Gold-spurners, ring-haters, ever eager to share and welcome in your kin, in widest circles, spawn of life : I hail thee, unseen sources of awesome-flowing giving! Wide cosmos, galaxy-garlanded, fortress of stars : for there our Yule is ever, does not cease! O toasters, boasters worlds' shaping declares, presents and presence changing hands with mirth and boldness, may I, and those I love, and all struggling to transcend the narrow miser-ways of earth become your protégés! For blazoned gold and silver zodiac ring-surrounds the stars with signs of what we might become, fulfilled, and made the true of selves! You are the dream-projection of divine telos hid in us and earth and stars : may we fulfill! And then the gold within display, in acts that blessings manifest, in meeting needs, and greed alone to give, and drink more deeply! Haunting of our own concealed grandeur, holy icons : in your poetry the stars come alive and dreams become bolder. Hail! What faith to hold abundance in not-knowing, and ne'er believe the miser-scares, which preach the burning flames and dearth of hunger! To conjure, from thin air, the confidence in sheer subjunctives, and then pledging their infusion into world! To hold against the normal ought's a higher faith that wills the unexpected good! May I, unfolding, shed my narrow husks and blossom-burst into a fuller fit of giving! Love is not small : your wide arms embrace all. May I have the honor of participation, though imperfect, in your Tuletides? I would give, and taste the gift, each every day.

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.

Heimdall represents the dawning of that living fire of awareness in humanity that stands before its powers and potentialities, and brings craft to stand as a means of realizing this potential.

Everyone blushes a bit at mention of Baldr, because even in the presence of his name, which alone carries the reputation (let alone his strong and bold and shining presence itself), living in an age of shame, one's best deeds themselves seem to shrink from what suddenly and obviously seems possible, what to say of those times one acquiesced to the worst ... It is not that Baldur holds us to an impossible ideal, for then he would be cruel to an incapable being, no, it is far worse than that. It is that in the presence even of his name we remember, at first dimly, and then ever more clearly, how sold down the river our own sense of possibility has become, and how much more we could be, not only for ourselves, but for the world, if we would dare to believe in the good inside of us and all things, and defend that for the treasure it is. Baldur defends that gold, the true gold, that treasure-ore that held up to the warmth of the sun, in truth and light, may slowly, gradually, beautifully shed its slag and come into its own ; and in his time here, held his sword high against any who would tarnish this process. Instead he escorted the gradual, steady, forward-looking and daring untarnishing of world, its progressive unfolding and blossoming into its treasure-nature. In his presence we feel, my God (O Bright and Boldest God!), how cravenly I have been before the world's cynicism, how far I have bowed before the idols of moral cowardice, because all that is commonly declared impossible in the human soul is, gasp and weep and pull oneself up to see, normal. It at least once was in the presence of such bravery, which boldened one, encouraging and coaxing one to dare the deep goodness within self and world, and raise the sword to match that high bar. So naturally, in the face of such uncommon confidence, such realized goodness never doubting, one feels some chagrin, even for whatever good one has eked.

I want to encourage a little more rigor in the evaluation of passed relationships. It is mental and emotional laziness to focus solely on the sour, and to fail to adequately appreciate and assimilate the lessons we were gifted in the relationship. The Gods put us in situations which provide opportunities for growth and learning, and relationships are not to be evaluated in terms of their pleasures alone, but often in terms of the productivity gained by their challenges. That a relationship has proven unsustainable does not mean it was unproductive. It is likely the other person stretched you in new ways, and gave you eyes to see things in a way you never did before. If not, the fault may often lie in the mirror more than in the other.

I hate to burst anyone's bubble in nuclear family-worshipping America, but the family is not the primary social organization of Homo Sapiens. It is, rather, the band, and the tribe. In other words, Aristotle was right : man is the political animal, the animal that lives in the polis, the level of social organization that transcends the family and which requires complex interaction of people from different lineages.

This is really important to emphasize, because first of all, it represents actual social organization amongst our ancestors and everyone else on the planet, with the extended family clan-band, organized into local, clan-interacting tribes ; and secondly, and far more relevantly, because it was the fascists in the last century who were the big "family values" folks, with the Christian Right following closely in their footsteps.

No, I'm not telling you to hate your mother and father. Au contraire. Your mother and father are links in much wider chains. Pick up a textbook, for example, on Australian Aboriginal kin terminology, and realize that complexity in social organization is the particular genius of humanity, as humanity. Looked at in this anthropological way, Aristotle was correct, at one level, even though the "polis" as a literal burg or town is not the only way of creating this trans-family organization. The polis was, in many ways, an advance over agrarian ways of life, which for all their idylls, had many disadvantages. Anyone who has studied the agricultural revolution and the dislocations and cripplings this created for humanity, in addition to its advances, understands this, as important human elements lifted up into expression by the hunting-gathering way of life were left behind for more settled ways. Anyone who is not familiar with these studies had better come up to speed : let's get with it, folks! Mannaz is a critical rune, so catch yourself up with what scientific anthropology has discovered and compiled about our species. Moreover, the contradiction of agrarianism, with its settled mentality, stifles one of the most important energies relative to our spirituality : wod. In fact, many anthropologists believe that the pastoralist way of life was subsequent to agriculture, as a reaction to its oversettled ways, as people packed up with a few goats or sheep and allowed themselves to wander again. (Pastoralism also has its own contradictions. There is Fire and Ice in everything, and the key is to find the right balance.)

The disadvantages of the agricultural revolution are important to understand, because it is that revolution that ultimately generated the dynamic between the cities and the countryside, because cities are, in part, places that people flock to to escape from the boredom and dulling of their human potential to be found out on the farm and in plantations. (It's far more complex than this, and, I want to make this clear, farm life has a great deal to offer, particularly when a native nobility provides a microequivalent of some of the cultural advantages of the polis in their courts and halls.) Slavery is primarily a feature of agricultural peoples.

Any time the vast complexity of human potential is blunted by a social system, that social system is ultimately headed for revolution of some kind, even if that takes thousands of years, because there is an evolutionary imperative to developing all the gifts the Gods gave us. While it may be true that the Australian Aboriginals refined and developed our particular human talent for social complexity to a savant pitch, there is no doubt that the genius is common to us all. There is a yearning inside humans to reach out to their potential. This is why isolated family farms, cut off ages ago from larger tribal connections, will not satisfy everything in everyone, and why they will produce movement towards cultural centers where the possibilities for interaction are much greater. Tribal forms can provide many of these satisfactions without the need for literal cities, but the interactions and the satisfactions they provide must be present.

It may seem obvious to common sense that families are the basic unit from which the species reproduce and from which we have emerged, but reality is often counterintuitive to our common sense. In fact, a study of our closest biological relatives, the primates, indicates that reproduction happens within the context of the band, with male-female bonding a relatively transitory phenomenon, perhaps becoming perennial in some instances. The family as a coherent male-female pair with children exclusive to them is an emergence out of this matrix. The family is, therefore, not primary, but subtractive from the primary social matrix. We can see, therefore, that there is nothing wrong with families, as they provide certain kinds of satisfaction we enjoy, so long as they are not cut off from the larger band and tribal organizations.

This is evident in "home schooling", which has many perks to recommend it, but one of its drawbacks has often been an impoverishment of social contact amongst people so raised. (Not to mention that, let's face it, so much of this movement has simply become a way for regressive Christian Rights to resist coming into the 20th century : yes, I said the "20th" century, because they are a far distance from the 21st. Public schools, for all their imperialist indoctrination, and yes, that needs to be resisted, at least teach people the basic facts of modern life, and, more importantly, they provide (however messed up these may be at times) significant social contacts.) Don't think so? Talk to people who were raised in home schooling and then went to a real school, and what it's like to actually have friendship circles now, and how goddamned stifling a confining family life can be. (Readers familiar with my style will understand how dialectical I am, and that I push provocation to overcome rigid thinking at the same time the core legitimacy is affirmed ; I support home schooling, conditionally, and find it has many interesting possibilities to offer. Many succeed, although many don't, in overcoming these contradictions.)

If Aristotle is right --- and he is, albeit modified from an ethnological level, which shifts the terrain to kinship complexity, and corrected of its citystate-imperialism --- then emphasizing the family is just not going to do it, because, a) the human spirit reaches beyond this level of organization to something more complex, interesting, and satisfying, and b) it is not the evolutionary unit of human survival, and thus does not satisfy the requirements for social cohesion necessary to sustain us over eons of time.

Thus, it is the extended family (ie., the clan or kindred) and the theod which should be emphasized. No, and with all due respects to the lofty formality of the theodists, the theod doesn't need to be organized as an Anglo-Saxon tribal kingship, but a social contract of some kind between extended families is the idea. And, let's get more real : a theod is simply an organization corresponding to people who share the same language, and thus, it expands out to embrace the nation itself. (No, for Gods' sakes, I am not encouraging nationalism, but inter-national indigenism that takes up the human potential developed in the primal matrix and attempts to raise it to higher levels, without distorting its proportionality. So far, "civilization" has produced lopsided images ; which doesn't mean it won't, with some intelligence and democratic input, eventually succeed in raising things to a much higher level, in a way that corresponds to our innermost potential, and which doesn't distort the innate proportionalities of that potential.)

Put concretely : question your neolocal-supremacism. Look at Mexican families, for example, where children and grandchildren often live under the same roof as their parents, along with aunts and uncles. Those households are extended family households. In a certain sense, they are a collection of families as we understand them in the nuclear sense. And they offer many advantages. So : do you make fun of people who live with their parents, who live with their grandparents? Do you support and understand those who choose to affirm the extended family system, or do you automatically assume there is something wrong with those who do not choose neolocalism (the anthropological word for the situation -- a minority-choice in the history of humanity, by the way -- when people leave their parents' homes to go live on their own)?

Mannaz : the ways of humanity. They are complex, but ultimately satisfying to learn and to fulfill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! Good Yule!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.