Don’t miss out on the wind.

Plato emphasizes that the wise must transcend the body and its material prison in order to discover their refined spirit. No doubt this is based in ancient pagan spiritual practices grounded in the mysteries. But it is only half of the story.

The soul is, in fact, bi-directional. It connects to the spirit, and it connects to the animal-spirits within the body. It grows up from the earth, but is breathed into by the spirit. We find this in the Voluspa strophes where mankind is created from the trees. The odr is in between the ond, the spirit that can soar into the cosmos, and the la, the blood, and leiti, the senses, both of which give us animal movement.

The fact of the matter is, we need both.

We incarnated to have an experience of Beloved Mother Earth. Doubt not that we wanted to feel ourselves deeply within her womb. The ascetic path of detaching from everything bodily and material only speaks to half of the equation. It is true that if we get too caught up in the senses and take everything literal we find there, we may lose out on important spiritual truths. Yggdrasil, for example, cannot be seen with the five senses. Blake called that part of us that is entirely invested in the five senses the “spectre”, and it is this part of ourselves that doubts spirituality and questions immortality. This is the animal part of ourselves that becomes afraid of any fright of death. But it is also the part the is deeply attuned to the primal experiences of the earth. We ought not slander this animal. Indeed, we have come in part to care for it.

Don’t miss out on the wind. I believe that we need to experience the qualities of this natural and wild world, the wilder the better. This is important to our soul. Lately at times I will do nothing but open my window in the evening, with the lights off, and lie in bed, allowing myself to experience all the sounds on the air, and feel the cool wind. I may do that for an hour or a couple hours. Or I go outside and walk around, to feel the sky, the trees, the grass. I need these things. These are not extraneous.

The fact that Plato de-emphasizes these experiences may suggest that in his time, particularly in Greece, there was great gusto for the material enjoyment of the senses, and that this could be taken for granted, and thus, his teachings were intended as an antidote, a balancing medicine. But the fact of the matter is that spiritual teachings have since been imbalanced in this direction. Opening our Cosmic Mind is important. It is important to practice the gaze of see-through eyes which turn this opaque flesh and matter transparent, so we can look into body and world and see the tumbling stars and nebulae through them, and soar to all the far places our spirit of wind may take us. In this way, we may surge throughout the nine worlds, and allow the Great Tree to gallop as a great horse. These are important. Some of Plato’s suggestions on de-identifying from the body can be very useful in this regard.

But do not miss the fact that the soul needs the earth besides. We do need what Father Sky offers. But we also desperately need what Mother Earth offers. We will not be complete without feeling the soil in our hands, many a time, tumbling in the grass, licking – yes, licking – the bark of trees (non-poisonous varieties!), running our hands through someone else’s hair, standing out and allowing the winds to affect us. These qualities we need within us. We need to deeply experience them so that they become a part of us. The ceremonial magicians and hermeticists speak about uniting the microcosm – our psyches – and the macrocosm – the world about us, and this is an intellectual expression of a very heathen sensibility. We become ourselves through the world. We grow soul through the experiences of the world.

Let us not become after life a hungering soul who is bereft of all the experiences we needed to be full and complete. This does not mean diving after experiences like a tourist. It means taking the time to really feel and reflect, and deepen that which we encounter into true experiences. The dead who do not do this miss the carved wood of the chair, miss the exquisite linen of the doily table-cloth, crave the textured bark of the hickory, long for the wind. For these qualities do not live within themselves. That is what it means to be a heathen, to take these qualities within.

For the truth, which Plato did not speak, is that when you deepen your experience of the sensual earth-world about us, it deepens into an experience of soul that is as spiritual as the ascetic spirit.

Or did Plato? He spoke of material things as shadows of their real spiritual forms. This suggests that by immersing ourselves in the material things and deepening our connection, we could touch the level of spirit-form within the things. This is probably how seers and witches functioned in his time. So he may have expressed this as well.

What is really needed is a balance. There are those who can afford to detach from their enslavement to the senses, and stretch their mind beyond to more cosmic and intellectual truths. But there are those who are so in flight they have lost their groundedness. Now why did they come to Earth, of all the nine worlds? Perhaps because their soul lacked some of the weightiness that is fitting for a good soul. We come here to mature. If we trust Beloved Mother Earth, as the kind guardian and spiritual guide behind and within this material stuff, she will help us find that rich and soulful maturity.

Don’t miss out on the wind. The earth The leaves. The ond cries out we are immortal. Let us listen. But the blood and the senses say, you are a traveler, a short sojourner in a place of marvel, whatever its terrors : drink the marvel, taste all you can. The blood and senses do not lie. Spirituality is simply finding their proper place. The sense of mortality rises up from the blood and senses. We know we are not here forever. Therefore every moment is precious. Therefore we have an opportunity. The soul has a chance to be stained not by sin, which mars it, but by the color of earth tones and the texture of experience. This makes for a colorful, alive, vibrant soul that will enrich and nourish the underworld within-of-all-withins when it returns at last to its roots.

For why did a flower arises from roots at all but to blossom? Raise and unfold thy petals, drink in the rain, feel the sun on your fronds, and come into your own bloom of warmth. The soul says, let me run like an animal upon these blessed plains. Allow me to pant and stand my ground and truly feel. And the soaring spirit, which longs to rise above and sail the seven seas of the nine worlds, will be enriched by the experience.

Tower of light,
as sun beneath the sea rising,
arms stretched out in dawn
shoreline yawns, she beams, and I,
upon the highest seat on granite crags
that all above the circling worlds does sit,
am stunned, with awe of brightness bound
within a sterile, barren wasteland. Ah!
If only I, who like her light, was once sore bound
within the lair of howling brutes, might free :
release that seething ovum-field so burgeon'd out
to barley-burst in green and gold upon the fields!
For I have caught her shy yet stern and stoutest eyes
beneath that deepest palace shining gold
beneath the green-blue waves where Gods take sip
of Aegir tribute-brewèd beer : but ne'er
before this moment dawning 'fore my eyes have I
been awed so deep with ripe so frozen buried!
Tears! O if these tears might drip as drops of rain
from antlers of Eikthyrnir, down,
to where her homeland, frozen-bound, is found,
then thaw, the ancient loin-runes of my wand, might work
such magic marvel-ripening as ne'er the eyes have seen!
Alas! But yet this rescue may not --- no, it is forbidden, sure!
Then why my eyes did rest upon her bosom beaming
cleaved beneath the ice-rimmed sea above? O why?
For I might rescue her entire, loose her gripped
by blue-cold hands! But as it stands, I rue,
bereft with sudden love forbid and foreign.

A gift for Gardner, and his grand dames
who England opened ancient ways
unto the muggled modern zombies
banal-bound to mill-pulled machines.
From the heart of a home's secrets,
the sweet woven writhings of a kindred's craft,
books' leaves fluttering in the Autumn wind
he up gripped words to cover paths
that witches' mouths once spoke in secret.
These other authors' utterance he tailor-seam sewed
to fit the garment of the garden's God and Goddess
words women private-poem hymned, and could not share,
for oath : and oath he held, yet wrapped the naked
unspoken words in luscious leaves blood and white dew
inked by masters of magic and sex god and star'stress' wonders.
He did not need to unroll these words, for women worried
that these spells by stranger's paws might sullied be,
for soft psalms of the amateur's breath,
long hallowed in the family's secret ways through long times of hiding
might misunderstood by modern minds twist, and spit, and drive
away long kin-held fairies who gather round the magic round.
Yet he did! For beauty and subtle night's trance ought not
ever fade from the fields of blessed mother, beloved Earth!
So he psalmed, for these naked spiral writhings spellbound
spoke deep summerlands where loved ones gather
and grow their strengths for new surgings! Together!
Beyond the veil of our deepest fears, in Night's seeming snuffing,
there gasps of plenty, gasps of pleasure dawn
in the witch mind twirling naked and blindfold
on the god-named blessed circle where nymphs once
spun this spunky British gentleman long spun out
by his laughter's large eccentrics, beyond his hope or grasping.
In deep halls of grand canyon-down meandered lichen ways
to Holy Hel's sun dancing fields of apricot and frolic, he saw
the family's friends gathered in rest and pleasure, paraded
and feasted by the phallus' antlered wheat-showered God,
who in yoredays drew down blessed dew
of lunar queen's loin's marvel, kissing her, and joined his spells to hers.
In the fullness of month's menstrual orb, she taught
midst the thicket-weave's waves of fallen leaves
all matrons and maidens the heart's spell of love,
if all fairies welcome they would tend. And hunters, horn-drawn
out to pastures flocked by old oaks' many children,
heard in the deep-root spiral scent
of stag's musk the old big-bellied laughter-wisdom
of the phallus' smiling God tomes.
The gold-runed leaves of the grand dames have faded,
burnt as offerings unto the heavens, whose incensed smoke
enlucks the world, and are not found. Yet Gardner's arcane
words compiled, collaged, and wrapt up, boquet in rose
and rapture, woo, and welcome thee, and thee, and thine
to dine and taste forbidden wine
brewed by kinsmen in the depths
who wait and wassail thee. Ho!

A study of fraud, greed, brutality, and stupidity is a good way to begin spirituality. Don't start in the heights. Begin right where you are, in your community.

The Gods have set down some lessons for us. There's four big opponents in front of us : survival and the struggle to thrive, which is necessary, and then three perennial opponents who are not necessary but constant companions to us in this age and dispensation : Loki, Gullveig, and the Giants.

Let us begin with Loki. A study of the hucksters, con-men, and manipulators in a community, who learn the jargon, who twist it to justify the basest of motives, who take advantage of a community's ideals and then with often unnoticed audacity, in the very name of those ideals, is a good way to get wise. And Odin does want us to get wise.

Loki is strong in each of us, because we want to fool ourselves. We don't like to think that we can be taken advantage of, and yet our own need for delusion, and our refusal to look at things square in the face, allows us to be manipulated. And the less we are willing to see the trickster within ourselves, and simply condemn it in others, the more we are tricked by that very trickster, who punishes gullibility whether it comes in the name of innocence or judgemental and oversimplified moralism.

It's deeply disappointing to study fraud and its pervasiveness. This disappointment, and working through all the feelings that go with it, is a deep and beautiful way to nourish the wisdom within us, and is an important part of the spiritual task. To open our eyes and see flaws, and see the failure of hopes and ideals, is an important step in developing the groundedness and savvy that empowers us to further realize those hopes and ideals. Loki will teach us, if we will study him, not only what fools others are (which is often easy to spot), but what fools we ourselves are. This develops an important moral humility to which Odin points in Havamal 22 : Vesall maðr ok illa skapi hlær at hvívetna; hittki hann veit, er hann vita þyrfti, at hann er-a vamma vanr, "A man who ridicules everything is impoverished and ill-charactered ; he knows not that which he most needs to know, that he does not lack blemishes." * Which is one way of saying, "Look in the mirror."

It's not a bad place to begin by cataloguing your own flaws, your lies, your attempts to cheat others and cover it over, your deceit to yourself about your real motives in questionable situations, not to lash yourself, but to learn. To learn whom you have been worshipping in your deeds. And from that awareness, to trace consequences, and make a conscious decision whom you would really like your actions to worship.

And to acknowledge, in a hard life, in a life which is not always easy to survive, fraud and deceit are constant temptations, and often get the best of us when we're not noticing. And just as the Gods were willing to tolerate Loki up to a certain point (but not a step beyond), in reality, a little of this energy, in balance and kept in check, can be a part of the rich texture of life. But one must be very careful, because it is a slippery slope. A little white lie from time to time to gentle someone's feelings or smooth something over may really not be too terrible a sin, but if it becomes a habit, it can become problematical. Loki will pitch for the benefits of fraud and deceit, and sometimes he will be right, but the myths show that he often got himself into more trouble than he ever anticipated in his mischief and humor. He is an example to learn from, not a model to imitate. We are all still struggling with this, and frankly, our learning curve, collectively speaking, is pretty poor. Like Loki, we may be able to (up to a point) get ourselves out of the messes into which our slippery behavior has cast us, but we may in the meantime cause a great deal of collateral damage, and in a wyrd universe, all consequences, however delayed, have a way of catching up to us. Whether we are damaged in our own persons or in the consequences our beloved descendants will have to suffer is never certain, but that a "gift calls for a gift" is the primal law, and here we might remember the ambivalence of this word, particularly in German, where gift can mean not only something of worth and generosity, but also poison. Gift for gift, poison for poison, we might say.

In a world of limitations, where poverty is all too often a bone-breaking and spirit-crushing reality, where there often seems all too little of what we want, and too many people competing for it, greed is also a constant temptation in human life. We all have needs and we all have desires, and the temptation to put "me first" ahead of every other consideration and value in life, to the neglect of all else, and out of all proportion, however extreme that sounds when explicitly stated, is often very strong. We want what we want and we want what we want, and you be damned if you stand in the way. Listen close, America, you too are being called out. We have a craving, you've got it, or you stand in our way, and we'll cheat you, we'll starve you, we'll bomb you to get it. Because "that's how life is". The Mother of Wolves whispers in our ears, "It's a dog eat dog world". Traumatic fear of scarcity fuels and powers Gullveig's luring words. And let's be clear : it's not that a greedy impulse from time to time is going to condemn you. We're all human. We can be adults and understand these temptations, but also understand that from the Gods' perspective that is no excuse for laxness in our alertness and responsibility to do the work of personal, kindred, and collective growth. And we will catch ourselves from time to time having got caught up in it, and that can be ok, so long as we do catch ourselves, and so long as we are willing to take the requisite responsibility for our deeds. But greed has become so much a religion in America, developed as an ideology of mercantilist and increasingly corporatist capitalism, that the scolding that ought accompany disproportionate greed has receded to dangerously low levels. Scolding is a great tradition in heathenism. You can hear the norn Skuld's name in it. She is not called a valkyrie for nothing, because she can be a fierce warrior in calling out behavior against the loom of that which should happen, as it has been woven as potential into the weave. And if we, continuously and consistently, beyond the pale of ordinary human foibles, refuse to live up to that potential, we may by all rights be scolded, and ought to be. (Again, with the condition of moral humility expressed in Havamal 22.) The negative consequences of greed are all about us. Its disproportionate excess has inspired equally excessive antidotes, instead of seeking that healthy place in between where the intelligent mean acts as powerful fertilizer for the soil of our souls. Because of imbalanced and unaddressed greed, our relationship to money is extremely poor. We haven't even yet digested the first rune in the set!

The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem guides us in the healthy relationship to Fehu, money. Feoh byþ frofur fira gehwylcum; sceal ðeah manna gehwylc miclun hyt dælan gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan. "Money is comfort for every man ; though each man should distribute it abundantly if he desires to obtain a share of honor in the judgement of his lord." Money is meant to be a comfort, and one gains honor through appropriate generosity. It is attention to appropriate generosity and the spirit of magnanimousity that keeps money within appropriate limits. But the Icelandic and Norse Rune Poems warn us against the temptation to abuse. Fé er frænda róg ... ok grafseiðs gata, the Icelandic Rune Poem warns : "Money is strife to kinsmen ... and the road to the sorcery of the grave." The Norse Rune Poem cautions : føðesk ulfr í skóge, "The wolf is raised in the woods." There's no mistaking these direct allusions to Gullveig's causing strife to the kin of Aesir and Vanir, and her raising of wolves in the Ironwoods. Greed is a real danger in life, and combined with fraud, can create monsters that threaten the balance of the world. Endeavour to keep greed in check, not only in your life, but in those around you. Call out your culture in no uncertain terms when it begins breeding wolves.

Our third perennial set of opponents are the Giants. Time and again, we see the stupid people -- however myopically clever they are -- running things, and using brute force and the monopoly on violence by the State (or otherwise) to enforce their stupidity and impose it on others. Our ancestors recognized this combination of idiocy and force that often combine with excess and disproportion. They gave this spiritual power for ill the name jotnar, and visualized them as big, dumb giants with raging appetites and tempers, and identified them as the enemy of the divine force in us which impels us to grow more intelligent and seek harmony with nature. Yet time and again, we often refuse to learn our lessons, ignore the teachings of the ancestors, accept the propaganda thrown our way, and join ourselves, either in complicity or with enthusiasm, to jotnar forces.

If we do this in heathenism, we reduce heathenism to a cargo-cult, abusing symbols to render them inert, giving lip-service to the Gods while continuing with enthusiasm our stupidities, and systematically ignoring the connections (or disconnect) between our proclamations of value and our actual actions, between word and deed. We seldom ask what it means to proclaim the worth of the intelligence and spirit of the earth (Jord), of the oceans (Njord), of organic farming (Frey), of wisdom itself (Odin), or the integrity of love (Freya), and instead go by rote, a rote now given greater sanction by our false, symbol-abused gist of sanctity.

And while it's important to call out those people and institutions which are larger than us and acting even more like giants than ourselves, still we must ask ourselves to what degree we maintain our own ignorance and stubborn prejudice, acting with brute force to stuff our mouths (and groins and whatever else), while ravaging others around us, including the smaller creatures for whom we truly are giants.

Fortunately, the Gods do not leave us without tools against these opponents, for they have given us the power of wíg, of battle and struggle against pernicious tendencies, both internal and external ; but even more important than this, in our striving for survival and thrival, they have given us the power and potential of frith, the choice to harmonize with others in a spirit of mutual aid in order to get what we want in the world. As the title of a wonderful book of black and white woodblock art says, You Don't Have To Fuck Over Other People To Survive. Heathenism extends this worthy anthropocentric spirit to the entire world.

There is a kind of bottom-line test of heathenism (or any symbolic system for relating to spirit in the world, for that matter), and that is : is it enhancing our learning curve relative to living in harmony with the world? Because that eco-evolutionary learning curve really is the bottom line. Odin wants us to sharpen our wits and get on top of this dilemma. Do we answer it? Do we dare to call upon Him if we refuse? I like religion with hard questions and clear implications that in turn derive difficult challenges, and demands that knock us off our complacency and impel us to grow. Odin's message boiled down might be : "Look around, put your thinking caps on, and stop dorking around." Wisdom is not just knowing something. It's doing something about it. "We are our deeds"? We're an activist religion, like it or not. Are you an activist?




* A more literal translation, keeping the word order, would be "An impoverished man and ill-shaped laughs at everything ; he knows not that which he needs to know, that he is not lacking blemish." I have chosen the above translation for the emphasis I read in the original.

All translations copyright 2011 by Siegfried Goodfellow

I feel so grateful to heathenism, for helping me to grasp a holistic spirituality that does not divide me from my wholeness but keeps me grounded in common sense and the earth. It has helped me to realize that single variables in life, no matter how wonderful, do not make paradise simply by maximizing them to the neglect of everything else. Life is about fibre and texture, which requires many threads in the weave. It has helped me to see that I need my connection to the earth as much as I need my connection to the sky. It has helped me to affirm the struggle in life and that it is ok, even meaningful, that life is often a struggle, and, that I am in struggle rather than perfection, that I experience conflict and passion as often as I inhabit serenity and love, is not a mark against my spirituality, but rather a sign that life is complex and rich and full of knotted goodness. And at times it's bad ; not good at all. In those times we fight to make it better, and we often suffer in the fight. Too much fight and we can lose our humanity and love, and this is important to hold onto, but what heathenism teaches is that sometimes too little fight can lose us the same. There's the pragmatism of the farmer and the ecstasy of the poet, and the love of life of both. There's a place for your curmudgeon and a place for your idealist, a place for your shrewdness, and a place for your highest nobility. Praise be the Gods! They are demanding, and they are compassionate. They are wise, and they are understanding. And they desire such rich, rich goodness for each of us that they ask us to work so we can harvest the best life has to offer us. It's hard work ; it's good work ; praise be the Gods!

She is excess

And then there was bitterness of rocks crushed in waters drawn from sulphur springs, and tisaned with agrimony ; there was the cold block of ice cut from the frozen lake ; chill that dulled and buffeted the bones ; and sore need that gnawed at a man, like the chill that dulled and buffeted his bones. For meager was his nest, and the axe was all about, in the woods, with sword and feud, and darkness.

From his humble hovel he succored and savored the bitter flavor, to draw out its long strength against the barren times of longing and troubles. Hard was a man’s life, and endurance an art much in need of cultivation. The man let the cold, dense stones, cut to build the bridge, live within him, that he might their wisdom drink and draw on strength tamed in times of first beginnings, when rock from mountain was drawn as ore from egg of deepest earth.

There is memory in the land, never-faded, of famine, of leaves of unknown trees desperately gobbled and crunched, by minds half-mad to find nourishment ; the peeling of soft bark to chew and gnaw, and then throw in meager stew ; the taste of tough grass ; the crumble of dry leaf chawed dusty and mold-bland in the mouth. And who knew how hard another’s life might be?

But need was never good, which is why gold oft drew an illness of fury even within the family, setting neighbors to driven feud; and a man had to learn to live as cold sleet, and blades of blizzard breeze, icy caress of the clear creek, and drawn-out shiver of the ice-blade lunar night.

Let need be undone. Let prosper come. Let sun and shine and golden grain brim the meadows wide. Let golden hale as liquid mead be drunk from sun. Let cheer of hall’s fire boil cider for warmed bellies, bright with smiles in the harpsway. Let arm in flannel arm be linked that legs might jig upon the floorboards. Let cupboards bulge with bags of peas and lentils, cellars sawdust-stuffed with roots and carrots, tubers and the excess summer fruit. Let smiles of lovers be fertile and breed broods of smiles more and smiles more, and eyes dance full in the fullness of a shared hall with all its shared stores.

May cold days be lived for warmth, may lone days be lived in light of dear companions hoped-for, may days of darkness dream of river’s fire of the sky drawn herald white-horse blaze o’er air’s arc which no cloud can cover! Let mood and mind of men be mirthed. Be bottled and corked the warmth of woman’s love, and glow of hall’s companions in feast, with fiddle and harp and lyre, lure the stocky thighs to leap and roundel, so that day’s draw of joy might yeast and be brewed into strength for long winter days ; and lightly soothed by wine of in-drunk memoir, strong wait with soothe the spring’s fresh morn.

Chaos has been tied in knots, with great struggle, to bind the entire star-looped loom together, that it might not pull apart. And do Powers Whole preserve this bind and weave, to ensure the marauding beasts of discord do not run amok and tear the cloth to shreds? Indeed they do, with such tremendous arms of manly might and wizards’ cunning we can hardly fathom, for all our gratitude for this miracle of order out of could-be anything-else, could-be nothing-at-all, could-be always-falling-apart, and we complain when it fails? Ah, what fools we are, that every wish we whim comes not to fruit we plead the victim, when we might not be at all, and all for them who bind and taut the net that it might hold against the raging darkness! Let us praise the binders who shaped this tendril-stuff into strongest cables that in mesh the world together hold! Praise them!

New Thought (a.k.a. "The Secret", "The Law of Attraction") Summarized:

1. You are being punished for your thoughts.

2. Your thoughts are sinful, and so you reap the consequences. (Based on Jesus' teaching that if someone looks upon a woman with adulterous thoughts, they have already committed adultery.)

3. The only way out is to purge and cleanse yourself of sinful thoughts, and focus totally on righteous thoughts.

Since, as we know from centuries of monastic contemplation, this is impossible, the whole thing is a set-up. Carl Jung established that the mind is an organ that achieves balance through compensation : for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction, and thus too much focus on positivity will tend to summon up an equal reaction of negativity.

New Thought depersonalizes God into a quasi-Newtonian set of "universal principles" or "great mind", but the essence is still :

A Peeping-Tom God prying into your private thoughts and punishing you for those sinful thoughts and rewarding you for nice ones. This is Santa Claus as the Universal Thought Police. And Thought Police is an appropriate term because the implications of the system are completely totalitarian.

How does this differ from heathenism?

The Gods are not Peeping Toms. They do not pry into your thoughts. They are not constantly scanning all thoughts. That would be discourteous behavior. It would be intrusive, security-state apparatus, 4th-Amendment-violating total surveillance. The privacy of a person in his own home -- the home is his or her castle -- is an ancient Teutonic principle.

If you want to get the Gods' attention, you must knock. Or you must hang a note on your door saying, Please come in. They may be able and willing to read the general state of your heart by the glow of your actions and intents, but if you have something specific to say, you've got to make it clear that you are speaking to them. Complete telepathic correspondence of every thought that passes through one's mind as constant courier to the Gods would constitute the biggest, most cumbersome, and unnecessary spiritual bureaucracy the world has ever seen.

Think about it this way : a good parent is not constantly shuffling through all the drawers and private effects of their child. If the door is closed, the door is closed, unless there is some good reason to suspect harm. A parent doesn't need to know every thought nor every action of their child. They will get the sense, if they are perceptive, what the general mood and overall effect is, gently from time to time offering guidance or inquiring about deeper things, but for the most part, waiting to be asked. If a parent can be so sensible and respectful of privacy, are the Gods any less sensible?

The general tone of New Thought, however positive it tries to paint itself, is condemnation. Since few or none of us ever experience total good fortune, any pain, suffering, or deprivation we experience is punishment for bad thoughts.

New Thought condemns you for who you are and tells you you have the power to do what you don't have the power to do. You can't control your thoughts. You can suppress them. You can emphasize some and de-emphasize others. And you can indeed identify oppressive patterns of thought (like, say, the New Thought paradigm itself) and begin a process of reassessing how you think about things, and how you approach them. (Hint : this is called the practical and psychological use of Reason.) But never have a negative thought? Come on! Come back to reality. It's never going to happen.

And if it did, would such a mindstate prepare you for reality -- you know, the real place where we live, where there actually are wars and invasions and epidemics and divorces and car crashes and accidents and traumas?

Can "It won't happen to me. It won't happen to me. It won't happen to me" really constitute a spirituality? That's called denial. The American pathology, perhaps, but hardly a religion, no matter how you dress it up.

Let's look at reality from a different perspective :

1. There are problems in the world.

2. You've been given a rational mind to be able to figure out, alone or with others, how to solve a good deal of those problems.

3. Because the problems are trenchant, you're going to get frustrated along the way. This is inevitable, but too much disappointment can impede your rational problem-solving skills, and defeat after defeat can be disempowering if you are not willing to think things afresh and take life as a series of challenges.

4. The universe is an orderly arrangement of chance, with cause-and-effect conditioning chaos, and vice-versa ; thus, sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don't, and a good deal of the time that has to do with something someone somewhere did at some previous point, although what the precise relation and ratio is is often rather odd. Let's call that "wyrd". Because of this, there are some things in your control, and some things that will remain outside your control.

So far so good? Now let's look at another set of principles :

1. Human beings tend to be narcissistic. They tend to get caught up in their own personal drama and narrow interests, and ignore the bigger picture.

2. Yet human beings live in a bigger picture. A much, much bigger picture. One that affects them.

3. Because of this, if there is to be any effective approach to reality, there must be developed skillful means to get people's heads out of their asses. We acknowledge from the get-go that this will be imperfect, because the narcissistic tendency will tend to warp even our skillful means into ways of being caught up solely in personal affairs. Nevertheless, we don't want to condemn human self-centeredness ; only de-center it enough to get a larger perspective.

4. Because life can be difficult, humans will have a tendency to see the bigger forces as negative and ill-willed. Heathenism acknowledges that there is truth in this, but not the whole truth. Moreover, it suggests that malevolence is directly linked to stupidity, which suggests an alternative.

5. Human beings are also surrounded by awesome and obviously mightily-beneficent forces as well. We all know if the sun were a little closer or a little farther, life would not be possible, and while this may, in this solar system, be a long result of chance, there are numinosities that condition that chance.

6. Opening up to the larger, more awesome, and ultimately beneficent picture can be a helpful way to live a more fulfilling life. Since we are in the analogous position of an ant trying to think about the Grand Canyon, we will need to utilize symbols, metaphors, models, narratives, and personifications --- in other words, art or poetry --- literature, we might say --- in order to do so. This literature, however, is not intended to be self-referential, but to open up onto forces roughly analogous to its symbols, so that human beings in their soul and in their lives can become oriented towards the larger picture.

7. Of those greater forces, the most basic are Mother Earth and Cosmic Mind, Immanence and Transcendence, which must come together for there to be a viable world. From their union come other numinosities vastly important to the soul : Love, Fertility, Strength, Justice, Confrontation, Moderation, etc.

So heathenism, too, is addressing thought, in the larger sense of orientation, but it approaches this not through a program of suppression (remember, New Thought = Suppress Your Bad Thoughts), but through narrative, symbol, and psychodrama ; in short, through poetry.

The next questions to ask are, Why tradition? and then, Why tribal tradition? First, to address the first question :

1. Generally speaking, wisdom is something that develops with experience, both within a lifetime, and intergenerationally. When a set of interacting people living in the same environment confront the challenges of their surroundings for some time, trial and error will generally have weeded out some of the worst choices and selected for some of the more adaptable choices. Of course, this is both approximate and imperfect, and we acknowledge from the start that both historical trauma and personal stupidity can intervene to load a tradition with its fair share of foolishness, and therefore there is a need for careful emendation. However, again, over time, a tradition has probably developed checks and balances that allow the intelligent user to identify and check tendencies towards stupidity. Although this is imperfect, it saves on having to reinvent everything from scratch (which might be creative but would have to replicate every error as well).

2. Tradition provides creative artists with a common orientation, and "curriculizes" folks' creative activity in the face of life's challenges so that a progression can slowly grow and build. In this way, creativity grows in relevance rather than ideosyncratic isolation, dispersion, and ultimately irrelevance. Getting human beings onto the same page can be a marvelous thing.

Secondly, why tribal?

1. In the process of civilization, with its tendency towards abstract rules, the balance between transcendence and immanence has shifted tot he detriment of the latter. Our concrete relation and engagement with Mother Earth has atrophied, particularly in environments which are increasingly entirely human-made, and therefore reflect our own narrow perspectives, rather than opening out onto the larger world.

2. Because of this, the symbol-systems of simple people, who have stayed close to the soil, can be of immense value and inspiration. Those who have intergenerationally maintained their balance with immanence hold a system of tools of tremendous value.

3. In particular, because in this era of world history it has been predominantly nations of European extraction who have conquered the globe and disrupted cultures through imposing processes of detribalization, there is a need for balance at the heart of our civilization, by restoring the lost tribal potential that was once a part of each and every European nation. A new synthesis is needed, to restore balance, and this means a re-engagement of the lost tribal traditions of Ancient Europe are of particular relevance. Restoration of Indo-European cosmological wisdom, as a conduit to accessing the more ancient Neolithic and Deep Paleolithic Wisdom is a way to restore balance to that process identified as Western Civilization ; not, certainly, to impose Indo-European cosmological wisdom on everyone, but so the tradition which has already imposed on much of the world will be able to resonate and scintillate with indigenous peoples everywhere, and even inspire renewal. In this regard, Germanic-Scandinavian heathenism represents a worthy, powerful, and particularly flavored restoration of Indo-European cosmological wisdom.

As such, its roots -- if not its present shoots -- are far older than the less than two centuries of New Thought. Because of this, it has a much larger history -- a better track-record, you might say -- of dealing with reality.

The real secret is that your thoughts do not control reality, and Thank the Gods! Can you imagine what a horrifying and dull world we would live in, what a sad phantasmagoria, if everything around us were nothing but a reflection and manifestation of our own narcissism?

And how much more disempowered are we if we neutralize one of the world's most marvelous mechanisms for challenging our narcissism --- chance --- with vapid declarations that "Everything happens for a reason" and "Nothing happens by accident"!

Bullshit. Come back to reality. The universe is pervaded by reason, but it is also pervaded by chance. You can create meaning out of chance, through active engagement, but chance by itself is chance and will not passively yield to you.

If you're seeking prosperity, you can listen to the equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes which will increase your vapidity, or you can listen to traditional earth-based wisdom, which says :

In general, prosperity is a reward for good diplomacy. Which is to say maintaining courteous relationships with all your relations --- the earth, the water, the air, fire, and all the world's creatures, including your neighbors --- in the long run makes for wealth outside of zero-sum games.

Odd that it takes barbarians to teach one courtesy, but that is often the nature of Wyrd.

I wrote Wyrd Megin Thew in my second year of heathenry. It represents two years of deep engagement with the tradition, after having mastered its contents, but going further into profound, intuitive meditation of the material. I filled up at least three very hefty notebooks with the contents of these meditations, in which I would lie down (akin to “going under the cloak”), meditate upon an aspect of the lore, and go into a kind of hypnagogic state. I would then write down what came to me. It was a kind of meditative half-nap, in which I observed how my unconscious engaged the material. This explains some of the richness and deep soulfulness of the material in the book.

It began simple enough. I made a boast at sumble, in the kindred with which I was practicing, that within a year I would publish a book on heathenism. It so happened that I had already almost finished the said book when I made the beot, so it wouldn’t be that difficult to fulfill. As it stood then, the book was very slim, perhaps about 80 pages, and mainly covered some insights I had had about the Gods.

As the year progressed however, so did my ambition, slowly at first, but in an accelerated fashion as the year came towards a close. At first I wanted to add a few things to what I had written. As time went on, I knew I needed to include all of the intuitive, meditative work I had been doing. But that material filled up three large notebooks! I typed all of that work up, and began organizing it into categories. I had a tremendous amount of paper around me at that point, and putting it all together into categories was an immense organizing task.

Two weeks before the due-date of sending the book off to the printer, as I had boasted, I had the idea that I wanted to summarize all the mythological poems in the Poetic Edda, all nine mythological books of Saxo’s History of the Danes, and the composite mythic saga as compiled by Viktor Rydberg. I crammed and spent day and night creating detailed summaries of the poems. I wanted someone who had no familiarity with the lore to be able to have access to quick prose summations.

By the time it was finished, a book that was 80 pages had now burgeoned into something near-monstrous. Double-spaced, and in a readable 12 point font, it was almost 1200 pages, and that was in an eight by eleven size format! I reduced the spacing to single-space, and the font to 10 point font, and thereby reduced the book down to just under 400 pages, but the result was still colossal.

I now have seven additional years of heathenry under my belt, including not only daily research, but in-depth and meticulous research translating directly from the original sources, and consulting important secondary sources written by established scholars in the field. What impresses me now is how accurate my intuition was within the first year and a half of being a heathen.

There are certainly changes I would now make. There are corrections to be made. I had decided to include an old piece, “What Do Our Stories Tell Us?”, because it had a certain charm. Even when I decided to include it, I had already superceded much of it, but still felt there was value to the piece. The piece has potential, but in retrospect, I was far too uncritical of the Grimm Fairytales as a source, and perhaps read too much into them, playing too loosely and creatively with them, stretching them beyond what they may have said. My interpretations were interesting, but I think I would be more conservative with them now. What is of interest was my desire to look into traditional fairy tales to see what they might say about the folk and our history. In the same piece, I also included traditional local customs, stories from the Eddas, and implications of Tacitus’ work. The thrust of all this is still valid, even if some of the conclusions may have overstretched their mark.

The chapter treating the Gods --- ironically, the original core of the book --- may be the weakest part of the text, despite the fact that it contains some highly original and important conclusions, primarily because the treatment of the Gods is so uneven. At that time, I was not intimate with the entire pantheon, and so treat the Gods selectively, according to how much I had acquainted myself with them. Consequently, many important Gods get very cursory treatment, while others have a great deal of material dedicated to them.

There is a particularly large section on Loki, and my evolution in this regard has diverged a great deal, although it is by no means over. Loki is a very complex character. At that time, I had a great deal more faith in Loki, and this shows in the book. Two things changed in the meantime that are worthy of note and perhaps further examination. The first of which is, I gave further and more detailed attention to the pattern in the stories, and gradually, that pattern did not match entirely what I had hoped Loki might represent. The traditional stories seemed to be saying something different from what I had wanted them to say. On that point, there is still some possibility of reconciliation with what I wrote about Loki in Wyrd Megin Thew, because at all times, I was engaged in complex, and certainly not simplistic, encounters. But what was decisive was actually examining the behavior of people around me, and realizing how pervasive cheating, lying, slandering, double-crossing, and so forth are, and moreover, how devastating such behavior can be interpersonally. Moreover, this kind of behavior is pervasive amongst people who claim values quite crosswise to these mischiefs. I began to see how much of an influence Loki had upon people at an archetypal level, and came to appreciate just how undisciplined most people are.

For myself, in many arenas (though not in others, which is a task for my continued rounding-out), I have been a very disciplined person, able to play with temptation, and engage salacious impulses without much danger of being pulled in by them. Yet such discipline, I think, is rare, and so I realized that I could not simply advise a naïve engagement with Loki, because such would be disastrous, pulling people into all kinds of compromising situations, when people already are making havoc of their lives! Now, from a certain perspective, archetypally oriented, an intelligent and prudent handling of Loki could in fact awaken a person to their own mischief, and thus serve their evolution towards greater consciousness, and loyalty towards the Aesir. But such is a tricky alchemy requiring a great deal of caution, foresight, and guidance, qualities I took for granted in myself, but was expecting of others. As it turns out, I have seen nonsense coming even from those who were more positive about Loki, which, while that might not come as a surprise to some, was certainly a surprise to me, because I thought attention to Loki would grant, if anything, an immunity to gullibility. Yet skillfulness in handling shadow is poorly underdeveloped in our culture. It may turn out yet that there are some redeeming possibilities for Loki, but of such, I must remain extremely taciturn, because that is, as the Apostle Paul might put it, tough and sinewy meat, where most heathens have still yet to be weaned, and rightfully so, off their milk.

When I look back over this book, I have to laugh at my naivete that anyone would really plunge into a book of its monstrous size and density, and yet there are such beautiful phrases and insights liberally and even copiously sprinkled throughout the book, that I am awed that such things were able to come through me. There are really some profound and amazingly soulful things said in this book. I was striving for a deeply soulful heathenism, and this book expresses that.

From my more knowledgeable perspective today, could I get behind everything I said in Wyrd Megin Thew? Probably not ; I have matured in some areas, and in other areas, I have learned a great deal more which rounds out the material I explored. However, I would say that at the very least, I could still get behind 80% of what I say in the book, and probably a great deal more. What it lacks in footnoted rigor, it makes up for with sheer soulfulness.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the book, and from which the book received its title, was a poem that represented my early attempt to engage and transliterate the Tao Te Ching into the Germanic idiom. The title Tao Te Ching means, “The Way of Ancient Virtue”, or “The Classic Virtue of the Way”. “Wyrd Megin Thew” means “Wandering Way, Strength of Old Customs”. It represents an idiomatic translation. My poem was a result of going through the Tao Te Ching page by page, contemplating each section, and then formulating a response from what I knew of heathen culture at that time. Some examples, for charm’s sake :

“The wyrd that can be worded is not so weird.

The word that can be weirded speaks wyrdly.”

“Wyrd dreams in grains of wood rippling through trees.”

“Everywhere wyrd flows, it ‘weirds’ –

Teases out, twists, warps, curves...”

“Violently men untangle to make sense

Of world

While Wyrd weaves on

Tangling its twistings.

Reason loses sight of the river.”

“The kings hand down

No commands

But speak the words of Folk

Before they have arrived,

And they think, “Yes.

He speaks truly.””

“Tranquility is a goddess of healing.” [“Eir”, the Healer of the Gods, means “tranquility” or “peace”.]

“Wizards will wilderness.

Because they wish what wanders,

Their wonderings have effect.

Seducers of world, they woo

Phenomenon back to source

And see fruitful blossomings

While winking an eye.”

“Events are alive, and grow

In their own way,

Weaving and twisting

Chthonically.

The accountant weeps

At the tangles of wyrd.

But what berries to be found

In this briar patch! Dance nimbly.”

“When a country loses heart,

Disarray is everywhere.

It is silly to focus on the disarray.

The heart must be returned.”

I was convinced that Wyrd was an idiomatic counterpart to Tao, and that therefore there was a kind of weird Taoism implicit in heathenism. I still think this is an enchanting possibility, and moreover, I agree with the thrust of the poem that this is precisely what wizards practiced, and substantially how they accomplished their magicks. Moreover, some fascinating ideas were suggested in the poem, one of which is the idea that a vow at sumble unites those participating in the sumble into a kind of pact against the static, a conspiracy against the world of rigidity and stillbirth, and a commitment to blossoming. This is a powerful concept. To commit to Wyrd is no small thing, because it is to commit to ecstatic becoming against any status quo which would try to block the emergence of creativity. Rather, it is to align creativity with the rhythms of Wyrd itself. When we have begun to fully realize this Taoism of Wyrd, I believe that we will finally be on our way towards maturing heathenism towards its Old Growth potential, and that I stand by.

Wyrd Megin Thew is a difficult book because its format does not match that of other books about heathenism. It is a weird text that follows its own flows. That can be something to be proud of. It is like entering into a thick forest, and having to follow the streams and creeks through.

In my Introduction, I outline my approach of reindigenization, reclaiming the original, primal, tribal parts of our being. As I say later in the book, we utilize our Iron Age ancestors, who passed the lore down to us, as conduits through which to access, however obliquely, the Deep Paleolithic. The material, therefore, must be purged of what dross the Iron Age imposed upon it. The book thus represents a quest to penetrate beneath the level of the Iron Age to that which lies beneath it. I make clear that it is pre-Roman Germanic and Scandinavian culture I am aiming at, and therefore all elements of imperialism, picked up in the encounter with Rome, must be dropped. In order to do this, I advise that we must work through the alienation that the centuries of imperialization, and its consequent militarism, have imposed upon us. Without working through that alienation, we will alienate the ancestral material, and become subject to distortion. Particularly, I suggest that the ghosts of WWII are still with us, and must be worked through before we can hope to be free of them. I still stand by that statement. Nazi racial and state-enforced Volkism may have been only one possible culmination of many of earlier romantic nationalism, but a culmination it was, and this must be squarely faced, so that we can free ourselves from this standpoint. If there is one thing I regret about Wyrd Megin Thew, it is the fact that being new to heathenism, I gave far too much heed to folkish perspectives, in a desire to not alienate anyone. Now I do not care about alienating people who approach things from a wrongheaded angle. I am bolder. But then, I actually used the word “universalist” as if it were something to be avoided, which is ridiculous. Where universalizing results from mere imperialization, then it is something to be critiqued, but universalisation can also emerge authentically out of full development of particulars and their interaction in ecumenical dialogue. At some point I will try to take volkism back to its godfather Johann Herder in order to renew it and find new directions, but that is a task for another time.

The Introduction also begins by defining a heathen as someone from the heath. The relationship to Mother Earth and wild country in particular is zeroed in from the get-go, and this is a position from which I have never retreated. I then examine the nature of a true warrior, who resists imperialization and takes on giant powers. I make it clear that in this world, this refers as well to giantish organizations, like giant corporations, aggressive nation-states, and so forth.

The chapter on Wyrd is one of the most significant in the book. I underline the responsibility of prophets and prophetesses to tend to Wyrd, and to tend to the folk in such a way that they in no way abuse their spiritual authority. Utilizing fear-tactics or encouraging morbid superstition is abuse and frankly, sinful.

After an in-depth chapter about the Gods (although somewhat uneven), I explore a number of heathen values, beginning with “worthship”, where worthship, valueing that which is worthy in life, sums up the rest of the values. The second half of the chapter is a cutting-edge essay exploring the idea that “baed” represented an ambiguous middle ground between good and evil, and did not represent evil, but rather, something more akin to the “perilous”.

I then explore aspects of the soul within heathenism, with particular focus on the fylgia, and its relationship to the wild, emphasizing that our overenculturation is often what holds us back from full connection to our soul. Enculturation is a necessary part of maturation, but we lose something in the process that must be regained. The fylgia as wild animal reconnects us to that primal which was set aside to allow us to live politely amongst each other.

In “Forms of Worship”, I cover the basics of blot and sumble, and add the importance of festival as a worship-form. I cover holidays as well, suggesting that we find a synthesis between our modern holidays and those celebrated by our ancestors.

A particularly interesting chapter is “The Archaic Order of Northern Europe”, where I try to explore the tribal sociology of theods or kingdoms, with particular emphasis on common law, odalism (the economics of allodial property holding versus feudalism), and the responsibilities of true nobility, along with the place of thralls. In other words, this is a chapter about law and order, with some fascinating implications, some of which are not entirely irrelevant to modern day issues of taxation and freedom.

There follows a chapter about the centrality of the Viking as an outgoing expedition of adventure akin to the fairy-tale notion of “going out into the world to discover one’s fortune”, a chapter reflecting on magic as a kind of pantheistic prayer, and a chapter on the runes, which includes not only reflections on the meanings of the runes, but something I found particularly helpful, a “rune contraries” section, which outlines what the world would look like without the application of each of the runes, each of which demonstrates a problem we have in the world today, and thus proving how the runes are needed, together, in tandem, to create healthy culture.

The crowning chapter is the chapter on Lore, which includes all my summaries of the lore, but begins with an essay reflecting on the nature of Lore, and how we must engage it symbolically and intuitively, and must never fall into either literalism, or an intellectualism which would banish our dream-associations. In short, I endorse surrealism as a valid way of approaching lore and allowing it to live within our lives.

Overall, this is a fantastic accomplishment, however rough it might be in form, and contains insights which I believe could nourish people over a lifetime. It includes some amazing artwork created by Eve Ghost (from the band Scarlet's Remains and Purnama), including the cover picture of Yggdrasil, as well as some other artists. I have had a few requests for the book, but it is presently out of print. When I have the time, if people think they might be interested, I can scan in the images of the pages, put that into a PDF, along with perhaps a 2011 reflection and correction page, and get it up on Lulu.

The work, after all, is the basis of everything you see reflected in Heathen Ranter.

I’m glad I wrote it.

Landscapes one needs

Colors for which one hungers

Times of the day one seldom sees.

The right display of bark

The badger’s cubby hole

The hawk’s spread of rusty wing

The lopsided hand-built architecture.

Soul says, take me out to see these things.

Odr says, let me wander far and wide.

For I am not whole without beholding

All the quirks the world’s strange mirrors

Let me see in me, alive.

They call her the Follower, and yet we follow her. We long for her. Sometimes she seems so far away for we have fled her and do not know the way back home. Then we look out the window with wist and wish for her. Sometimes we do not know it is she we long for. She is out there, calling us back to where we are ; we have fled our true location, and like a lost animal, we wander in the forests, bewildered, thinking she has strayed when we have lost our way. For we are youth, who lose ourselves so easily, and have not learned to trust. O, most loving one, she waits and calls the beacon call back home, that we might hear and let our melancholy and desire guide us back to where she sits. She has been watching all along.

An authentic heathenism works against the bulldozing of history and significance that has characterized so much of the last four hundred years, and which is only increasing and accelerating, with each generation now out of touch with that which was vital to the generation beforehand. We are losing a great deal of soul in this overturning of culture, for culture is where soul deposits so much of itself. So much is plowed over in history anyway, by history’s natural processes, and the inevitable process of growing old and then letting go, and yet in heathenism, you don’t entirely let go : you go home. In death, you go home to all that is old. Yet this world, the world of mortal life, must not lose its roots, the roots by which it connects to that which has significance and meaning, so it is worthwhile holding on to that. We know that each generation plows the field anew, and therefore disrupts as the soil is thrown up, but there are some things which must be preserved. The plow must not touch the ancient oak tree, nor the groves that are nearby. There must be a balance. In the natural scheme of things, a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter can all return to the same tree and recall significant memories around that place. A grandfather, a father, and a son can sing the same songs, and thus pass on a continuity of spirit and memory.

In the modern world, everything has become bulldozing, a tremendous process of losing so much as old monuments of landscape and history, whether those be natural or architectural, are razed to make way for innovation and finance ; and we need every power on our side to prevent this bulldozing from undoing the history of our lives, and to fight against it. This can include collecting photographs, old tape recordings, excerpts from books, and other means to hold on to some past that has been lost and has been erased around us in our fury to undo what is, and replace it with the “new”.

As we preserve soul as it has manifested in our works, and in our surroundings (through its own activity in nature), in our language and in our life, we must not come at that ideologically. We must not come at that xenophobically in such a way as to want to keep out foreign influences. No, separatism is not the answer. The demand must be the right to choose and affirm the rate of our own alchemy. The right to affirm the rate of our own alchemy : that’s the key to a vital, dynamic conservationism, that conserves values at the same time that it is radical, because it maintains connection to our roots. That which is radical in another culture may have the possibility of touching what is radical in ours, and there is interaction at the edge-zones, and that is important. That we have the right to affirm that alchemy that is native to our soul is so important! We must resist the imposition of rates of change that are foreign to the pace of our souls. We know that that alchemy, as with all living things, involves taking in that which is external, taking in that which is foreign, and digesting it. We have the right to digest, so that that which we take from without may become authentic within us. Where my soul touches your soul touches another soul, then and there, a “folk-soul” may emerge, but the core or key element is the soul itself, and soul touches and is contiguous with other souls. The focus is not, therefore, on separated nationality, but on that which nationalism was originally trying to preserve, which was a patriotism towards the soul, which finds itself in particularity, and therefore which resists the bulldozing of particularity by impositions and imperial coercion and globalization. So that element of nationalism which was attempting to create and foster a patriotism towards the soulful, in all of its particularity and concreteness, is indeed something which ought to be affirmed, but it must be purified and excised and separated from the xenophobia and isolationism which characterized it, because we live in vital interaction, and that vital interaction can and often is a vital part of the soul, and at this point in time, so many of us are already mixed anyway, that mixedness is of our soul. We needn’t excise or cut off any of our rich heritages or our possible friendships and loves for some separatism, or even some, Gods forbid, some supremacist ideology, which is itself an abstract imposition on true, authentic soulfulness.

And lest the concept of authentic soulfulness become parochial, let us remember that we must travel outside of that which is home in order to appreciate that which is home, and when we go outside of that which is home and visit other people’s homes in other places, we come to appreciate our own home more, and discover the true nature of homeness beneath that layer of ignorance and parochiality which we have unconsciencely imposed upon soul.

So all of these are important, coming from a soulful position, to retrieve and restore that which a genuine folkism would gather, but without the horrible ideological trappings that created more tragedy in the world, and more separation, and we don’t need that. It’s not about separation. It’s about the right to one’s own pace and rate of alchemy. We’re talking about a combat of speeds here, and there are some who are demanding that things change at a certain speed or you get bulldozed, and that is what we must fight against.

Holding : holding against change is a value in heathen culture, and it is a worthwhile goal, however formidable the obstacles and odds may seem, and thus a zone for genuine heroism.

It is of primary importance that two of Odin’s names listed in the Grimnismal catalogue are Saðr and Sanngetall, “Sooth” and “Getter of Sooth”. Sooth is a word with an older Indo-European provenance, with a deeper meaning and more widespread cultural representation than “truth”, and it is found in the Hindu tradition as sat, which refers to reality itself, existence, beingness. It is not just “truth”. It is not just a kind of epistemological alignment that takes place in some abstract place in the head alone. It is an ontological alignment with the way things are, a congruence with reality itself, and particularly the deeper reality that underlies illusion. We find an example of sooth in the Anglo-Saxon Maxims, where it says that “frost shall freeze, fire shall melt wood, ice shall form a bridge, water shall cover itself, the earth shall cover itself,” and so forth. Now all of these seem rather simplistic definitions, and almost tautologies. Of course frost will freeze and fire will burn wood. But what this underlines is that attention to reality, and congruence with it was something highly valued.

In Norse parlance, sannr is connected to ideas of “proof”, of “evidence”, of things which have been proven and made certain beyond a reasonable doubt. It is connected with ideas of testimony, and therefore with court processes. In other words, something which is “sooth” is something which would convince a jury. It is therefore something which has been examined and crossexamined from multiple angles, viewpoints, and testimonies. It is also based on oathed testimony, and therefore sets the standard for us when we would determine what “sooth” is. It is our connection to reality ; that we would, standing before our most Holy Gods, declare in a court of law. Therefore, that which we would not be ready to declare under penalty of perjury, not just to a court, but to our court of our Gods, can only be expressed in the language of uncertainty and not in the language of sooth.

But because the chief God of our pantheon has as one of his names “Sooth”, it means that sooth, getting at the truth of reality, and moreover, making a living connection to it in one’s life so that one is congruent with reality, is a basic value of being a heathen, of being Asatru, of being true to the Aesir.

We have a duty to get to the truth, and specifically, by getting beyond illusions. One of the foremost opponents of the Aesir are the beings around Utgard-Loki’s court. Thor has an encounter with them, and so does Odin when he goes down into Utgard-Loki’s realm to retrieve the mead. (For those who have not yet made that connection, you can see that the Utgard-Loki episode, where Thor is in Skrymir’s glove, is referred to in Hárbarðsljóð 26, where Skrymir is there called Fjalar, and we know that Fjalar is another name for Suttung . Compare Havamal 13 – 14 with Havamal 104 -110 ; in the former, Gunnlodd is named in connection with Fjalar, and in the latter, Gunnlodd is named in connection with Suttung. Suttung-Fjalar is the giant who had taken the mead unto himself, and into whose dark, mountain realm Odin had to retrieve the mead.) We know that Utgard-Loki was a master of deception and illusion, and could make one thing seem like another. Gylfaginning 47 calls this eye-glamor or delusions of sight sjónhverfingar, literally “sight-turnings”, to turn away from seeing things as they are, a spell or trick by which the eye does not catch what is really happening. This is the stock and trade of the professional magician or illusionist, who distracts his audience’s eyes away from what he is really doing, but Utgard-Loki is the master of such craft, and with tremendous power and magic behind his turnings and twistings of vision. (We might also think here of vision in the more expansive sense : how often in life we turn away from that vision or visions which give us strength and heart, distracted by a thousand petty details which take us away from the heart of our path. A turning away from vision indeed.) The same passage also refers to these powers of illusion as velum, “wiles”, tricks and guile, the trademark of Loki, but on such a grand scale that in this episode, even Loki is completely taken in and tricked! For this quintessential trickster to be taken in by guile speaks to an almost cosmic power of illusion. Thor’s strength saved him, although he was not able to penetrate the illusion, while it was Odin’s capacity of sooth that allowed him to pass through such a realm and successfully retrieve the mead, for he was able to keep his connection to reality and penetrate through deception.

You might say, borrowing Hindu terminology, and lightly, without taking on all of its connotations, that it is valid to a degree to compare Utgard-Loki’s magic of illusion to the Hindu notion of maya, and sat, sooth, goes beyond and underneath maya in Hindu cosmology, and sooth, likewise, goes beyond the illusion of Utgard-Loki. Maya variously refers to delusion, deception, a misleading or false interpretation of nature or the purpose of being, in which we are no longer connected to the deeper truths of what are. So in a sense, we are surrounded by webs of deception, half-truths, and lies. Everyone has an agenda, and we need to penetrate beyond that, and we need, in this regard, to utilize the court method of getting as many voices as we can, from testimonies of people who are willing to testify on the basis of sound sources, where they really put their reputation on the line for what they assert. When we face the internet, for example, the primary media through which modern people search for the truth, we are often facing a web of half-truths. It has become a repository for fakelore, generated by a hundred dozen groups with agenda, each of which may present a very convincing story on its own, isolated from the other stories and facts, but we ought suspend being sold on any one story until we’ve heard the gamut of multiple viewpoints. That’s how a court works, and Odin himself says that a person doesn’t know anything until they’ve traveled widely, and that’s because you have to travel widely in order to get at many different viewpoints. It behooves us to observe this when getting at sooth ourselves, because it is very easy to become superficially convinced of anything, and to act on such conviction, when one’s exposure to the various arguments out there is shallow and inexperienced. Havamal indicates that only when we’ve been around the block and beyond a few times can we discern what sorts of things tend to steer the minds of men, and having seen them, we will not be taken in ourselves. [1]

Odin’s other name which is pared up with Saðr is Sanngetall, which simply means “He Who Gets Sooth”. Odin gets at sooth. It can also mean that he “begets” sooth, as in engendering it, implying that he is the source from which sooth is birthed. It can also mean he who guesses at sooth, and achieves sooth by riddling through to sooth, and indeed, Odin does riddle through to sooth.

There’s another important aspect of sooth that contrasts with “pipe dreams”. Sooth is about congruence with reality, and specifically, the reality of the world we live in, the reality of nature, and the reality of what it means to live on Mother Earth. There are many different ways of living on Mother Earth, but there are also ways that violate nature’s laws, and therefore we end up paying for them. If we pollute and poison the earth, we will pay the price. Here is where Odin is somewhat impatient with those who dream delusions against the texture of reality. We need to stay true to the texture of reality. Sooth implies fidelity to the phenomena, and through that fidelity, finding the truth that underlies and lies within that phenomena, and this certainly includes the phenomena of nature and of life. Because Odin has these names, we do not only follow saga. We do not only follow myth and epic, which are enormously important aspects of connecting to the worldview of our ancestors, and richly metaphorical keys to deeper truths that allow us to see through illusion ; but, we must also follow science, not in any narrow ideological sense of that term, but as the systematic search for the truth of reality beyond our wishes and delusions. Such science, as a personal and interpersonal practice of search for the truth, and systematic attempts to remain congruent with reality, by questioning and cross-examining our own assumptions, opinions, and premade conclusions, must come into account as well. Ecology as the science of natural interconnections is therefore a valid truth-form within heathenism, as other sciences can be as well.

There is a fascinating scholar, Thomas Sefton, the author of The Gods Remain : Old European Religion as found in Greece, the Germanic Countries, and Elsewhere (http://www.kolonospress.com/index.html), who has taken a somewhat partial, but quite fascinating take on Germanic cosmology, and has compared, specifically, aspects of the Sigurd saga to aspects of certain Greek tragedies in the Oidipous cycle, and claims that the function of a hero is not necessarily to win, for good does not necessarily and always win over evil, but to come at the truth however difficult that truth might be, for the ability to come to terms with the truth of reality, however unsatisfying, however painful, is one of the true signs that marks a hero, and marks them out as courageous and deserving of glory. He suggests that we contract with Odin when we wish know the truth, even the uncomfortable truth, the difficult truth, and a truth which may work crosswise to our desires, including our desires for good to always win out over evil, and our desires for the Golden Age. It’s an interesting narrative, and I suggest that people check it out for what it is worth. So long as it is not taken out of proportion, it can be an important contribution to our understanding, particularly of the notion of sooth, suggesting that we have a duty to be in touch with the uncomfortable facts and the difficult realities.

Yet I must point out, contrary in some ways to his narrative, that this kind of realism and attention to the texture of existence, need not lead us away from the Golden Age archetype of Baldur, for they can work hand-in-hand. After all, Baldur is the son of Sooth (Odin). We have here an important notion. If Baldur is the child of Odin as Sooth, then that means that the way to reach towards Baldur is through facing reality as it actually is, and not as we would wish it to be. This doesn’t mean putting aside our ideals. It means being realistic about the prevalence of our ideals in the world, and to what degree people actually value the things they say they value, and what they are actually valuing through their actions. When have a grip on this, then we can begin, however humbly, to shape reality and infuse it with the strength of our ideals, rather than becoming deceived by our own pipe-dreams. This is both a realistic idealism and an idealistic realism. Odin and Baldur are father and son.

All of this is part and parcel of coming into devotion to Odin as Sooth. I would argue that it is Odin’s devotion to sooth that brings him his great wisdom. In fact, this may be a key to understanding the runes, which are presented as universal mysteries, and yet which on first examination appear to be almost quotidian banalities of existence : cows, ice, gifts, roads, lake ... Very simple things. There may be a truth here that is worth examining : that it is through these simple things, it is through contact with the profound that lies within the simple, within the simple realities around us, that we discover the great mysteries. Indeed, to suggest something perhaps a little radical, it could very well be that we could construct our own rune-set in the present, by taking common, everyday realities, and finding their profundity, just as in the Iron Age, their rune-set reflected the common things around them. The idea that through honest perception and connection reality we can find profundity is something worth serious thought and consideration.

We need contact with reality. By that, I don’t mean someone else’s idea of reality. I mean real things, like stones, and rocks, and leaves, and metal. We need contact with real things, because those real things lend us their qualities. Over time, by being in contact with reality, with sensuous reality, the things share their qualities with us. We can become like steel ; we can become like rocks ; we can become like the leaves. They share their essence with us, and it is only through contact with nature and the realities of nature and the heill-infused material world about us that we learn how to be fully human. This is perhaps one of the most significant and overlooked aspects of sooth, of maintaining contact with reality through the phenomena, for through sensuousness there is a sharing, and not just a communication of qualities, but a genuine communion of qualities, through which we can discover the stoneness, the leafness, the metalness, the waterness within ourselves, and become everything we were meant to be.

We cannot become everything we were meant to be if we do not allow the qualities of reality to midwife those qualities of soul within us, so everything around us reminds us of who we are. This is akin to Plato’s notion of anamnesis, the idea that we have had former lives and are simply remembering what we already knew but have forgotten. Even if we do not buy into Plato’s notion on a literal level of reincarnation, the idea that we were once fruits on the World Tree means that something of the All lives in us, that is potent in our potential, of which the things of the world remind us. The wonderful thing about the root metaphor of the World Tree is that everything has circulated through it. It is a constantly recycling process of everything, and since we have been fruits on the World Tree, there are elements of everything which have indeed passed through us, for they circulated through our embryos, our soul-embryos when we hung on the Tree. Our soul-embryos were fed on the sap, through which all forms have flown into. The intelligence, and more importantly, the significance, of all things have flowed into that sap which circulates throughout the Tree, throughout the unseen but profoundly real body of the Living Cosmos. Cormac’s medieval Irish Glossary includes a curious term, tuirgen, the idea that one becomes everything, from the lowest form to the highest form, which is mirrored in Iolo Morganwg’s Barddas, as well as in Rumi’s idea that we have been mineral, vegetable, and animal. From a Norse perspective, we can affirm that all of this is true, not necessarily in a literal sense, but in the sense that we have been on the World Tree ourselves, and have thus experienced the traces of the interflow of everything, and that therefore, it lives within us, waiting to be awakened, through remembrance, through contact with the sensory materials about us. There’s no need for us to be weak : we have the strength of stones and mountains and steel, the flexibility of the willow tree, the freshness of the green grass, and the ability to let go, like the falling leaves, all within us. We just need contact with reality in order to awaken those qualities within us. This is the power that sooth offers.

[1] Havamal is full of useful advice on how to penetrate the realm of half-truths, assumptions, and ill-investigated opinions :

Inn vari gestr, er til verðar kemr, þunnu hljóði þegir, eyrum hlýðir, en augum skoðar; svá nýsisk fróðra hverr fyrir (Havamal 7), “The wary guest, when he comes to the meal, with thin hearing keeps silent, his ears actively listening, and his eyes looking about ; so every wise man is inquisitive and carefully investigates what is before him.” In other words, one who is wary of the prevalence of sjónhverfingar and wiles in the world, holds back from speaking conclusively until he has listened to what everyone around the table has to say, observing closely, and then has enquired into the matter. One listens with “thin hearing”, in other words, not getting taken in by everything. We might imagine it as a kind of cursory skimming of people’s arguments, taking in its form and gist without committing to it or being taken in by it, so that we can review it later, comparing them with other arguments, and come to our own conclusions.

Sá einn veit er víða ratar ok hefr fjölð of farit, hverju geði stýrir gumna hverr, sá er vitandi er vits (Havamal 18), “He alone knows who has widely traveled and has journeyed much ; he who has wits knows how the mind of every man is steered.” In the master-apprentice training widespread in Europe, the one who has completed their apprenticeship and is ready to begin practicing is known as a “journeyman” (or in German, geselle), one who has journeyed from workshop to workshop to experience the different styles of various masters in the craft. This kind of journeying to complete one’s knowledge and training, and round out one’s skill, is a traditional part of heathen culture, as Odin indicates here. Once you’ve been around enough, you begin to see what kinds of things guide men’s minds, and being knowledgeable, you then have the opportunity to steer minds as well, but towards the truth, for those who keep their wits about them have a truer kind of knowledge and are thus able to guide others.

Ósnotr maðr þykkisk allt vita, ef hann á sér í vá veru; hittki hann veit, hvat hann skal við kveða, ef hans freista firar (Havamal 26), "The unwise man thinks he knows it all if he's been through a few storms, but he knows not what he shall answer if men test him." Freista means to be put on trial, not necessarily legally, but through a series of tests and questions. The notion of a trial invokes the idea of a jury, who in traditional times conducted the investigation, and thus, one has to be ready to face a panel of one’s fellows, who have many different perspectives, and are not going to question you alone within the zone of whatever ideology you’ve subjected yourself to, but rather, from various standpoints of common sense and the reasonable person standard would test what you know. Can you answer questions? It’s easy to think you know a lot if you haven’t had to face questions. Margr þá fróðr þykkisk,ef hann freginn er-at ok nái hann þurrfjallr þruma. "Many thinks himself wise, if he is not questioned and he can stay behind in dry clothes." (Havamal 30.)

Ósnotr maðr, er með aldir kemr, þat er bazt, at hann þegi; engi þat veit, at hann ekki kann, nema hann mæli til margt; veit-a maðr, hinn er vettki veit, þótt hann mæli til margt (Havamal 27), “For the unsophisticated man, when he comes amongst men, it is best if he is silent ; no one will know that he knows nothing unless he declares too much ; such a man does not know that he knows nothing although he proclaims far too much.” Shooting off your mouth before you know enough will expose you as a fool. It is listening, and not thrusting your unsophisticated opinions upon others, that will allow you to become more sophisticated.

Fróðr sá þykkisk, er fregna kann ok segja it sama (Havamal 28), “He is thought wise who knows how to question and report his conclusions fittingly.” Part of listening is asking the right questions. Knowing how to question is also knowing how to think critically, and frame one’s inquiries in such a way that one is able to outwit potential half-truths and unexamined assumptions in the other’s answers. Again, the model of a trial is perfect here : one has to know how to ask questions in the same way that a lawyer can examine and cross-examine a witness. Then it is important to frame one’s conclusions appropriately and fittingly, so they are neither exaggerated, nor disproportionate to the established facts. To report fittingly is to practice sooth ; sooth is an ideal that draws us closer to reality.

all translations copyright 2010 by Siegfried Goodfellow

It has recently come to my attention that there are some heathens who believe that our ancestral religion has little to do with ecology or reverence for the earth. Such colossal and inexcusable ignorance on the part of people who ought to know better requires a response. Reverence for the numinosity of nature was so pronounced that worship itself was centered in sacred groves. In addition to quoting classical sources as well as native heathen sources, I will be extensively citing from modern studies of sacred groves in India which underline their religious and ecological importance, for this is the material which amplifies and brings into both focus and significance the former sources.




[L]uco reverentia ... potestatem numinis prae se ferens (Germania 39), "They pay reverence to a sacred grove, ... where they bring themselves before the power of divinity."

Nature is infused with numinosity. God is in the grove.

[L]ucos ac nemora consecrant deorumque nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident (Germania 9), "They consecrate sacred groves and forests to the Gods, and invoke them with secret names, because they consider that alone to be respectful." Ceterum nec cohibere parietibus deos neque in ullam humani oris speciem adsimulare ex magnitudine caelestium arbitrantur (Ibid), "Moreover, they neither restrain the Gods within walls nor imitate them with any kind of human countenance, because of their belief in the majesty of the heavenly Gods."

Stato tempore in silvan auguriis patrum et prisca formidine sacram omnes eiusdem sanguini populi legationibus coeunt (Germania 39), "At appointed times in a forest, by ancestral divination [ie., communion with the disir], and out of ancient and sacred religious awe, all people of the same family, and the deputies of the people, gather in the forest."

Eoque omnis superstitio respicit, tamquam inde initia gentis, ibi regnator omnium deus, cetera subiecta atque parentia (Germania 39), "And everyone gazes upon it, respecting and caring for it [the grove] with such overwhelming awe, as if in that very place the people first emerged, for there is the God who Rules All, all the rest being subject to him and heeding him." Deorum maxime Mercurium colunt (Germania 9), "They worship Mercury [Odin] as the highest and greatest of the Gods."

All-Father is in the Woods. The wind blowing through the trees manifests the holy presence of his thoughts. "Weather" and "wind" are all from the same Proto-Indo-European root from which the name Vata/Votan/Odin emerge. Wodan in Anglo-Saxon refers to someone possessed by a spirit, raving, running wild, full of fury and bacchic ecstasy, roaring, growling, murmuring, roaming, blustering, wild, and of the woods. The homonymic relationship between wod and wood draws the two concepts together, as one goes to the woods to go wild.




Vilhelm Gronbech, drawing upon his extensive depth studies of the Icelandic Sagas, summarizes the heathen approach to the sacred groves, as evidenced in the Sagas : "...[M]en would point to a stone, a waterfall, a meadow, a mountain, as the holiest of holy things, the true source whence all luck, all honour, all frith flowed out to pulse through the veins of kinsmen. Thorolf's family had their spiritual home in the mountain that stood above the homestead --- Helgafell (the holy mountain) it was naturally called. One of Thorolf's contemporaries, the settler Thorir Snepil, lived at Lund, and he "worshipped the grove" (lund) ; another, Lodin, acquired the Flatey valley right up as far as Gunnsteinar, and he worshipped the rocks there. Hrolf lived at Fors, and his son Thorstein worshipped the waterfall (foss), and all the leavings of the house were thrown into the rapids. Helgafell was fenced off from daily life by a holy silence ; nothing, neither man nor beast, was suffered to perish there, no blood was suffered to flow, no dirt to defile. But it was not only a place inviolable ; it was the place whence luck was brought. When it was a case of hitting upon the right decision in a difficult matter, the discussion was adjourned to the holy place ... [P]lans made on Helgafell were more likely to succeed than all others. From the foss came inspiration to the seer Thorstein Raudnef, so that he could always see, in the autumn, which of the cattle would not live through the winter and therefore should be chosen for slaughter. The power of holiness is the same as that which Tacitus heard spoken of among the southern Germanic tribes ; in the land of Hermundures there lay a salt spring, where the gods were to be found, and where men could have their wishes fulfilled. He knew too, that the Batavians assembled in a sacred grove to make plans against the Romans ... On the island of Fositeland ... two features stand out distinctly : the blessing in that spring which was in the grove -- for there the inhabitants procured their water -- and the peace and solemnity of holiness which marked the resting place of luck. The animals grazed there, sacredly inviolable, all that was found within the boundaries lay undisturbed in its place, while men came and went, the people moved in silence towards the spring in the middle, drew their water, and moved silently away." (Vilhelm Gronbech, The Culture of the Teutons, Volume II, "Holiness", pp. 112 - 113.) The groves were places of inviolability, where no blood was to be shed, and where animals and trees were left in their wild, self-willed place.

Indeed, the entire universe was visualized as a tree whose well-being the All-Father worried over, and for whom he urged human beings to be thoughtful. In Grimnismal 35, he says, Askr Yggdrasils drýgir erfiði meira en menn um viti: hjörtr bítr ofan, en á hliðu fúnar, skerðir Niðhöggr neðan, "The ash-tree Yggdrasil suffers great hardship, more than men know about : the harts bite from above, and the side [bark] is rotting, Nidhogg diminishes from beneath." Since the Tree is under such stress, we ought be healing rather than scathing influences. After all, we are trees ourselves. Not only were human beings drawn out of trees in the yoredays, but poets commonly refer to people as trees.

As far as the overwhelming evidence that Jord/Nerthus, "Earth", was also "Frigga", "beloved", in other words, "Beloved Mother Earth", I will refer the reader to William Reaves' excellent essay, "Odin's Wife : Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology". A religion where Mother Earth is the wife of the chief God is without any question an "earth-centered religion".




The sacred grove is an Indo-European wide (and beyond!) institution. "The protection of patches of forest as sacred groves and of several tree species as sacred trees belong to the religion-based conservation ethos of ancient people all over the world." (M.D. Subash Chandran and Madhav Gadgil, "Sacred Groves and Sacred Trees of Uttara Kannada", in Baidyanath Saraswati, ed., Lifestyle and Ecology, D.K. Printworld Ltd., New Delhi, 1998, p. 85.) The institute of the sacred grove is not a mere matter of speculation, because the institution, while under attack under globalism, still persists in India, where it has been studied. "Although such practices became extinct in most parts of the world, basically due to changes in religion, and during recent times due to changes in resource use patterns, sacred groves and sacred trees continue to be of much importance in religion, culture and resource use systems in many parts of India. ... [T]he scientific study of them was initiated by Gadgil and Vartak (1975, 1976, 1981). Gadgil (1985) pioneered the view that sacred groves and sacred trees belong to a variety of cultural practices which helped Indian society to maintain an ecologically steady state with wild living resources. This view has been fortified by many later studies..." (Ibid.) Addressing Indo-European wide practice, they say, "...[E]ach community had its own sacred grove. Especially worshipped were sanctuaries built among anormous age-old trees which were never to be cut down ... Sacred enclosures formed one of the major categories of land use. These usually contained groves of trees and springs of water ; within them the environment was preserved, as a rule, in its natural state ... Aquelus spoke of travellers praying under the trees on "a little sacred hill fenced all around". But the grove of Daphne was ten miles in circumference. A grove near Lerna stretched all the way down to a mountainside by the sea. Alexander the Great found an entire island dedicated to a goddess identified as Artemis ... ". (Ibid, pp. 86 - 87.)

There is a fundamental reason such "religious conservation" has passed out of existence amongst Europeans. "Due mainly to the rise of dogmatic religions like Christianity and Islam, which advocated faith in one god and were explicitly for the eradication of 'pagan' practices, the tradition of maintaining sacred groves and sacred trees vanished from most countries." (Ibid, p. 89.)

"Religious conservation" is an apt term, because such groves are ecological sanctuaries. "Studies on sacred groves reveal that they are priceless treasures of great ecological, biological, cultural and historical value." (Ibid, p. 90.) The authors quote D. Brandis, "The first Inspector General of Forests in India ... "... These sacred forests, as a rule, are never touched by the axe, except when wood is wanted for the repair of religious buildings, or in special cases for other purposes..." ... The forest was in good condition and well protected. Nothing was allowed to be cut except wood to feed the sacred fire and "this required the cutting annually of a small number of trees which were carefully selected among those that showed signs of age and decay." (Ibid, pp. 90 - 91.) Although precise regulations may have differed from nation to nation, in general, a pattern of strict conservatism of the wild resources of the grove prevailed. In general, these were "sacred places where trees and plants were allowed to grow undisturbed and where reptiles, birds and animals could have free living without fear of poaching or interference by man." (Ibid, p. 91.) Medieval laws in Germany show that cutting down sacred trees carried extreme penalties, and the Greek story of Erisychthon demonstrates that amongst the Greeks such an act was considered a crime as well.

Today, in the midst of widespread disruption of natural areas, the practice of sacred groves gives nature a resting area from which to regenerate. Such areas allow scientists to study flora and fauna not found elsewhere. "Ramakrishnan (1992) observes that the climax vegetation at higher elevations in Meghalaya, as at Cherrapunji, is today represented only by sacred groves. According to A.S. Chauhan of the Botanical Survey of India, the sacred groves of Meghalaya, totalling about 1000 km2 of undisturbed natural vegetation, are found scattered in small pockets all over the Khasi and Jaintia Hills. With heavy pressure of population on the land, these groves remain the last refugia for 700 rare plant species (Down to Earth, 1994). ... Such groves and forests are often the only remains of the original vegetation ..." (Ibid, p. 92). "Early travellers like Hunter in 1879 nad Gurdon in 1914 made frequent mention of the very conspicuous groves of evergreen forests on the Khasi plateau in Meghalaya (Rodgers, unpublished). Bor (1942) stated that all evergreen forest patches on the Khasi plateau were either sacred groves or land unfit for cultivation." (Ibid.) The authors list 107 rare birds catalogued by scientists in sacred groves.

"Evaluating the small-scale refugia of peasant societies, Joshi and Gadgil (1993) argue that such a system may permit biological resource use at near maximal sustainable level, while keeping the risk of resource extermination low. Such an interpretation is consistent with the fact that in the tribal state of Mizoram, the village woodlot subject to regulated use is termed the supply forest, while the adjacent sacred grove is called the safety forest (Malhotra, 1990)." (Ibid, p. 97.) The authors argue that the emergence of the institution of the sacred grove was in part a response by agriculturalists to their disruption of the habitat, and thus represents a learning curve in response to resource depletion, and therefore "sheltered the community of early peasants from this impoverishment [of biodiversity]." (Ibid, p. 112.) Thus, there were both pragmatic and spiritual reasons for early agriculturalists to institutionalize the sacred grove. These groves were distinguished from woodlots "where people gathered their regular necessities of fuel, leaf manure, minor timber, etc." (Ibid, p. 99.), and often had taboos not only on cutting down trees, but hunting within them, which ensured a "richness of wildlife" (Ibid) in the area. Consequently, these groves, "... in addition to acting as sanctums for wildlife, would also have provided ample food especially for frugiverous animals." (Ibid.) Various forest officials in India have noted that the sacred groves are "of "great economic and climatic importance. They favour the existence of springs, and perennial streams ..."" (Ibid.) Subrash Chandran and Gadgil concluded in 1993 that the sacred groves, "being mostly patches of climax evergreen forest, played an important role in the conservation of biodiversity and helped in the regeneration and restoration of degraded forests around."

Under the British regime in India, many sacred groves were seized by the government, and local ecologies "were subjected to unregulated exploitation" (Ibid, p. 101). This constituted "a major intervention in the traditional resource management systems of the region with ravaging consequences for the landscape. Timber became the major commodity for sale. ... The local peasants in most places forfeited their traditional hold over the forests, including the sacred groves." Nevertheless, religion provides at least a basis for resistance, and significantly, the groves have managed to survive mainly in areas where "Christianity and Islam have had practically no impact on the religion of the people."

Studies show that even heavily stressed peasants maintained up to 6% of their land base as sacred groves, with supply forests and other areas adding another 30 - 40% of their land. When we consider that these were modern studies conducted on peasants living subsistence lifestyles, and that sacred groves in general represented no utilitarian function, this is quite remarkable. Even at these lower percentages, the authors conclude that "the sacred groves have found to be sheltering several plant specis which have mostly vanished from areas in between", constituting "centres of plant diversity, harbouring even rare and threatened plant species", and "may be considered the best samples of the climax evergreen forest of the region" (Ibid, p. 112.) Additionally, sacred groves were "haven[s] for wildlife" (Ibid, p. 113) and a rich variety of fauna. Taking into account the integration of sacred groves into the entire resource management system of the land base, the traditional system was found to be "surprisingly similar" to "alternative agricultural systems ... based on ecological principles of sustainability and stability" (Ibid.).

Chandran and Gadgil emphasize that the spiritual traditions immanent in the sacred groves are "strongly cosmocentric, where man lives as part of a system in which everything is related to everything else", but warn that, "today, rapidly drifting from our traditions of sustainable use and coexistence, we seem to be entering a man-centred world that implies the decimation of nature."

Germania, too, where "nothing was more powerful than Wyrd", was cosmocentric as well, where humans fulfilled their needs within a larger context of respect for the natural world and the Gods who infused that world with life and spirit.

In conclusion, heathenism is, has been, and must be an earth-centered religion if it is to remain true to its roots. The material presented here in support of this conclusion is but the tip of the iceberg. Care for the Living Cosmos (Yggdrasil) is part and parcel of the religious ethos itself, and this includes setting aside and caring for sacred groves where the wild flora and fauna is free from human interference and destruction.

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get back to their roots.

What does life want? Life wants to taste the sun, to drink in light and make it live a thousand forms. And sun, sun is blaze reaching out towards life’s formation ... Look upon green, and see gold : gold enfleshed in leaf, gold grasped as rain and now leaping up to return through form to source. Gaze upon meadows, and see a single stream of sun, a golden river greened, withal, around. Life is sun’s kaleidoscope, and evolution an iteration of mirrors. Through this superdriven plasma articulated thousand and million-fold, spirit ascends through out-blossoming evolution, and so the sordid soiled flesh of monsters was seeded by the Gods with uprising potential. Here Sol, here Jord, here Freyr and Odin speak their wondrous, choired galder. Life is but their song’s choreography.

Odr, Freya's to-be-husband, having rescued her, and then, in his madness, gone on to avenge his father and battle against the Gods, now rises to surrender the sword to win the hand of Freya in wedlock. He must leap out from beyond the earth's edge, grasp Bifrost, and ascend through the heavens, up towards Asgard. There he must pass Odin's riddle-tests before he may be let through to take his love.

Arose the rose’s kiss-bestower, rampant rave of love’s sweet song, the soul, to seek his mistress, out beyond the bounds of earth’s edge. And there, ebonocean diving, rich molassan spackle of Night’s cloak, he sought in desperate swim the silent song-paths of stars. Gasp as up the roiling foam of vacuum churned, he grasped the iridescent, thousand-huéd fish-tail, glittering moon-gold’s scatter wet upon its sleekened, stellar back, and rose, as fingers clutched the argentine sands of an unseen coast or istular peninsula, and up upon his feet.

Now glide, as surf or skied the turbulent wave of rainbow’s rush, with fleet and flight feet that coast the rolling undulations. Fast, the fire’s rapids ripple : he must ride, with pluck and certain stride, and catch with agile feet the tread of the flame’s slip. And as a flag unfurling in the wind of aether, a shook and tied-died tongue of flame, he rode the outer paths of song and eerie static.

He traveled along tongues, long elongated star-filaments vibrate, through the sonar void, light’s eclipse, as salmon towards the spawnness, light beyond the blind.

Light begleaming refractate, inflected shimmer-disperse from every round rim of eyes, and refulgent crescendo, celestial splendor waxing, eyes swore all sights before were blind, for this unveiled illum’s biosis, the very species myriad of photonic genesis, and awe was a thousand vellums of words, each its own peculiar hue and shade.

And still up the stellar canyons ascend, upon the congealed granite of vacuum photoned, pulsar’s riverine melissa-speckled ladder, out against the blind-black vastness of full-cannot-be-seen and thus so empty-seemed in awesome ocean of dark overwhelm. Light might be believed in darkness, if love drew.

And so drew on the mad, bemaddened rush of spirit’s eloquence, up, impossible beyond the quasars’ homelands, rise, and pass the falling-rising rim of fortune’s wheel galactic, creamed will-o-wisp churned to spiral labyrinth, through whose mazes mazed bewildered youth toward love. For there upon the pinnacle, power’s gaze of aether’s ancient homelands, source of spirit’s winds, unfound peak and everywhere-centered centrum of awe, befulcrumed high-hinge within the all, the very heightitude of beyondment --- there, love’s elegance and festive choir dined. Atop and without, the without-within a thousand miles alone reveals, for so the here is only found in journey. There --- the highest here --- he found her, beyond the walls of riddle.

Questions peaked the quest in puzzle, hostile rebufferment of homebody’s baffle. Growling hounds on stellar guard rails, grim intimidation of maestro’s interrogatio : the test celestial of dissertatio : GOD’s enguardment of the holy places shut to monstrous marauds. There in quick and helix-ricocheted rapid of call and response question, wit against wit, the prove, the final fristing, haze of mind’s realize, in divine dictation of riddle, the Full-Swift strong passed the eloquent candidate, past, in capped-and-gown’d graduate, on towards love’s abode, where all-waiting welcome arms of adoration lip-rims ope, as sunrise’s never-ending gaze from out the gates of newest dawn elope upon forever-fields of union’s wonder.

We may ask ourselves whether polytheism is but pantheism aspected, and given focus, lending us human form and figure with which to understand and comprehend the infinitude in digestible chunks : the poetry through which humans particularize the Pan. From this standpoint, polytheism is but archetypal pantheism, where we channel an experience of pantheism --- the divine coursing through the all of all --- through the mediation of those archetypes which are native to our psyche, and developed out individually and artistically by each culture or subculture into those pattern languages we call "religions".

Within this paradigm, we can afford a certain agnosticism regarding the ontology of these archetypes ; in other words, the question of, "Are these archetypes just categories of our mind? Are they simply very colorful personified Kantian categories through which we experience the world?" or -- "Do they subsist on their own and have their own actual beingness?" It seems to me that we must return to the Norse idea of Wyrd as primary, meaning that life is a Mystery, and sometimes these questions must be left in mystery. For if I respond to the archetypes in my nature, what does it matter their ultimate reality, so long as when I act as if they were real, when I enter into that poetic place of deep play, I am affected and I am transformed in relation to the pantheistic totality? Or must we take ourselves always so seriously that the idea that the religious aspect of ourselves could be encountered and experienced through deep play is so offensive? Are we so deadly serious that we cannot see how serious deep play may be if it is engaged with sincerity and with devotion? And are we so attached to the notion of certainty that we cannot allow our engagement with the divine to include that play of uncertainty which a certain agnosticism embraces?

So to speak of archetypes is to speak a/Gnostically, affirming the ecstasy of our experience without trying to imprison it within static certainty. It is not to assert the unreality of the archetypes, but to suspend and bracket the question of their ontology, and to speak phenomenologically. The particularization of the archetypes through the art of any one culture represent heirloom forms of those archetypes that have a charm and poetry of their own, and if they appeal, we may take in inheritance from the ancestors, and experience and develop them on our own.

Indeed, polytheism must embrace multifacetedness, and if I am a multifaceted person, then there are aspects of me which take literally my religion and which ontologize, and then there are aspects of me that play with uncertainty, that ask questions, that live my religiosity through the riddles rather than through the answers. James Hillman has a brilliant idea in Revisioning Psychology that each God has a type of thinking and a type of imagining that is native to that God, and so if we only think our polytheism through one category, through one way of thinking of things, through one facet, we are not truly being polytheistic, because there is a style of cognition, of affectivity, of even worldview that is native to each God, and thus we can pass through the circuit of the pantheon as a means of approaching, in a human way, the totality of the divine All. (Indeed, my frequent critique of Asatru has focused on the movement's tendency to view the entire pantheon entirely through the eyes of a warrior archetype, thus castrating the full spectrum of divine color.)

I want to re-emphasize that this a/Gnosticism is not a coldness towards the warmth of religious experience, nor a retreat into conceptual abstraction and sterility. Rather, it is to engage the fertile and mildly warm middle place between the hot and the cold. Between the fire and the ice is where we find our "best place", our optimum.

So if you were to say, in response, "Why, Siegfried, do you not believe?", I would say, Oh! I believe! But to believe is to be in love, and who can explain love? Who can account for how they love, for all the different thoughts they have in love, for the surge and the drama and the shifting cycles of experience within love? Indeed, on any one day, my attitude towards the beloved may differ. Ask me one day, and I am cynical about my love. Ask me another day, and I am rapturous. Ask me yet another day, and I am content.

For I will be anarchical in my spirituality. I am not going to be held back from my full experience through narrow rules and arbitrary cognitive restrictions. Tradition, for me, is a patterning of freedom, and I take it in that spirit and in that light.

The advantages of utilizing multiplicity in particularizing the divine is that when approach the All, it is so overwhelming and all-encompassing, that for beings with our limited cognitive capacity, it tends to blur into one vague "stuffness" with little differentiation. But when I utilize these various lenses that the ancestors have cocreated and crafted -- the "runes of eternity" that Rig taught to the first King -- then aspects of the divine totality, of the pantheistic promiscuity that is this cosmos, unfold before me in rich particularity, that I would miss if it were all one vagueness.

We must remember that for Jung, archetypes were not so flat as Kant's logical categories. They had a beingness to them, which resists us and behaves independently. It was their very independence that forced on him the notion that our psyche, our soul, our experience participates, and is implicated, in essences that transcend us ; that when we look "inside", there are aspects to our experience that transcend our personal concerns, and which, for that they resist us, and confound us, and confront us, and upset us, and frustrate us, as well as inspiring us, and challenging us, and pulling us out towards something greater with a sense of striving --- because of all of this, they have an independent reality or being of some sort. But Jung's genius is in maintaining the agnosticism of the concept, because as a more vibrant, living, animalistic form of Kant's categories, Kant of course said that it is through these categories that our experience comes to take on meaning and through which we are able to differentiate anything, so how could we make any statements of certainty about these beings or essences which are the archetypes, since it is through them that we experience? Another way to say this is, it is through the Gods and their powers and their gifts and their styles that we are able to experience the world at all, and therefore how could we make an independent evaluation of the Gods' reality, of their ontology, without utilizing an aspect or style of the Gods to do so? You see, we are within a moebius strip, a ouroboros, a snake biting its own tale. We are within a complex series of Celtic knots, in which we cannot untangle ourselves, but only circulate through the mesh.

So to suspend the question of ontology is not to deny the ontology. To leave in abeyance just exactly what is the reality of the Gods is not to denigrate the reality of the Gods. For we ourselves are subject to the same doubts and questions, particularly for beings like ourselves, who come into existence and then out of existence like a flash, like gnats flying through a room. Are we real? Who is the person asking the question whether the Gods are real? Who is that person? Is that person real? What is reality in this circulating, unfathomable Celtic knot of Wyrd in which we are all implicated? Would we not be arrogant to assert any certain knowledge about topics so mysterious and vast*? Who can say what the mystery of one's self is, let alone the mystery of the Gods?

So I will say as an heir, and a proud heir at that, of the ancient polytheistic paganisms of our ancestors, that I am an archetypal pantheist, and to emphasize that I am also anarchical, and therefore will not have my ecstatic, mystical experience subjected to someone else's arbitrary restrictions, I will call myself an anarchetypal pantheist, with no prejudice, and full embrace of the archetypal experience of that heirloom pantheon my ancestors have handed to me. And because it is rich and powerful and connects me with deepest source, I say it is real, and yet, because I do not arrogantly step into certainty, I also have the ability to nomadically wander outside of those heirlooms, and experience the divine with other folk who have other means of connecting, and thus my experience really is broad and rich.







* I have elsewhere spoken of our faith as an "audacity of will" willing to assert connection to that which is loved even over the abyss of death, beyond which empiricism can say little to nothing, and therefore which defies a scientific materialism. Nevertheless, such a faith, as a function of the will, is not a matter of certainty, for we ourselves are in mystery about which we assert, and yet, whatever its ultimate form, we do will that mystery. To say, I worship the Gods as I understand them, is a humble statement, that yet can admit of passionate devotion, even to the point of willingness to make sacrifices unto them, for even without certainty, life itself is a gamble where we must choose what is of worth and make our bet. Should the Gods, or the divinity which they encompass and express, transcend and surpass our conceptions of them, which they undoubtedly do, we have faith that we will be judged by the inherent worth of our deeds, and the devotion within the motives inherent to them. My audacity may be expressed in my passion, while my humility is expressed in my acknowledgement of mystery, and therefore the inadequacy of any primate modelization of that mystery. Such audacity tends towards great deeds ; such humility tends towards tolerance.

The stampede primeval of storm-gods into the blizzard, grappling in the fog with formlessness to draw out form in the haze : visualize the Gods wrestling with shadow in the sleet, dismembering the storm with their own passionate chaos of vibrant order, bringing life where there was derangement. Creation may be imagined as such a battle between clarity and obscurity, shape and shadow, light and darkness, with resultant color spilling forth in the blood of the clash, with all its nuanced shadings. In this melee, the formless immensity threatened to swallow and vanish the holy powers, who, persevered from their own audacity and wild-eyed eagerness, thrust themselves further and more creatively into the grapple, to rend the formless and render form. Here the rime-thurses, the sleet-and-hail throngs of frost, were thrown out of their howling derangement, with the warmth of the strong arm wielding mallet against the Earth's anvil, to shape. Here the horde of the wod-warriors, the wild, rushing wit and gusto rising high in inspiration, which we see reflected in a river's white-water surge, or the blitz of the striking wind through the course of the forest's branches, charged mightily and with primordial, undaunted confidence into the challenge before them. We may say in a sense that this battle continues indefinitely within the soul of the world as we seek to create in the midst of disorder.

The Gods give the world the gift of order. But this is living order, to which our penchant to line things up in rows and columns is the most elementary and juvenile rudiment. From the electrifyingly vibrant and ramifyingly complex intelligence of the Gods' order, even our most advanced mathematics, in all their complexity, are as child's play. There is within that order the Gods give a logos function, in the deepest sense of the word. And the name given to this order is heill. It is a whole-making force, that touches ice and forms a snowflake, engerming crystalline growth into the very structure of substance.

The Gods grasp essences. They are able to grok the essential nature of a thing, to see its potential locked in a static form that protects but imprisons the essence, and free it by reshaping the form to fit the essence. These are great acts of understanding. Edmund Carpenter has a classic essay about Eskimo sculptors and how they see the subject suggested in the material, and work to bring it out. "As the carver holds the unworked ivory lightly in his hand, turning it this way and that, he whispers, “Who are you? Who hides there?” And then, “Ah, seal!” He rarely sets out to carve, say, a seal, but picks up the ivory, examines it so to find its hidden form and, if that’s not immediately apparent, carves aimlessly until he sees it, humming or chanting as he works. Then he brings it out: Seal, hidden, emerges. It’s always there: He doesn’t create it: he releases it: he helps it step forth. In a deeper sense, of course, there is no “it”; he does more than discover: he reveals." (Edmund Carpenter, Man and Art in the Arctic, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Browning, Montana, 1964.) "The carver never attempts to force the ivory into uncharacteristic forms, but responds to the material as it tries to be itself, and thus the carving is continually modified as the ivory has its say." (Ibid.) This releasing of potentiality is found in the Norse word órlausn, which has taken on the meaning, "to answer or respond", yet which literally means, "to loosen out of" or to "release". And thus, when we are asked a question, we release the answer out of the question itself. This is how the Gods create.

Carpenter's imagery allows us to imagine how the Gods handled the broken bones and flesh of Ymir as they pondered creation. "The carving lives in the hand as it is moved, spoken to and about." (Ibid.) Even experiences can be freed from the dull undifferentiation which would keep them locked up. "I’ve seen silent, gently, slow-moving Eskimo, suddenly caught up in the hunt, accomplish astonishing feats of skill and daring. Yet there was consistency here. They were the same. They simply allowed the world to act towards them with complete freedom. They weren’t passive: they freed this experience from its formless state and gave it expression and beauty. When you feel a song willing up within you, you sing it; when Eskimo feel themselves possessed by the hunt, they commit themselves fully to it." (Ibid.)

Carpenter suggests that the environment of the tundra -- a barren, difficult environment our ancestors identified with Jotunheim, or approaching thereof -- forces the artist to find the shape in the form in order to create order. To his description may be supplemented the knowledge that our Gods formed the world out of the screaming blizzard that was Ymir. "The environment encourages the Eskimo to think in this fashion. To Western minds the “monotony” of snow, ice, and darkness can often be depressing, even frightening. Nothing in particular stands out; there is no scenery in the sense in which we use the term. But the Eskimo do not see it this way. They’re not interested in scenery, but in action, existence ... for nothing in their world easily defines itself and is separable from the general background. What exists, the Eskimo themselves must struggle to bring into existence. Theirs is a world which has to be conquered with each act and statement, each carving and song – but which, with each act accomplished, is as quickly lost. ... But his role is not passive. He reveals form; he cancels nothingness. ... they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside. ... Carver, like poet, releases form from the bonds of formlessness; he brings it forth into consciousness. He must reveal form in order to protest against a universe that is formless, and the form he reveals should be beautiful. ... Here, then, is a world of chaos and chance, a meaningless whirl of cold and white; man alone can give meaning to this – its form does not come ready-made." (Ibid., emphasis mine.) This cancelling of nothingness, this conquest of the undifferentiated and howling monotony, to bring out its difference, is the shaping magic the Gods bring to existence to ground our world. The form is not "ready-made", and yet it does lie inherent within the material, if one has the eyes to see.

There is thus a study of the material to understand its essence, and then a bringing-out of this essence by shaving off that which is inessential, and bringing the essence into that form which allows it to come into its own. Because shaping implies working with the material, there is thus an intimacy that is cultivated with the nature of the material. One does not carve marble, ivory, and wood all in the same way. Similarly, the different parts of Ymir's body presented different possibilities. With each material, one must work with the grain in the wood, the structural pattern inherent in its substance. One explores the material to see what it can do. There is thus a playful sensuality inherent in creation, and indeed, the Gods are described as playful in the age when they were shaping the world.

The Gods therefore find the potential within matter and shape it by giving it form. That shaping is a creative act which bestows heill. The two words most frequently utilized to describe creation in the Eddas are sköpuð and gerðu. In English, they "geared and shaped". "Gearing" involves preparing, which implies careful planning for contingencies, and the ability to meet that which may come. It is thus a species of intelligence and order. They readied the world for the challenges which it would unfold. Gearing also means taking the time it takes to prepare something : letting it cook in its own time. Great things take time and slow preparation. In "shaping", the Gods gave proportion to life, that the matter within it might find its proper pathways. Because shaping works with the material at hand, it is not about imposition, but release, of form. Each essence is allowed to spring into its being, and finds its own within that shape native to it. It is thus not broken from what it is and twisted beyond its own inherency to suit the whims of the carver, but blends itself with the material, subtly bending and stretching it to find its point of greatest balance. (If our modern landscaping followed such divine principles, our houses and other structures would blend harmoniously into environment, for we would shape our environment, bringing out its higher power and creative potentiality, rather than impose upon it.) Balanced and made whole, it is heill.

To heill we may contrast illr. Illr is the opposite of heillr. It is a disordering force, which deranges the wholeness of all with which it comes into contact. It is not malicious per se, although if it has been driven mad enough by its derangement it may be, but more unbalancing. It is thus, as our more modern form of it ("ill") suggests, sick, unwhole. It can have a dementing effect on its surroundings ; it is misshapen (ósköpnir), unfortunate, even cursed. It partakes of the hríð, the storm, both disordering and tending to cover over differentiation.

Heillr shapes, gives structure, form, intelligence, balance, and most especially, ability to cope and adapt. Adaptability might be the very definition of our word "wit", which in its modern form connotes an ability to adapt to verbal badinage, yet which extends beyond this to the ability of intelligence to meet and match what is encountered in experience. When we are whole, we are able to hold together against dissipation and storm. If the Gods were to cease their blessings, the heill still in the world would continue for some time, but eventually, without periodic reinfusions (particularly as we ask for them and participate in them through offerings and sacrifice), would begin to run down, and the world would eventually return to storm. Shaping finds that proportion which fits the essence precisely so that it may run its own course, and is not drowned in the smother of storm.

In this way, the Gods outwit the storm by infusing within it an element of intelligence that outstrips it. If you impregnated chaos with self-replicating pattern, then despite the protean evanescence of the constant emergence and dissolution of forms, you would still be able to slowly build coherence on top of this arising and falling. The pattern would have to be so vastly organic and squirmingly intelligent that it would be able to outmatch and surpass the rate of dissolution. Thus through sheer replication of desired verdant form, the transformal march of dissolution could be mocked, and an enduring if liquid structure could be devised and propagated. Thus, any one wonder may disappear, but the bewonderment process is so fertile and rampant that bewonderment begets bewonderment in uncontrollable lushness. Thus, the striving process of coming into vibrancy (the evolutionary process of blossoming out one's wholeness), in which form is pursued by form, must have the capacity to outstrip the predatorial nature of the bedulling and dissolving forces. Heill allows this inherent intelligence to emerge.