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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And find upon their feet the fleeting wind of wisdom!

Errors made within the midst of rising up

May sure be cured within the rile of mobilization!

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

That mocks the stolid giants, truer looters,

From whom stealing is but recompense.

Wod-Wielder, ward this upgust mob

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

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

Someday, like a sprouting grain, the gain

Of free associations, guilds again, shall Frodi-welcome

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

Let Robin Hood be life to stir

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

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

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

Calling all artists! Commissioning art for the concept "Harvest-Land". Please send me your drawings, paintings, etc., of your conception of what a mythical "Harvest-Land" would look like. Include all symbols, folk figures, deities, etc. that seem appropriate. The more Indo-European and Teutonic the better, but all entries that meet these criteria will be posted on this page and aired for people to view your work. Help take us there. This kind of art can be a form of path-working, and open up the gates for people to pass through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My writings are but a long prayer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let his soul forever animate these waves!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's both a blessing and an obligation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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