Finding Common Ground With Ancestors

When it comes to the question of ancestors and ancestor worship, the modern Heathen is in a peculiar situation. On the one hand, we know from archaeological evidence and various laws prohibiting the worship of the dead, that people in the Heathen period worshipped their ancestors. However, on the other hand, judging by the frequently asked questions that tend to crop up on ancestor worship, it can be hard to figure out how to honour your mostly-Christian ancestors, and still be a Heathen.

Indeed, if we are to honour our ancestors, one thing that we all need to face is that large numbers of them might not approve of us walking away from their religion. In a lot of ways, this is no different from navigating that ground with living relatives, and I think there are very few modern Heathens that haven't had to do this. Admittedly, I have been very lucky with my family in this. My family has a peculiar heritage of its own in that large chunks of my father's family were Spiritualists, and claimed clairvoyancy or healing. Having grown up with my own slew of strange stories linked to that heritage, I don't doubt any of those claims. Now one thing about spiritualism is that dead family receives a type of reverence. There is the sense that they haven't really gone anywhere after death, and that they're all still just hanging out watching over you. Or at least that's the mindset I grew up with when I was a kid. So with this in mind, ancestor worship should be easy for someone from a family like mine, right?

Well, in my experience, this isn't always the case. For while they may have believed in things like talking to the dead, and healing, and magic to some degree, they also had very definite ideas on *how* to do those things, and what lines should never be crossed.

When I was a kid, I would learn these lessons during my many chats with my father either late at night, or when he and I were travelling the country in his truck. As my father was mostly a healer, his lessons were based in that, and were something that I struggled with. It wasn't the kind of energy exercises he would teach me, or the surprise psychometry tests, or the going into trance thing, but the idea that I would ever have the same knack for it. Moreover, I thought their stuff, the stuff from my family was more than a little batshit crazy. After all, Spiritualism has all this weird turn of the century stuff going on in it, and it all seemed far too love and light for what I thought I needed to learn for dealing with the things in my bedroom that made it hard to sleep at night.

Over the years, I got further and further away from the ways of my father's family, and this wasn't a bad thing, I am who I am, my dad is who he is, and they were who they were. However like with living family, a gulf can arise where you feel their disapproval as surely as if they'd called you and screamed at you down the phone. Things don't feel 'right', offerings don't seem to go down well, and there's this sense of loneliness that comes.

With the living, the grievances are aired, and if your family is anything like mine, we all shout at each other, and then we're back to business as usual five minutes later. However you can't really do that with the dead, and sometimes, it might even take years to figure out what's not going right. At this point, some might say that some form of divination should have been done, or a Ouija board cracked out...except my family were against those things. For them, the only 'divination' acceptable was 'spirit', Hell, I've seen a ouija board session go really really well, and then when I've tried to call my family forth, it's gone completely dead. Nothing, nada, zilch.

The breakthrough came last month when my husband hurt his back, and I got the crazy idea to try and heal it by using some of the old family tricks. Settling down with him laid before me, I went into trance and began to channel the energy through me as my father had taught me, but then came to a point where I wasn't quite sure what to do. In spite of the whole 'not really feeling my family too much for a while and especially since I came to America' thing, I called out of them all the same. What I wasn't ready for, was 'hearing' my grandmother say 'FINALLY SHE GETS IT!', and Josh complaining I was prodding him in the back even though my hands were inches away. After I was done, he said it actually felt better, and by the end of the day, he was fine again.

So healing, the act of restoring haelu, of manipulating haelu for good seems to be the thing, the common ground that both I as a Heathen, and they as my ancestors can stand on.

And I think that's the thing, when we have those disconnects, as with our living relatives that we disagree with, I think the only way forward is to try and find our common ground with those ancestors that we feel in our lives, be that common ground a love of car racing, or healing, or a love of fine malts!

Our Ancestral Shrine

The Rites of Spring

These past few weeks have been busy attending to what I can only describe as the 'rites of spring'. Spring is one of those times of the year that leaves me feeling conflicted. On the one hand, I love the life returning to the world, the new shoots, the warmth... the green. But on the other hand, I know that all the green comes with a price for me; namely that the green stuff often makes it hard for me to breathe.

Last year was hard, I was a new person in a new land that seemed to hate me. I know that's an illogical thought, but there were times when my asthma and allergies were so bad that I thought this land would be the death of me. I really didn't want to be here.

But this year has been different, I still have the allergies and asthma, but I don't feel quite so strange in this land, and I think a chunk of it is the garden. I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I can run again, or to the point where I was training for a 5k, but the simple acts of pottering in a garden, trying to grow food, and putting hands to dirt have been game changers for me. Our home at the moment isn't a forever home, but it's definitely a home as opposed to somewhere to lay our heads, and although it's still pretty strange and foreign to me at times, it's more of an adventure now to try and figure out what it all is.

This past couple of weeks have been one of working on a new god post, a birch post in honour of Frija. We found the wood for it in New Hampshire when we were visiting friends and in spite of having to largely improvise tools or work that bit harder to do certain tasks (like for example, using an axe and hammer instead of a chainsaw to trim it down), it's been very good experience. The biggest concern when doing any kind of carving for a holy object (at least for me), is that your work will not dishonour the deity you're attempting to honour. And it may seem kind of strange to be so detail-oriented for a post that is going to be veiled (I'm also embroidering her a veil because in our cultus, Frija is veiled and we are not to see her face), but again, it's about doing right by the deities you love, regardless of how many times you get 'bit' by your knives, gouges, and chisels. Once she's finished and ceremonially offered to/veiled, her face will not been seen again - except potentially at certain times of the year by members of the cultus. Along the line, I would also like to create a wain for her, but this is an ambitious project.



This time of the year seems perfect for this too, and there is something about this birthing a new statue at the same time as the world is coming back to life that seems particularly apt to me.



Last week/weekend, we celebrated Beltane, both at home and at a marvellous local Pagan festival which was as raucous and as fun as Beltane should be. For me though, the highlight of the weekend was our planting ritual that we had yesterday, and which I'm going to talk a little about because I don't think we do that enough - talk about the 'small' rituals of our lives. We all talk about the big rituals and the big blots we go to and participate in, but it's far rarer that we talk about the day to day honouring of our gods, ancestors and the local landwihts. And for me, that is the 'meat' of Heathenry. It's in the everyday, it's in how you see what you do when you're doing the most mundane of tasks, it's in how you try to make your lives/families/communities hael/more hael through your actions and it's the millions of small actions repeated over time that count far more than the occasional large acts. At least in my opinion, for the first is indicative of a lifestyle and worldview as opposed to a weekend activity choice.

For weeks, we've been preparing for our garden, getting the seeds, learning, and planning how we were going to do it. We'd had our tomatoes and herbs started indoors, and our potatoes planted before the last frost of the year. To say we were excited about the actual planting would be an understatement. But we really wanted to do something to honour the land, the Eorthan Modor, before we touched tool to earth to dig the plot, and so we decided on an adapted version of the Old English Aecerbot charm.

The actual charm is really quite complex, and has Christian overtones, but the idea of burying offerings in each corner of our growing land was one that felt very right to us and so our simplified version involved the blessing of eggs, apples and tobacco (eggs for new life/new starts, apples as an offering to our ancestors - common in our families, and tobacco for the spirits of this land), a blessing of our tools, and burying the offerings before digging the plot.



We began just before sunset, saying prayers of blessing over our offering items and the tools we would use to work the land with, and then processed to each corner where I had pre-dug a hole with a completely different spade than the ones we would continue to use. Adding the items to the hole, I then chanted a section of the 'Erce, Erce, Erce' refrain before we buried each carefully. Once this was complete, we grabbed our tools and began to dig and today we planted seeds.


A little blurry, but you get the idea!



We're hoping for potatoes, beans, carrots, squash, pumpkin, scallions, tomatoes and herbs. We're hoping to put good, hael food on our table instead of the crap that is sold at the store, what's more, we're hoping for yet another fulfilling tradition we can pass on to any children we have.

Potatoes

Happy Spring!

Pagans

I have a confession to make.

I have a LOT of Pagan friends, friends that I hold dear and value, friends that I've known for years. You see, I'm from that weird little island in the North sea where people drink a lot of tea, Druidses like Ed Prynn collect standing stones in their back yard, and Pagans and Heathens often hang out together.

Or at least they did when I was last living there.

But there is one wee bugbear I do have with some Pagans, and that's the assumption that Heathens are just a slightly different flavour of generic Paganism...or Paganism with Norse trappings. I don't blame these people, they're generally good people and a lot of the information out there about Heathenry from things like those Heathen 101-type books really don't do us any favours.

There are also certain assumptions within the Pagan community of what a Pagan is to contend with (note, this is all going to be UK-specific, or based in experiences with UK Pagan communities); for example, there's the assumption that everyone is a soft polytheist that worships 'The Goddess', or that all Pagans cast circles, or hell, even that the pentacle is a universal symbol!

These were all things that bugged me when I used to hang out with my Pagan friends in the UK, in all honesty it bugged them too, because just like Heathenry, Paganism is a vast and varied beast of a term that encompasses many different worldviews. One term we had for this was the 'wicca-borg', and note that I spell 'Wicca' with a small 'w' in that term! Which is yet again another UK differentiation...the practice of spelling lineaged Wicca with an uppercase 'W', and non-lineaged with a lower case. A far more derogatory term for the small 'w' wiccans is calling them an IRAB, which is an acronym for 'I read a book'. All this sounds quite nasty, but so is not having your differences respected, or even patronised for your differences!

And yes, that does happen! I've actually had the experience before now of being told that I wasn't as 'enlightened' as this particular individual because I'm a hard polytheist!

Moreover, it's not just we Heathens that feel this way or have these experiences, I know Hellenic Pagans and Tradcrafters that have had the same issues (using the term 'Tradcrafter' in the UK sense here, as opposed to the American usage of British Traditional Wicca). And talking of Wicca (note the upper case), I've had Gardnerian friends express dismay at the way that parts of their practice (as corrupted as those parts are so as to keep within the bounds of Craft oaths) have formed the basis for this ecumenical wicca-borg.

There are reasons why we Heathens tend to get on well with Wiccans as opposed to wiccans. Part of it is the years of study they put in, but another part is the awareness of group to group differences. Wiccans get that we don't see things the same and they often enjoy talking about and debating those differences.

And that's what it comes down to at the end of the day, acknowledging and respecting our differences while finding the common ground we do have and partying heartily on it!

We Heathens are hard polytheists, for us it's disrespectful to consider our gods to be aspects, but I'm cool with you doing that in your practice because it is your practice and I'm cool with other people having different traditions and beliefs.

We Heathens don't generally cast circles, but there is some literature out there from the older generation of Heathens that was admittedly far more influenced by Wicca/wicca than we tend to be now that feature something called the 'Hammer Rite'. Most Heathens don't cast a circle (except for groups that have been around for years and for whom it's become traditional), for example some of us walk the boundary of the area we're working in with flame while singing a chant, and that boundary doesn't have to be a circle, it can be any shape!

We Heathens have a myriad of symbols but the pentacle isn't one of them, nor does it have any meaning to us.

We also don't believe in reincarnation...well a minority of people do, but they're a minority and it's not a widely held belief.

But most importantly, there is no such thing as 'we' Heathens and I've been very naughty to write using the term 'we Heathens'as we have neither orthodoxy nor orthopraxy and each group varies from the next. Each group of Heathens has its own culture, its own ways of worship, its own worldview when it comes to how the gods are seen, what role the gods play, the etiquette that should be observed around a Ve/Weoh/shrine,its own rules and its own traditions. Unfortunately these differences aren't always respected within Heathenry, but things are changing, more Heathens are actually asking each other what their ways are are and respecting the difference as opposed to just assuming that because person A is a 'Heathen', they're the same.

To me, this is a very positive change, and a direction that I hope Pagan communities are also moving in. We don't all have to be the same to stand shoulder to shoulder as allies, and our common ground is quite a large and fertile patch. It's one that is seeded with friendship and marriage, it's one that knows the same pressures of living in a larger society that can be downright hostile to us, it's one that appreciates the value of good friends and good times, and it's one that I've personally missed since moving over here.

So I'll be getting my Beltane on at a local festival, which I know...isn't considered particularly Heathen, but this Heathen is from that island in the North sea that drinks entirely too much tea, and that has Beltane celebrations all over.

I'm sure they won't set literally everything on fire like they do back home, but I'm sure it'll be a load of fun all the same :).

Disposable People

So guess who's bringing the polemic again?

Over the past few weeks, I've been musing over the nature of community, and more specifically how modern Heathen communities function.

Even *more* specifically, I've been paying special attention to how communities deal with those among their number that are different, or contrary to the general sidu of the community.

Generally speaking, most Heathen communities strive to work on the basis that they're a group of people who are vaguely co-religionists, that also share common values. We often talk about only allowing 'people of quality' into the community, like the community we're talking about is some fancy schmancy gated community in some posh into which no riff-raff shall be admitted.

The reality is that we're actually many separate individuals, couples and groups that are separated by distance. We generally spend more time with those closest to us geographically, but our interactions with the rest of the community are far fewer; perhaps a yearly Thing.

But then there's the internet..

Oh boy, and does it cause trouble!

In person, we can see the person we're talking to, we can see their facial expressions, and body language. We can't just pretend that it's a name on a screen and 'not a real person'. In other words we're far less likely to be dicks to each other, because in person, the consequences for being dicks are far more immediate (not to mention unpleasant!).

But the majority of Heathen interaction - even among established communities - tends to take place online.

This isn't automatically a bad thing, but I think it's been harmful in some ways.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the concept of the 'Disposable Person'.

So what is the 'Disposable Person'?

We Heathens are community animals, we're also animals to whom reputation and worth mean so much. This isn't a bad thing - after all, it's our way of protecting ourselves against people coming in that would harm the wider community - our way of weeding out the monstrous.

However, have we lost sight of what 'monstrous' really is? Moreover, is this causing us more damage in the long run?

If you spend time around any community, you'll find that some people seem to have far more of a leeway than others, and that a trait that's considered to be far too negative for inclusion in the community in one person is completely overlooked in another. Communities are full of contradictions like that - it's only natural - we're humans, we network, and we're always more likely to overlook when our friends fuck up than people we barely know.

Two traits in particular, which seem to make a person more likely to become one of these 'disposable' people are being anything resembling a Seidr-worker, or being a 'Lokean'.

People that first come to a community claiming to be Seidr workers or discussing related topics tend to be treated in a far more guarded way than those that don't, and will probably find it much harder to even get into a community in the long run. I get it, it can be annoying being told how someone can do all this magic woo woo when you haven't even got a clue what type of person they are in more concrete terms. But often times, people that do this are just *so* damn excited to come across others that might have even the slightest idea of what they're on about. We all want to belong, we all want community, and if people can't find that community with decent folk, then sooner or later the chances are that they'll find it with folk considered to be far less scrupulous and become part of a larger problem. Ironically, more often than not, in the communities that hold the reputations for being more against Seidr, some of the most prominent members are Seidr workers themselves! So what gives? Is it a case of 'Witch Positions Filled: currently not accepting applications from newcomers!'? Or is it just that those people became a part of the community in a time when the pendulum of opinion was slightly less on the 'anti' side of things?

Even worse than being a Seidrworker though, is being a 'Lokean'.

The more I think about the term 'Lokean', the more it annoys the shit out of me. It's an almost henotheistic term (putting aside debates about Loki's alleged godhood for a moment), it implies that Loki is your personal Jesus as opposed to a god you also offer to, or even predominantly offer to. It's like drawing a big fat line between yourself and everyone else, then putting up neon lights with 'LOOK AT ME, I'M DIFFERENT' on them.

Now I'm not saying that if you worship Loki, that you should hide it, that you should crawl into a hole and just disappear - not at all. It's just...is that the entire point of your Heathenry; being a 'Lokean'?


And this is a great point, all of us, both in community and out, 'Lokean' or not, focus on the point of difference rather than commonalities.

Common ground is a great thing, common ground can be built upon, whereas just drawing some big-ass dividing line between two camps does nothing but cause trouble and eventually persecution complexes among the smaller of the two groups. Sooner or later that persecution almost becomes the identifier of the smaller group, their rallying cry, and the romance of the underdog is gained.

When we deal with people that say that they offer to Loki, the instant reactions ranging from long explanations of why people shouldn't offer to Loki, to expletives, are really not helpful. They do nothing for any of us. It is not the place for us to tell others what they do in their own homes. At Things we host, yes, we can stipulate which deities and practices are within keeping with the sidu of the Thing, but we can't tell others what they do in their own halls.

And really, when it comes down to it, should we judge them for their Loki worship before their deeds?

I know a few people that offer to Loki back in Europe, they're friends, and I daresay some of you reading this blog will know some of them too. You'd also probably stand at blot with them and may even call them 'kin'. You know them to be good people, you know that their deeds speak for themselves.

I would love to see a day when the 'Loki thing' is a non-issue. I would love to see someone introduce themselves either in meatspace or online as someone that offers to Loki, and it to be met with something as casual as 'yeah Loki? Not my thing, dude...now kite flying, now you're talking!' . I would love to see those that offer to Loki accepting when it's not someone else's thing and I would love to see people looking for common ground and getting to know each other as people. Mostly, I would love to see certain groups that exploit the lack of acceptance of those that worship Loki lose members, eventually lose popularity and that underdog martyr mystique, and eventually disappear - no longer relevant to anything or anyone.

I would love to see us stop treating others as 'Disposable People'.

A Writer's Prayer To The Allfather

Oski they call you
Wish-bringer

Os

Mouth, father of all language

His word-hoard unending
His skill, endless
Words come to life
their meanings he moulds well

Inspiration flows swift and clear
Though from a cool spring
Under the world-tree

Refreshing
A shock to the mind that quickens the heart

Inspire me wielder of words
Guide me, lord of language

Help me always find

Words to move the hardest heart and reach the toughest mind

Spaces And Behaviour

Source: The Abstruse Goose


The artist that drew this comic, gets it. He or she gets it far more than a lot of Heathens I see in the wider community. We are the product of thousands upon thousands of years of struggle to survive. We are the product of courage, strength, persistence, heartbreak, joy, hope, survival, love, passion, and a myriad of other facets of the human experience. How do we compare? How would we measure up in their eyes?

That is something we each have to judge for ourselves.

As for myself, I've judged myself somewhat lacking over the past few years. Instead of building and growing, I've torn down and stagnated.

In the book, 'The Well and the Tree; World and Time in Early Germanic Culture', Paul Bauschatz wrote:

"For the Germanic peoples, space as it is encountered and perceived in the created worlds of men and other beings, exists, to any significant degree only as a location or container for the occurrence of action...whether of individual men, of men acting in consort or in opposition, of men and monsters, or whatever. In all cases, immediate actions are discontinuous and separable deriving power and structure from the past."

Read that quote, read it again, and when you're done, read it yet again.

The idea that space exists as a container for actions, and that the immediate actions that take place in that space derive their power and structure from the past, is something we should all take into account when considering the places and groups we frequent.

In the modern world, I believe that includes cyberspace, and that some particular spaces on the internet are nothing more than containers for unhael behaviour that just perpetuates itself ad nauseum. Perfectly decent people can go to these places and become perfectly horrible. The oft-mused upon question of 'why do Heathens behave worse online than in meatspace?', I believe is down to this. It's almost become tradition to eat our own. It's almost become desirable to act in certain ways on certain groups - and so the bad behaviour is perpetuated without apology or further analysis.

And I have done my fair share of this over the years, I'm not just standing here and pointing fingers. It's one of the main reasons I feel disappointed with myself, and the single main reason why I don't frequent certain groups anymore. I continue to lurk on some of these groups, not to mention the pages of certain characters that I think are harmful and going off the deep end. There are some truly unhael people out there that are sucking people in to their miasma and then playing victim when questioned. This won't last forever. Eventually the truth will out - it always does.

As for me, I'm focusing on building again, on trying to be hael, and on educating. It's an exciting time, and I very much feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my life as opposed to fighting against the tides, conversely, if things go the way they should, this may even turn out to be far more efficient at getting what I was trying to do done, when I was fighting against the tides.

Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel.

Odin

^This.

What a beautiful piece of filming, and what an evocative depiction of Odin. It reminds me of standing atop the Neubuerg with my husband, making offerings to the Allfather.