From a certain standpoint, heathenism is a conspiracy with Gods who have been partially exiled from the world by encroaching, invading spiritual forces of corruption, deception, illusion, and seduction, and aligning oneself with them in order to retake the world. The importance of deeds, then, is that they represent sheriff-actions of foreclosure of parts of the world declared by the seizer to be forfeited to the robbing powers, and reclaimed as the property of the Gods. (Not in the name of some Gods-awful theocracy, but for soul, and therefore soul's Guardians!) You declare your deeds to the Gods as a way of saying, look, I've been able to seize back this much more of the world to you, and I render it into the divine hoard to fund greater expansion of divinity into the world. You declare your deeds to your fellows to inspire and encourage them that it is possible to take back zones of soul, and to goad them on to similar spiritual audacity. We do not want an impotent, limp spirituality that is the consoling of defeated spirits, but spirituality that awakens and takes on the world itself as its field of activity. If this seems revolutionary, it should! Spirituality should represent a massive activation, and a suppressing and even ridiculing (all in good humor and with good intentions) of passivity. It is moralization against demoralization.

I wonder how many people would like heathenism if they saw it as a political contract uniting families and clans into a tribal commonwealth, overseen and guaranteed by sacred oaths to the divine, and that agreeing to those divines is affirmation of the oathed commonwealth. In other words, that what we call religion and politics are inextricably intertwined, not theocratically, but on the contrary, religion supporting the democratic process of the commonwealth (or innangards) in its relations to the larger world, so that the republics of earth become intertwined with the republic of heaven in one common destiny. Here there is both center and circumference, in an eddying toroidal vortex that blends and interweaves the best of both worlds.

Breathe. We take our breath from Odin's lungs, and when we breathe together, conspiring with the Gods, we may transform this prima materia into a hostel which welcomes the divine presences, an earth replete with numinosity and ideal, and increasingly closed off from the barren and cold. Such a breath is a prayer.