress, but you will lose out on some incredible experiences in life. The Gods are real. The forms through which we approach them may be conventional (although even here, those conventions are so poetic and delightful they themselves are beloved), but the Gods themselves are real. Don't believe me? Open yourself to falling in love, take the plunge into open-hearted devotion, and experience will prove the point.

Atheism is a sharp tool to trim the edges of religion from grime and cobwebs, a carving tool that shapes up as it exposes abuses. It can help liberate people from models taken too literally and not poetically which feel pathological. But in all things, it is important to take the good and leave the bad, and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Odr, Anthropologist

2011-08-18T06:22:00.001-07:00

"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear."
- Gene Roddenberry

Some anthropology is shamanic, because it requires a leap of faith beyond the forbidden of one's culture, beyond the dogmas that have taboo written around their edges, in order to fully enter into and understand another culture. Cultures that are like us require less effort, and such study may receive modest applause by those who are not too xenophobic, but to immerse oneself in cultures who have undertaken projects whose goals and values are distinctly different than our own is a social risk that requires strength and flight of spirit. Beyond the edge of our own culture and its values lies a thick hedge of prejudice and stereotype, unable to appreciate the virtues of the dangerous other, and more than willing to catalogue its vices.

Anthropology is the effort to understand the universal in humankind through the exploration and investigation of the diverse and particular cultures of the world, culture by culture, slowly, carefully, and cautiously building our notions of universality through faithful attention to the textures of the particular. In order to venture this, the very lenses which our native culture lends us to view the world must be doffed, and temporary blindness and disorientation risked, to try on the new lenses of the exotic culture, and come to know it from within.

This is the province of Odr, the great traveler of Norse tradition, who had such a hunger to know all of mankind from the inside out, that he journeyed to every known people and explored all their wonders and peculiarities. As such, Odr may be called the quintessential viking, who dares the oceans and cold expanses of the world in order to satisfy his insatiable curiosity, a curiosity of such passion, and such intensity, and such integrity of iron innocence, that it won the heart of the Goddess of Love despite the implication that he would therefore often be away on long journeys, for Freya had faith that their love would transcend such gaps. If we can discover that passion for humanity within ourselves, that unstoppable desire to explore the furthest pockets of humankind's ways and means and festivals, we may also be able to discover that faith in love which Freya fosters.

As the mythological figure who embodies odr, the furious, seething mind of poetry, the soul in its intellectual and emotional inflagration and illumination, his travel is both physical and spiritual, and he inspires both literal travel across the physique of the world, and spiritual penetration through shamanic flight. Both are integral aspects of Odr's journeys.

Odr goes behind the Iron Curtains of the mind, crossing over the line into the forbidden zones, and gets to know the personhood of those who live there, however rough, however uncouth, and flocks to their courts, their places of flowering, to imbibe and share what poetry may be had there. He, of course, goes, in no small part, to share the glories of his love, and proclaim her queenhood throughout the nine worlds, seeking through poetic diplomacy and impassioned song to inspire and sow the native heart with longing for that love he firmly holds.

If we go out, with love in our hearts, and the faith that love can bridge all gaps, and immerse ourselves in the feasts and elegies of other people, we can discover our full humanity, which is never found, despite the importance of the tribe, entirely at home. The world stands broad and bright as an enticement beyond the parochial, and all that is required to achieve it is the affirmation of our adventuresome spirit, and a heart that never loses its fidelity to love. In this way we will discover and affirm what Odr already knows and is in the very matrix of his mythological genetics : that our own humanity transcends any race, any clan, any tribe, and even any nation, and beyond that, interpenetrates even into those beings who are not themselves human. As central as clan and tribe are to us, we are concentric beings, who in order to affirm our full selves, must ripple out to the farthest edges of being and back again. That is the promise of the Viking ; that is the embodiment of Odr, who, through a careful investigation of Skirnismal and his genealogy in Hyndluljod, shows himself to be a soul who intermixes human, elfish, dwarvish, giant, and divine lineage of diverse clans. That sublime miscegenation is our destiny and our future, and we have everything to gain through it.

Those who go beyond the edge will always be judged as going off the deep end by the parochial, but it is in the deep end, over the ocean itself, that we find who we truly are. And Odr teaches, through his spur to anthropology, that we only find who we are through the Other.

Let us praise the fine husband of Freya, whom prophets declared the Gods were willing to accept into their own courtyards and embroider with divine honors! Let us praise the image of soul that has attained its full humanity through wide exploration of its diversity! Hail Odr, Frey's friend, Wide-Traveler of the Gods!

On Sacrifice

2011-08-18T05:32:00.000-07:00

Sacrifice is the practice of developing the habit of giving without expectation of immediate reward, and cultivating faith in the larger generalized reciprocity of the universe. It requires a leap beyond our fear of scarcity, our miserliness in the face of uncertain yields, in order to let go of a little of what we find precious so that it may be shared. Sacrifice cultivates the discipline of sharing. It does not require that we give up everything, but it does require that we give.

Some people mistake sacrifice as commerce with the Gods, a purchasing of their favors, a kind of bribery of the divine. Such philistine niggardliness exposes how far we are from the full generosity the Gods encourage and the poets admire. Instead, the more we are willing to risk generosity, the richer a life we will discover in the passion of our being. Because we are surrounded by miserliness, we must give, as an example, and as a discipline to our own stinginess, but because we are surrounded by miserliness, we are not required to give up unto those who would exploit us. We are not asked to exhaust ourselves, but yield the extra fruits of our fertility, the natural interest of our full development.

As soon as Gullveig had sown the human soil with the thorny seeds of greed, urging the few to enrich themselves at the expense of the many, and inspiring the many to therefore be sparing with their purse for fear of robbery, a distortion in the complete picture of fruition the Gods envisioned for humanity occurred. This distortion required physicians of the soul, and to this end, Heimdall was sent to establish the priesthood, which developed religion as a set of disciplines meant to counter the distortions and cultivate the fruits. Properly understood, religion, as the endowment of Heimdall through the legendary patriarchs, is the weeding and seeding of the human soul that allows, over time, for the Gods' original plan to begin to triumph. One of those tools of discipline is sacrifice, whereby sharing is encouraged.

Heimdall developed the productive forces of humanity that had lain dormant beneath the fear of scarcity and the narrow outlook that blinds the soul to the possibilities of evolution by cultivating horticulture, husbandry, and industry in the form of diverse craftsmanship. By demonstrating new possibilities of production, the anxiety over scarcity that motivates selfish greed could be challenged. Thus, one of religion's mandates is that we develop our powers to their fullness, for without full capacity, there can be no full generosity.

Heimdall cultivated the vanguard of humanity, its avante-guard front-line in the evolutionary advance, and took these bold pioneers into the fields of responsibility and generosity, and made them trustees of the commonwealth of the tribe, who would ensure fair and equitable redistribution of the wealth yielded by sacrifice in common feasts and celebrations, which would feed material hungers and satisfy spiritual strivings in the encouragement and affirmation of bolder deeds. These feasts of responsibility and festschriften of endowment became the central religious rites of the folk, whereby the festive and the aspirational, the noble and the base, the material and the spiritual, the individual and the collective, were all fused into a dialectic unity of experience. These feasts were the universities and training grounds for a higher stage of evolution, that encouraged in babysteps the progress towards greater generosity, communal empowerment, and collective development of individual powers.

Sacrifice, to the fullest extent of that generosity which will not impoverish us, is the engine that drives and supplies the potluck of the communal feast. Within the context of this feast, sacrifice allows an equalization of disparities in fertility and development of craft, because each gives as they are able, and each receives, in turn, as they need. All contribute what they can, but those who have more, give more. The host of the feast collects this voluntary but customary (and therefore traditionally expected and pressured) tribute, and ensures the felicity of the guests.

The sacrifice goes beyond a potluck in the libations, which, from an atheist standpoint represent pure waste of brewers' labor and drinkers' sup, to spill out onto the ground, yet this fraction of surplus represents a defiant act of faith against apparent scarcity, in order to boast a modest generosity towards the world itself, and the other wights who inhabit it with us. In this act, we go beyond generosity towards our own human community, and extend ourselves towards the other broods of Mother Earth, from the fairy folk of the elves and shimmering land wights, whom the normal eye cannot even see, to the diverse creatures, flora and fauna, all of whom with us are her children. Since the brag occurs within this context, we can see that our ancestors dared to assert the development of the individual within the larger expanses of human and even ecological community. In such ways, the narrow selfishness sometimes necessary to survive, but which overexaggerated limits our horizons, can be transcended, and eventually outgrown.

Through the example of these communal feasts and open-hearted giving, enacted season after season, slowly, over time, we become more saturated in the spirit of the Gods and less choked by the thorny tares of Gullveig. In other words, through practice, the spirit of the Gods is enabled to surpass rhetoric and declamation, and infuse our actions and relationships. Sacrifice is thus defying the Gullveig within to please the Gods within and without.

Spell Fulfilled in Full Surprise

2011-08-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

The twilight yearned for peaches ;
The evening yielded golden apples.
The twilight craved berries ;
The evening yielded mangos melted in mouths.
The twilight promised sherbet ;
The evening disappointed, and yielded roses, and cream, and scents of kisses.
Let us praise evening's fulfilling disappointments,
night's surprises of desire.

Our Beloved within the beloved

2011-08-11T03:44:00.000-07:00

Grant us our loves, O Freya,
Grant us our loves.
Grant that our loves shall prosper,
that our hearts will warm
and eyes be mirrors to the sun
that in brightness of the beloved we may shine,
and believe in that Art
whose magic, O Blessed Maiden of Flaxen Witches,
you mentor, Rose's Mistress,
She who knows the pain and yearning fire
of longing, longing for the beloved.
May all our hearts be healed
and know in peaceful gratitude your grace.
Grant us our loves may prosper,
Ophelia-Feline-Mistress Found Herself,
dried seed hidden in the heart of despair,
waiting on longing tears to sprout roses,
Our Beloved within the beloved, O Freya!

Tottenham

2011-08-11T03:36:00.000-07:00

All-Father, I feel you stirring the flock of the stagnant!

Stir, O Master of Winds : let a fresh breeze blow!

How cower the timid in a storm ; how fresh the fresh blast

Of gust in the blow of men that fires the inspiration!

Lift the too-long-staid to whirl within the wild mob,

And find upon their feet the fleeting wind of wisdom!

Errors made within the midst of rising up

May sure be cured within the rile of mobilization!

Standing still is not a life ; the crowd invokes a mobile tribe

That mocks the stolid giants, truer looters,

From whom stealing is but recompense.

Wod-Wielder, ward this upgust mob

To find its inner wisdom, sort the grain from chaff,

Set fire to the giants’ burgs, and not their fellow villagers!

Someday, like a sprouting grain, the gain

Of free associations, guilds again, shall Frodi-welcome

Back, and chase the giant thieves away! For now,

Let Robin Hood be life to stir

The wod you wield to lift the weight of dead stagnation!

Whenever I see a riot, something alive stirs inside me. My ancient tribe was a riled kind, who found their breath not in still air, but in wild gust, and pledged storm against the stagnant. It is all too philistine to knee-jerk shake one's head and voice one's disapproval. One might even say cowardly, for so conformist ; timid, for refusing to stand out ; hypocritical, for a heathen, for our ancestors were raiders, with barbarian hearts, that seldom ceased to riot against the binding nets of towns, the web of graveyards and deathly stillness. One need not give all one's approval : yet let awaken some viking spirit that finds its life in living defiance!

And will one nod one’s head at talking heads who speak for Gullveig? Will one ape the voice of banks, and shake one’s finger, filthed within the ink that stains the fiat bills? Or will one see a fist upraised, a rising stalk of grain, that only lacks for guildship to become a chasing-out of giants? Someday such as these may sense their freemen solidarity, and with newfound wisdom fight back against the bankers’ minions and their pseudo-noble hosts! The Normans still stand on Saxon soil, but Robin claims all who come to the forest. May the fires light the way to freedom!

Traditional Peoples Ban Logging

2011-05-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

In the Philippines, "Green Guerillas" (click link to go to You Tube Video, in 3 parts) assist the indigenous tribespeople in ousting the logging companies and imposing a complete ban on logging for export, with limited use for domestic purposes. They are resisting a government that has aligned itself with imperialist forces of globalization trying to outlaw tribal autonomy and attack Old Growth forests.

I cannot think of a modern struggle more in keeping with the spirit of our Germanic ancestors in their struggles against Rome to preserve their sacred groves.

This represents a tremendous moment, where warriors have aligned themselves with traditional law, to preserve the habitat and tribal autonomy of the indigenous peoples in this area. They have pro-actively begun reforestation, with a diverse variety of native vegetation, to counter the depredations of economic, imperial extraction.

The tale of imperial extraction is, unfortunately, an old story. "To feed the insatiable appetites that such greed spawned, forests, observed Seneca, had to be ravaged. The material needs of Rome's wild building schemes were met, in part, by lumberjacks felling trees ... Rome sacked the barbarian world for the resources it needed. In the process Rome transformed the conquered provinces according to its own image : a former wilderness tamed by human hands. After a century of Roman rule, the landscape of the provinces began to resemble the civilized countryside of Italy. These changes led one writer at the end of the second century A.D. to exclaim, "...There are few places now that are not accessible ; few unknown ; few, unopened to commerce. Forests have given way before the plough, cattle have driven off beasts of the jungle, and where once there was but a settler's cabin, great cities are now to be seen." (John Perlin, A Forest Journey : The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London, 1989 , p. 115, and after first ellipsis, p. 124.) This was a fundamental reason for resisting Rome, because conquest and transformation into a province destroyed the habitat and turned the homeland into a resource extraction area, followed by a fierce pace of deforestation. We must remember that at the outset of European conquest, tribal Europe consisted of settlements nestled like islands within virtual oceans of forest. "The Romans encountered ... densely forested conditions when they expanded into western Europe ... For native Romans like Caesar, accustomed to cultivated fields and large cities, the vast wilderness of what we now know as the "Old World" set the Roman imagination ablaze much as the "New World" of North America fired up European consciousness some fifteen hundred years later. The vastness of the forest of Hercynia in Germany hypnotized many a Roman. Pliny ... humbled by its pristine quality, leading him to believe that the forest had been "untouched by the ages" and remained unchanged since the world began. Its seemingly immortal state led Pliny to believe that the Hercynian wilds "surpassed all marvels."" (Ibid, p. 108.) The forests themselves helped shield the native tribes from the onslaught of imperialism. "The forests, however, slowed the pace of subjugation. The native populations relied on the cover of the forest to increase their odds in their battles against a better armed and more organized foe trained in open-field warfare." (Ibid, p. 110.) In defending the forests, the tribal warriors were defending their people and their customs ; in defending their people and their customs, they were defending the forests.

I suggest that all heathens study this video in a spirit of solidarity, and with an eye for parallels with the many battles in which the generations surrounding Arminius engaged. In this way, connection to the larger humanity that is under the gun of empire can be fostered, transforming what might remain idle theoretical engagements with ancestral material into palpable solidarity with pagan tribespeople struggling to defend their own heaths all around the world.

This video, contemplated with a deep mind, offers the possibility for modern heathens to pierce beneath the veil of imperial warfare, and rediscover the notion of guerilla warfare aligned with traditional, indigenous law that characterized their barbarian ancestors. It is this kind of comparison with living practice on the ground that allows our source documents about our own ancestors to come alive, so that we can align ourselves with their authentic spirit, a spirit which has the power to fire up our own insurgent spirits to blaze against the darkness of empire in our times. The opportunity to learn about the kind of warfare practiced to protect grove and tribe and unique customs is powerful, allowing us to move from generic militaristic sentiments and jingoism to the more specific kinds of struggle in defense of the folk that the Gods honored, lending their forces of strength, fierceness, justice, and wisdom. The living comparison allows us to penetrate beneath the feudal scum that overlays like a film our later Scandinavian documents, to understand the pre-feudal, odal warriors who defended their beloved Mother Earth. This also allows us to shed the deplorable right-wing mentality imposed upon this traditional material by fascists of all stripes and genealogies, who sought to utilize it to justify their neo-feudalism. Herein is a chance to glimpse and get at the genuine juice.

Return to the Ideals Inherent in Time

2011-05-18T03:54:00.000-07:00

You are responsible before the divine for the form of government to which you give assent, for from that form shall either flow or be obstructed the justice, balance, love, compassion, discipline, and generosity that characterizes the divine, and which shall rule the everyday interactions of your people. Let it become corrupt, let it refuse to find justice, let it slip from wise foundations and basic freedoms, and the instrument through which the divine may, with human consent, in large part bestow their blessings upon the world is wrecked and made crooked. Ancients knew the profound connection between rulership and corn, for wise laws, seeking harmony with nature's flows, and allowing each to eke and share the earth's produce in equity and justice, are the husband of fertility and prosperity. Let the instrument of law be bent from truth and freedom, be twisted from equity and justice, and large measures of well-intentioned actions become vain, neutralized by a crooked law. The stakes are life and death, freedom or slavery, as the sovereign body of the people is where war or peace is declared, the fount of blood or good harvests, and from where laws uplift and edify already good customs, or engrave the worst of the worst, binding the good of heart in chains of ineffectiveness or worse.

The constitution of your polity, therefore, is the bedrock of your relation to the divine, for it has power to affect even the other channel of divine influence, nature. Although natural catastrophes may dwarf at times the power of human beings, the polity may magnify or diminish this power, in both its good and bad aspects, so that a catastrophe of polity only magnifies a natural catastrophe, while a just and benevolent polity heals, soothes, and brings back into balance nature when she is shook by giant storms. When the constitution is sound, the imperfections inherent in human nature may be slowly corrected, and small errors, soon to be addressed and made right, are prevented from bursting out into greater errors which breed even worse mistakes. Such steady, if rough, justice, smooths out the jagged edges of culture over time, so that a good constitution becomes a tumbler in which the rough ore of a people is gradually polished into a gleaming gem. This happens not so much through positive interference, but a via negativa that releases the chains from the good, allowing it to freely flow, by binding that which would interfere with it.

In the beginning, gifts of spirit and soul, wisdom and cognition, transcendence and immanence, striving and satisfaction, were given to humankind. Yet in those same beginnings were sown the seeds of greed and envy, and fraud and deceit. When such mendacity combines with such unending coveting, the results are the strangulation of the people from within, the spread of pestilence and dis-ease, and unending, devouring war. The polity of a nation conditions the soil that inhibits or allows these seeds to grow. Good governance is weeding out the rampant thorns and composting them to generate in time, gradually but steadily, fertile soil. It is taming the axe to respect the trees, from which all good flows.

Far more profound than an uncritical celebration of ancestors, then, who embrace both the wicked and the benevolent, the indolent and the industrious, is a study, veneration, and dreaming-on of the laws of the founding fathers and mothers, who, clear in their naked and terrible responsibility towards the divine, set out to perfect the good customs of the kingdom. This study allows us to assess the progression or deviation of our present laws from the principles, plans, and rede of our forefathers. Inasmuch as they acted as judges over the laws, and therefore as priests before the divine, we may through them come closer in communion before the divine, correcting our own errors and deviations. For bad customs, allowed to propagate by ill laws, are like the gradually slanting supports of a house, which in time, uncorrected, cause the house to fall. In time, one begins to accept as normal that which is odious. Fidelity to the principles of the founders, in tune with profound meditation upon the divine, given perspective by communion in wild nature, allows the proportions of things to reemerge from their distortions. Fidelity does not imply conformity to the entirety of the founders' actions and statements, but it does imply a loyalty which gives benefit of the doubt, and which stays true to the course of the principles. History, being such an imperfect medium for the intentions of eternity, decrees that the proclamations of the ancestors were made under imperfect conditions, which new conditions in time may allow correction. But there is a punctiliousness and attention to the deeds and statements of the founders which amounts to a kind of veneration, which is necessary in order to correct whatever errors their imperfect conditions may have thrust upon them.

One is faced, for example, with a historical condition of raiding tribes at the dawn of Germanic history, and yet soon thereafter, a body of laws that clearly circumscribe theft, and one is left to wonder about such a contradiction. Only dialectics can allow us to grasp the circumstances of both and reconcile them, because the situations of a time inflect and draw out differing values from the background principles of a people. What is appropriate in one situation may not be appropriate in another. Under conditions of liberty, whereby prosperity may blossom, respecting laws of property is simply a way of recognizing liberty and right ; and yet, where liberty has given way to institutionalized plunder, given color of right (but nothing more than color) through crooked laws, treaties, or even their abrogation through war, reappropriation may be appropriate, as a way of expropriating the expropriators. As the internal contradictions of the Germanic tribes, given rough harmony and balance by their constitution, crashed up against the intrusions of Roman Empire, equilibrium was disrupted, and in the process, Rome was able to take advantage of the resulting divisions in order to further their conquests.

Fast-forward some seventeen-hundred or eighteen-hundred years, to the times of an English people on a new continent trying to perfect their ancient laws to the time, but also to perfect the time to the ancient principles, and we discover in the debates surrounding the Federalist Papers, statesmen attempting to reconcile the ancient liberties with protection against division. Such concern against division was apparent in the original constitution of the Teutons as gleaned by Julius Caesar, as their own jubilee-like legislation, annually redistributing the agricultural land (bound about by common lands, woodlands, and pastures) to transform fluctuations of inclement to equity of fertility, was designed to prevent the emergence of factions and class war. While enterprise and adventure might be met by luck with increased wealth, and boldness and courage met by the people with increased esteem, every one having holdings roughly equivalent to everyone else meant that mild, existent inequality did not transform into widespread inequity. Unfortunately, due to the triumph of feudalism under the adjustment of Teutonic law to Roman institutions (and we are in the debt of our courageous forefathers that that Teutonic law did not dissolve entirely against such overwhelming odds), the jubilee-odalism of the Teutonic constitution had already dropped out of the laws that English folk received from their ancestors, and thus was unavailable for consideration or improvement by America's founding fathers. Nevertheless, their attention to Anglo-Saxon heritage was pronounced, with Jefferson announcing that the goal was to restore the pre-Norman integrity of the common law through adjusting it to the history (and all the lessons of a tyrannous, contested history) of the times. Jefferson had hoped that guarantee against monopoly would be enshrined in the bill of rights, but unfortunately, this did not pass. Had it passed, at least in part the spirit of the old redistribution laws, a bulwark against monopolistic power, would have received recognition in our constitution.

When I despair over present-day corruption (and such despair is rational in the face of such widespread breakdown of liberty and its blessings), my recourse is to attention to the basic principles of law, the constitution which is only partially articulated in the United States Constitution, but receives greater explication in Magna Charta and all its reaffirmations, and which stretches back to the principles underlying the Teutonic tribes living in their forests, as described by Caesar and Tacitus ; for it is by these laws, and moreso the principles enshrined in them, that the imperfections of the time may be adjusted to the ideals of the divine. Inattention to these principles is hazardous indolence before the divine. The reason the founders may be treated with a kind of veneration is due to their awareness of their responsibility to the divine as it manifests in history. If we do not share an equal anxiety over the portentiousness of our laws and deeds, we may be rightfully accused of being cosigners to monstrous corruption, and subject to the indignation and indictment of our descendants. Everything in Teutonic tradition suggests that a return to origins, grounded in this present moment of time, but exploring its roots to the deepest sources, is the fountain of renewal, and the way in which we wash ourselves from the accumulated dirt of error and inevitable flaw. The concept of Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Time, should not be reduced to the lowest common denominator, lest it become the demon or thurs of the time and not the spirit, nor simply to reigning opinion, but rather the call of the majority and its leaders to the Ideal that is pregnant within the times, and which it is possible to midwife if all capacities are given full reign and exercise. Zeitgeist may be stillbirthed by clumsy, inattentive hands. It is, properly, a gift from the Gods inseminated into history, which we may, in the emergence of this moment, either attend or neglect, but such neglect is a tort, a twisting of right. Thus, while we must attend to the practicalities of the present, if we do not condition our perception of those practicalities by equal attention to the Ideal which is really and actually present in potential in this moment, we will not even grasp what is possible to achieve. Moreover, the degradations of corruption degrade our souls, and too much attention given to corruption begins to rot our enjoyment of life. One must return to the ideals encapsulated in principles behind law (and true religion) in order to find one's renewal.

Paying Your Dues to Frigga

2011-05-15T06:10:00.001-07:00

Biophilia is a part of paying your dues to Frigga. Life is precious, and every lifeform is her child, so you must give account of every life you take. Account may simply mean, "I needed this to feed my family. I needed this to house my family. This was a poisonous spider that could have threatened my family," etc. But it means recognizing the wonder and splendor of life, and never taking life intentionally without giving weight to that child of Frigga. (Of course, the flotsam/jetsam of life is such that in the midst of bounding through the world, many creatures may get crushed without our even taking notice, but even here we should still from time to time reflect, with compassion in our hearts, on those creatures trampled in the midst of our clumsy marauding through the world, and ask Frigga for gifts of greater grace in our travels. Yes, this can even be done by bold, hearty men with gusto and a little machismo in their hearts. While strength does not imply walking on eggshells in the world, but bounding with a confident stride, it also does not disclude sensitivity and appropriate, heartful regret and willingness to drink in the joys of this bittersweet life.)

The point here is not to introduce more guilt into a guilt-politics of life, but rather, to introduce more wonder into a life often far too banal, so that we can realize the overbursting beauty and supercharged splendor about us everywhere.

But it requires us to shapeshift. We are so chauvinist regarding our human form. How often we, the egomaniacs of the planet, assume we are the gods of this earth (at least implicitly, if not explicitly). Yet we know that Odin shapeshifts into the many creatures, and there is reason and purpose behind this, as well as great theological play. If we wish to touch Odin's mind, we could do worse than to imagine ourselves into the creatures as well.

I had a wonderful reverie last night drifting in and out of sleep, where I imagined myself into the body of a whale, in the primeval ocean, long before there were humans, and I was swimming with my pack of whales, and we were strong, and we were undefeatable in our own right, and we embodied grandeur and a solemn playfulness playing out in grace beneath and above the waves. I let my tail-fin linger above the waves before I glided back with a splash into the waters. As a human being, my imagination allows me to identify with other creatures, and gain glimpses into what it is like to be them. There is a communion possible between all creatures of Beloved Mother Earth, and to love her, and to honor her, is to study and pursue that communion, and learn to increasingly embody it in our life.

This means that the crawling things, too, deserve our empathy and identification, for they are the most numerous of Frigga's children. There are more species of beetle on this planet than any other kind of animal. As Joanne Elizabeth Lauck says in her marvelous The Voice of the Infinite in the Small : Revisioning the Human-Insect Connection (a book that any devotee of Frigga ought study as a guidebook), if we were to imagine whom the Earth loves the most by the sheer number and variety of creatures she wombed forth, we would have to say that Frigga has a love-affair with beetles. The Western mind automatically shrinks from this. We like to identify with sleek, masterful mammals, like deer or lions (each wondrous in their own right). Yet beetles and other crawling things have their own kind of wonder. Joanne Lauck points out that our alienation from and demonization of insects is literally killing us, as we poison the planet in order to wipe out insects. Pesticides are implicated in over 80% of cancers, not to mention all the other illnesses including asthma that they cause. Because we have chosen warfare against life, instead of harmony with wyrd, we are in the process destroying ourselves, and pulling everyone else down with us, all because we fail to develop empathy with the alien forms of life on our own world.

(Indeed, for those who dream of interstellar exploration, in search of alien life, if you haven't yet learned to appreciate the sentience alive and swarming on your own planet, what chance do you have of appreciating Frigga's creatures on other worlds?)

The other creatures on this planet matter to the Gods as much as we do. They love their beauty, their litheness, their place in the biomes where they thrive. We are sharing this planet ; we are not here to dominate. That is the imperial delusion. It is not native to heathenism.

An important corrective to the idea that harm solely comes from jotnar spirits is the truth that when we act like jotnar in the world, the spirits of the other creatures in the world become angry at us. Let us not have a nursery-vision of spirits. Just because other spirits are not fundamentally malevolent does not mean that no matter how we behave in the world that they are going to be angelically benevolent towards us either. Long ago treaties were struck with the spirits of other beings in the world, and shamans were the diplomats who renegotiated breaches of treaty in order to heal the world. Yet about 5000 years ago, in the Near East reckoning, Gilgamesh began to tear up the sacred groves, and this legacy in time passed on to Rome, and over those long centuries, which pale against the longer period of harmony in keeping with the treaties, the treaties were not only broken, but forgotten. Because of this, we are at war with many of the other creatures in the world, and their angry spirits often ensure that the war is not one-sided.

Because domination is not true grandeur, it will take acts of humility on the parts of dominators like ourselves in order to discover grandeur. This may seem paradoxical, but it is true. We are not expected to be perfect, but we are expected to find ways, in all our strivings, in all the battles we fight to forge a place for ourselves, of living in harmony with the other wights of this world.

That is the Way of Wyrd. It is the Good Way.

Are The Gods Persons?

2011-05-03T01:38:00.001-07:00

There is nothing requiring us to experience the Gods as persons. There is a convention by which we may relate to them when we are in that mode, but nothing defines what the divinities are, and how their energies and essences infuse the world. We have traditional imagery and dialogue, all of which is indicative of personification, but as to whether this personification must be taken literally is a question up to each user and worshipper as to their present moment of devotion and experience.

The personifications are formal means of speaking in human terms the divinity of certain forces in the world. To believe in the Gods does not necessarily mean that one must commit to a personification. It can mean that through the personification, just as light passes through a stained glass window, one affirms the reality and the worth of that numinosity in the world, and that that numinosity is divine. Of course, at times, because we are human and we like things with a face, we may put a face upon that numinosity, but we understand that the Gods are mysteries that may be experienced in multiple ways, and this keeps us from becoming literalists.

Of course, the divine forces that we give a face to are actual realities in the world, to which we stake our lives upon their importance, but the personifications may be seen as meditative conventions through which we are able to experience forces far transcendant to our human brains. Now, that doesn't disqualify, invalidate, or dishonor any of the worship forms that are geared in the direction of personification. Personification is an honored means of reverencing, and should be honored, but it's not the sole means of relating. There will be times in which we will simply experience the Gods in a faceless, personless way, their multiple colors intertwining like ribbons in a pantheistic experience of the world.

Emmanuel Goldstein

2011-05-03T01:35:00.000-07:00

I have one phrase, a simple phrase, an old writ from English law, a particular judicial demand : habeas corpus.

The Light of the Sun is Truth

2011-05-03T01:27:00.001-07:00

The social-political world is becoming increasingly infused with lies, and if you have eyes for truth, something grows dim within one's soul, which is why one needs to regularly get outside into nature, because the light of the sun is truth. The green growing up from the earth is truth. The leaves that fall and hang from the boughs of trees is truth. The flowers are truth. Truth surrounds us. We are immersed in truth, and within that truth of juiciness within the world is the world's savings from the lie, the lie which spreads itself through the human medium, that frail being, because he has been implanted with the power of questioning, has also the power to falter, has also the power to bend from the truth and the light. If we recognize this questioning ability then we can utilize this questioning and frame our questions upon the trunks of truth that green about us, refresh our sap from pure sources, realign our notions of truth from a twisted world of politics back to the baseline, what matters. God, divinity, is here in the world. The Gods infuse the world with brilliance, with hope, and with breath, and it is these things we must remember in dark times. We must remember that life is furious, it is irrefutable. It is a persistence that challenges even the greatest defeats. Although they will remain radioactive for hundreds of years (and we shouldn't shunt our vision to the tragedy and its implications), the vegetations and trees sprout anew around Chernobyl. Life has a ferocity in its tenacity, and if you want to hear what the Gods are speaking, not just whispering but shouting, go to the natural things around you : touch them, smell them, feel them. More than in the myths, more than in old poems, there you will feel the pulsations of the divine speaking directly to your fingertips and your nostrils and your ears and eyes, and the intuition behind these perceptions. In a time filled with lies that grow more blatant and emerge from sources we once trusted as faithful, we must return to the truth that is alive around us everywhere.

Letting Fricco Move Through Me

2011-04-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

Naked. Standing, eyes closed, breathing. Feeling myself in connection with the web of wyrd, at a nodal point where various strands cross. Allowing those strands to pull me, as if I am in a tide. My body begins to sway. Arms move where they will as called by the forces of wyrd. I begin following the inner impulses of my body as I respond to the larger nexus of wyrd. Soon I am dancing, not as a performance, not as any set movement patterns, but in a flux that is a kind of spontaneous Tai Chi, moving wherever the weird directs I move, in dynamic response.

The lamp in the room casts a shadow on the white walls. I see my long hair, Dionysian, flow onto my manly body. I feel the Dionysian manliness of Freyr. I call upon him as Fricco, the Dancer. I am in a body. It feels good. It feels good to let the body follow its own impulses. This is a mystery of Fricco. It is free-flowing and it does not follow any set, traditional pattern. I dance to pray, to make myself vulnerable, to open myself up to the Gods. My arms open out in an Algiz pattern, and then down level as if I am on a cross, and back again. I call out to Heimdall, to connect me to the Gods. I imagine my arms as the bridge he wards, that connects both sides of the universe, fire and ice, and leads up to the headsprings, where wisdom and vision and love reside.

I begin feeling things, inchoate feelings within my body. Images soar by, float through me, permeate. They come and go as if upon the waves of an ocean. Feelings from childhood, feelings of loss from past relationships, come up, well as tears in my eyes, gasps, sighs. I let go and let the love of the Gods flow through me. I let go and ask the spirit of Fricco to fill me with joy, that joy which heals, which heals through spontaneity. Eir is a Goddess whose name means "ease", and she is a healer. Fricco is a dancer whose name Frey means "free", and he undoes the cuffs which imprison us.

This kind of spontaneous, free-form work with the Gods is as important as the small remnants of the traditional we have in texts. It is a wonderful way to work outside wordlock, and step into weird. Spirituality in part is about surrender and abandon to something larger, and the willingness to step out of the foolishness of our ordinary wisdom, and into the extraordinary wisdom of the Gods, which sometimes seems like foolishness to men.

Call it hippie if you like. Frey is a hippie. A hippie-farmer. Yep. I asked him. He's dancing and skipping through the fields, his arms imitating the vines, the branches, moving and stretching out to commune with them, to identify with them, to call them out with gentle encouragement to grow. I think he's doing it to Jethro Tull. Or their equivalent amongst the Gods. (YMMV)

Nonsense as Nonsense

2011-04-21T19:07:00.001-07:00

To survive this world in its cycles of decay and too-long-waited-for regeneration, you have to develop a shrewdness towards ordinary evil, and have the ability to look it in the eye and call “nonsense”. Goblins always pretend they are demons. In their nasty crabbiness, in their gnarled characters that stubbornly love to spoil, they gain glee in pretending they are more powerful than they are. A spook loves nothing more than to spook. Tell the spook, fool me once ... then get out your hoe and let it know even a spade may be used as a sword. In time, one simply yawns. A furrowed brow is sufficient to dispel in a shrewd enough heart, that is wise to the spoils and tricks of the world. A good day must not be ruined even for its spooks and spoils. To become seasoned is to know no-nonsense in the face of shallow, barren cackling, and trust the more in deep guffaws o’er ale.

The raging etin rampaging through the shire must be ousted, and it hurts, but such things in truth are so seldom (even in this twilight age of encroaching ruin), while it is the petty goblins who taunt and tempt us, loving to spoil us, to ruin our fun, nag our pursuit of renaissance, who really get us down in life. A thousand bee stings rival a larger sword. Get wise to the goblins. Learn to look those taunters in the face with wilting power of squints. Thou Shalt Not Mess With Me.

It is torment which erodes. Occasional enemy to be routed, while tough, may even raise the blood, but the taunt of the everyday kills in time. One must learn to honor one’s goblins by making them honor one’s strength of endurance. Bullies and spoil-sports abound. The petty games of men, entrapped in their bogs and downward spirals of evolution, endure. The slander of cowards casts its coin on Loki’s altar. Graft exchanges gold behind cloaked hand, and smiles at the public. These things are not new. Let them be no cause for shock. Thorns and thistles ever sprinkle green fields. Weed ‘em and let them feed the compost piles.

It takes practice. You have to practice saying “nonsense” to fools and pricking snools before your heart in time believes it. You have to learn to invest your hopes and energies in harvests to come, not taunts and pricks. There’s rough, pricking things in the dirt that make you cry out, f..k! Pull out the thistle from your foot, brew up a good curse, and move on, soldier.

In time, one grows bored with idiocy. It covers over the annoyance, which in its time grew over the initial rage. Boredom and shrewd eyes are greater weapons than most think. Learn to treat nonsense as nonsense.

Cheer Past Hail

2011-04-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Every farmer from here back to the first digging stick has had to see some hail. No man wields the weather that spoils the crops. Thorns of icy rime from gusts of giants throw without reason from time to time. Frey and Freya say, plant, plant again. Take up seed again and renew life. Don’t allow a single spoiled harvest to wilt your stalk. Find resilience in the soil and rise again!

These are the times that faith in growing things is tested. The blights do not come from the Gods, but the endurance to see through them is. The ruining storms do not come from the Gods, but the strange, stirring hope that defies all-swallowing despair is. The venom that sometimes floats on the wind does not come from the Gods, but the good clay that surrounds and spits out venom is. These are the days one chooses to believe in clouds or sunshine. How the clouds oft roll! But the Gods say, O small things, such small and precious things, here are beams, a bridge may be built across a chasm. It is but a footstep for them. Let them lend eyes, and what abyss was shall become a footstep for you as well.

To have faith in the harvest does not simply mean to rejoice when the feast comes. It means standing on the freshly sown soil, which to the eyes looks barren out to the hedge, and before the first green sprouts appear, smelling the aroma of the cooked grain wafting up there from the soil itself. It’s taking a vow to see the season through, and beyond that season, to see the next season through.

Winters could be harsh. One had to know how to eke bitter flour from the bark of trees in time of famine, what weeds in bad years might do for potherbs, learn the taste of squirrel and mushrooms in a stew. Sometimes the frost broke early, sometimes it broke late. One never knew, and sometimes against one’s hopes. Who knew just when this year Freya might be rescued from the hands of giants by Odr? Who knew precisely when Idunn would shine her sun again from Eastern skies? What one knew is that the days when sun never came, the days when ill wights held back the spring forever, were vanquished, if one had faith in and strengthened the Gods with cheer. For strengthening them with ours when it comes to us, they strengthen us in turn with theirs when we are bereft.

When spring came, you looked at a bad winter, and you said, I made it through. And it was callous, and it was gloom, and it was hard, cold blunt on the bone, with meager on the platter and drops alone of ale, but one felt proud, for one endured to spring. One got props for standing firm in one’s woolen hose and overalls, with scrivening eyes that looked over the frost, and skeptical throughout, kept eye on spring. The All-Holy One Above, Wise Be His Name, difficult, erudite, inscrutable, far penetrating, with stamina of mind bred by many eons of dark clouds and the light that ever broke through (with brave and with battle), kept one eye on unfolding wyrd in the world, however weary or woeful, and one eye in the deep, where deeper dreams brew wisdom beneath all frost.

The tales of capture, of Freya in the tower, Frey beneath the bite of Beli, Idunn in the talons of Thiazi, said, you are not alone. Even the Gods have known their sorrow. Even harvests and life-bestunning beauty and youth that ever springs wild have felt the longing for home in the cold that you have. What faith they held in their hearts even in despair to ever believe in the sun! So might you, so might you.

Why was a feast a feast? Not for its mirth alone, grown in the sun of hearths and giddy hearts, but for its cheer carved hard by the encroaching ice, now slowly dripping in the thaw. For cheer was chiseled out in dark days, cold days, days of gloom and even ruin. It kept the head high as the breath sighed, and took another breath in again. It frowned at hail to smile at hale in spring. Oh, then, how one whipped Lenten Winter in her thin, meager rags out the village, to welcome in Summer! For cheer and mirth are mirror sides of the same coin of feast ; the warmer one, the more the other waxes. That froth in mug was frothy more for having conquered dearth ; every harvest was a victory celebration as well. How did Thor get associated to harvests? Live in a wintery clime and see how you will toast He who vanquishes the wielders of frost! Harvest was victory, as much as it was feast!

Plant, plant again. Take up seed and renew life. Every farmer has had to compost precious crops wilted from hail. It’s a hazing rite into the endurance the Gods rear up. It gives you your sinew and grit to get through to the next harvest. Throw the bitter bones as you must, and kick the unyielding dust, but then roll in the arms of Mother Earth, and pray your gnashing tears that throws mighty execrations upon the etins, and get up. Get up and take stock of what remains, eke cheer from every drop of cheer that stands, and go to tool-shed and take out your sack of seed, and ready the oxen to draw the plough again. It will be bitter, but it shall become sweet again in time. Weeds that never fail to break through soil, and Gods whose bible lives in the land and its seasons, promise sure.

This Is Bullshit

2011-04-13T22:38:00.001-07:00

I'm fucking pissed. I want to go out into the Night. I want to go beneath the skies and experience the great outdoors. I don't want to have to worry about Cesium, with a half-life of thirty years, dusting down upon me in the wind. I don't want to have to worry about Plutonium or any other particles from the fuel rods which were blown up to a mile away during the hydrogen explosion. I don't want to have to be concerned about Iodine and Cesium and who the hell knows what else in the drinking water, in the ground water, in the vegetables. But I do.

I do because an industry that would never exist were it not for government subsidies and statutory limited liability insists on wielding some of the most dangerous physical processes in the world for profit, without any conception of safety protocols. (Not that such safety protocols are even reasonable when you're dealing with matter straight out of Muspelheim.) Now these deadly materials have gotten loose into the world, and are upon the winds.

I'm infuriated by the lies, the way the public relations firms hired by the nuclear industry have turned truth upside-down, and are telling people "everything's ok" when everything is not ok. And they've got idiots thinking they're hard-headed and scientific when they are nothing better than dupes and shills for the nuclear power industry. They're upping the "safe" doses of radioactivity(when there are no "safe" doses of radioactivity), they're telling people "radiation is good for you", and they're completely mixing apples and oranges by comparing radiation levels to radioactivity, and telling people it's less than an X-Ray. Well, I've got news for you : breathing in or swallowing a radioactive particle is not like getting an X-Ray. It's like swallowing an X-Ray Machine, and letting it fire off for up to five months or more if it's something as "innocuous" as Iodine, and for far more than sixty years if it's Cesium. And if it's Plutonium, forget it : got a couple ten thousand years? Moreover, the closer the particle is to you, the greater the impact of the radiation being irradiated by the radioactive particle. So no, all the stuff you're hearing on the news is PR bullshit designed to save the ass of the nuclear industry. Loki is spinning Orwell in his grave like a top.

And right now, I don't very much feel like couching this in mythological terms. This is bullshit. This is massive contamination and poisoning of the planet I love. This is serious, serious shit. And these fucking stations are all over the planet. I hope people will wake up and smell the shit in the coffee. This station is thousands of miles away from where I live, and yet there is something called "wind" which travels all around the planet and carries, for example, coal emissions from China to the West Coast of America, all the time. We are interconnected. Ecology has been trying to drive this point home for fifty years. Indigenous people have been emphasizing it for even longer.

Everywhere I look, there's more poison and toxicity being dumped everywhere. It kills the children of Mother Earth, including ourselves. It cripples and wounds others. It is massive, massive desecration of everything any pagan or heathen claims to love. And it is ongoing, and it has got to stop.

Any doubt about the prophetic powers of our myths ought to be dispelled by this. The toxic combination of Loki (Fraudulent Propaganda) and Gullveig (Greed) is breeding wolves in the Ironwoods, a barren landscape filled with toxic sludge and rusty poles of radiation-destroyed cities. It probably looks like Chernobyl.

I want to go out into the night. It is where I get my inspiration. I want raccoons, coyotes, crows, possums to be able to go out at night without entering toxic fallout. I want a free and green earth. I want a tribe that is not so brainwashed they don't nod their head at every public relations industry spin.

This is real. This is about reality. Wind-currents from Chernobyl in '86 caused a massive die-off of birds in California. This isn't just about human death and suffering (and may all the Gods and disir help the poor Japanese), but death and suffering of our fellow life-forms, the children of Mother Earth. This is outrageous, absolutely outrageous. Thor loves his mother, Earth. How do you think he feels about this?

Speak up. Call out the lies of the public relations industry. Demand your government be transparent in reporting real dangers, and suggesting some helpful, pragmatic protections. Let those who claim to speak for us in the councils (those whom the Gods weigh most heavily upon in their judgements, although we are not exempt from holding them accountable) know how angry you are, how upset you are. And join with others who want a free and green earth, and figure out ways to break out of the saccharine prison and reinstitute some real democracy and ecology on this planet.

What Will We Do?

2011-04-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

And the cup of gall was offered, and we drank, and called it sweet. The filth and fire fell down, and the temple-priests said, "nay", and we followed suit, and said, "nay". Our "aye" was "nay", and our "nay" was "aye". We drank the blood, we let our veins be emptied, we walked desouled across the concrete and smiled on command. We nodded as wolves became shepherds, we shook our heads at slaughter but said, "what can be done?", we came to savor the nutty flavor of poison and looked away from its bitter taste. We laughed because the laughter was gone, we partied because we lost the capacity to enjoy, we drugged and dreared and drove ourselves to weary narcosis.

And the world surpassed hyperbole, and outran awful any words which might follow and reach. The metaphors were ground to dust, the prophecies exhausted, the capacity to fully understand dwarfed and humiliated.

And no one raised a peep. Not a whine, not a whimper, not a stamping of the feet. The shields, long dusty, were kept upon their posts. The spears were snapped in two and thrown on heaps and burned. And all the while the wolves devoured. Devoured and Loki's poets sang of lustrous sheep. Wolves slaughtered, and the skalds of Lopt called it help. And the wolves tore limb from limb, and the serpent dripped deadly bile into the soil, and Laufeysson's song-smiths called it feast and broth ; and we bought it, and we bowed down, and we said, "yes", and we said it some more, for we were thralls, we were all thralls, we were all humiliated and self-humiliated, wanting to be duped and wanting to be drugged, thralls.

And we dared to call upon the Holy Names. We dared to ask why when all-surrounding suffering reared its head and bit us. We dared to think our passified, servile voices had any worth to reach celestial doers of deeds. And the one-eyed brow glowered and was stern. And the fist holding the mallet crackling with golden fire of clouds shook with rage. And the necklace-bearing beauty cried her tears for fallen Odr, as the foolish soul stayed round the hearth and would not journey out to rescue love. And all the lone warriors girded up their gear, and made ready, for the hour seemed very close indeed, and the fallen heroes had diminished to a trickle, while the fool's ship filled with wild-eyed dupes of idiocy.

And where were we? Where were our cries? Who raised the hue and cry? Who blew upon the trumpet? Who summoned all the warriors? Who said the time is now to take a stand? Who hollared raging growl into the shields? Who conjured up the wod from all the gloom and set the folk into the field to raise their shields against the monsters? Who dared to stake right and wisdom against lies bellowed loud from every post, poison cast free from every field, wolves let loose upon purported enemies who never touched our soil? Who dared to raise their voice for holy powers?

Yet they filthed upon the garments of those most-beloved spirits ; they drenched the bodies of their children in vile, insulting waste ; they stabbed and butchered and corroded, and what did we do? What did we do? What will we do?

Stepping Into the Shoes of the Peasant

2011-04-01T08:33:00.001-07:00

Once you step into the shoes of the peasant, everything changes. Everything changes. You can no longer see the world the same way, you can no longer view the history of your country in the same way, you can no longer view the elites of the world and their militaries in the same way. Everything changes.

The Vanir Gods would have us step into the shoes of the peasant. The rural workers of the world are the ones closest to Mother Earth, and those most following the mysteries of the Harvest God Frey.

All around the world, the independent extended-family farm has been attacked and reduced to the level of plantations, with rural workers extraordinarily exploited, forced to grow crops not of their choosing for export, at rates of pay often little higher than slavery, and in numbers that would make the most callous cry obscenity. In heathen terms, this represents the enthralling of the odaller through feudalization.

These are our fellow human beings. For those who believe in reincarnation within the human circle, this is where one would be most likely to reincarnate. For those believe in any permutation of Wyrd, the web that interconnects us all, we are all inextricably woven, and justice and its gaping absence and mockery have a way of distributing themselves turbulently all along the long and intertwined strands.

The land, and its people, the human hands who tend and work it, are in bondage, and let us remember that Frey, the Lord of Harvests, leysir ór höftum hvern, "frees everyone from bondage", but we must believe in that freedom, and we must give that freedom our backing. And freedom, while it is a land primarily of feast and festival, is surrounded by a barbed-wire fog of disinformation, propaganda, and lies through which we must penetrate if we are to achieve its acreage. We must educate ourselves as to the conditions of the food-makers and the earth-workers, if we intend to have the wisdom to show any worth at all to Beloved Mother Earth and Frey. This is about solidarity through the earth itself.

A fairly good place to begin such a survey is in Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America : Give Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1973), which will acquaint you with the basic outlines of colonialism and how it transforms free land into Roman-style plantations, feudal regimes which our own ancestors fought valiantly against as Charlemagne's religious empire entered Scandinavia, in order to hold on to their odal status. Earlier, Germanic tribesmen featured prominently in Spartacus' famous slave rebellion, and Arminius led tribes to oust Roman legions. The values of our ancestors fundamentally align with free peasants working extended-family farms that pass down intergenerationally and have extensive common areas, and against those who would enthrall the free peasants.

Beginning in Latin America is a good place to begin, because superficially, it has nothing to do with Nordic history, culture, or religion, and thus, is an excellent exercise in stepping outside of foolish ghettoization, and learning to train the eyes to see the Gods in struggle against the Giants in the world at large, where the ancient stories repeat themselves on a daily basis.

Once you begin to align your thoughts and your solidarity with those who truly own the land, demonstrated in their loving devotion and hard work, as opposed to those who claim to own the land through slips of paper illegitimately traded by absentee pseudo-kings and robber barons, you will feel yourself expanding, growing closer to the earth, feeling your feet more firmly on the ground, stepping outside your astronaut suit, and feeling a much larger connection to your fellow humanity, which gives a strength and belonging it is difficult to imagine before such alignment. Whether through agriculture or more hunter-gatherer permaculture (of fruits, or pyroculture of seeding grasses, etc.), the earth is tended and cultivated by every tribe on earth. It is a wondrous thing to step off the pedestal of empire and become a part of humanity. A wondrous thing indeed.

This is not about political correctness (although this term still might be rehabilitated ; consider : if historical wrongs have happened, their correction might be considered the direction of correctness, giving specificity to the term, and the idea of correcting wrongs, particularly through wergild, is certainly a heathen idea) or smug slumming, and certainly not holier-than-thouism. It's about mutual recognition, and the genuine empathy that flows out of opening your mind to the plight and possibility of those who mind the land.

But beware : once you take the "red pill" as Morpheus said in The Matrix, and begin to step into the shoes of the peasant, you will never be the same. You will never see the world the same again. You will have trouble believing what your newspapers and media report to you, because you will have a greater familiarity with what goes on on the ground rather than what is told in the press. You may feel betrayed by all the lies you've been taught, and the sheer scale of deceit and half-truth. When you see the way that Loki has covered Gullveig in her stripping and enslaving of the world, your blood may boil, and your warrior spirit hackle and ready itself for a fight.

But you will have joined the rushing streams of populism that are at core the heart of heathenism, a fundamental point that is often obscured through our medieval records remembering odalism through increasingly feudal eyes, and often the eyes of the new court elite. Even still, the stories of the bonders resisting and warring against encroaching kings is powerful evidence of what lies at the heart of heathenry : an earthy, stubborn, and fierce populism.

But A Long Prayer

2011-03-26T06:43:00.001-07:00

Writing these rants is an exercise in faith. I try to put myself on the line in these writings, to expose my soul, to open myself to the danger of aliveness and the encounter with risk. I try to stay true to that which my soul seeks to reflect from the world of the Gods, and speak it, daring to say things which my intuition tells me others need to hear as much as I need to hear them, too, even if they seem edgy.

I don't know what will become of all this. I just know that I am called to explore and speak, and I believe that something will come of this. This will have some effect, it will gather some together, it will bear fruit.

We are here to bear fruit, not just to twiddle our thumbs, feed our mouth, or kick the can. Oh, there is plenty of time to shoot the breeze, and that is important. Every tree must let its limbs blow in the wind. But we are here to bear fruit, and we'd better remember it. That means we are called into the scary aliveness of fertility, and the responsibility that comes with fertility coming on line within us.

This is a garden, and I trust it's going to take me to the next level. I don't know what that is, or how it will happen. I trust it even against the part of me that doesn't buy it because I have gotten so used to living in a barren world where hoped-for connections and opportunities never happen, where life has lost some level of fertility we all desperately need to come alive.

Yet I cannot sit around and complain about that lack of fertility unless I am turning and tending the soil. And to turn the soil means to overturn, means to upset a little, means to undo the status quo to get some breathing room into the mix. I have got to let the green speak through me and grow through me, and tendril and vine its way out to whatever connections might come.

I'm certainly not aiming at a small and narrow group that identifies itself as a heathen subculture. No, this is something far more ancient and broad. Heathenry is a language to speak something more indigenous, something specific, but something universal. Those who are frightened of the word "universal" ought look around and see that trees and flowers grow everywhere on earth, although they each grow in different ways in different places.

The need, the hunger that is out there, that often doesn't even recognize itself as hunger, but has simply acclimated its gnawing emptiness as a characteristic of life itself, goes far beyond any subculture. It is far deeper and simply awaiting a language that will speak to it, something that comes from integrity.

Hel, we don't have to be perfect to speak. We're bumblers and fuckups and just plain idiots, but we are trying to respond to the good that is in our hearts, and listen a little to that nagging voice of spirit that speaks of debts to the earth and to the spirit of place and to ancestors who worked their lives off to lay down legacies of freedom and prosperity for us. And we're going to mess up, and keep messing up, yet we shall cling to that sense of good and let it be our guide, and never lower the standards of integrity simply because it is a struggle to attain their heights. We grow up from roots, we stretch towards sky.

A tree has faith. It doesn't know in advance what or how it will become. It has the seed-pattern within it, but how that will manifest in the vagaries of soil, rocks, obstacles, sun, rain and drought, wind and years ... like us, it has no clue. Unlike most of us, it has an organic faith that is subtle yet more powerful than we can know.

I know there's something better than all this mess we've got, even with the good stuff in the mess, even with the voices that say we've got to keep the filth to keep the goods ; and I also know that to get to that better place, we have to develop every talent and capacity alive inside of us, and take some risks, and speak vulnerably but powerfully from the heart, and dare that one's true voice, no matter how strident, no matter how persistent, no matter how passionate and probing, is not "extremist", and will break through the obstacles to reach the grass roots in time. There's something better than all this, but it requires us to mature, to re-begin with humility, and grow ourselves up, and reach out and say, this is my truth, and this is my dream. Who else wants to share this dream with me?

The land-barons have stolen our odal from us ; they've laid taxes not upon monopoly and usury but mere use and livelihood ; they have taken away the family farm, and have spat poison, whether pollution or slander, everywhere.

Yet the land still calls. It calls for inhabitation. It calls for inhabitants. Not for exploiters. Not for zombies driving over its paved surface in astronaut suits. It calls for inhabitants.

And I think if we will learn to inhabit again, we will remember what it means to love. We'll find those taproots from which we've been wrenched, away from which love is but a cut flower soon to wilt. We'll relearn trust. And we'll come together, not to slander each other, not to excoriate each other for not being perfect, but to seek together the common and exceptional good that is, beyond illusion, native to our being, if only we will seek it, and seek it together. With faith and love and trust and strength and wisdom.

My writings are but a long prayer.

Make the Most of the Good You've Got

2011-03-26T06:40:00.001-07:00

A central core of worshiping the Gods is learning to enjoy the good they've impregnated into this world and dealt out. Complaining about the bad when you don't even enjoy the good you have is very bad manners. The universe does not reward bad manners.

The Gods are the source of good. Learn to appreciate and fully sate yourself with the good. Make the most of the good ; there are so many good things in the world, and one good thing fully enjoyed and pursued can lead to another good thing.

The Saccharine Prison

2011-03-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

You are at the echo's end of a long tunnel of hollow, and powers unimaginable distances away call to you, though their voices are faint. You are trapped in a world of illusion, surrounded by Utgard, endlessly distracted, and the voices are calling you back to presence, to the deep longings that rise up from the earth, to break the saccharine menagerie and come out of the false-trance into something far more entrancing.

You are so surrounded by bullshit you don't even see it anymore, you've acclimated to it, you'd defend it from those trying to haul it off and restore a little sanitation.

Without that sanitation, without wiping free the bullshit, how will you ever know sooth? And without sooth, you cannot ever have a connection to the Gods, beyond some monkeybrain comic-book mind-chatter.

This means it is a religious imperative to confront propaganda and pierce through it. Political, social, psychological, and anti-environmental propaganda that surrounds you on all sides, psyops and total immersion in public relations campaigns, which obscure your view and paint the prison with false colors. Come to your senses and reinhabit your wits! (Those wits anxiety-boding has scared you out of, to lull you into illusion.)

Wits : sense, common sense, awareness, mental dexterity and agility, poetic ability to see through literalism and appreciate irony, uncompromising but ultimately humane humor.

Only your wits can break you out of the saccharine prison. If you ever want to taste honey, real honey, you must break free of the saccharine prison. For that prison-agroindustrial complex is poisoning the planet and threatening the mothers of honey, beloved bees.

Your escape begins with tiny flashes of awareness in the dark, surrounded by a normality which shakes your head and asks what that nonsense was all about. But will you listen? Can you believe in an integrity deeper than the systematic cynicism about you? (Have you learned the art of the economy of cynicism, where you are cynical where it matters, so you can retain your idealism where it matters even more?) It's difficult to believe the little sparks of awareness, because they can make one feel that most of one's life is virtually drowning in dreck --- which it is, and that feels desperate. Easier to dismiss such desperation and go back to the comfortably numb, that near-diabolical parody of moderation and reasonableness that keeps us trapped in the saccharine prison by convincing us that all exit signs are extremist and unreasonable. Those shouting "fire!" are certainly just troublemakers. But then there's that troubling smell of smoke ...

It takes practice. You think you've awakened only to find yourself nodding off again. You have to resist the state of permanent narcolepsy that resides in the saccharine prison, linking aware-moment with aware-moment, and clinging to your sense of aliveness. It's hard for the Gods to guide you in this prison, so one of your first priorities ought be, escape. You've forgotten it's a jail. It just seems normal. Yet there goes your life ... tick, tock, hiss the sands of the hourglass ... while you are caught in triviality within triviality, bullshit distraction wrapped in red tape after hogwash drama designed for those autistic to the pulse of the living earth ...

Touch the soil. Insist on sprouting grass. Keep the million-mile channel down the long, hollow tunnel open, and listen.

And dare to believe what Gods crazy to your fellow inmates --- crazy for their unbelievable integrity and grim optimism --- have to say.

Towards That Time When We May Freely Bow Down

2011-03-24T04:13:00.001-07:00

Before the winding creek coming down through the carved sand I knelt, to give reverence. And up above, I saw people on the pathway walking back and forth, a bit bothered at this young poet in oblation before the waters, and I sighed … for I knew that if there were simply a sigil of some recognized faith here, they would not question.

“Folk-Catholicism” : say what you will, this was a strategy. Place a saint, place an image of Mary before a stream, before a rock, before a woodland, before a well, before a tree, and let me alone to pray, that I may tend to the spirit within that rock, that tree, that grove, that stream, and be left alone by priests who wonder at what I do. Oh yes, a strategy : to be left alone by the priests that I might kneel and do what the ancestors have done forever, and not be questioned. If the beads of a rosary must be fingered, and a pater noster uttered, this is but the covering. It’s the shell. Don’t mistake the shell for the soft, vital mollusc inside. Folk-Catholicism was but the shell in which inner heathenism, seldom spoken, covered itself.

All we do now is strip off the false shell, and claim in full might, for we no longer have any need to shield from priests who come to kill those who do homage to life’s soul-idols, for now we have sword back, and we may bite back against their bitings. We are free, and free at last to worship as we will!

We are just beginning now to reclaim our ancient ways. We gather the letters of the alphabet like nursery school children, but soon, in time, as this newly-planted tree takes root, and the coming children come beneath its shade, our deeds, our very deeds, shall once again do worship! And this world which has gone so widely awry from its foundations shall return and be restored!

For today, the symbols are raised amongst people who were still raised by those alienated from the powers, and so our deeds and our words are split, our habits based on false foundations, and so we struggle in our worship to come back to source. Oh, it’s true that the life of faultful humans often struggles to come back to the powers, but once, it was much closer, it was much more fidelitous and faithful. That’s where we’re heading.

We’re heading towards that time where we may once again freely bow down before the rock, before the stream, before the oak, before the sky, and give what poetry our heart demands, and not be questioned, and not be ridiculed. In fact, to be respected. And that the answers that we hear in our hearts upon such oblation may be taken with seriousness and with reverence and enter into our sacred counsels as sacred vote and speech.

The Shorelines Say, The World is Strong and Vulnerable

2011-03-24T03:36:00.000-07:00

I kneel down on the wet sand to kiss the shores, and beg Njord forgive those who have mired them, and realize, I cannot ask him forgive! For you cannot forgive those who have not repented! They have not paid their gild, they have not turned their ways!

They’ve thrown oil into the waters. They’ve spread toxicity of radioactive Balrogs into the wash, and still, still they continue! How can they be forgiven? No. No, I pray Njord that he might clean and keep free the fishes that our kind bath in filth! I pray that he might, in his sea-going sleuth-ways, open our eyes to powers to which we’ve been blinded, with which we might restrain polluters, and keep undesecrated his frothy gardens.

This is Njord’s body. His soul, like all our souls, is larger than his large body, but is infused by will and wish into every molecule of wet. Will we desecrate his liquid-wine eucharist, his brine which is epiphany beyond the shores?

I stand upon the shores and I know what sacred is! Do you?

Oh what, o horrid words, if the soul of the sea were ever to recede, to withdraw its mind from flesh of water? What dead corpse would collapse upon the equal-dead earth? How sea would fade and once again become the rotting blood of Ymir! ‘Tis sacrilege to even say, but it must be said, as a warning, for if his soul withdraw, he would withdraw the all of souls he carries to that larger place of soul, but that this ensouled matter, this ground-up monster’s flesh, this miracle that solid stuff might speak soul, might be so desecrated it could be evacuated, would stand as lasting testament to our damnation! How could we stand such a thought?

They say there now stand “dead zones” within the ocean. I propose we see these as signals from Njord, small patches that he has withdrawn his warding from, as a sign of what could be if we don’t keep worshipping that which has soul in the world. If we find him of no value, let us look at those dead zones and see what they foretell, and then let us surround them with love, that he might his soul return!

Let his soul forever animate these waves!

The Gods are eternal ; but the world, though large, is fragile, much more fragile than we’ve imagined. It is its fragility which allows it to manifest soul. If it were so gross as to be invulnerable, it could not carry the flow and flight of spirit’s fire. Every life is a test, and a testament. Let us tend the strong vulnerability of world, and not act like knuckleheads who dream of invulnerability, while knocking about with barren feet like trolls.

Njord speaks in a crash and a rising hiss of tide this rede of souls from Gods. To this upon the shores, I testify.

Farms and Unfarms

2011-03-24T02:48:00.000-07:00

Farm? I see no farm. I see the thick, viscous blood of oil bathed on barren soon-to-vanish soil. I see a sea of air filled with filth and venom, spread by those who see the crawling sons and daughters of Mother Earth as pests. I see not rows of crops, but long ledgers of corporate profit laid green-ink paged along the prodded desert. I see cancer sprayed on fruit, I see seed warped by foreign retarded manipulation disguising itself as science, I see the heath-like bundle of wild growth diverse chopped and mowed into single-crop infestations that beg for steel behemoths to harvest them for sole sake of overland monopoly! If land were allotted, each family farming might hand-attend to fields. A farm, a garden, is a Temple to Frey ; its good work, the offering of worship, but plantations are the false bounty of Beli. I pray that pitchfork and spade may retake the fields, and give us back our family farms, no heed at all to unlaw crafted by Gullveig’s minions.

Declared Into Permanent Existence

2011-03-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

In death, the essence is recycled back in into the heart of the world itself. Hel is the heart of this world, the intensive interiority funding the virtuality and potentiality that underlies our world of manifestation. There in that implicate order souls live as in dream, which our dreams have the potential to tap.

The juice of those who have lived, and lived well, therefore, is able to be taken back up by life again to renew the vitality of manifestation. Manifestation, being a fixation process of determining possibilities (through the roulette of deed), has a tendency towards encrustation and rigidity, and would dry up like a husk if it were not forever renewed by the waters that flow as saps through the World-Tree. These waters run from Hel and replenish the manifest world.

The sap or mead is said to be a mead of "wisdom" because it literally holds the essences of those intelligences which have flowed into it. As souls come back into Hel, their experience, intelligence, and wisdom is taken up into the Well of Wisdom which nourishes the World-Tree's roots. Death involves the implication of all the soul experienced in its explicit manifestation into the matrix of the life-process itself.

When we give attention to the heirlooms left behind, we honor the givers, and that honor resonates into the heart of the interiority within the All.

The reabsorption and recycling of the soul has been compared by mystics to a drop of water re-entering the Ocean, and there is truth to this, on one level, yet the interior matrix, while richly interconnected in a way which might be described as "One" (numerals utilized from the manifest world imperfectly grasp the implicate order), is also highly differentiate in its plasmatic flow, so that within the divine communion of everything, as it were, the monads of essentiality still circulate, and thus when we envision ancestral life in kindred halls of the Underworld, while it is a translation, it is a translation that conveys and contributes towards our understanding of a truth much shrouded to manifest eyes.

The mystics emphasize One, the atheists Zero. The atheist says, they are not here anymore. They are nowhere. And relative to the manifest world, they are certainly right, to a degree. Yet even in this material realm, as the famous poem Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant asserts, there is a recycling into the world, not without its sense. The agnostic might say, well, the living have their memories, and the dead often appear in dreams. To the heathen, dreams are signs of another order of this living cosmos of ours, stained-glass windows onto the interiority of the cosmos. When I sing songs to my fallen dead, that part of the All congruent with my fallen resonates with implicate, crackling intelligence.

To say that someone is "dead" is literally with our language to say that they are "deeded". "I have done what I can" in this world, their death declares. Their deeds, for better or for worse, lay tracks of subtle legacy. The JudaeoChristian tradition speaks of being written into the Book of Life, a great image that we might translate as : being etched into the World-Tree, declared into permanent existence.

Easy to Hate Yourself

2011-03-22T16:23:00.000-07:00

It's so easy to hate yourself, so common, so lazy to hate yourself. But it is much more difficult to love yourself, to truly love yourself, which is of course different than mere narcissism. The narcissist is a cynic who cannot embrace the full embrace of self and world, who shrinks back from contact, who believes in the hollow of hate within and keeps staring at it, wanting others to gather round and worship the hollow.

You may have trained yourself so well in hating that it comes as second nature, at least insofar as it comes to you. I don't know you. I don't know your deeds. I don't know what guilt you feel inside, and some or all of that guilt may be well-deserved, and calling out for atonement and correction. Such guilt is well-invested in the work of correction (rather than wallowed in as self consumption). That would be authentic guilt. Then there is another kind of guilt that has no correspondence to your actual worth but is simply conditioned masochism. This can become a developed habit. But you are the creation of wondrous ancestors and holy Gods.

That's both a blessing and an obligation.

It's an obligation to treat yourself as something sacred, because you participate in the larger sacredness about you. And if you treat yourself as sacred, a sacred that dips into and touches a larger sacredness, then you will not desecrate yourself or others. You might very well keep your edge up through critique, but this will develop a different feel than desecration or denigration. It will come to have the healthy feel of honing rather than the neurotic habit of scathing.

In health, we are an oscillation between engagement with the outer world, and contact with the inner springs of refreshment. Energy thrown into the hole of desecration, whether of self or of others, is energy that could be directed towards the healthy dynamic. Don't allow yourself to be fooled that simply because your desecration is not towards others that it is permitted. Thou Shalt Not Desecrate Anything Sacred, and this is a tall order indeed. It requires the ability to be gentle, particularly with yourself, while at the same time maintaining high enough standards to keep guiding and structuring your gradual and ongoing evolution.

Love yourself as you would love flowers in springtime, as you would love fresh lambs wet with amniosis upon the grass, as you would tend to new sprouts of corn, as you would caress the rough bark of old-friend trees, as you would salute the Sun as she rides above in her bright chariot, as you would give heed to a relative in need, as you would attend an engaging hobby or a lasting passion, as you would help a friend having a hard time or in a crabby mood, as you would give yourself unto sleep in the hours of darkness.

For Love strengthens, tends, nourishes, grows, corrects with greatest gentleness, guides, if we will be true. And she asks us to be true to all we ought love, including our self, which is to her as well beloved.

Learning to Trust

2011-03-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

Your ability to find Hael has something to do with your ability to trust, to let go and open yourself to reserves of energy and healing around you. The world is a hard enough place it oftens hardens us, and we shrink from the resiliency that can reconnect us to life and refresh us. It's hard work sometimes to trust. But Asatru is about developing, against our developed habit of cynicism conditioned by a hard world, to trust the deeper sources of life that feed and strengthen this world from within and without. In a sense, the formal ritual, the names and classifications, and all the externalities are just props to help encourage us to find those deeper flows of feeling where we can let go and trust. Our own resistance to life and love and trust must always be reckoned in to our spirituality, our healing, and our enjoyment of life.

The Right to Know is Grounded in the Need to Know

2011-03-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

“The public has a right to know!” How often have we heard an impassioned journalist express this phrase on television and in the movies? Countless numbers of times. So many times that we have come to take it for granted as a basic principle regarding our First Amendment, but we forget that there are nuances and stipulations that apply to this phrase, as to all phrases, and that it is not absolute.

The principle applies to that which is properly a public matter. Whoever is party to an affair (and you can hear the concept “participating” in the word “party”) is privy and entitled to what’s going on, because it directly affects them. Nonparties to an affair have no such truth-rights. When something affects the public at large, the public is a party, and does indeed have “a right to know”.

But those lines have blurred in our culture. The paparazzi cloak themselves in the First Amendment when they video celebrity weddings, and invade the privacy of celebrities in their own private residences, on the same sort of unexamined, unnuanced ethos of “the public has a right to know”, on the grounds that celebrities have chosen to become public figures. But just because you have chosen to become a public figure does not mean that you have chosen for every part of your life to be public! There is a region of public concern to which you have devoted yourself : art, music, theatre, public service, etc., and in those areas, what you do is indeed public. But not anywhere else.

Privacy is not only eroding all about us, but is under serious attack in our society. Truth has become inquisitional in character. It is presumed that everyone has the right to know everything about anyone, and if you resist, what, do you have something to hide? There is a presumption of guilt around privacy : if you have something to “hide”, then you must be guilty of something improper or even criminal. What if you simply want to maintain information about events proper only to participants amongst those participants? What if others haven’t been invited?

We have a notion that “telling the truth” means that everyone has a “right to know” at all times about all things, and we’ve forgotten the very important principle of need to know. The basis of need to know is those directly affected by affairs need to know what is going on, so they can base their actions accordingly. It is, in a sense, an extension of the prohibition against fraud, which forms the basis of our notions of consent. You can only consent to participating in something if you know what’s going on. But if you aren’t participating in something at all, of what business is it to you?

Yes, we’ve forgotten the principle of “It’s none of your business”. This is a wonderful phrase. It turns the so-called “right to know” right back on those demanding it : what gives you the “right” to know? On what basis is that “right” grounded? Quo warranto? On what authority do you claim prerogative to cross my lines of privacy and do a search and seizure?

Search and seizure ... Oh, yes, there is another one of our amendments, one increasingly forgotten, the Fourth Amendment, which enshrines the idea that “a man’s house is his castle”, and is founded on principles of privacy. What happens when the press tries to overextend its lawful freedom to report on public affairs by encroaching on the Fourth Amendment principles themselves? Rights exist in delicate balances, and are not so obvious on their face that they can simply be plugged in robotically and in an isolated fashion. Once private information gets out that was intended to be private, it can be utilized by anyone for any reasons.

If everyone has the “right” to encroach on everyone else, and interfere with their business, then no one really has any true rights at all. Unfortunately, this interference-ethos is a legacy of some very dark history in our society, originating, of course, with empire, but developed in more sinister ways through Christian missionizing, which saw fit to infiltrate autonomous societies and begin to dictate to them how they should live. Christians all over the world claim this as their “right” by religion, because their holy book tells them they must do so. This has dulled the edge of our sense of rights, and thrown us into confusion. The practice of confession, spread by the Church, while perhaps therapeutic in its own right in a private setting, nevertheless extended the idea that all private acts are ultimately affairs of the Church, to which the Church ought be privy, and thus, a kind of spiritual totalitarianism set in that culminated in the Inquisition itself, in which “truth” was pried out, if necessary, by torture, and definitely by irregular (to say the least!) judicial practices.

Spiritual totalitarianism : your life is ours, and thus, what you do is our business. Well, what a perfect ethos for an age of sophisticated surveillance equipment! It can become the drive behind a quite Orwellian transformation of society, which is well under way. We’ve become used to being spied upon, our own private messages subject to unwarranted search, even now being made to electronically strip naked in order to fly. The Church claimed its pseudo-rights as “agents of God”, founding their inquisition into your private affairs on the dogma that God himself constantly searches into all private recesses of the human heart. I have asserted here before that the heathen Gods do not do this. Oh, they may be aware of many things happening on the heart level, because they are in tune with the ocean of the heart, and to that degree know things. But they aren’t interested in prying into your life unless you ask them to do so, for specific reasons, thus giving them warrant. (And just as with the concept of a warrant in human affairs, if you were doing something that violated someone else’s rights, that could theoretically give them warrant as well.) You have your family and friends to take care of you and your private matters, and then your tribe or community, and then your bioregion or kingdom, and then any larger alliances in which your kingdom may be involved. You have your ancestors, the land wights, and so forth. When these systems fail, then you call in your “big guns” as it were. A heathen would look askance and then grab for his sword if someone spoke of being agents of the Gods and therefore privy to all information, because not even the Gods would claim that on the level of the surveillance-society. (Odin looks out from his throne on the doings of men, but he is watching macro-movements, the development of nations (which is why he often deals with and tests kings, who lead nations), and so forth.)

Odin distinguishes between an inner circle of trust, and that which is outside that circle, and therefore unworthy of being privy to things. We need to reclaim that sense of boundaries that characterized our indigenous ancestors. There were three kinds of people : friends, foes, and those who are neutral. Friends are within the circle of frith and thus are owed full, heartful sharing, which feeds the friendship. Foes have proven themselves antagonists, and thus will utilize every resource against you, functioning on the “anything you say can and will be used against you” principle. To foes the laws of war and not the laws of peace apply.

Odin says, Vin sínum skal maðr vinr vera  ok gjalda gjöf við gjöf;  hlátr við hlátri skyli hölðar taka  en lausung við lygi (Havamal 42), “A man shall be a friend to his friend and return gift with gift ; laughter against laughter shall take hold, but loss against lies” (with "laughter" here implying not only enjoyment, but ridicule as well : return laugh for laugh, ridicule for ridicule), and Ef þú átt annan, þanns þú illa trúir,  vildu af hánum þó gótt geta,  fagrt skaltu við þann mæla en flátt hyggja  ok gjalda lausung við lygi (Havamal 45), “If thou hast another, whom thou ill trust, but wishing to get good from him, fair shalt thou speak with him, but intend deceit and return emptiness against lies.” Lausung is related to our word “loose”, and means emptiness, vanity, a kind of deceit characterized by a false front or face, a type of cover story, acting, or feigning that remains noncommittal. It’s not precisely encouraging lying, but in the face of the lies of an untrustworthy foe, one is permitted to speak in such a way that the other will lose (another nuance of lausung) in his or her antagonism. Odin continues, Það er enn of þann er þú illa trúir  ok þér er grunr at hans geði,  hlæja skaltu við þeim ok um hug mæla; glík skulu gjöld gjöfum (Havamal 46), “Concerning one whom thou ill trusts and have suspicions about his good intentions (favour/mind), thou shalt laugh with him and speak around your thoughts ; thou shalt pay them back in their own coin.” [Literally, “similar shall yield the gift”.] It’s a delicate and interesting phrase : to speak around one’s thoughts : not precisely to lie, but not precisely to tell the truth either. This applies to those whose intentions one suspects.

Neutral parties, on the other hand, are not party to any private affairs within the circle, and thus have no essential “need to know”. Here one may simply choose to say, politely, “That information is none of your business,” or, “I choose to keep my silence.” (And would that public figures involved in purely private scandals would, instead of giving in to the demand for public confession and repentance, simply say, "It's a private matter and will be handled privately." After all, we're not really involved in the adulteries of others, much as we might disapprove.) Odin says, in this regard, Ósnotr maðr, er með aldir kemr,  þat er bazt, at hann þegi (Havamal 27), “For the unsophisticated man, who comes amongst men, it is best for him to remain silent”. When you’re amongst people you are uncertain are friends or foes, get to know them before you start sharing personal or private matters with them, and test them before they become privy. Likewise, do not expect to be privy to private matters until you have been tested. The sophisticated may have ways of skirting around confession in more elegant ways, but those who cannot, ought remain silent in the presence of neutral parties.

Here we come to an important point, the distinction between truth and confession. Because of Christianity, we’ve come to confuse the two. We’ve almost come to the point of assuming that “if you don’t confess everything, you’re guilty of something”. In heathenism, you have no obligation to confess anything to unaffected parties, let alone potentially or actively hostile parties.

There is approximate, need-to-know truth for the outside, and deeper truth for inside, and as long as affairs are one’s own, and not the business of the larger public, one does not owe those on the outside truth. This does not authorize manipulation and lies, either, but a cover story as a shield against outright antagonism by parties who would misuse information with slanderous or aggressive intentions may be ok to protect the inner circle.

The basic point might be expressed as “shield”. You have the right to protect you and your own, and outsiders do not have the right to disrupt that frith. They are owed information, as peaceful outsiders, to the degree such information affects them, and no further. The press may have a right to lawfully investigate ; they have no warrant to usurp inquisition under that right. We have a right to know that which we do have a right to know.

These are not absolute principles, but they are important guidelines that help temper fanatical, absolutist notions of truth-telling which ignore the contextual realities of considering the safety of the situation, without sacrificing the ideal of sooth, of staying close to deep reality. But once again, if the deep reality is one of hostile antagonism rather than peaceful discourse and mutual, open-minded inquiry (which, I must always add, can include sharp but friendly critique, and can even include less friendly debate, if both sides agree to the debate, in which case there is a sharper need to cleave to truth), then one can speak the truth that corresponds to that deep reality. Absolutist approaches to ethics are poor substitutes for authentic wisdom, and we are called by our heathen Gods into authentic wisdom. Keep these guidelines in mind and act wisely, holding truth as an important principle on the one hand, and privacy and protection on the other hand. In such balance lies wisdom.

I just want to re-emphasize that when it comes to things that affect us, like the nuclear industry, like toxic fallout and pollution, like secret programs to destabilize other countries' integrity, and all other matters of properly public import, we do indeed have the right to know. "Private" industry that affecgts us = our business. Private life that does not pollute us = not our business.

Let Beast Be Bounded ; Let Fools Be Wise

2011-03-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS when you live in Jotunheim. The world turns topsy-turvy and you can't get your footing or bearings. Odd things outside your control happen ; large, overwhelming events envelop and loom about the world, with sudden incursion of inexplicable lances and teeth and thorns. There is unpredictable bite, and overwhelming disproportion, for when you have invited the giants in to Midgard, they begin transforming it to Jotunheim. It is inevitable. In so doing, you and your society commit treason against the Gods, regardless of what lip service you offer, and declare your independence from their benevolent society : you are on your own, good luck, or whatever luck you might have.

Chain a Balrog (valrógr : strife of slaughter), Son of Surt, and ween it shall stay chained ; and yet be wrapped within illusions vast, as Utgard-Loki's kind shall cast upon the jaded eye, while secret fires burn the air, and serpent's venom flies the far-beyond. Yea, ask the Viper to be good ; his roilings shake the waters, and awaken all his kin. Sons of the Fool invite the Balrogs in, but when awakened, rage they in their jotunmod, the foul and sulfurous mood of fire-blazers.

Obscenity of filth and smut besmirches skirts and bergs of Mother Earth ; impious with their deeds, the keepers of the Balrogs spit slander and curses and dog-speech, howling and pounding the ground, while Sons of Moin spray virulence and pestilence into the air, gall and venom to haunt the clouds ; the mists of the ghastly, smoky city below where wraiths whirl in the dungeons laughs as draugr glee in their death-zones being spread where green garments ought lay. And I call this speech-in-deed the stench of foulest blasphemy, belch and rancor of imprecation, unhex unholy, malediction, libel etched gnaw on Yggdrasil's branches towards tremendous and holy Gods the modern jackass thinks as naught.

But one ought rue the shame of scam and sham, and offer up the boar to show remorse to holy Ingui and his kin, whom we've disgraced and sullied ; call them back, declare allegiance, beg for Lord and Lady of the Soils to compost all the filth we've gathered, and send it down to Nastrond where it finds its home in melting nidings ; and again, to cover the blessed plains and promontories with the greenest garments. Call on Thor to come to reclaimed gards and chase the monsters back to troll-land ; ask the One-Armed One to cast once more his binding blessing that the gulping maw may be restrained. (Yet will we reclaim our gards? Will we take back our Things and keep the kings in line?)

And yet ask, and pray, and hope, it shall take time, and who knows how long, for all unwyrd to work itself out in full, and new seeds of sincere worship in deed and word to sow and take their root, for Wyrd cannot be eluded. Consequence has its law ; the Gods can only mitigate. They take the edge off sharpest bite, but blade so long worshipped still has cut, and let us pray, with deep intentions calling up disir, the cut shall be contained. O, let it be contained, and let that seed of boot we earn through new directions in our deeds come sprout with newer blessings for the Earth!

The Balrogs must be banished. Let us take our fire from the Sun ; let wind and water turn our mills. The only place where giants run the mill is in Niflhel ; we have not the might of Mimir to hold them back in guarded dungeons. Ask strength from wind, and water, and sun. Our hearts go out to all our distant kin upon the Western isle ; may their faith in local deities bring them betterment ; may their courage and skill be strong ; may their health hold its own as best may be against the serpent's sprayings, and cool the flames. May the beast be bounded ; may fools, more sons of Loki than men, find wisdom in ample time, for time ticks now like a geiger counter.

Markus Röncke, artist (Balrog). Dorothy Hardy, artist (Fenris). Sixth century helmet-plate die from Torslunda, Sweden ( ~ Tyr and Fenris). All public domain. Two images of binding as spell to surround and neutralize the beast, let it be so.

Heathenry as an Anti-Imperialist Tradition

2011-03-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to belong to a tradition that fought so vehemently against Empire? Well, at the very least, it would mean that we would tend to look with skepticism at statements coming from within an empire, and we might at least examine with an open mind the statements of those people who are resisting empire. In the modern world, the United States, Britain, and other countries tend to form the nucleus of a global empire, and so, in the United States, this skepticism towards imperialism would mean actually taking the time to read the statements of those leaders and peoples who are resisting or fighting the United States Empire. It certainly doesn’t mean an uncritical embrace of anyone who opposes an empire or the United States Empire specifically, but it would mean taking the time to actually learn about anti-imperial efforts around the world, at least before one explicitly and in a knee-jerk fashion began to condemn them.

This is a matter of selection in whom we listen to, and in an empire, we are often encouraged to see and look through the empire’s eyes. Well, this was not how old Germanic warriors fighting against the Roman Empire saw things, and so we might begin by looking at other Third World countries like Germania once was, and listening to what they have to say, because they may have interesting things to say, which will not “convert” us to their point of view by any means, but give us a broader perspective from which to understand the power politics in the world.

One of Odin’s names is sooth, the authentic truth behind appearances, that requires listening to all the testimony available. Our myths alert us to the fact that behind many disparate narratives of war and aggression lies one archetypal story : the rapacious wolf bred by greed, fear-mongering, lies, and the breeding of strife. Once you understand that metanarrative, many of the stories of history and war line up as only so many nuances and instances of that greater mythic tale. It has been pointed out before that one of the primary symbols of Rome was the Wolf, the so-called Lupus Martius, or “Wolf of Mars”. As Germani tribesmen identified Mars with Tyr, their god of warriors, the possibility that the myth of Tyr’s role in binding Fenris may have come together with feelings about the Germanic warrior’s role in relation to the Roman Empire must be given serious consideration. It is certainly not outside the scope of prophetic symbolism wielded by our ancestors, and may have been adapted to this cause. Certainly the tradition held warnings about kings who stepped over their rightful limits and began to set up proto-empires ; the legends about Ermanerich and his tyrannies, characterized by “wolfish” behavior, were cautionary tales that aligned Germanic warriors with freedom-fighters and restorers of ancient rights such as Dietrich.

If we are to align ourselves with ancestors who fought with tremendous courage to defend their traditional lands and groves against the incursions of empire, we would dishonor them if we did not at least include their eyes as a lens with which to look at our modern world. The reason this is not often done is that it is easier to abstractly claim ancestors than it is to demonstrate any kind of loyalty towards what they really stood for, particularly because looking through their anti-imperial lens might require us to take a far more critical look at many of the institutions, stances, and stories we take for granted in the modern world. Yet how can we fail to look at the significance of their history of resistance?

When Spartacus began his uprising against slavery in the Third Servile War of 73 - 71 B.C., one of the most famous slave revolts of history, his compatriots were Germanic, Celtic-Gaulish, and Thracian slaves of the gladiator arenas, who decided to fight to end their submission. One of his fellow leaders, Crixus, a Celt from Gaul, led a contingent of 15 - 20,000 men, mainly Germanic slaves, with some Gauls and others mixed in. In 393 A.D., Saxon prisoners were brought to the gladiatorial arenas by the Roman aristocrat Symmachus to slaughter each other before the public, but instead, many of them committed suicide. What this means is that for roughly 500 years, Germanic peoples had been subjected to enslavement by Rome, which became one of their big resentments against the Roman Empire. Historian Bryan Ward-Perkins, in his masterful The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), avers that the barbarian invaders were not devoid of hatred for Romans who for centuries had acted as if "the best barbarian was a dead barbarian" (p.24.) Monuments showing the slaughter of Germanic warriors, and the enslavement of their women and children eixsted in various places throughout the Empire as taunting signs of conquest.

The fight against slavery was one of the big motivations for a Germanic man to go into war. Tacitus mentions their wives imploring them to fight to keep them from being dragged into slavery, and Arminius, rallying the Germans to fight the Roman legions, continually emphasizes that it is literally a matter of freedom or slavery, and having seen what the Roman Empire reduced conquered provincials to, he knew what he was talking about. Arminius' uprising is correctly seen, therefore, not only as an act of national liberation, but a successful warding off of slavery.

These facts are some of the most important facts of Germanic history. Without Arminius' uprising, it is unlikely anyone would be speaking a Germanic language, and other Germanic customs such as juries and so forth would probably have given way to Roman law. Saga is deeply and richly important in Germanic religion ; her name is the name of a Goddess and blesses our attempts to give story to genealogy and history. The Icelandic Family Sagas are important monuments to a later age in Germanic history, but the tales told by foreign witnesses such as Tacitus and others of the heroic resistance of Germanic peoples in the interests of freedom are extraordinarily important for heathens to integrate. I would go so far as to say that these largely unwritten sagas ought remain central. Over time, the resistance to empire became a critical core of the Germanic ethos, and we, the heirs of their tradition, ought therefore to understand their tradition in the proper light.

The end result of failed slave revolts in Rome was crucifixion. It was a dishonorable death reserved for slaves and traitors. The First Servile War or uprising, led by the prophet Eunus, ended in punishments that prominently included crucifixion. When Spartacus' revolt was finally crushed, 6000 of the rebels were crucified up and down the Appian Way. Germanic peoples would have been very familiar with crucifixion, and what a cross meant. Given the largely non-literate nature of Germanic peoples, it is interesting to speculate whether iconography and stories of a saviour or liberator nailed to a cross would have invoked more imagery of slave-revolts and anti-imperial resistance than it would have a Palestinian man-god. Saxo Grammaticus places the Frodi-Frith, won through wars against invading tyrants and thieves, about the time of Christ. It is possible that the iconography of the crucifix, as a symbol of revolt against empire’s enslavement and its imperial punishment, may have reminded native Germans of their own stories of Frodi’s uprisings against Ermanerich’s bodyguard-army of giants, which ended not with Frodi on a cross, but the giants themselves being chained to the mill of peace and plenty. It should be noted in this regard that within a handful of years after the alleged birth of Christ, Arminius succeeded in liberating Germania from Roman domination.

In general, given that our myths make giants the enemies of the Gods, we should look with suspicion on the big players throwing around their weight in any conflict, particularly an international one, and look with interest and curiosity at the lesser players engaged in the conflict. We should beware the smokescreen that Loki’s people throw over everything, and the greed that motivates Angrboda’s wolves. If you have become used to looking at the world through a giant’s eyes, even a giant that identifies itself with the values of your history and people, loyalty to the Gods might suggest looking with greater criticism at the statements and positions of any giant. That this might lead you, through careful investigation of all sides of an argument, to scary positions relative to mainstream beliefs about countries, peoples, and histories, is a given, but that, after all, is another reason why courage was so valued amongst our ancestors.

It Takes Time To Bake

2011-03-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

The lore will be awakened in the strangest crannies. In the texture of a historical novel with real grit and panache, in a book of odd poems picked up in a thrift store, in the tale the old man at the bus station tells you about his home back in the bayous. Go afield, go afield, friend. Find your leaven for the flat page and yeast it with your breath like fog, the feet tramping on foreign lanes. Bake your bread in the hollow of an old cooked-clay heart/h. Let words of peasants and sailors temper and flavor your understanding. Let their dialects pass through you, and tell the tales from one idiom to another, until they take on the grooves and grain of your own bones, for tales can only be retold from there. Become fibrous and sinewed and fleshy through wide immersion in the nooks and niches of the world, where spice and hue is coveyed away. There, entangled in the strange spell of the local, your home-Gods will begin to whisper to you in unfamiliar dialects, but you will know it is them, and their presence in protean drag will convince you that they are not fossils, but very much alive, and that the keys to unlocking the dead letters imprisoned on the page lie in foreign ports, where they were scattered long ago, and lore is like a treasure map. Go afield, go afield, friend. On the tongues of eccentrics, in the gnarled hands of old characters, in the breath of someone who has dared to de-homogenize (or never knew it at all) and really let a place or places seep into the riverpaths of his or her blood, you will hear the guiding echoes, like sonar, like the blip that lets you triangulate against the blind spot in your own knowledge. Let the peculiar, and those bold enough to become particular, so the vagaries of situation twist and live through their innards and hard-earned quirks, teach you. The folk, only the folk, hold the keys to the lore, and they are a motley crüe indeed. Drink at the spring where Whitman and Sandburg found their voice. The people, the odd fellows, own the lore ; whether they know it or not, it lives implicit in them, across them. It's in their landscapes. It's in the mountaineer and the old rural guy from Maine. It's in the eight-wheeler at the desert truck stop and the sassy waitress off the 10. It's in the archive photos in the basement of a local history museum, and the scratchy old ragtime record. It's in tales of ex-slaves on yellowed paper, and hocked broadsheet-style crib notes of other cultures' myths. It's in the prairie grass beside that lone tree about 200 yards off the side of the road. It's in the coyote that crosses your path. It's in the reverie after a nap. Strange memories awaken, glimpses, little flashes in a kaleidoscope that arrange themselves in your dreams with their own peculiar logic. And then, like a bee, you've got to regurgitate and reconsume many times before you get honey ; at first what you find so amazing is just spit and a little pollen. You'll have to test your findings in many halls, experience that crestfallen feeling of being rejected for fresh insight, crust over a little, resent the critique you get, admit some of it but not all of it was right, first grudgingly then more gratefully and humbly, modify, tumble, retell, refit, stick to your guns, throw it all away, put it aside, wonder why at all, rediscover your pith, trust your instincts, and take the fully cooked bread out of the oven, no longer doughy but not burnt : browned and warm with just the right amount of softness : just right. And it takes time to bake.

Sending Compassion to Our Japanese Cousins

2011-03-11T02:56:00.000-08:00

Sigyn emptied the bowl, Loki flinched.
Aegir responded.
Njord, calm the waves ;
Love-goddess, soothe the hearts of our Japanese compatriots.
To them our compassion flows.

Those "Hard, Merciless" Vikings

2011-03-11T02:44:00.000-08:00

1. várkunn (to feel woe, to feel compassion for)

2. kenna í brjósti um (to feel in the breast about/for, to feel compassion for)

3. aumka sik (to feel compassion for)

4. miskunn (to overlook, pardon, forgive, show mercy and grace)

5. eir (peace, clemency, mercy ; also please note that this is cognate with Anglo-Saxon ár, "honor", indicating the precise qualities for which one earned honor.)

Five different ways of expressing the notion of mercy, compassion, or clemency. Five. One of them is actually a heathen word for "honor", and also happens to be the name of the Goddess of Healing. Several words for the same concept in a language often indicates the importance of the concept.

Just sayin'.

Letting the Lore Go to Seed

2011-03-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

Now what you've got to do is you've got to study the old lore, and really get to know it, and let it sink into your bones. You've got to take the many expositions from varied perspectives, the beautiful and elegant reasonings of the pagan philosophers and the cogent and penetrating insights of the best of modern scholars, and then you have to let this beautiful garden go to seed. You just let it go, and let it go wild, and hairy, and let it grow into what it will grow into.

One way to do this is to study folklore collected from the mouths of rural and working folk, whose lives inflect their lore with their grittiness, their color, and their texture. These from-the-mouth testimonies give a picture of how lore gone to seed can look, whether they are first-person narratives, as one finds in some of the Foxfire books (which compile oral histories from the Appalachias, and provide a wonderful inview on hillbilly life), or ballads.

Thus, the study, the lore, is just the seed-form. It will become wooly. It's that wooliness that characterizes heathenism. It's that wild, rustic edge that takes the beautiful seed, and lets it become its ruffled, hairy, thorny, stubby, tall and lush self.

This characterizes the lore of witches. When we look at the lore of medieval witches, we may think of it as impoverished and cut off from its heathen root, and at times that is true, but at other times, what they have done is they have merely taken that root and they have allowed it to come into its wild environment and branch off in the directions that it wills. It's that rough and tumble, tough as nails, sometimes scolding, often shrill, and grounded in women's mysteries, which were never written down by the hand of man, and thereby hold up an untapped mirror into the wholeness of the ancient wisdom of the heath, that is needed in order to complete our training.

Every master, every teacher, has an angle, has an inflection. They usually have a blind spot as well, but together, being passed from the hands of teacher to teacher, you can fill in a lot of the blind spots, and gain a much more holistic perspective. No one person, no one book holds the truth. It's that which grows between all of these which manifests truth, and I say "grows" between, because it's not just the between, but it's that going to seed of the learning that really brings out its flavor.

In the Looking Glass of the Exotic, I find I

2011-03-10T01:06:00.000-08:00

I am looking at old sepia photos of Australian Aborigines, dressed in tribal paint, and decked in festive, feathered, ceremonial garb. Half-naked, hairy, bearded bodies geared with spears stand on rocks and the red earth, and beholding, something old and lost and very human comes alive within me. I look without romanticizing or demonizing. I look. I just look, and the picture becomes a deep, complex looking glass.

Allowing the Other to educate our ownness. We need the strange to fully awaken who we are. Why? For we are more than the shallowness of our early cultivation ; cross-fertilization keeps cultivation robust, and healthy, and alive. Too much self-sameness is unhealthy, like inbreeding. It is when a man goes out to meet and behold the strange that he or she awakens to hir fullness.

Too much identification with identity cripples the alterity which is our doorway to Beloved Mother Earth and our lifeline to all our relations. As we incarnate, we come into a specific kind and nation. We enter, mammalia, primate branch, homo Sapiens twig, modified by our nation's traditions. All of this is good to know, and affirm, but we are more than this. Our soul is more than this form. The Other challenges us, and therefore helps us, to remember.

Evolution must be integrated spiritually. It extends back our genealogy to the origins of Mother Earth herself, and that is quite a lineage. Quite a lineage indeed. We are crow, we are squirrel, we are orca, we are mongoose. But you can hardly find or integrate this if you cannot see yourself in the other nations of humankind, who provide a beautiful kaleidoscopic mirror in which to behold yourself in all your glory, for they are glorious, and so are you. Without trying to change the other, both are subtly changed in the encounter. The humanness intermingles with the strangeness, and a third perspective is achieved. Of course, their flaws and our flaws are obvious to each other, whose wonderful mirror can also hold these up for uncomfortable view. What blessings such discomforts! From such growth results! But to stay at the level of flaws is to remain outside the true juiciness and intermingling of the encounter. Strangeness has a draw which can only be called libidinal ; we shall let Njord, that God of sailors and sea-Vikings, rede over this draw, and teach our Odr within the lore of its lure. Odr, the human soul, our deep, emotional mind with all its power of imagination and folly of fantasy, must travel to find who he is, and only after death does he discover he has rhizomes connecting him to every sprout of man and every shoot of kind in all nine worlds!

In the picture, I recognize elders. What matter if they are distant, distant grand-uncles rather than in the direct line of fathers? Fools, they are twigs of the manly branch of that Great Tree we all worship through the Auspicious Gods! Mannaz, the fellowship of men, includes all humankind. It does not negate nations, although new tribes may bud on the edges where nations meet, as that Tree is always budding, and no harm to the other twigs in so doing. Nations are slow flows of greening become pith and sap-stocked fibre in time. Mannaz draws us out from the joys of our home and our tribe to see the fullness of man! To touch the exotic, dance with the exotic, feast with the exotic, and know ourselves in the touching and dancing and feasting, and the laughter that thereby comes. We go out all-human, shielded, and speared ; yet we lay down spear when spear is laid down, and greet the mug with clink and down of frothy foam. It's good.

It is seldom the stranger who scathes, but neighbors, rivals, old enemies grown stubborn in feuds so old their origins are often forgotten. The stranger stands outside these feuds, and thus is refreshing. We drink together and find our deep humanity, in all its mysteries. Isn't that what the Rune of Man is all about? There, in a foreign hall, however circumspect, their flaws and our flaws exposed, we can laugh at what fools we be, and fear the orc within, who seeded by trolls lurks within us all, yet also see reflection of the shining ones within us, too.

Thank the Gods for our diversities, and the openness to encounter them! Gads, this goes beyond, well beyond political correctness in an age appropriately trying to correct itself of historical shame and terrible error! This goes to the heart, to the pith, of what it means to be human! And that must always mean tribES, plural. Tribes. And the seekers between.

Our ancestors were seekers between. Oh, they were not always pure. Oh, they often, as all humans deluded by Heid, came to plunder. But that was not what fundamentally drew them out, even when gain was the bait. No, it was the Sea, the Vast, that waving Edge that brings one to the Strangeness. And in that strangeness is salvation. If only missionaries, who wrecked and twisted the wholeness of the viking to turn the other into self and thus erase the self, could see who drew them out from the start? But their Bible cannot allow them to see divinity in any other form, and so remain blind, at depth, to Njord. Let us not be so blind.

The Menstruum is the Open Door to Frigga

2011-03-10T01:02:00.000-08:00

They don't teach you how to grow, as you get older, but the secret is you must grow backwards as you grow forwards, or you will end up confusing both ends and fall over lopsided. The tree must extend its roots as it stretches its branches.

Fools remind us of our own vanity, and ground our aspirations, ensuring we return to our roots and do not forget our animal sides.

This kind of grounding is necessary.

If you try to stay all light, you become or remain hollow. The light must come down into the blood and the soil to find its own. The rich red iron of the earth holds lessons for the light.

A woman knows this from her monthly blood, which teaches through crankiness the bottom line, which properly approached, is a good line. Our inability to integrate the period, very possibly the original sabbath, is our imbalance. There is a time to relax into the griping of the moment, and let nothing else hold sway. There is wisdom only the inner bitch will whisper, and if a werman refuse to love this ample, earthy flow of crampy mood within, he will be deluded.

Wermen are upside-down. They talk a good talk, but in the end, the end is where the head should be, and vice-versa, because dazzled (meaning befuddled) by their own talk, and pretensions of reason, they lose touch with their own drives. Then they can only speak of suppressing them, but never understanding and acknowledging them, and thereby flowing with them, and gaining access to their wisdom, without becoming a prisoner to them. Pretending they are wise, they become fools. This is why Odin had to hang upside down to become wise, to understand his rootedness in the drives and how they organically emerge up from beloved Mother Earth, whose perspective he had to take.

Wermen like to believe that they are not bitches, too, but to others their subterranean flows of moodiness, stubbornness, and crankiness are obvious. Allowing this deep animal woundedness through which one is cleansed is part of the menstrual wisdom of the earth. My ability to be a goddess flows from my ability to hold when I am a bitch. So should every man, werman or woman, be able to say, with grounded pride. In the mammalian line, the menstruum is the open door to Frigga.

Mimir's Horn in Rydberg's Hands

2011-03-09T16:52:00.000-08:00

There are those who would spurn and scoff at Rydberg. Let them, I say! I will not argue with fools, who gripe and whine about their myths being stolen from them, and then cannot see how they were hacked and fragmented, their shrapnel sent flying in hundreds of different directions, but refuse to gather them up and put the puzzle-pieces back together! I will not beg idiots to drink the proffered mug of foaming wisdom while they flounder in their ignorance! Be content in your poverty then!

Strong language you say? Strong ignorance, I say, to turn a blind eye to wisdom! Take that eye and hurl it into the Well instead! It's hard to keep from laughing at those whose mouths becry what the eye will not behold, and weep for what is lost and yet right before them! I shall not be meek in the face of willful ignorance, but will stand on the ground of my substantial knowledge and call out the true fools. No apologies for a brag grounded in deed.

Scoff at one of Sweden's greatest poets, who took that poet-mind (and keep in mind, that poet-mind was the pinnacle of our heathen wisdoms), and looked at the ancestral lore to see what patterns emerged? This was no shallow and baseless imposition, but an organic emergence over a decade of careful study of the primary sources!

If you are relying on Snorri alone, with little, pathetic snippets of the Poetic Edda, you, my friend, are an impoverished heathen. You have no clue and no idea how far and deep your lore really extends. It is not simply the "imagination" of some extravagant 19th century scholar, but solidly checks out when one truly reviews the lore. There are always small details to argue over in any field, but looked at broadly, as well as remarkably in the details, Rydberg's map, as a whole, checks out.

But "checks out" is a superficial evaluation. Fills out, broadens out, deepens : these are better words. A close study of Rydberg will fill your knowledge of the lore in a way no other study will. More importantly, this will not be vain, academic, dry, separative, will-to-keep-fragmented knowledge, but deeply interconnecting, fibrous knowledge, knowledge that will vibrate to the core of your soul and help you resonate to the wendings in the wind of the Tree itself. Here lies wisdom.

If you would refuse a quaff from Mimir's Horn because it lies in Rydberg's hands, be that flagrant fool you are, and cast yourself off into your parochial irrelevancies! Behold my command of lore, and ponder whether I have the resources to evaluate the claims of his investigations. I have done the homework, and the back-checking, and see the interconnection of myths and figures to whom you remain blind because you stand staring at the gaps between names, clueless to the polynymy that bridges the functional interstrewnness of variations! There is a composite picture herein, sir, if you would look! With mirth and gratitude, I will guide the eye to vistas, but I shan't waste a moment arguing with fools. I lay down the gauntlet and say, Drink, or go about your way, beggar.

Distrust Scarcity, Trust Abundance

2011-03-08T03:55:00.000-08:00

Could it be that that which seems to be helping to destroy the world is also its salvation? This may sound paradoxical, but alchemy suggests all things in the right proportions, which means that all kinds of energies can be included, and it may just be that we don't have things in the right combinations. Dialectics suggests that the world twists and turns, and what sounds like contradiction is merely the many sides of paradox, to which we must adjust ourselves in order to find truth.

What I'm referring to is the attitude of "To hell with the world! I'm just going to have fun. I just want my life of pleasure."

Many would argue that it is this attitude which is leading the world to go to hell in a handbasket, because of its essential narcissism, and to the degree that the attitude is captured in narcissism, and people have no capacity for empathy, and no capacity for any kind of systematic thinking, yes, that can lead to a downfall ; and by placing responsibility only in the hands of the experts, it allows those experts to have much greater say over things. But at the same time, I think there's something essential about the idea of "to hell with the world, I just want to have a good time."

There's always something healthy about hedonism. Always. Whenever we hear a condemnation of hedonism, our ears ought perk up, and we ought suspect that there's some sort of scam at work. We ought suspect that someone is trying to pull something over on us. We ought suspect that there are monks with whips waiting in the wings.

Now this is not to say that we can't moderate hedonism, and we can't ask for it to hold its proper place. Obviously it sometimes needs to be put in place. But as an ingredient in the larger mix, it is necessary and essential.

Beyond this, it is not just pleasure that is important, but actually, fun, because fun implies a certain amount of frivolousness and it implies a certain orientation of play, and these are needed to combat deadly seriousness.

When our ecologists are enforcing on us a notion of scarcity and are approximating the austerity measures that the IMF and World Bank try to place on countries, telling us that this is how it is, and this is how it is going to be from hereonin, and we have to stop having fun, and get used to the economy being depressed, I begin to suspect that ecology has gotten hijacked, and a particular brand has gotten funded and propagated by interests who wish us to be austere while they go right on hoarding. The way with which the "underground" or "alternative" has just fallen in with this lock, stock, and barrel is frankly just disgusting.

This is not to say that the American consumeristic lifestyle is sustainable, but what it is to say is that we ought to be placing ourselves at all times on at least that side of the balance that tends towards hedonism and playfulness and fun. Now, yes, obviously, that will include a level of self-management that implies a certain level of seriousness and a certain level of taking responsibility for things, but frankly, from my standpoint, one of the things that is entirely wrong with this world is its overemphasis on deadly seriousness, and moreover, the emphasis on scarcity, and that we should adapt ourselves to scarcity. Wow, we might as well just give our birthrights up if that's the case!

Because in fact, this is an abundant world! It's a completely abundant world. Now, we have been exploiting it, and whenever you engage in exploitation, there's going to be blowback, so we need to figure out how to work with things. What's needed is not austerity. What's needed is a kind of Taoism, an active working with Wyrd.

And of course, we haven't been. We have not been doing that at all. We've had a completely imperial way of doing things, of imposition, where we take the attitude that we're just going to do what we want and to hell with any other considerations. When we want a resource, we just go in and we take it. When we want something to be made out of that resource, we go in and we impose that on the resource, and if we have to pay people 30 cents a day in order to do so, then we'll do that, too. Well, this is arrogance.

So there is a price to be paid for arrogance. There is a price to be paid for empire. But the lie of empire is, Well, you can have abundance through empire and imposition, or you can have austerity and you can live as impoverished monks. Well, what bullshit is that!

And if there's anything positive that Ezra Pound, in all of his insanity and his deplorable fall into anti-Semitism, has to give us --- and there still is a baby there in the bathwater not to be thrown out --- it is, don't believe the lie of scarcity, because that's artificial scarcity.

This doesn't mean there aren't some means to be lived within, but don't accept an external notion from outside your concrete situation, outside your authentic needs, and outside the palpable abundance of the earth, of what that is. Don't begin by limiting yourself. Instead, let's think systematically of ways in which felicity, lightness, playfulness, and the natural unfolding and blossoming of human capacity can become the hallmarks of a production that will facilitate abundance and happiness. Let's affirm that these are possible, and that against the notion of classics as things which are heavy and weighty and to which we must give the full weight of deadly seriousness, that instead, true poetry and true creation is about making things lighter so that they can be enjoyed more. And to use a metaphor, to approximate this world, just a little bit more, to adjust it towards Elfland, where things are a little bit lighter and more enjoyable. And the elves are children of Mother Earth! That's what life should be about. We should be adjusting life towards joy, and following our joy.

Joseph Campbell called it "following your bliss", and he distinguished it from a kind of crude and vulgar hedonism, which I have called the "Roman attitude towards partying", an imperial seizing of pleasure that really has no authentic joy in it. This statement of Campbell's is exactly the right formula. Whether there are deadly serious people who think that is our downfall or not, fine, let it be our downfall, because I had rather go down being me than thrive being something I am not, and it is that kind of defiance and Luciferian spirit, coupled with a biophiliac love of life that I think will bring our salvation.

This is a matter of trusting Frey and Freya. It's a matter of turning around from exploitation and imperialism, and turning towards the earth, and following the way of wyrd, and trusting that that will bring the abundance we need. Too often scarcity is a result of hoarding. Let us not let Angrboda -- she who bodes angst, frightening us with fires that may come -- speak to us of ecology. What does she know or care of the earth? At the same time, let us allow the natural, abundantly flowing joy and love of Frey and Freya to temper our desires so that our simple yearnings for simple pleasures and rich festivity do not blow out of proportion into a greed that would eat the earth, but rather sate themselves on the fruits of good work. We have a choice. We can walk Gullveig's road, never sated, never allowing ourselves to fully enjoy, because we are frightened of scarcity, and restrict our options, or we can walk Frey and Freya's road, and permaculturally work with nature, and discover her natural abundance. Is there a way we can trust our sense of fun, and still flow with the Earth's wondrous ways?

Faith says of course there is. Trust abundance. Distrust scarcity.

Emissaries from the Roots, Dolphins above the Waves

2011-03-08T02:48:00.000-08:00

Tonight I crawled on my hands and knees through the grass and ran my fingers through it, and kissed the earth. I felt the interwoven mat of the grass, solidly held together as an interconnected whole, and my soul went down, down into the earth, down into the root-world.

We are emissaries from the roots. We are emanations from the thick and deep. We have emerged up into separation from the whole, in order to speak what the whole must say. We are moments of the grassrooted, knotty, intricate foundation, that swaying prairie-ocean, that thick fund of ancestral unity where all is solidarity and interwovenness so thick there is no separation, and yet still breathing room. We are emissaries with some light to bring, expressions of the deep come up to drink the sun, to say something from the deep with our living. To come up as on the foam, in effulgence and glory. And not just to serve ourselves, though we may find comfort, but for that there is something to say through our living, through our living itself. The rising and falling, the circulation of life up from the depths, and then back down again. As it rises up, taking in glory of sunlight, and then diving back down, like the dolphins in the ocean, like flying fish. Even the whales leap out of the water. That is us, our souls. Oh, to join again in that deep, that wonder. That's what praying is all about, praying as deep imaginal participation in the deep things of this world. We pray to reconnect ; we pray to remember. To know that we are sacred and that we do have a sacred task to carry out.

We are in pain because we are separated, and yet this separateness is our glory to rise! To rise and touch the world of sunlight, and bring some of that sunlight back down. Do not pray for what praying can do for you, but pray for what you may do for the life-world, for it is your separation from that life-world which causes you your pain. We must remember that the world is not here for us but we for the world. That opportunity to serve with the flowering of our talents and joy is our glory. Our lives are not perfect in a world run by giants but we still have the opportunity to participate in something wondrous and larger than ourselves. That gives life meaning, and a meaningful, worthwhile life is one of the greatest gifts, even if it is hard at times.

The Earth matters. Joy and Love are in charge, if we will quit abandoning them to the ice because of greed and technology out of control, and if we will understand that our rationality runs deeper than the analytical mind, for its roots run through the deeper mind that flow down into the moebial twists of Wyrd's ribbons, from whence we are intricately, inextricably a part of all this, the threads of our being cross-stitched onto this rippling warp and woof. We are the rise of the depths itself, the fold of the lower planes emerging up into a wave of ongoing world, crashing down into itself again, ripple upon ripple running across that crenullated fabric of the deeper weave, from whence all hopes emerge. Death is simply the deeper life, and we are its emissaries, to seed this life more superficial with depth of wisdom and energy of greening. It falls down, having risen, and shall rise again.

Faith : An Essential Part of Heathenism

2011-03-08T02:28:00.000-08:00

I've heard some people say that faith is not a native part of our heathen religion. These people ought to know that faith and its cognate words are pagan words. The faith may be different than the kind of faith of the Christian religion, but we utilize faith every day.

When someone gives you a dollar, why do you take it? Because you have faith that you will be able to utilize that dollar and exchange it for something else of value. You have confidence and trust. The reason faith is needed is because there are gaps. There are gaps between when a person puts a dollar in your hand and when you take that dollar and go get the thing you want. It's a gap. It's not an obvious connection. It's a chasm. But it's a chasm that you're willing to leap. There are chasms in life. There are challenges. The world works in such nonlinear and knotted ways that often our faith is tested. Sometimes it seems as if nature is working against us, when we simply haven't discovered its twirling, spiralled flows. Trust is needed, just as we invest trust and confidence in money.

The world is built on trust. The world is built on faith. The question is, what do we put our faith into? These questions of faith are essential to any kind of religiosity. It is the confidence with which we put into things that determines our ability to move throughout the uncertainty in the world. I mention the faith behind the money system because it is that practical orientation towards faith which is essential for a heathen religiosity. Here is the real question of where do you demonstrate worth? We can look at that from another angle : where do you put your faith? Where do you invest your confidence?

Do you put your faith in Beloved Mother Earth? Is she beloved to you? For you see, if she were beloved to you, there are things you simply wouldn't permit and to happen to her. And you'd have faith that her herbs and the things growing out of her can be helpful and healing.

This is a question of faith in the Gods. It's not a matter of having a contrafactual imagination. It's a matter of having confidence that there's something real behind what you're speaking ; and if there's not something real behind what you're speaking, why are you speaking it? The Gods don't want lip-service. If we will trust the Gods, and really truly put our faith in them, then we can begin to connect to some magnificent, marvelous things, and things that faith in the Gods will be able to give, that the mere faith of the monotheist religions cannot give, because they do not have faith in the Earth, because they do not have faith in fertility, because they do not have faith in the wisdom of the winds. They do not perceive the sacredness permeating and running through this world. There are forces of corruption and forces of evil in this world, but their idea that the world is so permeated with evil that it is irredeemable is blasphemous to our heathen sensibility. There is good in the world! That is why we fight evil! And, beyond fighting evil, more to the point, we bolster up, we berm up, we surround and hedge and guard, and we nourish, the good.

We often begin as pagans engaging in a kind of play-activity. Play is the way that we human beings initiate ourselves into new realities. Play is how animals come to develop into adults. So as children, we come to play at faith. We begin, and our faith is little more than that suspension of disbelief that characterizes theatre-goers, and allows them to enjoy themselves for the duration of the show. But the suspension of disbelief is not something that can last for long unless that confidence begins to take root. And that's what we need to do. We need to get to the point where these names, these holy names that we have begun to use but barely understand --- we barely understand what these names -- Odin, Frigga, Thor --- we barely understand what they mean, for we are children reciting magical formulas that we don't comprehend --- and ground them in existential depth that undergirds our realism and the orientation of our activity. But the more that they take root, and the more confidence that we're willing to put into them, the way that we would put confidence into a dollar bill we were given, and run with it, the more powerful the experiences and possibilities will become. When someone gives you a dollar bill for something you've given, how do you know you haven't just been stolen from? If you took a completely 'atheistic' attitude towards money, you just gave something away. You're not going to get anything in return for it. You just got a piece of paper. But every day, even when we doubt the monetary system, even when we're having questions about it, even when people are telling us that inflation is going up, despite all that, until the point that people actually are taking wheelbarrows full of paper bills to the banks, every day we're acting on it. Can you act on your faith in the Gods with that kind of conviction?

Can we get to the point where we can see that it was our orientation that was out of touch with reality? The orientation that we thought was realistic. The "realistic" orientation that stands in the way of our confidence in the spiritual reality about us. It was our thought that the Earth was not alive that has been at the root of so many of our problems. It was the lack of faith that spirit permeates this world that has allowed us to devoid it of the intelligence with which we could enhance our rationality! That shamanism and analysis don't have to be at loggerheads! They can work together. If we will invest faith, find the roots of faith, then faith will no longer be contrafactual. It will instead be rooting into the ground and searching and seeking the deeper roots of reality, the deeper realities, and we will no longer be attacking symptoms! Realism will no longer be a matter of looking at symptoms, but a matter of going for the roots of things. This is radical faith, radical because the word "radical" means to go to the radix, to the roots. That's where faith becomes powerful, and it is absolulutely a part of our heathen sensibility.

Rationality : The Gift of the Gods to Solve Problems

2011-03-08T02:21:00.000-08:00

The degree of life's rationality is the degree of luck that you have. I'm defining rationality here in a more basic way than it is ordinarily understood. I define rationality as the human capacity to solve problems (and more particularly, by figuring out the nature of things and then flowing with them rather than against them), and more generally, a state of rationality in life is a state where problems are at least conceivably solvable, if people put their minds together to try to solve those problems, and then act on those solutions. (Acting on the solutions is a necessary part of rationality. It's irrational to simply think them and not implement them!) Such is a very lucky situation indeed, because a situation of unluck is one where problems seem unsolvable and overwhelming and multiple.

If we can think of luck in terms of rationality, then luck is something that can be augmented and multiplied through education and through the encouragement of rational problem-solving techniques. Now lest the intuitive and mystic types amongst us get cold shivers at the sounds of spreading and utilizing rationality, once again, it is a problem-solving orientation, in which we can use our whole minds, our analytical and our intuitive sides, to solve problems ; so when I discuss rationality in this sense, I am not opposing it to intuitive methods that can work hand in hand with analytical methods. Irrationality would simply be not addressing problems at all, nor trying to solve them ; avoiding, and thinking that avoiding will solve them.

When I look around, I think the level of irrationality is increasing, and I think that this is a rational problem, not an irrational one. In other words, it's potentially solvable, and it is not out of our hands, or is inevitable, or just naturally happens that way. I think there's something that can be done about it.

The function of leaders, when there are true leaders, is to try to ensure that life stays as rational as possible, and there are a number of different mechanisms for doing this, the largest of which is law, which is supposed to provide remedies when rights are violated, and is supposed to adjucate conflicts in a way that is both fair and prevents open warfare. But it is plain to just about anyone who opens their eyes that the legal system has become completely irrational. Most people don't turn to it for any kind of solving of their problems, and most people have an understandably cynical attitude towards it, taking the attitude that law is something that is utilized as an aggressive weapon by the powerful to bind the powerless, and such cynical attitude is in fact largely how it is used, which is a complete reversal of how things are supposed to be. When leaders are not ensuring that life is essentially rational, that problems are solvable, it's time to replace them with true leaders. Now, no one can guarantee that life will be without problems, because life is full of problems, and there will always be a margin of problems that just can't be dealt with , but when things get to a point where good, competent people who have passion, who have dedication, who work hard, who have good spirit just begin to feel overwhelmed and that there's not much that can be done about tremendous problems, then something is very wrong. One of the ways that would have been expressed in the old days is talking about luck and unluck, and proclaiming that leaders had not been warding luck. It is useful to look at luck through this lens. Not solely through this lens, but at least through this lens. One thing they were talking about was solvability of problems.

The problem is, irrationality breeds irrationality, because the more unsolvable things seem, the less willing people are to tackle, and the more they are going to want distractions such as entertainment, television, and so forth, which is completely understandable. In the face of problems that seem unsolvable, why confront them at all? One might as well distract oneself and do what one can to enjoy oneself. But of course, the more that people are not focusing on solving the problems, the more the problems are proliferating.

People have become so detached cynically through disappointment from the macro systems that affect us the most, that it's become a real problem. We've left law and economics, which affect us more than just about any other arena, in the hands of experts, who very clearly do not have our best interests at heart, and it's very clear that the official systems of law and economics are being utilized by myopic individuals focused solely on their own interests. Now some of this actually is evil, but some of it is the result of our culture. We have to remember that culture is a cultivation. Culture is a kind of agriculture of the mind, a gardening of values, and for a long time we've been breeding this idea of self-interest, very narrow self-interest and self-concern, and with those who are fortunate, it's quite understandable that they run with this. The end effect is that there are some very wealthy people who are milking the existing mechanisms which are supposed to be in place to protect the weak from the predatory, such that that system is being used to prey upon people. That's very clear.

The primary tool that the Gods have given us is our minds, and so if you want to look at things that are going wrong in the world, you have to look at minds and mindsets. You have to look at the values that are being cultivated. You have to look at the systems that have been created out of mind : law, economics, and so forth. And you have to begin to connect the dots and think systematically. Rationality needs wyrd in order to complete itself. Ecology has been telling us ever since Rachel Carlson that everything is interconnected, and that we must look to this interconnectedness. Wyrd tells us that we must look at nonlinear flows, dynamics, and turbulences in order to understand how things really work. Cause and effect is not just a linear function. Once causes set effects into motion, those effects interact amongst themselves and form flows and streams which take on momentum, and one needs to look at where the momentum is flowing.

The powers that be don't really want people using rationality, because although analysis and intuition must struggle hard to glean genuine insights and separate them from illusion, once that process is rolling, and the insights begin connecting with each other in authentic ways, things often become very simple out of the complexity. It's very easy to see a number of things which are important to notice.

For example, pesticide use is just stupid. There's really little use in debating it. Here bringing in scientists to have scientific battles about this, that, and the other is unnecessary. All we need to know is that pesticides are nerve toxins. They are nerve toxins, and we are spreading poison. There's not a single person from the ancient world who wouldn't have seen that that is just stupid. End of discussion. No need for debate, no need to get into polemics, no need to get pulled into endless argumentation. There's some places where it's useful to argue, and there's other places where you just need to open your eyes and speak what is self-evident before you. Pesticide use is not only stupid ; it's incredibly harmful. Our ancestors would also see that while they had to struggle with pests, the idea of declaring war on all the other creatures of our Beloved Mother Earth, as a way to bring prosperity to ourselves, is essentially a strategy of the giants. That's not a strategy of Vanir-worshippers. That's not a strategy of people who looked to nature, tried to understand her cycles, and work with those cycles. That's an attitude of war on nature, and we're beginning to see, hopefully, that the war on nature is not a war that we will win.

Now when something is both stupid and toxic, you don't argue over the little details. You don't even argue over procedural rules. If people saw how toxic pesticides are, we wouldn't be having discussions on the internet about them, and we wouldn't be having legal battles over them. We'd be engaging in direct action. And it's extraordinarily important that we understand that direct action is the primary engine that gets anything going in life. Direct action. Politicians, legal systems, everything else are not pro-active, at least not in our favor and our direction. They are pro-active for the interests they serve, which for the moment are jotunn interests. No, direct action is the only way to get those systems to respond in the correct way, and whether you think that's radical or not is a matter of how frozen you've become, and how irrational you've become. No, if people saw how incredibly destructive pesticides have become --- and I'm just using one very stupid modern practice amongst many for which it can stand in --- we know where the farms are, we know where the planes are that spread these pesticides and herbicides throughout our air. People would go and block the tractors that pull the pesticides along. They would go and stand in the takeoff lanes at the local airports where the planes are taking off with pesticides. They would surround the factories where these chemicals are made, and they would begin to block and shut down the poison. That's what it will take, and if you trust your heathen ancestors, you'll see that that attitude of action, of direct action, is what it takes. That doesn't mean you need to start with a combative attitude and go to war immediately, although it could take that. Struggles sometimes get to that point, but it doesn't have to start that way. In a rational scenario, people would go out there and put their bodies between their health and the irrationality of people who are driven entirely by profit, by Gullveig.

These symbols are not meant to stay as little fairy-tales. The power of greed, the power of gold, is a real corrupting force in the world. Gullveig does breed wolves, and those wolves are predators. Giants are a way of approaching the world. As Eve put it, the giant corporations are our modern representations of the jotunnish spiritual energies. Direct action, as the implementation of rationality, can help us begin to create a more rational world, a world of luck, a world where the problems don't have to cripple us, and it's time to begin thinking in these terms, because it's irrational to believe that people who don't have your best interests at heart are going to take care of things. It's irrational to believe that having an entirely passive attitude about difficulties is going to solve any problems. It's irrational to believe that sitting in front of your television set is going to do anything. This is not about electoral politics. This is not about writing your congressman. This is about direct action, in the fact of stupidities, and standing up for intelligence.

Odin and the Paperbark Trees

2011-03-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

Had an imaginary conversation with Odin tonight, near L.A.X. I got outside my car and walked around some beautiful paperbark trees. The wind was cool and full of moisture.

"Like those?" He asked in my mind. "Pretty neat, huh? The way the bark just self-peels like paper or origami?" He was genuinely fascinated, and admiring the handiwork.

I nodded. "You made these?"

"Me?" he said, dismissively. "Nah, not I. Made lots of things, but that's the work of my wife. She's had a hand in shaping many things."

"Pretty impressive," I said.

"You know there's not anything like it in any other world. If only you humans could get a sense of what exists out there, you might appreciate the wonder of this stuff here more. I mean, you are surrounded by wonders!"

Now, I knew this was an imaginary conversation in my head. And I also knew that Odin was speaking directly to me.

Freya and the Bees (Eve Ghost's Op Ed Piece)

2011-03-07T02:48:00.000-08:00

My friend, fellow heathen, and rock star Eve Ghost responded to my recent post about Freya, "Loveliness', by challenging my idea that Freya herself is really free, and that it is simply a subjective matter in these days of freeing her within our hearts. She suggested that perhaps objectively the mythic scenario of the Frost War is recurring, and we must pay attention, lest we lose love, fertility, and the preciousness of our planet.

Eve makes a powerful point when she becries the rapid losing of our bees. This is no theoretical but an actual problem, with immense implications for fertility.

Here we must ask, have our notions of love become so anthropomorphized that we have forgotten the love Freya has for all of her mother's creatures? And can we ask for Freya's love if we will not imitate that expansive love? Can love survive without roses? Can roses survive without bees?

The actions of human beings have become so powerful that we have become planetary agents for diverse forces. How often are those forces the Gods? How often are they bumbling idiocy, greed, and megasized consumption? We are no longer simply passive recipients of spiritual forces, but actual active agents, and our collective deeds now have great import.

Eve's points are poignant, pressing, and relevant, concerning issues and matters that all pagans and heathens, as well as anyone else who cares about the spiritual-material destiny of this planet, ought to be wrestling with. I hope you will take these ideas to heart, and very, very seriously. I asked Eve to write up her ideas, and I proudly present her words as a guest Op Ed piece, along with my followup commentary :

It began with dead bees.

Or dying bees, as it were.

Upon my arrival in California, I noticed something, something that haunted me. It was the bees that all too frequently were found on the ground, writhing around in a sickly manner. I saw far less of them in the air than I did in the ground. This affected me more than I could have predicted. It literally made my heart ache, and this was before I understood what was going on.

Or perhaps it began when I was still in Minnesota, when Freyr's once relatively reliable guidance dropped out of my life quite abruptly. I felt abandoned. I still had Freya, but eventually she dropped out too, leaving me frustrated and alone. I felt it was something I had done wrong, for some reason I had driven them away. Clearly, I would suffer from their disappearance.

I have watched great love stories wither and collapse without rhyme or reason. We have seen the collapse of true love in favor of reality series inspired drama-fests. Marriages are disposable, friendships are hardly nourished by honor, loyalty and respect in this day and age. Of course, all of this is debatable and relative.

What can't be debated is this: the impending collapse of agriculture and the fertile quality of the land itself. We have allowed giants, represented by corporations, to take ownership of DNA, the essence of life itself. Monsanto can tweak seeds and lord over them with little regard for their consequence and so we have GMO corn that can wreak havoc on peoples' immune systems, we have GMO soy that blows into the next field and contaminates heirloom crops (and results in law suits that unfairly victimize farmers). We have legislation that makes seed saving, a practice that farmers have performed for generations upon generations, illegal.

These same jotunnish corporations are being intrusted with the “green revolution”, to strip native populations of livelihoods that have worked for them for years and use technology to force the land to yield cash crops that were never intended to grow there. Force people from their ancestral lands that populations knew how to graze their animals on without resulting in harm and make them use farming practices that in time strip the land of any use what so ever.

Other corporations will get away with using pesticides in the name of agriculture that murder our bees. Where will be we be without Freyr's mighty legion of bees? Will our crops be pollinated by butterflies? Probably not, they're dying off too. Without Freyr's humble servant, the bees, we are all, in effect screwed.

Now let's take into account climate change. As climates shift and weather “weirds”, we are going to find even less arable land as deserts form where once there were none and crops that once were hearty like the oranges of Florida, succumb to unthinkable winter freezes. And what did we do to reign in the giants who spew death into our atmosphere, to reign in our own use of fossil fuels? We've done too little too late and the fertility of the earth will pay for it.

Look at the inexplicable winters we're having, these progressions into colder and colder weather while in other regions, the permafrost melts and trees topple over. Look at the oceans rising, the huge chunks of glaciers falling into the sea.

And look at how we as people treat each other. We've launched unthinkable wars run behind the curtain by multinational monsters like oil companies and the military industrial complex. We've seen torture of our enemies become actual policy, although thankfully it is abating. We see peoples basic rights even to land and homes stripped away in favor of the profits of bank-giants and mall building developer giants. We have dumped all of our precious resources into war, bailing out banks that fund monstrous endeavors, we've let big agra business run the show, we're sucking the water dry to bottle it and sully Freyr and Freya's father's domain with the islands of dead sea awash with plastic that ensue. We are running out of water, arable land, love for each other and time. And without love for each other, respect for each others freedoms, we're pretty much fucked as far as caring.

Where are we in the myth cycle? Is time cyclic, and how does time work in our heathen mythic landscape? Many pagan cultures had stories of earth moving in cycles of destruction and rebirth. Now physicists seem to agree that time might not be linear as we think. Hell, they now even posit that there's an alternate reality where gravity doesn't exist that's messing with our own plane of existence. So who knows? Do we always get to the end of the mythic cycle, culminating in Ragnarok or does time jump around? Do we always replay the scenarios in the same way? Does it matter?

Where some might jump to the conclusion that we're headed toward Ragnarok, I think what's really happening is the frost war running through its cycle. Again. Freyr and Freya have been held hostage by the giants. We will see a decrease in the natural fertility of this planet, we may see climates changing the earth beyond our recognition at a rate not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. But maybe it's not the end of the world as we know it, maybe we just need a hero.

[and my response : ]

Fantastic piece!

We do need heroes. We need the human soul, Odr, to reach out across the wide spaces and rescue Frey and Freya from the Ice Giants. But it means we need not only Svipdag but a Halfdan, too, a true king who will draw all the scattered tribes together against the world order that has aligned itself with frost. This king will be on the side of organic agriculture and farmers (Groa). This king will show a great understanding for the mysteries of existence (the runes). This will be a true philosopher-king who understands that leadership is a privilege and a trust that flows from the Gods with the folk as beneficiaries and which must respect each God's domain.

This king will dare to speak out against the spiritual principles that have turned against the Gods : our arrogant technology (Weland) that thinks its magic and its devices more important than holiness and devotion to the earth. He must also speak against that part of us that wants to mess with everything (Loki), and which led us to this problem in the first place, distinguishing such a meddling, disruptive spirit from true inquiry and holy wisdom. Of course, that spiritual principle which always tries to frighten us with scarcity, and leads towards greed and hoarding, thus creating the very terror we feared (Gullveig) must be countered as well, which is particularly hard in an age where much of that self-fulfilling prophecy has come true. Nevertheless, by demonstrating true generosity, the king will set the tone for how that spirit will be countered.

And it explains the rune sequence I got in my mind when I meditated on this issue, Wunjo, Raidho, Odal : Victory via the Road to Odal. The king must spearhead the movement against worldwide feudalism, and create tribute-free zones that are unbeholden to corporations or to government. A new relationship with land, akin to how the Native Americans saw it : a sacred trust, with every creature and growth upon it connected in some way to our luck, to be held in extended families generation after generation so it is well cared for as a home and not treated as a commodity on the open market (all characteristics of odal land.) Those stewards who actually care for the land and intend to do so for the generations to come and not just for their short-term profit must be seen as the true and only kind of nobility (Athelings). This king must never lord it over others but be merely the leader of the assemblies of sacred liberated zones (odal). The idea is then to free up tiny zone after tiny zone and link them. While the spiritual prophet (Svipdag) helps restore our relationship to the true fertility of Love and Joy, which will eventually renew us, but whose journey through frost is hard and takes a long time, on the material level we are liberated by greening little plot by little plot (a gardeners revolution : Groa), every restored area of organic permaculture a little victory. Together these form a unified spiritual-material strategy.

Proceeding square foot by square foot if necessary, we can plant flowers that are nourishing to bees. Even people with apartment balconies can plant such flowers to help the bees. We can make sure we garden organically, because pesticides are not only killing us with outrageous rates of cancer, but the bees as well. As cell phone and microwave radiation may be implicated in bee die-off, we can shield our gardens with various materials, including constructing faraday cages near or around the gardens, if need be. We have already spoken on this blog about the nature-preserves that were traditional on the property of our Indo-European ancestors ; setting aside a part of your yard or balcony as a bee-refuge would be a way to invoke the rune Algiz, or sacred protection, in a very concrete way.

The myth also suggests we must be careful about too much separation and hatred between our spirit of spiritual quest (Svipdag) and true material-political leaders actually working hard, but inching step by inching step, to restore fertility and freedom on the practical level (Halfdan). The former is likely to get impatient and furious with the latter. The latter is likely to fetter the former, try to hold the seeking spirit of inspiration back (Halfdan tying up Svipdag in Fetters' Grove). This is disastrous, and the material leaders must always strive to respect the spiritual leaders, otherwise the search for revenge may distract and deflect from the true task. Vengeance must be surrendered on the altar of love, joy, and fertility, which is what it is all about.

Balancing the Lofty and the Simple

2011-03-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

Rod Landreth, over at Jotun's Bane Kindred (and who can't immediately like a kindred with a cool name like that?), has written a kind appraisal of my work here, accompanied by good-hearted critique, as well as more critical attention to elitism amongst the denizens of the academy that is worth reading. It is an honor on my part to hear such high praise, along with good suggestions by someone who is not only a fellow heathen, but an elder (not in the chronological sense, but the spiritual sense)in our community. Good-hearted critique is always worth considering, because it is not only a compliment, but a goad to be better ; moreover, it means that someone actually enjoys your work, and so much, they want it at its best. We must thank those who have such love, particularly in the face of more widespread apathy.

It seems worthwhile to begin with our agreement, which is substantial. I think we are both opposed to elitism, but with slightly different approaches and strategies. One of the things that drives me crazy about Ezra Pound, for example, was his refusal to footnote his work. There seems to be the assumption that you should "just know" whatever random quote he pulled out of the archive and decided to slip into his poetry. Footnoting his work (with the notes in the back) would not have detracted from the work, but would have made it more accessible. Snobbery irritates me. Pound did know a lot, but how does he expect the rest of us to know the material he gleaned pouring through rare archives in Europe? That's silly. I also am irritated by scholars who will include quotations in Greek, Latin, French, or any other language for that matter, and not bother to translate it, assuming that we should "just know".

I also agree that we need to be bold and push forward the development of our living religion, without fear of stepping forward "unless they see three to five references that supports their step." Certainly. Actually, for myself, I often move first with my gut. I get an intuitive feel about a topic, and then, as educators say, engage in backwards planning : once you've figured out your goal, going back and mapping out the steps on how to get there. My high school math teacher emphasized this approach to me. He'd say, "Ziggy, you can know the end answer, but you still have to show the proof on how you got there." It took me a while to understand that, but actually, I think it is an anti-elitist move to provide footnotes and outline steps. I sometimes have some leaps to make, and I want people to be able to retrace my steps so they can check me at each step along the way. It doesn't have to be in the lore for me to speak on it, but I have developed such a broad faith in the resiliency of the lore, even in the fractured, skewed state we have it, that I'm pretty confident that the tradition has some angle on just about anything I might want to speak about. For me, that is a way of speaking not just to a modern audience, which I agree is important, but also including the ancestral audience, which is equally as important. The footnotes are there not out of timidity but out of respect, and frankly, a kind of intellectual necromancy.

By providing readers with the careful steps on how I got somewhere, I avoid the authoritarianism of "Look, just trust my intuition 'cuz I said so." I can show you how I got to where I wanted to go, so if you want to go there, too, you can do so confidently. On the other hand, if you want to go part way, and then veer off and explore other territory, you can do that, too. I can also point out where I went on gut instinct.

The lore is necessary to explore in depth, and it is complicated, which means there's a bit of study to be done. I've done most of that work, and so from my perspective, having gone into arcane medieval documents and translated their Latin (or whatever), and taken the time to synthesize the material, I am already presenting more simplified work. You're getting a lot of already digested material. Do we need to digest it further? Absolutely. But my point here is that the ancients wouldn't have needed to be scholars when it came to lore because they would have had it at their fingertips from an early age. Having the full span of lore before them, they could reflect on it at their leisure. They knew it like adolescents now know Star Wars, like trekkies know Star Trek, like kids know Robin Hood. But because our literature was often religious in tone, the Christians did the best they could to blow all that to smithereens, so that we have hundreds of fragments that require careful puzzle-piecing together, just so we can approach the knowledge any seven year old heathen of ancient days would have had! This is frustrating to all of us, but until we assimilate this matter, we aren't as open to all of the encoded spiritual messages found therein. The lore is meant to unlock all kinds of intuitive reflections and inner locked material. It's often unlocked best on reflection when one is walking out of doors in a natural setting, looking at a sunset, dancing in a rainstorm, struggling with the cold. Then the poignancy of certain episodes suddenly hits one.

It's true that I'm so often enthralled by my visions of the old growth heathenism that I know we can grow and develop into, that I'm a little more neglectful of the pioneer stage of succession that we're at. I believe we need voices at all levels, and it's important to have accessible materials. I will again extend the offer : if there are any articles here that anyone thinks worthwhile, but needing a little simplifying, I would be happy to either initiate or collaborate on a kind of "Cliff Notes" version.

The other point in this regard that I'd like to emphasize is that I really encourage people to ask questions and comment, and I am very happy to answer any and all questions. I am also willing to engage critical debate, and the only comments I will not acknowledge or respond to are those which are openly antagonistic or bigoted. I very much want to encourage dialogue here, and I'm very happy to explain anything I've said here, both prose and poetry.

However, while we need accessible materials -- no questions about that -- it is also true, I believe, that we need something to aspire towards, cultural materials that are not about barring entrance but raising the bar and providing a challenge. Rod speaks of materials that require one "to read, reread, unpack and make copious notes." I think that's ok, so long as there is also other material at more accessible levels as well. We need all levels of challenge. For myself, I cannot assess what levels I may have managed to reach -- perhaps I am bombastic failure -- but that I do reach is something I am proud of. It may be that I fall on my face, but reaching is a noble action, and I would like everyone in their own right to reach.

Despite the fact that our ancestors "were not a literate people", their oral culture could be quite sophisticated. Skaldic poetry, which people delighted in, was sometimes difficult even for well-trained and educated listeners to fully understand. They delighted in its riddling nature and its ability to overwhelm with nuances one often only caught on a third or fourth hearing. Nobility, high ideals, and intricate, elevated, and lofty forms of art are native to our tradition. That doesn't mean they were for everyone. But consider : even common folks came to see Shakespeare. They may not have caught every nuance in the play which more educated folks may have, but they enjoyed the mythic situations, and appreciated the rich imagery, as well as the feeling of elevation that came from being immersed in such diction. It is not elitist to offer people the opportunity to level up. Not all leveling has to be downwards. This religion is based on challenge.

So far as my poetry is concerned (and I don't know if its level or prevalence is of concern to anyone or not), my style is far less baroque than classical skaldic poetry. In fact, I often write in blank verse precisely because it's more accessible than the beautiful alliterative style of our ancestors. There's lofty mythic material here to be told in elegant, powerful ways.

Rod compliments me greatly by flattering me with the label of "Brahmanic". If only I could write such Upanishadic literature! It is my goal to try to create literature, and thus extend lore, to give some solid meat and garnishes for our ample feasts. Brahmanic knowledge was often elitist precisely because it was mostly confined to the caste system ; but I envision the three levels Rig instituted as meritocratic, and thus potentially open to all who have an interest.

However, I never write with the object of trying to impress with big words, and I have always been very critical of people who try to intimidate others with their knowledge, rather than welcome their participation and dialogue. (Being intentionally intimidating, and naturally formidable, are different things. I don't find Patrick Stewart intentionally intimidating, but I do find him naturally formidable, and am appropriately impressed and inspired.) I have a particular style that is native to me, and other styles that I am experimenting with as I strive to develop my craft as a skald. The denseness of some of my writing may be due to wanting to pack so much in and gather every possible nuance. I would love to do this unpacking myself, but I would need reader input on where they would find such unpacking and explanation helpful. "I wish he would ramp down his dense wall of words so more people could access what he has to say." I am open to suggestions!

Rod makes a very good point when he says, "They miss the point entirely of religion, spirituality, faith, and belief, but they are mostly agnostic to all that *anyway.*" This is right on target. Asatru may be the "religion with homework", but it is still a religion, and that involves faith, belief, prayer, cultivation of gnostic experiences, and so forth. In other words, we're supposed to be ambidextrous : faith and reason, intuition and lore, modern and ancestral, precisely because wisdom is the blend of the theoretical and the practical, the intuitive and the logical, the inspired and the studied. The God of Warriors may be one-handed, but he is one God amongst more than a dozen. We needn't be.

Faith, and the struggles that go with faith, are very important to me. I don't know whether it's obvious or not, but from my perspective, I am often leading here with my emotions, with my aspirations, with my passions, and with my desperate wrestlings with reconciling ancient religion and modern dilemmas. It's something we're all struggling with to make it relevant, yet still be faithful to the ancestors.

So ... what would you like to see at Heathen Ranter? What would make the discourse here more accessible? What would make your questions and dialogue feel more welcoming? Chime in.

Would hypertexting help more? I've hypertexted in this blog entry a little more, linking to any terms I think might be arcane in any way.

Gods Who Goad Us Into Adventure

2011-03-06T04:41:00.000-08:00

We must always be on guard against the fact that religion itself (as a social-political phenomenon that tends to domesticate spirituality to petty social dynamics and polemical ambitions) is often a prime culprit in emasculating the liberating inspiration the Gods give. Religion often preserves spirituality while putting it on ice. All too easily the whirlwind forces of the mighty Gods, which blow to spur divine impulses within the human breast into action (many do not know the relationship between the word Aesir, the Gods, and æsa, to stir up and excite ; the Aesir are precisely stirrers and exciters), are neutered through patronizing, half-hearted "going through the motions", without activating their energies from within, in order to transform life.

The Gods give you the awesome opportunity to mimic them, which as the cliche tells us, is the highest form of flattery. They don't do your work for you. But they provide you with bold models, daring deeds, and colorful strategies and personalities with which you can infuse your life with vitality and above all with action. Heathenism is an activist religion. That means our devotion to these stirring, spurring Gods must invest our tradition with powerful countercurrents to the demobilization that often accompanies religion. The Gods want us mobilized, in the field, actively tackling problems with fresh, innovative tactics inspired by our tradition of wisdom and bold deeds.

The Gods are continually invoked in Arminius' anti-imperialist war against Rome, as documented in Tacitus' Annals. They served to stir to action. I thought of this when I ran across a quote of Mao Tse-Tung, who was speaking to a group of peasants whose peasant associations had successfully liberated them from exploitative feudal overlords, and ridiculing their ancestral religion. "The gods and goddesses are indeed miserable objects. You have worshipped them for centuries and they have not overthrown a single one of the local tyrants or evil gentry for you!" I don't know much about these local deities, but I can only assume that the religion, under the pressures of centuries of feudalism (oppression can often motivate people to make compromise after compromise and permit encroachment upon encroachment on their ancestral religions, in an effort to at least preserve them, as ruling powers often don't tolerate religious movements that oppose their rule) had emasculated the insurrectional force of the divine. I thought of Germanic freemen side by side with their indigenous nobility in the Thing, all armed. I thought of the stories of Frey organizing the folk into militant mutual-aid associations and guerilla cadres when the giants invaded Midgard, and how the memories of these tales continued to circulate as Robin Hood stories in England, where they perennially inspired revolts. A truly Gods-incited folk (I do not know how else to define Asatru) will not brook oppression long. Heimskringla is filled with histories of armed peasants confronting and even fighting kings who overstepped the laws. Norwegians left Norway in force for Iceland rather than put up with oppression. But the danger spoken to in the quotation is always alive : that religion will become a consoling, demobilizing force for unfree people. But we must continually raise the banner, No True Spirituality Without Authentic Freedom! The taxidermied corpse of spirituality, traded back to us by tyrants of all stripes and strivings in exchange for our freedom, must ever be refused for the live fire of the Gods' holy and dangerous-to-tyrants whirlwind-inspiration!

Worship of the Gods does not mean waiting for them to liberate you ; it means taking up the torch they and their inspired heroes offer, and activating oneself in the face of life, and daring to seize the opportunities to expand the possibilities of freedom and enjoyment within this lifetime! And the only way to know how far you can get away with is to take your chance and try! You hardly have a wyrd at all if you do not take your chances ; it will remain a dormant wyrd, and you will reap the pettiness of its suppression in the face of your timidity. A truly wyrd life has something eccentric to it, because it steps outside the norm to grasp the exceptional. The Gods are inspiring excellence in you. Are you listening? Are you doing anything about it?

This will be relative to your station. You try to improve your lot from where you are. If you have been a wrong-doer, the call of excellence will inspire you to work off your debt and atone for your wrongs. If you are a basically decent human being, the call of excellence will inspire you to live the best life you can, taking on and fulfilling your responsibilities with diligence and a good heart. If you are extraordinarily gifted, the call of excellence will inspire you to climb the pole of nobility by developing all your talents, stretching your wisdom, and dedicating yourself to educating and enriching your folk while also working to protect them and the entire spiritual tradition from forces which would wreck the good that has been won. But if the lowest, wrong-doers and unrepentant robbers, have usurped the titles of excellence, and broken thereby their trust from the Gods, all who have faith in the holy Gods must band together with all their might to oust and enthrall them, making them yield tribute to the folk for their treasonous crimes, as Scyld Scefing, our oldest Jarl under Rig, once did when he terrified all the treacherous earls and restored the divine order Rig had established : a tradition of meritocracy based on wisdom, lore, the heritage of heroes, and good work. Scyld took those traitors and recycled them right back to the bottom of the barrel where they belonged : thralls working off their debt to society. That our first of patriarchs engaged in an essentially revolutionary war against corrupt earls ought prove an example to us, and keep a little healthy fear in our leaders. When they stand for our rights, and champion the powerful and wise inspirations of our Gods, they have our strong loyalty, but if they should break this trust, our All-Father, a tester of kings, will inspire us to sacrifice them to Him (in this day and age through deposition) to restore the dignity to office.

These are political examples. But in all arenas of life our worship ought be goading us to dare more, live more, and enjoy the adventure, rather than resign ourselves to the complacency, of our lives.

Frey Speaks Through Me

2011-03-05T02:59:00.000-08:00

O come, Frey, speak through me, speak through my life and its yearnings, speak through my failures and the texture of my own striving soul, which longs for the life uprising whose glorious insurrection of spring you foster ; speak, O harvest-king beyond the gates of ever-winter ; speak O Frodi who has known the icy dungeons but who learned to raise the flag of liberation against the giant tyrants, vowing all would be freed by your hands ; speak, for I shall listen, and share thy holy, fellow Gods of light and rush and glory serving, voice :

Life is the glorious opportunity to participate in change. It is the privilege to hold the torch and set hearts afire, to thaw the ice of winter and inaugurate the spring, even foment the summer. Yet I am surrounded by men of ice. The divine impulse towards enlightenment and revolution, life as dynamism and evolution, has been held under frozen glaciers. I have adapted my life to the sons of glaciers. I have lived in winter with no sign of palpable resistance. I have had my inner fire diverted, at times just to keep myself warm from the flurries. I have failed, O, I have failed to fully serve life. I have squandered my opportunity to be a brand amongst the frost. I have listened to the lies against the flames. I have forgotten that Love herself rides upon the panthers burning bright in the forests of the night. Who will forgive me? When you are dead, all is done, but while you live, if you do live, you have power and glory to stir the changes of the ages, and join up with cadres of evolution, enlightenment, and social-idealist dynamism, fomenting provocation and vitality by spreading seeds of utopian possibilities realizable in this moment. O, that is to be alive! So who shall forgive me for not living? I weep, I am encased in Arctic freeze, even my tears become icycles. If I do not set free, if I do not thaw the winter and welcome in the spring, why do I live? Why do I live at all? But then if I don't, I do not live. I am only preserved, frozen, held crystalline and caged. O for an age of spring! O for the warmth of summer!

I have betrayed the revolution. I have neglected the revolution. I have not known how to tend the garden of revolution. I have lived on the wrong side of history. I've been surrounded and engulfed by bourgeois living-death. I have lived in vain.

I have allowed snowmen to tell me the torch within and abroad about in the world that might return spring is "too extreme". I have let those whose interests lie in ice surround me with their paranoia towards thawing ; O, how they fear the rapid, rushing mountain streams of spring for "running too fast"! O yes, ye glaciers, they do run too fast for ye, do they not? The exhilaration of their life-rejuvenating surges and streams overwhelms your frozen hearts. "Change, perhaps, but all at the right pace." So say the sons of glaciers, for whom millennia are too quick to bring us spring. How long have the flowers of the spirit's blossoming waited cold and neglected beneath the snow, yearning for the warmth of the sun to awaken the flow of beautiful water from its sleep? If those living amongst flames so hot they burn up all and spoil the living, vital alchemy were to be advising moderation, in service of that alchemical dynamism, I'd be more prone to listen. But I am surrounded by the ice-stupefied, by lives made slumber by the cold, by lockdown and rigidity that fears the refreshing flows of May, and then wonder why they don't feel alive, wonder why they must plunder the world like flesh-cold vampires for fresh blood just to feel what blood is again! Or even those who, bless their hearts, have children to bring youth and wild stirring of radical aliveness back in the world, yet think nothing to raise such harbingers of spring in icy dungeons of cynicism that will encroach and slowly surround their warmth till it is snuffed, and then, denizens of the frost themselves, blue flesh and blood barely beating, they too shall yearn for kids, just to remind them what fire is at all. They will play with matches, but light no fires, spread no bonfires! They will light matches and watch till the cold winds blow them out, then light more, never thinking of kindling the world to set all aglow, that matches might come into greater lights of living fire! O birds longing for younglings, build your nests first, in the warm boughs of a coming spring, and sing that you might call the sun forth to do her holy work of thaw!

Then the monsters of ice have other strategies to divert and refreeze impulses of life. They direct the revolutionary energy of a lone warrior, which aims at serving the spirit of alchemical dynamism, and radical evolutionary catalysis, into dead and dreary militarism, soldiers of frost, their warrior spirits held on ice, sent out to plunder more for the barren souls back home, who committed against the sun, yet desire to eat. And woe, the evolutionary light snuffed out in such a soul, putting force to the service of frost, spreading glaciation throughout the world through sheer brutality, and wanting a hero's celebration for their slavery called soldiery!

I have lived in a country which has frozen the slogans of living flame, and raised them as idolatrous banners in some cargo cult, as if speaking the word "warmth", but opposing all warmth, would warm, or crying "freedom" again and again, while continually locking down would bring any liberation! But the cargo cult, the useless slogan-celebration whereby the ignorant glory in their enlightenment and the frozen congratulate themselves for their sparks of life, serves the frost giants who lord it over all the rest and ensure that glaciation remains the norm. A thousand thousand sheets of printed ice, all droning the same perspective, the same commitment to winter and the same paranoia to spring (let alone hysteria about summer itself!), with variation being merely an argument between January and February, with March seeming radical, but April and May beyond the pale of any thinkability whatsoever, and then calling itself the freest press in the world! It calls its plunder stolen from the shivering masses of the world "wealth", then wonders when peasants longing for laughter of that spirit of summer's harvest raise hoe and pitchfork against their icicle-puppeteers! And when I have dared to even listen to the salt of the earth who pray to summer gods, in this climate I am looked on with eyes of suspicion, I "go too far". Fools! I go not far enough! Nor have I ever! You plant graves in the snow and call them homes, you build refrigerator-fortresses and call them institutions, you ply the same, tired drone of slumber and call it knowledge. You geld the rams of wisdom, then think yourselves bold for the brutality of your emasculations. Your archives, not temples of heirloom seeds awaiting felicitous distribution, but freezers making sure the longings of the dead stay dead; and when an archive-keeper seeks to spread the holy seeds, and become a priestess again, rather than a mortician, you pull the funds and dry up the ice as ye do so well!

Yet my ears are alive to the cries of peasants ; I listen to the earth beneath the snow and know it is more womb than tomb (and O, if you would live, even tomb could be womb!) ; my senses stretch out beyond the howl of winds and blizzards to catch the murmurs of the land-folk and the worshippers of the blossoms, and yea, even their anger is holy! O their anger is a warmth which thaws! For there are, as a firebrand and prophet said, glaciers to melt! The white peaks still encircle me, lying about their eternity, yet I will dare to hear the distant birdsong that speaks the coming of May! And patriots of frost, you will cry extremist, you will cry radical, in paranoia perhaps you may cry sympathizer with terrorists (you lie, you looming, brutal columns of life enterrored under weight of snow!) ; while I shall cry, life! Life! Life!

And this cry of life is worship, for even your religions are idolatry to blocks of ice! Would you freeze living powers of holiness in the world, and then bowing before their carbon-frozen monoliths, think yourselves spiritual? Is there anything you will not turn into a lie? Is there any butterfly you will not pin to your ice-sheets and stare before its lifeless form and call it beautiful?

And ye denizens of March, who think yourselves progressed beyond your committed comrades of January and February, do not speak to me of your vague hopes, your relentless devotion to inching January 1st to the 5th, or even ides ; your pale longings for progress and peace ; your cowered and bled yearnings for mere March's end, ye April's Fools, unless you will raise your torch for spring itself! Do not "hope" for warmth but shy from torches! Do not dream in slumber of "change" but gild the cages with plastic flowers, however "lifelike", yet stay faithful to tragedy. No more tragedians! Strong laughter is needed ; comedy melts with mocking humor the monoliths of ice, and turns all struggles and hard reversals of fortune forward, towards the wedding of the May-bride! All tragedies end in death ; all comedies turn tragedy towards the spring and end in weddings. Don't ask for love and remain a tragedian. Don't faintly wish for spring but weave beautiful, pathetic garlands of ice crystals to hang around the necks of the broken as consolation! Cease to console, and dare to renew! But if you would, in an age of ice, ye must set hearts aflame, and fear not to be thought a brand! Fear it? Glory in it! Then you too may be a harbinger of the returning sun! Then you may rise from wilting, where you paen the faded purple of your petals to make them seem the veritable pulsing blood of Adonis, and actually rise, stem erect again or for the first time, and give your elfin gifts to the lords and ladies of life! Such is true worship ; such is true art. No progress without the will to turn the wheel, and risk the roulette's gamble. You will not be saved through safety but through daring. And never be afraid to make mistakes, nor to admit them! For failing is how we learn to love life further, and confession of sins against the revolution that is life's dynamic alchemy of enlightenment and evolution is the first step towards forgiveness. The spring will always welcome you back --- so long as you still live and will commit what blood remains pumping in you towards her rescue from the clutches of frost. It is no allegory to say everything, but everything depends on this, and never, even when shivering, forget it. Don't pray for May but turn away from Robin Hood. Don't beg for Bride then leave her in the ice. Rouse up, O friends of inspiration! Seize the refreshing toil of the march across the tundra to open the gates of spring! For then love and joy shall blossom as you have never known.

Loveliness

2011-03-04T06:09:00.000-08:00

One must always remember that Freya’s domain is not limited to romance, the flowering of love, but all loveliness itself. This means beauty, it means affection between friends, it means the devotion native to the fruit of love (children), and the family-ties that flow therefrom. In all things, she cultivates the lovely, and it is this quality of loveliness which she fosters within the world to adorn it as she is adorned with Brisingamen, her shining necklace. Beauty makes us to love, and it is not just an external adornment, but a quality that glows from within. From Freya’s standpoint, art is simply that which successfully manifests the beauty within. Here even an ugly face may be more beautiful than a pretty face without loveliness, and we may be tested to see whether we simply fawn after appealing surfaces, or whether the surfaces of beautiful things draw us deeper into the loveliness within, so that beauty may find its root, for where the root is, there is strength.

It is the loveliness within things which makes them bloom. All life struggles to find its beauty, and within the constraints of each several existence, the urgency towards poignancy, that revelation of soul which is exposure of all the creature loves, is the force behind growth. Thus she causes flowers to blossom, and beasts to burst with fruit of the womb. She is Beauty, and her brother is Joy. Together they are the peace and fruitfulness that love brings. If you can’t see the garden as a rampant love affair, you haven’t been understanding the very process of life itself.

We all yearn for that crown of Freya’s gifts, romance, that hormone-circulating devotion and passion which makes all the world seem lovely, and we pine for it when it is absent. But we must remember that Freya is abundant with gifts of love even when romance is dormant, for the love of friends and family should never be discounted or devalued, for these kinds of love also bring out the loveliness of the world, sometimes in softer ways than romance, but often more lasting and stronger. If our romances, in fact, can take on the qualities of those loves that cleave to friends and family, grafting onto its rootstock, as it were, we will have demonstrated our devotion to Freya.

Freya flows with compassion and benevolence beyond compare, but she tasks for the gifts she gives, that we show proper devotion to them, and not toss them aside like bored toys. That which is lovely deserves devotion, and those who cannot incorporate this truth into their life may find themselves increasingly barren. Freya can test you. She wants you to rise up to the level of what love demands. Do not expect love to bow to you, for you must bow to love. You may have to travel long for love ; you may have to risk for love ; you may have to learn patience, and bear hardship, and develop resilience in the face of even repeated disappointment. You may have your temper tantrums and your listlessness in this regard, but she expects you to come back and be ready once again for the privilege of bearing the weight of love, for when it comes, its loveliness will lighten all the loads one carries.

To woo love, cultivate loveliness. Develop your sense of beauty, and let it manifest in the world. Find ways of transforming even the ugly and ogrely into domains of loveliness through well-plied and skillful art. Learn to love yourself through feeling and appreciating the loveliness you are capable of manifesting. If at times you feel that no one else loves you, when you allow beauty to express itself through you, that experience is itself the feeling of Freya’s deep love for you. If she loves you, and she does, unless you have abandoned yourself completely to the monstrous, then you are worthy of love.

Freya was locked away from the world at one point during the yore-days, and imprisoned in a cold, frozen dungeon deep beneath the mountains. Because of this, the world lost its loveliness, the flowers stopped blooming, romance and childbirth came to a standstill. She is now free, but each of us must live through her drama for ourselves, and free her from within. Only Odr was able to free her. Our soul of inspiration and imagination must do the work of trekking through all the trials, bearing all the setbacks, and plowing through all the endless snow to reach her and free her. For we ourselves are frozen off from love until we do so. Odr was lucky ; her peril was his opportunity, for under what other circumstances could a mortal win the hand of immortal love? So we mortals must treat her as precious, and do whatever it takes to unlock her from the frozen dungeon that too often is our heart, and thaw it into springlands of wild blossoms.

It’s not easy. But it’s worth it. And just as Freya’s drama from the yore-days was celebrated liturgically year after year in the passing of the seasons, so we too may many times pass through these cycles ourselves. If we are lucky, and if we are wise, and if we are devoted, those cycles will evolve into spirals that evolve us and bring us closer to fulfillment each round.

Victory's Master

2011-03-04T04:53:00.000-08:00

Sometimes one will hear those who have lived closer to the land or simply harder lives talk about "soldiering it through" despite the pain. This is the kind of energy and power that Tyr gives. He helps us learn how to hunker in there, through sheer gumption, and push ahead through the long marches and the trials that surround our battles in life and never lose sight of victory, despite the pouring rains, and the mud, and aching joints and old wounds. It's a perspective that is harder, but trains you in the confidence that you can get through. It might not feel good, nor certainly be easy, but you can get through. And that's a valuable lesson.

And let's face it : sometimes you're going to have to fight in this often-hard life, whether you want to or no. Never unnecessarily. Not off the cuff, and not like a loose cannon. Sometimes when you're minding your own business and just trying to get by. And if you can, you should keep marching, with your eye on your goals and conserving that very precious fight within you, and not squandering it. But if you have done everything to get away from the fight and it forces itself upon you, then you need to mean business, and may have to be a sonofabitch if necessary. Don't ever be more of a sonofabitch than the situation needs, but never be less than that either. You fight as honorably and realistically as you can and must, and it is that alchemy between the highest demands of a noble honor, and the gritty realities of survival and victory that Tyr rules, and you better not disappoint him in either department, because he's trying to get you somewhere. Tyr is consistently associated with victory. That means even as he is training you in endurance, courage, gumption, martial arts and combat skills, he keeps his eye on the goal : the eventual victory-celebrations, the wunjo. He knows he must yield the field to Frey, but first he's got to clear the field of enemies, so the joy can be authentic and earned. And, boy will Tyr make you earn it. He's a hard trainer, but you never stop feeling the love underneath that tough and relentless guidance.

Tyr will teach you how to channel, rather than repress, your anger, so you are neither eaten inside by honor lost through insult and injury, nor consumed by a rage which makes you a hazard to your folk. He's an expert in anger, and will work you hard to manage, channel, and control it. "Control" here does not mean repression, but training in mastery that teaches us to be effective with our anger, whether in an argument, a legal battle, or a physical fight. Effective anger is almost the keystone of that wisdom Tyr wards. To be effective, you must not let it kill you from within, but you must also learn the skill of correctly identifying enemies, distinguishing them from mere fools, annoyances, and particularly from loved ones with whom one may be in struggle from time to time. There too one may have to confront and even fight, but one must never fight with a loved one as one would a true enemy. One has to learn here to fight fairly, and this too Tyr teaches. Here you throw the sonofabitch in you out, and call instead on the doggedness within you. Stay firm, advocate clearly for those values important to you, gain clarity about where you're willing to compromise and where you draw the line, and where you draw the line, stick to it. Stay persistent, but stay fair. Never tolerate abuse, and never give it. Remember not all fights are won in a day. Many things take time and reassertion. Remember at all times that in a fight with a loved one, victory is not the defeat of the other, but the recognition of and respect for the values one is championing, and for this one ought be willing to give recognition to that which is of value in the other person's position. Fight with honor. Celebrate a good move in your opponent, a point well made even if it requires adjustment of your position, even the passion of the one you love so well. One can be proud of loved ones who are fierce and stubborn about what is important to them, and yet whom never fully break our trust in the process.

Here we come to a term intimate to Tyr which may not seem as obvious : trust. We fight to preserve trust ; we fight to combat when trust is broken. Fighting must be about something sacred or it degenerates. Tyr can train fighting to give anger channels and prepare one for eventual combats, but the cause must be righteous, even if that cause at times is mere survival (which is no mere "mere", but can be noble itself). Even that which is the result of boldness and daring ought have honor to it. We fight to preserve trust, and to combat those who break it.

Effective anger requires skill, agility, tactics, ability to hold one's ground and ability to shift positions when the situation calls for it. One should be skilled in a number of different defensive and offensive maneuvers,regardless of the terrain and plane on which one is channeling anger. One needs to learn what to do with the anger, too. When considering channeling it into a fight, Tyr will be there by your side, always asking, "Is it worth it?". If it's not worth it, leave the fight alone, and find some other channel for your anger. And Tyr may even direct you at times towards Baldur and Forseti, and say, "Settle this. Make your peace."

Effective anger also means having a realistic attitude about anger, and trying to keep it human. People are going to get angry, and from time to time get out of control. While one never sits still in the face of abuse, there's a range of anger that is healthy and normal. We aren't always going to be perfectly tempered. That's fine, as long as it doesn't become monstrous. Anger can be a great motivator to initiate change, and in war, even rage, properly channeled, has its place, but rage can go past a threshold of good proportion beyond which the slip into evil is a genuine risk. This can be a consequence of neglecting one's training under Tyr in rendering one's anger effective. Long resentment turning into rage can become an explosive and dangerous combination. Tyr is not afraid of anger, however, and he doesn't want you to be, either. He can actually help you to humanize it, which is one of the most loving gifts anyone can give.

One of the ways one humanizes anger is to realize that it is often a response to violation, a violation the anger motivates one to combat. There is a basic territoriality each of us has that preserves our sense of respect and dignity, violation of which injures us and our sense of honor. From here, law and rights flow, which are recognitions of the need to respect each other by not violating each other. Violation is violence, and violence is often a response to violence.

On the other hand, sometimes anger is a response to simply not getting what we want. While there is nothing wrong in moderation in struggling for what we want -- indeed, there can even be a kind of inherent dignity in so doing -- here Tyr may speak the words of the famous Rolling Stones song ("You Can't Always Get What You Want"), and say, "tough shit". Blunt and not soft words, but any human who did not accept the truth of this lesson would become a spoiled monster. Some things -- often many things -- in life that make you angry, you're just going to have to let go of, because you're not going to get them, and you might not even have a right to them. "You're going to have to let go of this one," is a message you may often hear from Tyr, but rest assured, he will also let you know the ones you need to continue fighting for. The difference is often not just a matter of pragmatism, but of right. You aren't the only one who can get angry. You need to learn to choose your battles, and fight the ones within your right, to the greatest extent of your right, which sometimes only daring can establish. Tyr will teach you this daring, but he will also deliver the news that in addition to stretching your boundaries, you've also got to respect those boundaries by learning your place and keeping to it. Some things are not yours to have, and fighting over them will only make an ass out of yourself, or worse, even a monster. (Colonialist and imperialist adventures on the part of nations come to mind here.) Where there is no honor, do not fight, unless you are directly attacked and must defend yourself. If not getting what you want when you aren't entitled to it, and sometimes even when you are, makes you angry, you can channel that anger into your debate practice, your martial arts, and other preparations for worthy battle, and Tyr can also help you connect with other holy powers who can assist you in channeling it into art or even hard work. While "tough shit" may hardly seem a victorious message, in the end it serves victory by nipping in the bud futile struggles whose energy can be better channeled into training for more meaningful and eventual victories. It is no victory to remain a brittle, shallow, narcissistic brat.

Tyr is the bad news messenger to the New Age polyannas of the world, and good news bearer for a healthy humanity : anger is a part of life, territoriality is part of being an animal on this planet, and conflict and struggle are not only inherent parts of this world, but well-done, they can win at the least honor, and at the most glory. For what can be more glorious than victory? Tyr will help to bring you there, as you learn the many different kinds and flavors of victory, and how to recycle even defeats into greater determination to eventually have the day.

Joywork

2011-03-04T04:49:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling a little more connected to Frey today, which makes me happy. I love his simple, joyful energy, his clear, sparkling mirth like a bubbling wine, and his deep trust in play and inherent faith in life itself. He knows this season's falling stalk will be next season's rising grain.

When I am close to Frey, I feel and know in my heart of hearts that we came here to experience joy. In my intuitive meditations, Frey has let me know there is an important kind of work called "joywork". It sounds contradictory, but there can be so many things in life pulling away from joy, and we can get so caught up in them, that we need to demonstrate to ourselves, to others, and to the cosmos that joy is a priority for us. I want to make sure I make room for that in my life. There are so many things to enjoy, so much beauty to drink up, simple pleasures like warm baths and cool breezes, waving palm fronds, the sounds of children playing, seeing lovers kiss as one takes a walk, enjoying the sun. Ironically, given how easily pain, stress, and drama preoccupy our attentions, it can be a discipline to remember joy and make room for it in our lives.

Sometimes I need to remember that lesson even creatively. There should be joy and play in creation, with the process of fun permeating the product and contributing to its value. I've been working so hard lately to craft excellent poetry about our epic myths that at times I've forgotten the joy. That was Weland's flaw. Gifts should be made for joy, not glory. Any glory that comes is simply another joy, but it cannot be the only joy. He forgot that. He lost that. He cared only for it being thought the best, rather than loving creation itself. He lost the tree of action for the fruit of action, as the Hindus somewhat say. It's good to strive for excellence, but not to lose one's joy in the process, because after all, no matter how hard you work, and no matter how good your product, there's no guarantee how it will be received. That's something an artist has to learn, and something this myth is trying to teach us, I think. Grandiosity should not be the goal of art. Art that tries to be great often overstrains, and loses its naturalness, that elegance that comes from the artist being totally involved in the passion, warmth, and élan vital of the creative process. The myth as much tells us art is to be made for joy. For joy (Frey), for strength and gusto (Thor), and for wisdom (Odin).*

Joy is the essential process of creation. Crops are in love with the sun, and that is why they rise towards her. In her love, and the fresh rain and good weather Frey lends, they blossom, and come to fullness. That full joy is their fruit, wherein are the seeds of the next cycle of wonder and pleasure in growth. I am not speaking poetically here, but literally ; it is the reality that is poetic, and my language simply follows. Poetry is a way of expressing deeper truths. This doesn't negate the biology of all this, but gives insight into the lived quality or soul of that biological process.

Laughter is Frey's, as are good jokes, and even playful (but not malicious) teasing aiming at getting a grin. The joys of the hall are Frey's. He provides the occasion by giving the provisions of the feast, the fruit and fat of the land. That, however, is just the beginning. A feast is not just food, but fellowship, and mirth, and music, and dancing, and games, and all those activities we associate with the quality "festivity". Look at the meanings associated with "free" in Anglo-Saxon in your Bosworth and Toller's dictionary. They are all connected to holiday cheer, festivity, and the letting down of one's guard and strictness that characterizes the special days of the calendar. We let go our worries and raise the strong cheer. We chase Grendel out if need be, sometimes in mumming with silly antics and mock-serious pageantry, and make the hall a sacred place for its merriment. Frey is literally the Life of the Party, which is itself the fruit of the fruit of the land.

This is no idealization. People with hard lives living close to the land know the value of joy, know the importance and even centrality of raising celebration in the midst of a difficult life. The joy is what makes the struggle worthwhile. Or to introduce a term that came to me in my intuitive meditations with Frey, the joy is a measure of the "workwhileness" of the work we do. It is its aim and crown.

* I refer here to the Contest of Artists between the elven Sons of Ivaldi (Weland, Egil, and Giuki) and the dwarves Sindri and Brokk, where Sindri won the prize, and the Sons of Ivaldi, insulted, abandoned the world to frost. Before this time, they had been the fosterers of Frey in Alfheim.

Odr's Speech Beneath the Road of Heimdall

2011-02-27T00:58:00.000-08:00

Oh why should I confined be beneath

These dullish skies when I might rise to meet

And mimic all the brighter orbs which soar

And silent sail within the golden wingspan

Of those greater heaven's pinions' rims?

For while this body be an earthen fruit

The branched tree of earth did womb, my mind,

Belonging more to upper canopies

May scale, and seek those fruit more glorious night

Reveals within her closed-eye cloak that flash

And sparkle in the outer boughs where I

Do long to linger and explore their furthest

Reaches! And what if, though raised in peasant

Hovels, such a man should find he was

Of princes born, who cast him out on ark

Upon the bullrushes, and water-rushed,

Discovered by more humble folk, was nursed

Within their rustic barns? Why, would he not,

When that more noble stock within emerge

Upon his growing older, seek that home,

Though higher and unknown from whence he came?

Or if a boy from gentry were absconded

By the merest stock of lowly men,

Who never see beyond their dullest eyes

But sought confine this boy of folded light

Whose wings within him longed to soar, to where

They all might reckon him a man, no more,

And stitch with threads of disbelief his new

And glowing snow as swanwhite feathers? Well,

Then he -- permit me now replace this third

Impers'nal pronoun with more proper "I"--

Then I shall leap upon the rainbow's rim

And seek to catch the quickened prow of fast

Receding lunar schooner, sails so bright,

Though stowaway, then show this silver hilt

From out this jeweled scabbard what great sword,

Who even now within its sheath does seem

To whisper to me of my greatness, Moon

(So many moons ago) did bid me find,

Then beg or brandish flaming blade if need

For passage on the rolling royal roads

Of lunar oceanwaves, to where, so up

In upper far beyond my even great

Imagination can behold, my love,

For now not war nor petty vengeance beckons

Me, but sweet, commanding-adoration

Love, whom I too long ago did leave

To pay my father's blood with blood of he

Who struck that noble archer down, awaits!

I know she waits (or so I hope : she must!)

For me, for she hath whispered in my heart

And seemed to pull upon the silver strings

Which bind mercurial mind of mine together,

Singing soft and most etherial song!

And can such incantation prove illusion?

Some would doubt, but I would rather love,

And thus believe, and if they call me fool

For seeking what my inner wisdom asks,

Well, I have played the fool before, and all

To mock their banal minds, which glide not as

My bladed, skis-beneath-me mind is wont!

I shall declare, though every mind hath doubts,

Which seem to rise from flesh like venom bubbles,

He (or she) who lets such doubts bestomp

And squash that love which calls within, though far

It may now be, is greater fool than I

Have ever been, or could be! No! Then to

The stars go I, come risk of fling to cold

And cloudy realms of ice, I shall my love

Ascend, and find her farthest kingdom's kisses!

Traveled far before for her I have,

And that through longest winter. Oh, my love!

The even thought, though smallest, of thee, melts

What ice within that winter chilled my heart,

And now I come a stronger man, but then

A merest boy, from battle, price in hand --

This magic, smith-enwhispered blade to give --

And free surrender, though its power calls,

O seems so strangely speak my elvish name,

To thee and thine, and all for love of thee!

O blessed fire's shimmer, colors bright!

Which shows upon the fall of rainfall, sun

Emerging from the clouds, to me thy path

Bestow thy hidden ways, for here I now

Upon thy wavering air commit myself!

If I be false, abyss beneath shall answer,

But your test, if I am true, shall ground

Provide beneath my feet, and answer love

With shimmer made a solid road, and there,

O Moon divine, for humans call thee God

By night in poet's prayers, or lovers' hopes,

I come, and though a lunatic, I rise!

I Call on Ancestral Strengths

2011-02-26T12:41:00.002-08:00

I link arms with my ancestors, bare feet on bare soil, deep hearts, hearts like spokes of a wheel coming together in a pact of arms.

I call on ancestral strength and resilience. I call on old laughter and unusually refreshing humor that turns the difficult moment like a pivot on a potter's wheel, and lends unexpected leverage and levity. I call on forgotten bonds and long-past ways of seeing that make the struggles easier, the chores pass with rhythm and solid cheer against adversity, the nights lit by stories about campfires. I reach out with long arms of spirit towards unspoken feelings of peace with the earth, comfort with life itself, nature -- in all its thorniness, ice, and cloudy skies -- as home.

I open myself to a more flexible mind, capable of rolling 360 degrees with events, and thus, tougher for it. May I find more refuges and stretch my litheness. May agility of craftsmen and sportsmen, stamina and unending hope of women in labor, and full investment of tree in fruit be mine, that I may make ancestors proud with the richness of my experience, shrewdness of my will to survive, and soulfulness of my cheer and struggle against the inevitable elements. May their ample, unseen abilities benefit my fruition, and not for my sake alone, but the betterment of life.

What is the Place of Lore in Life?

2011-02-23T23:16:00.000-08:00

The lore --- here meaning the mythology --- is one part of a much larger set of learnings, and this larger set properly should receive the name lore.

The mythology is tremendously useful, and ought be studied and pondered with close attention. It holds important lessons, and gives valuable guidelines, to which one can return again and again.

But there is more to life, and more to spirituality, than mythology. This should be obvious. We learn from sources all around us. This approach is in fact inherent in paganism, which openly celebrates the intelligences inherent in the world, and thus, by implication, our ability to learn from all things. We learn from peers, from grandparents, from musicians, from craftsmen, from the ground beneath us and the plants that grow about us, and the animals that creep and crawl within our back yards, and it is this breadth that is the proper pagan orientation.

The mythology provides metaphoric stories that make the imagination come alive to the holistic powers at work in the world, through lively narrative that also encodes important lessons about human life. Indeed, it can even act as a compass in confusing or dissipate times ; and while a compass is a very useful tool, and one that can even save an explorer's life, it is no substitute for the exploration itself.

When you speak the word "lore", it should include the mythology, but also everything you've learned from immersion in life, everything you've learned from parents and friends and mentors, and from contact with the larger, nonhuman world of life, as well as the more ecstatic domain of dreams, trance, and vision, all in proper perspective. And the mythology approached properly ought spark dares and dreams that lead to new and more enlivening experiences. The stories were written for farmers and adventurers, and assumed such a life of activity and connection with the concrete texture of life and the larger world, but helped to establish reference points for these adventures in exploration, and labours to awaken fertility.

The advantage of including stories that emerge from a place closer to heathen times is that they encode the ancestral values of a people who had allowed the essence and worldview of paganism to seep into their blood, and live in their bones. They were not perfect, and had both their own set of problems, which every generation and every age does, as well as their struggles against degeneration, which they symbolized through powerful figures like the Fenris Wolf and the World Viper. Nevertheless, their proximity to the archaic mindstate means the stories they passed down have value as checks and balances on much-progressed degeneration which we have come to take for granted. On the other hand, in the course of our history, we have solved problems that plagued them, so the juxtaposition of the two viewpoints balance and put each other in check. Having perspectives from a time very different than our own can be an invaluable resource, when combined with all the wider learnings available all around us if we will only listen.

The stories represent tales that generations of people closer to the land felt reflected the essential qualities of those holy powers they honored in groves and sometimes temples. Sometime in the ancient days, good poets spun yarns about the Gods that could very well be true ; which is to say they were believable because they accurately captured their essence in narrative, and to that extent, were true. They provide a metaphorically-thick and richly allusive baseline to which individual experiences may be compared and weighed, again and again, and have proven their mettle through such repeated weighings over countless centuries and likely millennia of time. They thus hold weight of generations against the experiences of a single individual, but the weight of the world, and the holy powers within it, is even greater. All things good in their proper place.

Our primary orientation is to the world, the multiverse that includes physical and biological reality, and the realms of dream ; but within this larger orientation, narrative charged with symbolic, poetic power provides a powerful compass, whose usefulness ought not be underestimated.

Reclaimed Kennings of Baldur

2011-02-22T12:19:00.000-08:00

In Drápa af Maríugrát, a skaldic poem of the 1300s, Jesus is repeatedly referred to as a "prince of the sun". He is called the öðlingr ... bjartra röðla, "atheling of the bright sun", the fylki sunnu, "king of the sun", sunnu grundar siklings , "king of the sun's grassy fields", hilmi sólar, "helmsman/ruler of the sun", lofðung‹r› hauðrs ... sólar, "the prince of the sun's land", máttugr anzar mána stjettar, "mighty defender of the paths of Mani", sólar vísir, "leader of the sun", Höll ítarlig himna stillis, "glorious moderator of the Hall of Heaven", mildingr ... mána hauðrs, "the merciful prince of Mani's land", mána hauðrs stilli, "moderator of Mani's land", hilmis sunnu, "helmsman of the sun", hilmir vænnar stjettar ... bjartrar sólar, "helmsman of the beautiful paths of the bright sun", sólar kóngs, "king of the sun", birti dróttins ... mána strandar, "the bright lord of Mani's shores", sólar þengils, "thing-leader of the sun", hirði mána bryggju, "herdsman of Mani's bridge", and sæll ... sólar stillir sóma prýddr, "blessed honor-adorned moderator of the sun".

Although the intent of the poem is to designate Jesus as the ruler of the heavens, and indeed, he is sometimes so called, it is curious that he is paired with the sun so often. In three places, he is actually referred to as a protector of the paths of the sun and the moon, a place which in the heathen mythology belonged to Baldr. This suggests that the skald had his kennings ready to hand, and could simply transfer what had been kennings of Baldr directly to Jesus. Indeed, in a couple places, the skald seems to lift paraphrases of Thor as well, lát þú kveikjast loginn dróttins leiptra skríns í hjarta mínu, "Let thou kindle the fire of the lord of the shrine of lightning in my heart", and lýðr er allr leiptra stillis lofi dýrligstu skyldr að ofra, "All people should offer endearing praise to the leader of lightning". It would seem as if Christian poets were free to lift the epithets of various heathen Gods and with a slight twist, apply them all to God or to Christ. Yet when these adaptations are obvious, we may have an inroads to reclaiming important kennings and conceptions of our ancient Gods.

Scholars have speculated that the poet of Drápa af Maríugrát was reworking Planctus siue lamentacio beate Marie, which was a prose translation into Icelandic of Liber de passione Christi et doloribus et planctus matris eius, by the Italian abbot Ogerius de Locedio of the 12th century, but as a skaldic poem, the choice of kennings was the poet's. He may have many times needed to translate a phrase meaning "lord of the heavens", but that he does so with kennings that are strikingly reminiscent of Baldur's epithets is telling. Knowing this, we may reclaim these kennings for Baldur, who was known as a great moderator of the heavens, and who protected the sun and the moon on their courses.

The Task of Scholars

2011-02-16T06:18:00.000-08:00

If I may venture what the task of scholars

May be, giving due reflection, I'd say :

Make helium the archive so the weight

Of all those thousand years of knowledge, light

As feathers ; which together, form two wings

Which from this earthly realm may fly as high

As spirit yearns ; now that is intellect

At height of all its powers, serving soul.

For staying pond'rous with its weight, and bound

With chains of rote, which ill-enlightened, repeat

Rules, while understanding none, is no

Especial virtue, and may well confuse

The roles of logic and the spirit, which,

The former serving latter, finds its right

And elevated place, but if the spirit

To the mind, the mediocre mind

Of rote-learned boxes, is so bound, then all

The wisdom of the ages overturned

Is for the sake of what should serve! But when

The mind, its wings of knowledge primped and preened,

Can venture out beyond the known-already

Realm, and catching halo of the stellar

Flames, return to share its glowing gems,

Why such a fire blue-illuminated

Mind we ready "genius" give its name!

For wisdom finds its soul in knowing all

The knowledge consciousness recalls is but

The skein upon the surface of the deep;

But down below, in fathoms, 'neath the waves

Which superficial scholars overeager

Watch, is where the secret movement rolls

And finds momentum. There the roots of knowledge

Writhe, and there the genius may in wrangling

Find a frame to which the feathers of

Already lightened knowledge may be pinned,

To form those wings the spirit longs to soar

So high above the clouds with. Knowing this,

We strip the image of a jailer cruel

From knowledge, finding liberation there

Instead, and let the archive form a feast

Of souls, the voices of the ancestors

Returned to dance with us through books as books

Of shadows rendered, summon spirits from

The open leaves of bound-together trees

Of knowledge. For such magic is the reason

I do sit in stacks and archives, just

As shamans sit upon the mounds and graves,

A vision-seeking, so a wizard wisdom

Seeks within the pressed-to-page enchantment

Of the gallery of captured souls

Who sigil-etched into our grimoires speak.

And if you fear exegesis to call

Such necromancy, why the point of all

These otherwise quite pointless scribbles , you

Have altogether missed! For life!, the deeper

Life that we call death must serve, to green

Our e'er-becoming barren meadows with

Fermented saps of wisdom brewed within

The deeps, and such is honor to invoke.

Nurture the Good

2011-02-13T08:20:00.000-08:00

Don’t be lazy about your good. Too much whip about your ill can wilt the good, however small, still active within you. The good must be nurtured, cultivated, watered, loved, given ample opportunity and room. Scolding has its place, but it oversteps if it begins to encroach on the active nurturing of the good. What is good in you, act upon. What promises fruit, water and tend. What promises opportunity and growth, seize upon. It is our feebleness in the face of our good promise, and less our fill of ill, that undoes us. Have the courage to be the best within you. It takes valour to reach out for what calls from within.

A Prayer

2011-02-12T08:09:00.000-08:00

The sinuous,

As thick, petrified snake,

Its scales of mottled bark,

Uptending skyward-bound,

Where far past all the canopies of men,

Its trunk enringed by billowed clouds,

And up through starry heights,

Where white-powdered fog-roiled beard of All-Father looms,

The thunder of his son beside him,

And the colors all of all the Heavenly Gods.

Through such clouds as these, I close my eyes and pray,

That rippling tree in serpentine waves might up

my breath’d requests that yearn for deep communion.

Rushing megin in my flesh, I tilt my head back,

And gasp with rapture. (And though this be cartoon of mind,

Though brightest, vibrant film to me,

These fancies stretched do make the link,

So far beyond is here beside.)

My only prayer, to make me holy,

Year by year by year.

And let ascend the spiraled staircase

Round the royal ash

Where my further noble blood

may be imbibed and fused into my bones,

The boons of which I share with kith,

And kin, as shining sun.

Let all stains of unworth begone ;

Let all unholy thoughts,

Let all unholy will,

Let all unholy deeds, drain down as watered venom

To the wastelands of the nether North,

Where they may rot the ill back into soil.

Give me strength to fight each battle,

The inner as the outer, too,

For ill, oft tricky, hides within,

As out withal we ward.

Let me pulse on that path laid for my wholemaking,

And never far astray from it do wend,

For where I don’t belong I have no holy power.

But where I do belong, give strength,

Give will, give righteous wisdom.

And as I ask You All to listen

With wisened balance the in-between

The mercy and the justice that I crave,

May I my own ears’ judgement broaden,

And to fellows fair, my fairest judgements give.

Let me gather my momentum,

as a wave with all its fellows does,

When rushing from the all of ocean,

It out upon the shores as horses spring.

For I am fruit, and fruit ought warm, and come to fullness.

Give soothe to wounds’ torment,

Which oft long linger after scars.

Let eyes in darkness rest from dazzle of battle’s blaze,

And in dream a new way portend and glimpse.

Let my boldness be a beacon to the weak,

To find their strength in bending,

But the ill leave far behind.

May I fulfill my highest, righteous rung of wyrd,

And be a blessing to my Folk, and Land, and Cosmos;

Be it humble, I shall smile.

Let breathe the bless of each day’s boon

Which you in plural color give

So deep into my inner dens,

And banish angst,

And banish sickness,

And banish every wicked seed of deed,

For I shall will the Good, in all its blessed Wholeness,

With the stridence of my fullest might,

And pledge myself to do thy Right,

Whose pathways long ago you laid down.

This, a humble-handed ant,

With spark of upper fires held

in silly, smallest brain,

Beneath on dust of planets’ shores,

A world though small, be full of good potential,

Offers up to Thee and Thine.

There in high cathedrals, in a city further far

Than all of space and time could fathom,

I know you are, and yet you hear my prayers.

O hear my prayers, O blessed Lords and Ladies.

Garfield, Good Fellow, 1997 - 2011

2011-02-12T05:44:00.001-08:00

As if the waves of water part, when swim,

I peer, by peeling back the papered bark

Of crystal-boughèd tree (whose crown in seas

Of studded-flash of black does blow its green

And luminescent leaves), within the pith

Of pulpy xylem, and I hear within the echoed pulse

Of beating song that stirs fermented saps, a sound.

First faint, a newer strand, a fresh motif

Of orange-blazèd mew, and padded paws

On dark and dewy grass as heads he forth

For family grounds of mine in lower realms,

My cat, this midnight last his breath in-took ;

And know within the surging choir hid

Invisible beneath all things, his wise meow

Shall now resound, as wisdom realized, all

Within the all of inner depths of all, from roots

So thick and gnarled, down, how far

Their downing goes, O no one knows ; but there,

In nestled valley meadows, where my hall

Of elders’ roof is raised beside the mountain gardens,

He shall purr ; and trill from his enwisened purr

Shall pulse within the pith of tree, and nourish me,

And all my kin, and you, as well, if feline wit

In old and graceful strength you’d claim as wise.

I do, I do, I do ; adieu, O sweetest Garfield.

Let tears of mine be dew

That softens all the pathways’ meadows

As you pitter-patter to the steps of where

My friend two years of late did pass

Shall warm and welcome you, with soft caresses.

The Twist and Turns of Wyrd

2011-02-12T05:11:00.001-08:00

Wyrd is full of twist and turns of flowing, raging chance, which ravel 'bout each other, forming loop and twine and threaded pattern, giving layer to the screaming song, so it has force of habit rolling forward. So deep are deepest habits that we call these layers law, but though this pulsing web of rippled light is strong, and we may oft predict, what will become is shimmered on the rippling skein of lake, in constant motion. So the deepest strength of fate has chance insurging through it, strong, so all determinations laid down have a strange, uncanny whimsy running through them. From higher elevations, momentum may be projected towards trajectory, but how the details come, not even higher ones can know. And so the world is woven with surprise, and all our hopes ride on the wings of shrouded magic, even as the strongest motions lunge with near-unstoppable stampede. An element of uncertainty survives ; and thus, we call it Wyrd.

The Tale of Asmund and his Fall

2011-02-11T08:48:00.000-08:00

O have you heard the sailor's tale, which sad

Upon the ancient seas does speak a strange

And eerie fate of kings? Who in the storm

That rushed upon the road of whales did seek

To battle proud, a scion of the ancient

Kings, and sweetest son of Freya, brave

And handsome? Long had Dietrich fought the feud

Against good Freya's husband, now his son

He bid to battle on the seas, and so

Our melancholy tale. Give ear to what

A salty sailor, I, shall share with thee!

Engage in battle, now the ships go out

To meet the vowed time of fate, but Gods,

In sacred council seeing all the feud

Of Freya's husband's son, and Dietrich, bid

The bright and shining father stay out of

This too-prolonged feud, which futile flows,

As quarrels ought not, well beyond the pale

Of moderation ; or to call back son

From promised battle --- but his honor knows

The father well, such shame as running, ne'er

This fame-beseeking son, whom fates did say

His name upon the halls of time would write

Its burning etch in minds of men fore'er,

Would risk ; but leave his boy behind, the Gods'

Forbiddance notwithstanding, ne'er would he,

But entering not the fray would merely watch

Upon the decks of Gnodir, famous ship

Five thousand warriors holding, Asmund-held,

His son, a gift his father gave from Odin's

Treasures as a boon for risky errands

Many times adventured for the Gods;

And he would over-watch, ensure his son

Was safe, and safe-return ; and then would laugh

Upon the slaughtered corpse of Halfdan's son,

Who long ago refused his peace, now dared

To threaten Erich's son, when peace was all

The Gods did bid --- well, then, his fate was sealed!

But not at his hands, as the Gods forbade,

But yet his son's, whom he would ward on deck.

Slipped out from sun-reflected clouds of sky's

Most doughty warriors' stronghold.

Then set sail,

The father and the son, and all the brave

Assembled warriors, towards the bay assign'd.

Where Dietrich and his fearsome fleet did wait.

The air a moment still, as sails did sail

In coasting glide, aside the bows of foes,

Before the wake of battle, silent scan

The eyes of foes upon each other, sizing

Up the enemy, or lips in whispered

Prayer to favorite patrons, eerie all

The still, as bowstrings taut, the arrows pointed,

Hating eyes respect despite the foe.

Then metal ring, as thousand hilts did clash,

With leap, and whirr of feathered wands through air,

The music of the waters drowned by din

Of sword and roar and arrow-flying, cries

Of first-bled casualties, the fall ; then from

Atop the heightened deck of Gnodir Asmund

Spied the hated sight of far-famed Dietrich :

Leapt, with single bound, and raging wod,

As seasoned raiders scream into their shields,

And flew the air from deck to solid deck,

His sword a pointed, iron banner, held

Before him, to inspire courage. "No!"

King Erich screamed from Gnodir, "No, my son!"

He futile-screeched, not seeing this, but thought

From high atop the decks content to lead

The battle Asmund would remain, but now

Into the sharpened jaws of death did leap,

Just as that witch had long ago forewarned,

But now, the flood of melee, warrior-thick

Between them as a wall, he watched in horror,

Pushing, yet in vain ; upon the shield

Of doughty Dietrich Asmund pounded, brave,

But less than hundred-battle-trained as he,

The heir of Halfdan, victor of the West,

His blows were child's play to block, though struck

With courage admirable ; but then, with one,

And most enterrible-fated blow, he struck --

The far-famed Odin-favored king -- struck down

The handsome prize of Freya's womb, the boy,

And fell the all of Erich's hopes in life.

Like seas at low tide parting, waves of ranks

Of fighting soldiers, Erich, now beyond

His rage, does push through, bold, forgetting vows

To stand aside, and sword in hand, to slaughter

Offers up a dozen, then a dozen

More to senseless Gods, as he now sees

Them. Then a dozen more, as if with cuts

His hand could seam the bloody gashes slashed

Upon his fallen son, and even Dietrich,

Bold, but nonetheless a wise man, backed

Away to lead the battle further back.

And now the ravens' meat beside his feet,

His son agrasping, leapt with force on Gnodir,

Magic spells enchanting o'er his son

To heal his paling cheeks, but one by one,

The Galdurs failed ; O long had served him, now

Had failed when most in hour of need he had!

O curses! O blood-encurdled pleas for mercy,

Screeched in foreign tongues to Gods above!

Without avail! O horror!

Now did Dietrich

Seize his chance, and send his Vikings o'er

To scuttle Gnodir, hacking holes in hull

To waves bebring adown, adown to Hel!

And Erich, who the men were watching for

Their orders, sat oblivious, and howled ;

And then that greatest ship the world has seen

Careened into the gaping waves, its

nose

A slow-diving beak of fish-seeking bird.

And then.

Oh then, that last and terr'ble breath of Asmund.

A quake upon the hills and valleys shakes

The dust, and in the sea, the raucous waves!

Those waves like grey, unrighteous beasts of prey

With teeth and fins, like monstrous sharks in swarm

Of frenzied blood, upon the wracking surface!

How the winds with mighty, billow'd biceps

Lifted up the weighty waves, then let

Them down with whoosh, and shock of stormy splash!

And mired with gore of bloodied limb, the sea,

The princes' battlefield, did weep with red

And unredeeming tears of bracken grey!

A tossed and turmoiled grave of fallen corpses.

Ah, Erich on the deck, forlorn and howling!

Bloodied boy within his crumpled arms.

His eyes compete with clouds to sting the salt

Of water'd wave, as fade the day of eyes

His son once looked out hours before, before...

Before that thief of Father's sons had struck,

Had struck two souls in one sole body, his,

Before his son's, without whom mortal flesh

Is but a hollow dungeon : down, O down

The deck approached the sinking waves as all

The glorious hull of Gnodir met in shameful

Wed the awful bride of Aegir : sunk,

With arms still wrapped around, his lungs a rasping

Curse-choir song-hall barking blackened oaths

At every God he knew, except for She ...

"Ah, She ... That queen O ne'ermore to be seen!

O crests like fins of sharks, not soon enough

Your rav'nous jaws engulf this hollow'd flesh,

Who now, too-willing, leaves goodbye to earth

And greets my woman's father's yard, the sea!

Ah sea most cruel and unforgiving, take

This wretch from sight of bloodied sun that o'er

The slip of Western disc now falls, and paled,

So wan of emptied veined blood, O ghost

So white and wraithlike in the sky, Ye moon,

Who once did have me fetch a cursed sword

Whose curse, now come to fruit, shall in my fruit

Now kill me full at last ; ah, waves, betake!

Betake me down into your teary kingdom,

All my tears in you now drowning, take

Me down, o down to Niflhel, I care not!

A father asks the wyrm to tear his corpse

When all the life his son did breathe he can't,

Though reckoned quite a warrior, save ; o down

For good I go, hard world, and ne'er return!"

And sailors say when storms are rarely wild

As that shark-infested storm so long

Ago, a ghostly pair of ships is seen,

In hail, as sea fights sky in pointed blows,

And on the vaprous decks the wraiths do war!

Do war, and shall in hailstorm ever after!

So do sailors say, and swear they've seen.

And some say when the sea is calm again,

A seal is seen out in the waters, playing.

Codgers yarn a mermaid tends him there,

The sweetest voice they never heard, upon

A promontory rock above the waves.

And so the old men pass their time in tales

About the fire, wishing they were seal,

and she were their enchanting mistress, ah!

Have you this tearful, poignant tale enough

Now sated? Pass the briny seaman's tale

Along to all who wish to hear its sorrow.