An exchange fromHeartbook: The so-called "Judgement Day": does it mean anything to Deanists/Filyanists? If not, is there an equivalent in our faith? Just some thoughts! I don't think there is any such thing as a Judgement Day in Filyanic/Deanic faith. Our actions create our werde so if we do bad things they return to us, and if we do good things they return to us. There will be a time when "all the worlds are ended", but I think that is when all beings finally return to Dea. I think that is the difference. We believe that every being, even the demons, will eventually return to the Pure Harmony of Dea. There are no beings that will be eternally lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Hawking has described Heaven and the afterlife as a fairy tale. We examine this astonishing declaration of the Faith of the Faithless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have ordered and am reading The Gospel of Our Mother God and am pulled to it with something I suppose is faith. It feels right in my hands, I don't know how else to explain it. I was drawn to your site in particular because I honestly thought I was the only one who felt a strong pull to Mary, Isis, Dea and felt that these were all paths to the same place. I've carried rosary beads and meditated with them since I was a kid without really being able to define what it was I was doing but knew I found comfort in it. It's been a relief to finally find out that I'm not the only one. I've tried to do some research on where the mythos in the beginning come from and I'm constantly led to fictional feminism writing sites. I know that google does not know all and thought that perhaps you could lead me in the right direction? I'm trying to define the basis for the creation mythos? Is it a mixture of modern ideas or a mixture of old ideas or neither? I apologize if the answer is somewhere on the site and I just can't find it. I would like to know how to define this book when I share it (and I will be). Is it feminine writing or something older? The various Scriptures (other than the Sanskrit ones) appear to have been written in their current form 30 to 40 years ago. There have been claims that they are much older, but we feel there is little evidence for that (at least in the literal sense of these exact texts being much older). Many of the motifs and archetypes in the Scriptures clearly have analogies in ancient traditions, and we certainly do not believe them to be at all influenced by modern feminism, "new age" beliefs or other modern doctrines. We believe their purity and holiness shines out far beyond anything of that sort. Some people hold them to be a revelation of ancient truth, and others simply regard them as inspired poetry. The only claim we make for them is the one you also have noticed - the fact that they feel so right. They have inspired people and changed lives for over three decades, and for many who find the patriarchal redactions of our ancient traditions unpalatable, these are the Scriptures, putting into words appropriate to the late Kali Yuga (but by no means influenced by its prejudices) the ancient Faith of Our Mother God. We have found these Scriptures to be a wellspring of truth and beauty, and we hope you will too.

A part of my daily practice, believe it or not, is my drive to and from work. I have a choice of routes, but I always drive along the fey-populated Spout Run and the beautiful river into which it feeds, the Potomac. Batty old woman that I am, I find myself in deep relationship with the water, the rocks, the honeysuckle that's thriving just now, the runners and early-morning kayakers on the Potomac, the expanding colony of purple thistles just as you exit onto the T.R. Bridge, the homeless vet I chat with there most mornings, the dead trees just at the edge of the island facing the Kennedy Center. It's a good thing that traffic moves at a crawl.

As I was driving beside the Potomac this morning, NPR was reporting on the flooding that's been happening alongside the Mississippi River and its tributaries. "Mississippi" comes from a Native American word that meant, "Father of Waters," and it was aptly named.

I simply can't imagine how much water it would take to do what the news reports describe, nor how it would be to live -- as a human, a tree, a bird with a nest in that tree, a snake, a fox, or a rose bush -- within that flood plain. One thing that rivers do, that rivers need to do, is to flood.

And so my sympathies are with the Mississippi and with the Element that I call every day when I cast a circle, every time that I need something to dissolve, every time that I need things to flow along. And, as well, my sympathies are with the humans, and the trees, and the birds, and the snakes, and the foxes, and the roses.

Because they are all the same thing; they are all, to paraphrase HC, Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess. And, yet, they are each separate and precious, and the desire of the human not to lose her home, and the desire of the fox kit not to lose her den, and the desire of the tree not to be swept away, are every bit as strong and as valid as the desire of the Mississippi to occasionally overflow His banks in a big way.

And so, tonight, I will sit at my altar, here in the district devoted to the Goddess Columbia, here beside Spout Run, here in the Potomac Watershed, and I will light incense for the Father of Waters and for all who live in His floodplain. I will send energy to strengthen the Web of All. I will listen to the words of Derrick Jensen, and I will be more grateful than I can express for having incarnated upon this watery, dangerous planet.

Join me at your altar, will you?

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

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

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

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

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

In terms of the Wheel of the Year, the Exaltation of the Queen of Heaven represents the final and culminating festival of the quarter-year Eastre Cycle. It is also the final High Feast of the Daughter Half of the year. However, while the Eastre Cycle ends on this day, the Daughter Half continues for another six weeks until the High Feast of Rosa Mundi, the first festival of the Mother Half. Like the period leading up to Nativity (the Festival that ends the Mother Half), this final phase of the Daughter Half is seen as a Mother/Daughter period. The Daughter is now reunited with Heaven (and therefore with Her Mother) after Her descent to Earth at Nativity. The parallel early winter festivals that come at the end of the Mother Half, while centering on the Mother, are concerned with the coming of the Daughter.

May Day is an ancient festival. For devotees of Our Mother God it is the Exaltation of the Queen of Heaven. Learn more about one of the year's most beautiful festivals.

The Flight of the Silver Vixen, reviewed on this site a while back, is now available in a shiny new paperback edition. It first launched as a digital-only book on Amazon Kindle. While this action-adventure story is not primarily a spiritual book, it is written from a Deanic perspective. Don't expect the sort of outright preaching that you find in some "Christian literature", but do expect a characters who, even when they are rebellious young tearaways, fundamentally believe in Our Mother God and base their lives around a Dea-centric philosophy. The book is set in an all-feminine Aristasian-style world (two such worlds, in fact) and has a philosophical thread that will definitely resonate with readers of The Feminine Universe. You can now order the paperback for $15 with free shipping to anywhere in the world, or get the Amazon Kindle version at only $2.99 for instant delivery to your Kindle (or to the free Kindle reader on your personal computer or iPad)

Maybe, when I die, someone could read the last minute or so of this.

We have to close the distance between pushing buttons and affecting Gaia. We have to touch people.

/kisses Bronowski's forelock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new article on Sri Durga (the Indian Sai Vikhe) has appeared at the Exotic India site. As usual this is an excellent piece and well worth the attention of those interested in learning more about Sai Vikhe in Indian culture.

Durga, the most highly worshipped goddess of Indian masses held in alike reverence in all sectarian lines, even Buddhist and Jain, in her form as Durga or in one of her many transforms - the ferocious Tara of Buddhists or the nurturing mother Ambika of Jains, is the ultimate of divine power capable of eradicating every evil and every wrong, and nurturing and sustaining life in whichever form it exists.

The article makes it very clear that, despite efforts to "edit" Sri Durga into the later patriarchal scheme, not only does She long predate such attempts, but that Her supremacy continues to be asserted by Her devotees even in the patriarchal period. Of the fifth century Devi Mahatmya it says:

The text is full of expressions that are denotative of the Durga's supreme divinity, such as 'Durgam jayakhyam', that is, victory is her other name, or 'Durgasi Durgabhawasagaranaurasanga', that is, Durga is the boat that takes across the cycle of birth and death; the one, that is, Durga as victory is the ultimate of all worldly acts, and the other, that is, Durga as 'Tarini' - redeemer from the cycle of birth and death is the ultimate of every spiritual endeavour. In the 'Viniyoga', the introductory couplet of the second Canto, the Devi-Mahatmya asserts this supremacy of Durga metaphysically too. . . . As regards her antiquity Durga is an entity beyond time. Even the Markandeya Purana that identifies Mahamaya - Devi's proto form, as Vishnu's 'shakti' contends with specificity that it was her who gave to Vishnu, as also to Brahma and Shiva, their forms. This statement has two implications, one that she preceded not only Vishnu but the great Trinity, and the other, that she was Vishnu's 'shakti' by invocation and by her favour, not by Vishnu's authority. Thus, by whatever name, the Great Goddess preceded all forms, their creator, sustainer and destroyer, the time that spanned them and the space where they evolved.

In this Kali Yuga with its violence and patriarchal domination, it is natural that where Dea was recognized as the one supreme Deity, it should be her Vikhelic form that came to the fore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conversation on the idea of Universal Metaphor sheds light in many directions. When we see the things of material life as metaphors for higher things we are able to participate at a much deeper level in our experience of physical creation. Of course the idea is only another approach to an old question. Miss Trent showed in The Feminine Universe how the belief in nature as mere epiphenomena of chemistry and biology popularized by the Darwinist mythos robbed the Romantic movement of the ability to see nature in spiritual ways. The post-modernist movement, despite its self-imagined radicalism and skepticism, is really a logical progression of late-19th century popular Darwinism/scientism. To take a very common example, I recently read someone who was advocating (for the several-millionth time) "deconstructing gender". Leaving aside exactly what such deconstruction might consist of, what strikes one about this is not the radical skepticism, but the absolute, unquestioning faith that underlies such a statement. To believe that it is possible to "deconstruct" gender we have to assume that we know exactly what gender is. And of course all "radicals" do assume that. For them gender has two elements and two only: the biological and the human-cultural. Everything that is not determined by biology was "constructed" by human culture and it is, at least theoretically, possible to strip away our human culture and leave our animal nature. We can then (if we choose to) build our own "constructs". But all this is based on a huge and completely arbitrary hypothesis: namely that biology and human construction are all there is. That the universe has no meaning, and that biological gender is not already a metaphor of something higher. In believing this, they completely contradict the entire wisdom of the human race from the earliest known times to the late 19th century. And, ironically, these "multi-culturalist" haters of Western imperialism, are absolutely unable to consider that anything other than modern Western scientistic ideology even might be true. In "deconstructing" the fundamental metaphors of manifest existence, the modern world is taking a huge gamble that modern Western ideologies about the ultimate nature of life and manifestation are correct. But the "radical" has no doubts whatever. Her blind faith in popular scientism is as absolute as that of any Jehovah's Witness in her creed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My writings are but a long prayer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday's post on the universal nature of metaphor has prompted a very interesting response from Deanic science fiction writer Annalinde Matichei. The authoress of The Flight of the Silver Vixen commented on her blog at the Sun Daughter Press upon how this understanding of metaphor as not purely literary, but inherent in the very nature of being has important implications for science fiction and how it gives a much deeper answer to superficial questions like "why do so many alien species look so much like humans". Miss Matichei whose work we have reviewed on these pages, has made fascinating contributions to a genre of science fiction based on traditional metaphysics rather than materialistic physical-only science. As she says in today's piece:

Of course, I am not proposing [universal metaphor] as a "solution" to some of the problems of current Tellurian science fiction. That genre, going back at least to the days of Jules Verne, has been rooted deeply and exclusively in the "Enlightenment" Tellurian view of science, which is inherently accidentalist. What I am proposing is something far more radical. A new form of science fiction with much deeper ontological roots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let his soul forever animate these waves!

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

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

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

The Aristasian social network, Heartbook, has published a Calendar for this year of Sai Candre 3331. It is labeled an unofficial calendar and certainly has a few unofficial elements - the Princess pictures are charming - though perhaps not to every taste, and there are a few slightly curious additions (most notably "St. Patricia's Day"). There are also some variations in terminology (the Exaltation is called the Coronation and Vois is called Hathor). However, taken as it is - unofficial - it is a charming and excellent guide to the Filianic year, showing all the months with their secular equivalents, and the festivals of the year. Find it here. There is also a more official Aristasian version of the Calendar here, but this is a Perpetual Calendar, and not specific to this year.