The Manifesto of the Atheling

This third draft of a Manifesto I'm writing, describing a code of living for the “Interior Elite” or the Athelings – is, in a sense, my attempt to rebirth a code of Master Morality for modern people. This work blends elements of the Perennial Tradition, primordial Pagan models of spiritual and symbolic worldview, and Classical virtue all mixed with a generous dash of Ancestral Traditionalism and Spiritual Ruralism- just perfect for (and quite expected from) a mind like mine. But I have a feeling that I'm not alone. This is for the true nobles.

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The Manifesto of the Atheling
Copyright © 2010

The "Interior Elite" or the "Aristocrats of the Soul"- those for whom we follow the lead of history and tradition and re-anoint with the princely title “Atheling"- are herein described. The term “Atheling” has, for this study and meditation on morality, been stripped of its old political associations (once it referred to the scion of any noble family) and is now given a more profound, internal, and universal meaning which speaks to moral and spiritual nobility.


1. The Athelings of our world have three things in common: they all evidence a natural thoughtful introspection, a desire for the calm beauty and quiet simplicity of the rural landscape, and a natural disdain for degraded modernism.

2. Spiritual "Ruralism" is not a re-statement of the older notion that a life based on farming or agrarianism is morally superior to a life spent in the giant maws of our cities; it is, instead, a call to appreciate, preserve, and seek out whenever possible the only peace and serenity in the exterior world that can match and sooth the thirst for peace and serenity within- the peace found in the untamed, unspoiled, or prudently and respectfully modified countryside.

3. Far from the crowds, the madness, the damnable noise, and the hosts of predatory minds warped violently by the poverty of aggregation, is found the only true refuge for the Atheling.

4. The Atheling will always cultivate a mental and spiritual detachment from modernity, though they are forced by Fateful circumstances to dwell among its artifacts, and among the anonymous masses of its unthinking disciples.

5. This detachment nourishes a dignified spirit; it partially soothes a soul forced to drink the bitter waters of the dull, uninspired aesthetics, the crimes of unrestrained capitalism, unrestrained collectivism, industrialism, and the stultifying social and religious choreography that all join together to define the spirit of the modern age.

6. In the special detachment of the Atheling, the entire sublime field of experience, anciently interwoven with reason, creativity, and a taste for the mystical (that sacred reality beyond our rational understanding) is safely preserved from the shallow absurdity of materialism and the arrogance of the materialistic sciences.

7. That divine creativity which alone can spare the soul from a painful famine and final death in the barren modern wasteland, is sheltered and flourishes in detachment from the clumsy grasping of the rude masses.

8. For the true Athelings of our world, Nature is never judged to be mere “material” and “resource”; it is symbol and spirit, never separate from the living and enduring being of each person.

9. The Atheling sits, unseen by the world, on a throne of highest dignity at the center of a kingdom of conscience. The noble man or woman always experiences two lives, a life of necessity in the outer world, and a life of eminence within.

10. In the detachment of the Atheling, the stains of modernity cannot cling to his or her spotless garments; the sovereign will of the Atheling is not moved, though a billion voices together call for that will to bend.

11. That sovereign will is instead freely given over to the dictates of the quiet and faultless conscience which moves and perceives with nature's all-encompassing fluidity, and that will is given freely to itself, draped in a cloak of creativity, crowned with the diadem of inspiration, and co-existing in serene trust with the ancestral and primordial wisdom that first established the foundations of the world, the foundations of excellence and heroism, and the foundations of a just social communion, so long ago.

12. Coeval with the perennial patterning of human experience is the primordial wisdom that was the provenance of sacred mythology- those precious and timeless stories of Gods and Heroes that are keys to insight and truth for the discerning and aristocratic soul. In these things trust can be reliably placed.

13. The Atheling is beholden to no modern judge, nor human spiritual authority; like all beings, he or she will only be finally and truly judged by the ancient voices and the enduring primordial spirit by which all things are rightly measured.

14. The true Atheling does not stand out of any crowd, nor do they blend in; they are immune to the tyranny of the group-mind, the hysteria of mass unconsciousness, immune to the inducements or threats of the powerful few, and unmoved by the manipulations and power-games of the disempowered many.

15. Passing trends do not obsess the Athelings; nationalism does not impress or impassion them, and wasteful, thoughtless living arouses only a just contempt which at any rate does not distract them from the path of sovereign will and the quest for truth.

16. For the demonstrable good of society, the Athelings make sacrifices; the for the good of husband, wife, children, and dearest companions, they sacrifice even more.

17. The saga in which the noble one will be remembered, their true fame, is in the flesh of offspring, in the memories of those dearest and closest, and the in the unfailing memory of the Godly world that remains invisible yet evergreen, even in this age wherein wisdom lies abandoned and is seldom found.

18. The fear of pain and lust for pleasure alike are secondary concerns in any decision the Atheling makes; a noble bearing born of interiorized truth and the balanced, reasoned dictates of conscience accompany the Atheling’s will in any action.

19. No action is well-taken without reference to the divine; the traditional origin of true human culture is the union of the human and godly worlds, and therefore the Atheling, as a bearer of the spirit of the true culture which shines behind the long descent of history, raises (through spontaneous and organic ritual) every intentional action of substance or potential gravity to the level of a sacred act.

20. The fantasies of the noble man or woman contain more truth than the "facts" tossed about and cherished by the peasants of modernity.

21. The interior spaces of the self- that unseen country free of the anguish of time’s decay, which forever borders the profound depths that are source to all persons and things- are the fields in which the Atheling plants the seeds of life, loyalty, affection, and highest aspiration to truth.

22. That interior self, and the Godly spirit that dwells forever there, is the only justification Athelings need for any act of will; they never apologize for arising in might, or for seeking or seizing what they or their own need for life or for their flourishing.

23. The Athelings are not strangers to acts of compassion; real nobility is also marked by fairness and compassion. Their occasions of compassion never come about under compulsion, nor are they condescending acts of pity, but freely chosen displays of solidarity with another soul that struggles.

24. Athelings never apologize for strength or virtue. They never apologize for the outcomes of their own willed actions working in clear-sighted tandem with their conscience.

25. Athelings never complain about powers and forces operating outside of their control in the body of nature, nor superior forces that no courage or ingenuity of man can tame or defeat; they simply and wisely endure the unavoidable outcomes of these things.

26. Noble human beings never debase their humanity, their bodies, their souls, or their spirits by consenting to accept a degraded, guilt-ridden vision or understanding of those vessels of truth and virtue.

27. What is most precious to the true noble is given to the deepest interior of the self, never to be lost again. That great interior realm is an impregnable fortress, safe from the assaults of the degenerate age, from the shallowness that masquerades as morality and righteousness in the outer regions, and from the greatest temptation of all- that seduction that would unseat from the throne of will and conscience he or she who rightly occupies it.

28. The Atheling never feels guilt; they only feel shame for the times when they allowed their own sovereign will to be subverted and led away to the outcome of their own pain, displeasure, or harm, or the harm of others. In that shame, they re-master themselves, and wax mightier, to the accomplishment of the highest ideals.

29. The Atheling dies- alone if need be- for this morality of strength and virtue which cannot, by its very nature, submit to the wills of lesser men or demons.

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Blot to Odin

Hear me, Wild Hunt's Grim Lord, Wish-Father Wandering,
Warg-master, Wolf in Timber Howling,
Wooer of Gunnlod, two ravens following!
Odin, High Lord of the Ancestral Host,
Fare in secret to my fire-lit hall,
Come to your honored seat,
And receive your cup of holy mead.

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This short article contains a form for modern Blots or sacrifices, close to the custom of Blot as it is done in the Idavoll Kindred, but also (I think) representative of most "general" Heathen Blots. It's good for poetic usage as well as a general inspirational model. The Blot itself is for the Sig-Father and Warg-Father, Odin, but the form can be extended for use in Bloting other wights.

Click Here to see it: Blot to Odin

In the Dark Forests of our Deepest Minds

"In the dark woodland of the Northern European consciousness, a figure waits: an old man, wrapped in a blue-black cloak. His broad-brimmed hat hangs low, hiding one eye; a sharp metal point glints at the tip of his staff, and two ravens croak from the branches of the ash-tree above him. He beckons: in his hand he holds an ancient drinking-horn, and the scent that rises from it is honey and alcohol, strong enough to set the head spinning with a single whiff. He is a grim one, this old man; his spear is streaked with blood, and the hounds that crouch at his side look more like wolves than dogs. Yet the gift he offers is enough to overcome fear, for the brave . . . for those who are not afraid to die."

-Kveldúlf Gundarsson, from Wotan: The Road to Valhalla


I've been involved in the modern Pagan movement for the last 15 years of my life. I've seen a lot of people come and go through the harvest of those years: some people I knew to be good or even great; some people I considered pretty worthless, and a lot of people in-between- the bored and the indifferent.

At first, I didn't stop to consider what it was we were all doing; I don't know where it came from that I should have become a Pagan, or been drawn to these things. It was just what I did; I didn't like what I had seen before that passed as "religion", and I was drawn to the vibrant imagery and ideas of the mythologies that came from parts of the world that didn't include Palestine. There were strange figures alive in my imagination that needed to be more than just characters in fiction books; they needed to be worshiped for who and what they were before they were washed down the drain of "fiction". It was very mysterious to me, but I didn't question it.

Now I know that our lives and our desires to worship the old Gods and to resurrect the practices and beliefs of a very old way had little to do with us and more to do with the legacy that we are all a part of. At the beginning, when this legacy began to express itself through us, it was one that we were largely unconscious of.

We are all the sons and daughters of an ancient cultural tradition. No matter who we are, behind us stand older powers and tendencies than we can normally realize. The impact of the ancient layers of experience that stand behind our bloodlines are far from done with us, even today- we are still our Ancestor's offspring, affected and shaped by their holy rites, their sacred words, and their hopes and dreams.

Cultures don't vanish just because rapid changes in the world result in the transformation of the religious ideals or social structure of a people. Most people may think so: what is a "culture" if not a "cult" of people who all hold the same things up as sacred and valuable, and who practice similar and related life-ways? I used to keep that shallow definition of culture before I understood the spiritual dimension of culture, and how deep and persistent it is.

Many people today say that culture is determined largely by language. Others look to archaeological scraps dug out of the ground. I look deeper. I say that true culture is determined chiefly by the sacred powers that came together to create the root from which all of the branches of the culture grew from. Those sacred powers are timeless and resistant to age and death.

Later on down the road, it makes no difference what language the descendants of the original culture" begin to speak; it makes no difference what religion they all start to practice. It makes no difference if they leave small villages and move into big cities and become shallow, materialistic people, almost totally forgetful of their Ancestors' ways. Deep inside them, in the "dark woodland of their consciousness"- the unconscious layers of their minds- still live the originating powers. And these living powers influence them, even without their conscious knowledge.

These powers cannot be escaped. We do not have a choice over who and what we will be internally; we are born to an Orlog that was established in the time of the first Ancestors, and we'll die entwined in that Orlog. The cosmetic changes made by the vicissitudes of history are small matters compared to the sacred forces that fed the roots of each human tree.


I've seen a lot of people come and go over the years, and watched them try many things to satisfy the longing inside themselves to uncover their authentic spiritual roots. Many flashy and inviting paths exist today- but not a single one can ever satisfy a person if it does not bring them back to their own beginning.

And I'm not talking about the hospital room that we were in when most of us came screaming into the world; I'm talking about something that I can't find the words for, but which I can feel. I'm talking about the numinous "space" of origins wherein still live the potencies that our Ancestors rightly called "Gods" and where the Ancestral Women of every bloodline still work at their looms, weaving out the Fate of each individual and each family.

The experience of ultimate origins puts us back in touch with a community of sentience that includes not just Ancestors, but formative powers and layers of causality that make us who we were "then" and who we are "now".

As familiar as the various forms of modern Christianity may be, they cannot take us back the full distance; Christianity only goes back as far as the first time it ever collided with our grandmothers and grandfathers, when missionaries first wandered onto their far green shores and set about trying to destroy our foreparents' access to their true origins. All we find when we take the "Christian ride" back is a foreign institution coming and obscuring the sacred power of our origins, and trying to replace it with the strange, foreign symbols and myths of a new sort of worldview.

Many people, driven by the new unconscious patterns of long-term social programming, may take refuge in Christianity's promises and hopes, but at the end of the day (or the end of their lives) I am very confident that most people will feel the warm glow of those expectations fall cold; they will feel alienated or dis-satisfied on some level- a crisis that Christianity as a whole has always been familiar with, and which it has played off as "a crisis of faith." Worse yet, it has traditionally taken a "blame the victim" mentality, accusing people who can't explain their discomfort of lacking faith- and using guilt to keep them right where they are.

Always longing to find "home", as I believe all people do, some of these Christian folk will hope that the final promise of Christianity- that of "heaven"- will be a realization and fulfillment of that longing.

The "heaven" they really want isn't a sunny, sandy "New Jerusalem" with the Big Jehovah and choirs of angels; it is a green land of mountains, forests, and fields and blue rivers and oceans, full of game and fish and longhouses and roundhouses, villages with warm hearth-fires and sweet mead, wherein walk beautiful women and strong men, safe, happy, together with their own children and families. It isn't full of camels and ancient Iranian Magi draped in silk; it is full of horses and deer, of wolves and ravens and mystics draped in hide and fur.

Heaven is not a return to the paradise of another people, or to another people's myth of a great future; it is a return to our own origins. And in the Underworld of our Ancestors, in the Godly Realms of our Ancestors- sacred and powerful and totally unrelated to the "hell" of the Christians- that sort of completion awaits us. It is a long-sought homecoming, a long-awaited rest among our true kin.

This is not just a matter of the preferential aesthetics that we want to see for this life or even for our afterlives. I once let myself entertain the notion that the afterlife was something beyond our understanding, and only "dressed up" in symbols and words for our limited minds to grasp- but today, I know that this is wrong. The "afterlife" is no more beyond our understanding than this life is- or this room, this morning light, this music we hear today, these people we talk to and interact with now.

I'm not saying that we can understand the true roots of all reality in the way we usually understand things; I'm saying that we can understand as well as humans can who and what the things of this world are, and what the things of the afterlife are.

What we will "see" when we die isn't so different from what we "see" here- the emblems of the afterlife journey- the Hel-Road, the Ship that Crosses the Waters, the "Field of the Folk"- all of these things aren't just cheap descriptions born of a poverty of language; they are telling us what our minds will experience. The "language of the mind" doesn't suddenly change just because it can't use the eyes of the head to see- if that were the case, we'd never dream in the concrete terms of this world: we'd never dream about animals, houses, people, or places.

There are primordial forms of experience that dwell both in the mind and in this world- for these two things aren't so different after all. Having a "language for the mind" isn't a sign of some primitive limitation; it is a sign that these things are part and parcel of the deepest universal expressions.

And the primordial forms of experience- the forest, the mountain, the sea, the ship, the dwelling-place, the fire, the wandering God, the Rune, the spear, the sword, the witch, the warrior, all of these ancient forms that encapsulate so many cultural realities- they are not "romanticized" symbols of an over-imaginative former time; they are universal emblems of primal power. They were with us before; they are with us now, and will be with us again.

We lost a lot when we decided to shrug off the "trappings" of culture and tried to find some abstract "deeper meaning" for things that excluded the primordial forms. Those of us who attempted to do so were trying to conform to the ridiculous notions of some new "transcendental" learning or philosophy, trying to escape our roots in the soil and the earth, trying to transcend our ancient cultures. We were encouraged to believe that "progress" demanded such transcendence.

The call to betray the ancient root-cultures and the sacred originating powers came first from Christianity, and still continues in some ways in academia- academia, whose memory for some of the most important things of our past is either lost, or always in doubt, always non-committal, always serving the politics of the new world, and not the souls of human beings.

The call to be a "modern" person is still strong in many sectors- "modernity" apparently means getting excited about celebrity gossip, the drug-riddled lives and broken marriages of pop stars, getting the handbag of the season, and watching reality TV, and not getting too excited about what the "primitive" people of the distant past were doing or saying.

The call to be "modern" seems to be a call to give up on ever finding our unique identity, and instead submerging ourselves in a great pool of human flesh and blood in which identity is lost. It seems to ask that we accept that everyone's ancestors were all "trying to say the same thing" with their Gods and myths- and (somehow) the god of just one people was always the "real" one, and we should pray to it instead.

Of course, the religious complex that has sprung up around that particular "god" not only justifies being ignorant of our true origins, but continually upholds every sort of abuse of power, every orthodoxic invasion of other people's freedom of mind and will, every prudish distrust of the body and sexuality, every condescension towards womanhood and the feminine side of human life, and every sort of tyranny that still murders people today- it upholds regimes overseas that murder and oppress in the name of the Old Testament, just as surely as it upholds the local minister who oppresses the souls and freedoms of people in the name of the exact same book and its sequel.

We can ill afford to go on washing away our own originating traditions of sacredness into a pit of abstraction, safely removing these things from our concern so that we can comfortably replace them with new trends; our Gods are not just more "symbols of human longing for the divine"; they are more than just "archetypes"- they are Gods. They are some of those originating forces that live forever in the deep forests of our true selves, and that is where they will always be.

And until we find our way back to those woodlands within, back to the originating powers (of whom the Gods are some among many) we will never know who or what we are, and we won't ever have real peace.

We can chant like Buddhists, pray like Christians, drum like Native Americans, dance like Wiccans, or scoff at others like bitter atheists, but none of these things will bring us to the lasting peace, knowledge, and wisdom that we are naturally heirs to, and which we are naturally, fatefully inspired to seek out. We won't have peace until we resolve ourselves to the Ancestral powers that still live in us and work from the deepest places.

Orlog: The Procession of the Ages of the World

Finally, after a long week of work, I have prepared a lengthy essay discussing a particularly Heathen view of history, in line with what the ancient lore tells us about the "Ages of the World", the world-shaping and the coming world-doom.

I describe it as "A Suggested Schema for Understanding the Becoming, Perishing, and Re-Becoming of the Nine World System Based on Voluspa and Gylfaginning."

You can see it here:

The Orlog Essay

More than anything, I think this work was valuable to me for arranging my thoughts in line with the lore, and valuable to many others as a way of learning about the perspective of the life-cycle of the Nine World System (particularly our Middle world) from the point of view of Heathen mythology and cosmology.

Thoughts on the Future of Revived Paganism

Okay, I've decided to write a series of letters to discuss the future of revived Paganism. Understand that I have to make a distinction here between "Witchcraft" in the traditional sense- which is really a wide-ranging term including many forms of sorcery, all of which can (and do) exist despite the culture that surrounds them. Some cultures make it hard to be a sorcerer or practice occult/sorcerous arts, but still, they persist. Traditional Witchcraft, in the true modern sense, is a phenomenon that existed during Christian times, and now exists in the skeptical/scientific post-Christian era.

I don't worry too much about the "future" of Witchcraft; it will always remain, no matter how small or diffuse it is, because people will always seek out fringe elements of spirituality or the occult, regardless of society or culture's mainstream beliefs.

But what of "revived" Paganism, such as Asatru, Celtic Reconstructionism, Hellenism, Romuva, and the other revived Indo-European Pagan models? They have adherents, good lore and sources, reasonably strong structure as far as rituals and notions of sacred days and seasons: they have all they need to induct newborns and converts into their communities, and all they need to marry people and bury them, with rites. These revived faiths are pretty much complete faiths, with one exception: they all have pretty small populations of adherents.

So where do they go from here? A small population is bad news, for many reasons, but chiefly because small numbers means "little known", even in this day and age of the internet. "Little known" means "little or no political and legal recognition", and that means no support from anyone or anything else other than whatever few people (if any) you have near you that also practice your faith or believe as you do.


The Individual's Hard Road

Revived Pagan faiths are strongly distinct from "mainstream" Pagan faiths- they cannot enjoy the same sort of "recognition" given to Wiccans, for instance, because most (rightly) don't want to be associated in the public mind with Wicca or New-Age religious movements. They tend to be more insular and even ornery about their beliefs. Couple these things with the fact that they are all strongly individualistic, on the level of person and their right to believe as they will, and quite defensive at the level of community (assuming that they are lucky enough to have communities) and not willing to even entertain changing their beliefs or ways, even if it means making them closer or stronger with other members of their own revived cultural movement. I'm not saying people should need to change religiously, but an attitude change towards cooperation with others would certainly be a powerfully good thing.

Two Asatruar groups will like one another well enough (sometimes) but will become very annoyed with one another if either side imagines that the other is criticizing how they do things or believe or worship. Within umbrella movements (like say, the Troth) you get certain points that all Troth Hearths agree on- such as their universalist policy towards membership- but beyond that, very little. I'm not saying that such stances as this "radical independence" is bad, but it does expose the Asatru movement as a whole to a special weakness. It makes the Asatru movement unable to spread fast or far, unable to advertise itself or present itself as a cohesive and attractive alternative faith for people.

Individual groups or people may try, in some ways, to display their beliefs, in the hopes that "like minded" others will be attracted to them, but the nature of cultural Pagan revivalism is such that it does not have much of an "evangelical" spirit. They don't produce missionaries. There is no sense- or very little sense- that the Revivalist Pagan movement as a whole has a greater role to play in the world, or that it could make the world a better place: to be clear, most revivalists/reconstructionists have a more selfish stance on their faith, defensively viewing it as "their own thing" or "their subculture", and once they have gained some standing within it, they scorn to share it with others.

If they have communities, they either attempt to keep communities small, or watch them break up with selfish in-fighting if they get too large. Even the umbrella organizations have a history of constant fracturing through growth and bad blood. It seems that the egos of the luminary members of all these movements have caused a great deal of trouble- and all the while, the idea that Asatru or Hellenism or any of these reconstructions could provide a very wide audience of people with a positive, life-affirming, nature-reverent, and philosophically sound polytheistic life-path was lost.


The Paradox

There was an interesting occurrence back in the 1800's, in the United States: man named Joseph Smith claimed that he saw Angels and had the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven given to him and two close friends. He made a lot of claims, and a rather devoted cult following sprung up around him. They created their own community- the first Mormons- and after a lot of persecution, fled the settled east of the country, crossed the Great Plains en masse, and settled in Utah. They built a city, and prospered. Today they are well known, and while they are reviled by most mainstream Christians, that doesn't matter: They have millions upon millions of members, massive stone Temples all over the world, billions of dollars in the bank, and legal protection everywhere in the civilized world.

I don't like cults, and I especially don't like Christian cults, but these people set out to live on their terms- they created a community by giving up on their old lives, believing in a shared vision, and striking out to find a new life, just like the Norse settlers of Iceland did.

Where have the days gone wherein people were willing to make radical changes in their lives, in the name of their beliefs? Revived Pagan movements won't have much of a future until they decide to truly ante up, and do something as radical as say, create a community- a physical community somewhere- for their families. Failing that, the countless splinter groups of people calling themselves "Asatru" or "Hellenist" or what have you can realize that they have a chance to gain the sort of social stability and recognition that will win their children and their grandchildren many freedoms and a better ease in social living than they had, if they could put aside petty squabbles in the name of working together better, wherever they happen to be.

The painful paradox here is evident: only brave, strong, self-willed individuals are going to be attracted to faiths like Asatru or Hellenism or CR, the sorts of people who have the guts to make a clean break from the previous religious or social conditioning they've undergone, to take such a radical new stance in life. And those very same people don't tend to play well with others, suffer fools much, or deal well with seeing the high-quality religious reconstructions they've worked so hard on being "diluted" or defamed by lesser individuals.

The very sorts of people you'd want in a Pagan organization are also the sorts of people that don't do "organization" well! This same population also (lamentably) tends to give us people who are excellent leaders, people of vision, but then, the inevitable happens: good quality followers emerge to follow them, and these "leaders" don't want to share power or abandon their little fiefs to work with others.


SPQR

Radical individuality is, as I have pointed out in many writings, not even a perspective of the Ancestral faiths, which were based foremost on the bonds of community, the well-being of city-states and settlements, the honor of families and clans, and the like.

Not everyone in ancient days was a "hero", a famous "known name" in the bard's tales, and even heroes had family matters to deal with. A strong sense of "clan ties" or family obligations was first and foremost on the minds of all people of honor. With peoples like the Greeks and Romans, even a sort of "National identity" began to form, as they began to compare the merits of their larger culture-patterns with those of foreign people they came into contact with. Some of the greatest men in the standard canons of western literature and history were honored for what? For sacrificing much in service to Rome- to Rome- the Republic or Empire as a whole, with all its variety and massive population. They were honored for being loyal, in their own ways, to an idea that was much larger than any one person or small community.

And Rome flourished with men like this, driven in this way. Another group that arose in Rome flourished likewise and for similar reasons- the fledgling Christian church had a sense of a goal and a spirit larger than any individual. For the settlers of Iceland, the goal they all bonded together to achieve was freedom from political compulsion and the tyranny of kings that were growing too powerful for the good of the people of their homelands.

It's certainly noble to honor the Ancestors' notion that "orthodoxy" should never be forced onto people: I myself couldn't agree more. The Ancestors, within their communities, were orthorpraxic and very much against "invading the heads" of other people, so long as those people held themselves up to whatever social standard was needed for the good of the community. I think this is a great model for us now- but the implications of the model have changed in our modern day.


You Must Be Worthy To Win

Whether or not many people will see it, we have threats and problems that the world has never seen before. What passes for "spirituality" in the mainstream has become shallow and materialistic, and in response, fringe lunacy has arisen- the politics of fundamentalism- which is just a manifestation of the hysteria one can expect when a movement comes crashing down, or begins to change so much that it is no longer what it was. This is happening to mainstream Christianity, though the process will not be done tomorrow. It will take another few centuries.

Islam will take longer, Gods help us- but all religious movements that are in violation of the basic truths of life cannot last forever. What are those truths? I list them as follows:

-The truth of animism and the need to live in this world of natural resources with wisdom and moderation;

-The truth of sacred reciprocity with self and community and world;

-The truth of qualified struggle between opposites,

-The truth of the natural sacredness and diversity of the spiritual world;

-The truth of the dignity of human life above and beyond what people may believe or what culture they may be born into.


If any religion or movement denies even one of these points, it cannot last. It will not last. It is not enough for an entity to win a culture war and set itself up as a dominant faith in an area of the world; it must be worthy to win, if the victory is to be lasting. How will we know who was worthy? We can see the organic spiritual beliefs of primal peoples all over the world that were NOT washed away in the crimson tide of revealed religions, and see that their beliefs were good and strong from the dawn of history, up till either this very day, or until the time came that they were destroyed. We will know worth in how they last, in how they endure.

And our Ancestral faiths have endured- through a firestorm of radical social change, and historical pogroms of annihilation. Why should we be drawn to them now? Because something of worth still exists, and has been passed down to us, something that was never defeated or forgotten.


We Don't Inherit the World From Our Parents: We Borrow It From Our Grandchildren

And what is the future of revived Paganism? Its future will be precisely what you see now, if we do not change in some manner- and when I say "change", I don't mean a minor change that is washed away in a few days. Something- I myself don't know quite what- has to change, a "second order" change as cyberneticians say- for our revived Pagan movements to be healthier and larger in the future.

No, an "evangelical" spirit isn't required, though some Asatruar- one famous umbrella organization- has actually embraced just that. But they are alone; and despite the fact that I am still skeptical of their route to the future, I do agree with them on a few important points- we- all of us modern Pagans- need land and resources at our disposal, social and legal recognition, and education for the public.

If that means appointing boards of people to handle matters, so be it. These sorts of "panels" or "boards" can be non-sectarian; but someone has to break us out of the dark ages of our living rooms and campsites and get us all into phone books, into minutes at town hall meetings and sessions of legislation, and someone has to represent us to the public.

Who is the "us"? It isn't any one community or another, but a new idea that we will have to embrace if we will have a future of greater religious fulfillment, and life fulfillment. It is the idea (to use an example) of "Asatru" or "Heathenry" which stands above all sects or "types" or communities or Kindreds. The same can be said for the idea of "Hellenism" which stands above this or that church or temple or deme. This idea doesn't ask for obedience to any doctrine, or for people to do blots or sacrifices one way or another. It doesn't ask for the worship of any God. It just asks that we work to display, protect, and solidify an identity to the world that can have the recognition and legal protection it deserves, and which our grandchildren will need.

And honestly, I believe the world needs Revived Paganism. It needs alternative spiritualities that can fan the flames of spiritual life higher in people, and which can bring people into a new paradigm of living in this world which is better for the world and all of the living beings in it.

The Heart of the Old Religions

Most people who leave Christianity and become Pagan (or try to do so) often carry with them the "God-centered" ideal of Christianity and try to build a Pagan practice that places the Gods as the central focus.

However, there is an issue with this that must be addressed- it may be that Paganism in the past was not centered around the Gods. When you look at it broadly and deeply, you can see that ancient Heathens of any stripe viewed human interactions as the primary "focus" of their lives- I'd say their "religious" lives, but it's not coherent to say that Pre-Christian people necessarily divided their experiences up in that way.

In Pagan times, "secular" and "religious" were not really meaningful categories, because even "secular" events were blessed and presided over by Gods. This is nowhere more evident than in ancient Rome, in which every event of government, sports, war, theatre, and even construction and the workings of their sewer system were not carried out without invoking the Gods of that occasion or event.

All of Indo-European Paganism shows this pattern; childbirth was every bit as sacred (and presided over by spiritual powers) as a "general" sacrifice for the people on any occasion. War was always seen as a sacred affair, as was business- Lugus and Odhinn were the Gods of merchants and trade, as was Hermes in Greece and Rome. Lugus and Odhinn were also Gods prayed to in times of war.

The central vision of the Pagans was one of interaction- between people, whether in family settings, war, commerce, travel, exploration, or what have you. These interactions necessarily included the attentions of the Gods, who were part of the great system of interactions, which spread from this world to all of the unseen worlds. But the Gods were not "more important" than the tasks that humans had to carry out. In a horizontally-related and circular system of causality like Wyrd, things can often be seen in terms of equal importance- for instance, it's just as important to be a good soldier and fight well, as it is to invoke the God of War before you go to battle. All aspects of living and interaction are important and charged with numinous force. This is why so many Heathen and Pagan religious rites were carried out in the home, and on streets, and in market squares, and in open groves and fields- because the sacred was a part of everyday life.

So interaction- human activities, the activities of families, clans, or societies- can rightly be understood as the true "focus" of the Old Religions. Interactions between humans and Gods was another focus, though implicit in the term "interaction" in the broadest sense. All of these interactions are tied together by Wyrd, or the sacred system of interconnectedness and causality. This is why more than one sharp-minded scholar has realized that Wyrd was the central mystery of the Heathen religion: interaction is the true nature of our lives, and of the Gods.

Living your life, being among friends and family, going through life's various tests and trials, this is the focus of the Heathen "religions", then and now. Instead of saying "religion", it is better to say "the Heathen life-way", because for our wise Ancestors, what we now call "religion" was fully integrated into everyday life. It wasn't something you "did" on certain days of the week, or only off in a temple. You really can't ultimately separate "religious things" from "non-religious" things. Like Wyrd, all is tied together, overlapping, and recursive.

There's no doubt that the Gods of old were seen as very important in the lives of the people- they prayed, made sacrifices, offerings, all to a huge extent. But they probably didn't go through their lives thinking about the Gods in the same way that Christians are expected to go through life putting "God first" in everything, and worrying about what God thinks about their thoughts and actions.

Heathens of old had a way of behaving that dealt with their interactions with their fellow man, and to another extent, with the natural world, which was the heart of their ideas of honor- keeping their oaths, being hospitable, being brave, respecting the Ancestors and putting ancestral traditions in an important place, and putting the good of their people first.

If a person lives in this way, they need not worry about what the Gods "think" about them. They can live their lives assured that the Gods support them, and in that sense, Heathens were more free than most modern Christians who carry their God around like a lead weight, or like an eternal one-man "oversight committee" of omniscient judgmentalism.

The motivation for true moral behavior can never be fear of judgment or punishment, and for the Heathens of the past, the reward for being a good human is not expected in some afterlife, or even in this one necessarily. A person of honor did what was expected of them and was a good person for no reason except that it was right to do so. Such a noble way of life may seem unbelievable or impractical in our cursed times, times where we have been reduced to the "whip" as the basis for "good" behavior in matters of both public life and moral or religious life, but the fact that it was not always so speaks highly of our Ancestors, and highly of those who set their minds to this way of thinking today- it is a magnitude of personal quality that is rare, indeed.

It also speaks highly of that mysterious thing we call "human nature", by showing us that our nature is capable of far more good and nobility than most modern religionists give it credit for.

Heathens didn't live in fear that the Gods were keeping tabs on their every word and deed- the Gods didn't fill the roles of big supervisors or celestial disciplinarians for the ancients. They don't fill those roles today; what they bring to human interactions is far more mature and sublime. It's true that some of the Gods- like Allfather- had sorcerous ways of knowing all things that occurred on the earth and in the other worlds, but this wasn't a disciplinarian's chart-keeping; it was the tidings of interaction and event which he was aware of, through the power of his sorcerously expanded consciousness. He took in such knowledge as part of his quest for wisdom and understanding. It's one of the things that made him so cunning and wise.

Whatever punishment or glory a person found in this world or the afterlife was between that person, their deeds, and Fate- the Gods were only a part of that system of destiny insofar as Wyrd required them to be; they were not the authors of the system of Wyrd. Always we see that each man and woman has to look to themselves and their own honor, and how they affect the larger system of kinship and life, when it came to their own moral and ethical behavior. Consequences are not written by the Gods; they are natural reactions to how we think and act.

The Gods are certainly important, but not the center of Heathenry and the old religions: being a good human being, interacting well and honorably with other humans and other parts of the sacred and natural world is the center. Seeing one's self as part of a greater web of interactive power is the focus for the wise of any era. The fact that you are human, and that mankind is itself a sacred manifestation of a Mystery, is a powerful but crucial aspect of the Heathen worldview.

The fact that you are human means that living as a human is by itself a sacred act, and one that requires all your time and attention. The Gods take care of their Godly business- humans have their own business to attend to. At times- many times, in fact- Heathens invoked the Gods for extra help and blessings, but then they had to go on living as humans, and doing well. Being human, with all that entails, is the focus of a true Pagan ethic of living.

The Culture of Reconstructionism and New Paganism

I've been involved in Pagan reconstructionism for over a decade now, and I have found it to be a useful and powerful outlet for my spiritual wants and needs. I've seen and heard many perspectives within the recon world, and even embraced many perspectives from time to time, before my heart settled on its present course. At the end of my day yesterday, I had to finally open a discussion with a dear friend of mine, a discussion about labels and reconstructionist perspectives.

I'm afraid that my work with the unseen world has done what it was intended to do: brought me into close contact with my inner life and the internal workings of the Fateful weave that I call my existence. My entire perspective on being a modern religious Pagan in the modern day is enormously different from that of others chiefly because I am not just a religious person- I am a mystic, a person who intentionally works with extra-ordinary states of consciousness, for the purposes of contacting extra-sensory reality and directly tapping its timeless sources of wisdom and healing. This is central to understanding who and what I am, though it is just one aspect of me.

And in the modern day, in the world of reconstructionist religions, this makes for a problem. I am typically not surrounded by people who perform the same task, who operate in the same way. I'm surrounded by people who usually go no further in their relationship with Gods or Spirits than lifting a horn for them and belching out a toast, before going back to talking about other things.
Even in the scholarly end of reconstructionism, dominated as it is by decidedly non-mystical types, many people try to deny that the ancient Indo-Europeans had spiritual specialists, of a type we might describe in modern language as "shamanic" or trance-using mystics, even though we know they did. In a hurry to distance themselves from the dreaded "new age", a lot of people who should damn well know better have put on intentional blinders to the presence of mystical traditions among our Ancestors.

But my letter today isn't about how blind some (most) recons are towards people who work in mystical ways today. I don't care about them, because I was long ago made aware of why they choose to ignore facts and embrace falsehoods- and sadly, I understand some aspects of their fear and frustration.

My letter today is about what a person can do when they realize that there's no label for them, no way of fully expressing in words what they "are". As a mystic, (and like mystics from all times and places) I often don't feel "in place", no matter where I am. Most people know me as the Seid-man, the Witch, and the Asatruar; those words are fine to me, and they express something important to me. All are correct when taken in context- but to me, they are just labels. And they mean different things to different people. There is a danger here.

For some Asatruar, for instance, "Seidmadhr" or Seid-man means that I am a possibly gay idiot drama-queen new ager who wants to play wicca within the context of Asatru. For some other Asatruar, it means that I use trances to do sorcery, for the good of the people I am working with. Big difference! One of these definitions is correct, the other, very wrong, at least from MY perspective.

Here's another example- for some people, "witch" means "baby-killing Satan worshiper who does black magic". For others, it means a goodness-and-light follower of the ancient God and Goddess of the old days". For others still, it means "a person who does sorcery, works with spirits, and seeks for odd corners of wisdom". Two of these definitions are incorrect from MY perspective; one of them is quite right.

Shall I continue? What about the example of "Asatru" or "Asatruar"? For some, this means that I am a horned-helmet wearing idiot neo-pagan who swills beer and thinks he's a viking. For others, it means a follower of a polytheistic faith born in the group-soul of the Germanic peoples. One of these definitions is correct; the other not.

Recently, I've grown tired of fighting the definition war. People, I have discovered, use labels as a means of force, a form of violence- even if they don't realize it, sometimes they still do it. To label someone gives you permission to force them into a "place", even if it is a place they don't belong, and even if it bears no relationship to reality- labels are all in our heads. But we live in a world of labels, and we wrong other people regularly by labeling them. We take our labels and assume that we know them, that we know what they stand for, when usually, we don't.

I'm aware of the many times I've done it, and I'm very aware of how much I've suffered in the label game. People want to know where you "belong", but as a mystic, I don't belong anywhere. No label exists that is sufficient for me- there ARE words that satisfy some aspects of who and what I am, but no single word fulfills the task.

That I am a vision-seer and mystic is only a small part of it- even people who have never had a vision in their lives are also impossible to label. Even the simplest person is still a magnificently complex being, if you know how to see them correctly, and labels don't really work for them as well- if anything, what makes a person "simple" is how easily and readily they accept labels for themselves from others.

Now, I'd like to stop this line of thinking for one second, and go into my next point, which will relate, of course. My next point is the culture of reconstructionism.

Reconstructionist Pagans spend a considerable amount of time looking back to ancient cultures to get their ideas about life, their framework for belief, and clues as to how to deal with life's moral and ethical issues. They do this in their (correct) belief that the Ancestors were very wise, and that their words and behaviors are worth paying attention to.

But where does this go? I know some recons who think that they are whatever ancient people they look back to, reborn in the modern day. In their minds, there is no real difference between them and the ancients- just a time-frame difference, and some annoying cultural realities that are different, but which they dream of changing.

I also know some recons that are very much aware of the fact that they are modern people, who are looking back to older cultural traditions for guidance. They don't think that they are ancient Celts or Germans or Greeks or Romans.

This brings up my idea of "Recon Culture". I am a reconstructionist Pagan, but I don't think that I am "exactly the same" as the Pagans of the past- indeed, how could I be? I am a modern person, subject to the same modern forces and understandings as everyone else in my cultural sphere. I have taken the initiative to re-examine my cultural assumptions in light of ancient cultural assumptions, but what does that make me? An American who really likes the past, or has a preference for ancient philosophies and beliefs? To this, I answer:

Recon Culture is it's own reality. It is its own culture- a religious culture- that exists in the modern day, and it is comprised of modern people who look to ancient models of culture and religion for guidance as to how to believe today, but also how to face life's trials. I am not just an American or a modern person who really digs the "old days"- I'm a reconstructionist, to use a label that I just got done complaining about. As often as labels hamper our understanding of each other, sometimes they help to understand.

At any rate, "Reconstructionist" means something specific. It's true there are many ancient cultures that recons look back to, and that means that there are many reconstructionist sub-cultures, but the over-arching label still means something.

And here we arrive at the next issue- reconstructionists, being human, allow themselves to fall prey to the dangers of labeling, every bit as much as the next person. Apparently, looking to the wisdom of the past doesn't grant anyone any immunity to the idiocy that sometimes follows along in the world of human efforts!

It is true that our Ancestors in the past were very devoted to the idea of their own cultures, their own tribal or social beliefs and customs. Some people say that our Ancestors weren't very "free" as we know the word, because they were so constrained by tribal custom and social duty. Personally, I disagree with these angles because they aren't taking into account a broader perspective, and (to me) emphasizing only the negative aspects of ancient societies.

What these cynics never point out is that ancient societies were very aware of one another, and traded and traveled and inter-married a considerable amount. Some of the biggest extremists in the Recon world- the so-called "tribalist" Recons who refuse to have anything to do with people who are "outside" their tribal boundaries, and who seek a "tribal" identity at all costs, even the cost of ignoring reality, really hate to hear this sort of talk.

But when you have temples of Isis in Britain, Viking gold showing up in Cairo, Egypt, Runes scrawled on pillars in Byzantium, tales and evidence of inter-marriage, exchange of Gods, and people from different cultures taking part in the worship of other people's cultural Gods, you simply can't justify your cultish, isolationist fear anymore- at least not by looking to the past for an example. There's plenty of idiocy in the modern day upon which you can base some dogma of separation and distrust upon, but not so much in the past.

Somehow, our Ancestors in the past managed to hold on to their own ways, their own Gods, but also live among other peoples who had other ways and other Gods, and not compromise their cultural identity, even when they traveled or adopted new Gods. Worshiping German and Celtic Gods didn't stop the Romans from being Roman; adopting Roman Gods didn't stop the Celtic people of Gaul and Britain from being what they were; the Greeks adopting Egyptian Gods or Goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from being Greeks. When the Romans picked up the idea of using soap from the Celtic peoples, they didn't stop being Romans. When the Gauls started drinking Roman wine, they didn't cease being Gauls.

I don't want to belabor this point; I just want to say it enough to tweak the misbegotten noses of the fools out there who have caused me so much trouble in my time among the Asatru.


Now the dreaded words have to come out- we are "new Pagans". Perhaps you believe that your soul is very old, and that you were Pagan before, long ago. Maybe you think that the elements of these bodies, and the elements of the world, are very ancient, and therefore, nothing is really "new". Points all taken. But your mind and personality, constructed as they are from modern influences, is new, and your decision to be a Pagan in a modern, non-Pagan culture, marks you as a new Pagan with a big job ahead.

Now, if you're smart, you chose to be a reconstructionist Pagan, and gained access to the greatest resources available to you, in understanding the Ancestors- history and scholarship. If you're not so smart, you'll make up some stuff (or buy into those who have made it up) and claim that those things are what the Ancestors really believed. Of course, you'll end up dis-satisfied, as the Truth has a way of making itself known.

Either way, whether you are the pink cotton candy new-ager, or the hard-core scholarly reconstructionist, you're a new Pagan. We may fancy ourselves THE Greeks or Celts or Norse from history, but we aren't; we're just their fans, their descendants, their admirers, in the modern day. We're their students, their apologists, the lovers of their literature, their sacred stories, and their religious aesthetics. That's what we are.

There is a danger in getting sucked too far into some form of ancient "identity" that begins to conflict with your modern self; I've met far too many idiots in costume who really think that they are Norse or Viking Warriors, straight out of history, alive in the modern day. They import their own stupid ideas of racism and cultural superiority and graft these things directly onto the ancients, and assume that people have always believed they way they as modern people believe now. This is wrong; it is a caricature of the past, it is a crime and it's the worst sort of narcissistic immaturity imaginable.

I've met too many people who think that THEY are the "Romans" or the "Celts" now- quite absurd, when you think about it, on all counts; What does it mean to be "Germanic"? To be "Celtic"? With these two broad cultural definitions, there is no real way to know. These people in the past were countless tribal cultures, spread across the map-board; they went everywhere, mingled with everyone they encountered, and eventually vanished themselves from the pages of history, either through war or cultural change. What, are the Germans today "The real Germanics"? What about the Spanish, who live in a country that was founded largely by the Visigoths? Were the Visigoths not Germanic? What about the French, who live in a country founded by the Franks? Were the Franks not Germanic?

"Germanic" has little meaning, in the sense of "being Germanic". In RECON CULTURE, however, to be "Germanic" means to adore the cultural ideals that Asatru has studied and listed as "Noble"- the Nine Noble Virtues, and to adore your Germanic Ancestors, working hard not to disappoint them.

But what about the people who are more than just Germanic in Ancestry? Sadly, I know too many people who ignore 90% of their ancestry in favor of the 10% that had sufficiently Germanic sounding last names.

What about those pesky Celts? No culture has been more ransacked and dishonored by the forces of new-age marketing than Celtic- but what is "Celtic" culture? I've been to many of the Celtic lands. I can assure you, the people I spoke with all had this idea that THEY- and not the others, were the "real" Celts, and they were all quite different. The Irish and the Welsh were very different from one another, in a somewhat good-natured yet competitive way. Both were hospitable, but the Welsh were different, not as flamboyant or as "in your face" as the Irish that I encountered. Both lived on sacred Lands full of much mystical power; I could feel it. The blood in me could feel it, as I bear an ancestral connection to these places.

But what does it mean to be "Celtic"? What, is it that Hollywood-created "rebel" hard-drinking spirit, which thrives under the strain of mistreatment by evil empires and invaders? I hope not! That stereotype is a dry riverbed. Does "Celtic" mean that we all walk around wearing cheap Celtic knotwork Tide-dye clothes, and waving around copies of "The Mists of Avalon"? I REALLY hope not- give me "The Fields of Athenry" stereotypes any day over that! I hope being from some cool Irish place like Dublin isn't your claim to Celtic fame- the Vikings, after all, founded Dublin.

I could do this forever, just to point out that there may be general features of culture, like "Irish" or "Welsh" or "Scottish" that can be found, but "Celtic", no.

To be a Reconstructionist Celtic Pagan, however, is to look to certain strains of literature from Ireland and Britain, literature which is believed to stem from pre-Christian roots, and to look to the histories of these lands (these histories including Gaul), when seeking inspiration regarding religious practice and guidance for one's spiritual and moral worldview.

People take the term "Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan" or "Germanic Reconstructionist" and they see what they want to see- normally, they see "Celtic" or "Germanic", and they miss the "Reconstructionist" part.

I feel a great amount of love in my heart for the ancient world, and I imagine, sometimes, that maybe if I could find a time-machine and be transported back to that world, perhaps I'd find the religion to my liking, and some aspects of the culture to my liking. But I don't have any illusions about the hardships or the alien things that I would see and encounter. I may be of British, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but I am also a modern person, seeking to live as best I can in alignment with the ancient wisdom of those peoples. I'm not a "Celt" or a "Teuton"- I'm a modern man who reconstructs their ancient religions and worldviews, as best he can within a modern context. I may spiritually view myself as an heir of their great wisdom, and I may believe that my ancestral line, including this spirit, was once a part of their world, but there's one last thing that has to be said, has to be understood- I am also a part of this modern world. That qualifies everything, brings a needed perspective to this entire "Recon" enterprise.

I encounter people who can't see the "Reconstructionist" aspect of their culture, and only see the ancient cultures involved, and they really believe that they are THE Greeks, THE Romans, THE Celts, or what have you. They take the label, and immediately (hilariously) begin looking DOWN on other people for belonging to a reconstructionist faith that takes its inspiration from a culture that historically conquered their culture or had conflicts with them.

Yes- as amazing as it may sound, I know Celtic Recons who HATE Asatruar, probably thanks to Marion Zimmer Bradley and the recent movie "King Arthur" presenting the Anglo-Saxons as baby-devouring bloody barbarians bent on murdering every Briton they came across. That's not historically what happened, but there is an idea that the Germanic and Celtic Traditions have to be in conflict. This idea is fantasy, but it's a reality to many Recons.

I know many Asatru that believe anyone worshiping non-Germanic Gods is a traitor to Asatru- and yet, they talk till they are blue in the face about the importance of honoring one's Ancestors. Where does that leave people like me, (and there are many like me) who have mixed ancestry? Let's just come out and say it- EVERYONE has mixed ancestry, both now, and even in the past. What am I, a descendant of Ireland and Bernicia, to do? I worship the Gods of Asatru because it is part of my heritage, and because Asatru is a great Reconstructionist faith, with many resources and a large community.

But my wife is Irish; my daughter is named after the great Queen in the mound in County Sligo, and my family prays to the Gods of Ireland and Britain, too- in a fully Celtic Reconstructionist context. This isn't a new thing; Celtic and Germanic Gods have been prayed to together in many places, for a very long time. Roman and Celtic Gods and Roman and Germanic Gods were also prayed to together. Oh no! Ideas and labels of "purity" have just been flushed- except that those ideas were never based on reality.

"Asatru", according to some, means "True to the Gods"- but are people who pray to Zeus and Athena, or Brigid and Lugus, not "True to the Gods" as well? Just because the word "Asatru" may be in some Germanic language, that doesn't mean that the idea doesn't apply to many polytheists.

This is where labels come home to haunt us. I know that no label really serves to identify me perfectly, and I think this same thing can be said for everyone- we DO use labels, but how many of us really feel that the few labels we've chosen fully serve to explain us to ourselves or to the world? I feel sorry for the people who can label themselves perfectly- Oscar Wilde said "Only shallow people really know themselves".

My modern mystical vocation forces me to realize the truth about myself- I am a modern person who deals with trance-work and spiritual contact. In every culture of the human world, there have been people like me- and they have been called many things. I know what Pagan cultures I am ancestrally related to, and I proudly engage in the activity and method of Reconstruction, when it comes to guidance and religious practice. But I cannot label myself as just one thing or another, and expect to feel satisfied.

My dear friend told me something interesting last night- she told me that she prayed to the Gods of ancient Wales when operating in a formal context. But personally, in her own private religious life, she didn't use names at all- she merely communicated from the heart to those Gods or spirits that she desired contact with. I understand what she meant; even though I do use names in my private religious life, I think this idea of "Formality" is important- when I work with the Idavoll Kindred, on that formal level, we call upon the Gods of Asatru. When I work with my wife and daughter- my true family and deeper kindred- it is less formal, but still a formal level, and we pray with all earnestness to the Gods and Goddesses of Ireland and Britain.

As for me, privately, non-formally, well, that's the very best of me, and I save that one all for me.


It's more important for me to be a mystic, a seer and healer, than anything else. Of course, as an Ancestral pietist and a polytheist, I could never and will never ignore my Ancestors or what they believed. But I am not just them. My capacity for vision or mystical insight is something apart from my Ancestry; it is a universal quality of humankind that I express, not something tied to one culture. To Asatruar, I express it in the language they (sometimes) understand- Seidr. To those who are heavily invested in Irish or British Paganism, I call it Taibhsear, Druidry, Draiocht, whatever they need to hear to understand. To the Greeks, I may say "Iatromantis".

To someone from Dr. Michael Harner's foundation, I would say "Shamanic practitioner". Among my traditional Witch friends, who are by far the easiest to communicate with, I'm just Robin, that Witch and pain-in-the-ass of many. I enjoy Dr. Harner's description of Witchery as a descendant of the shamanic wisdom of old Europe, which is a definition that I happily subscribe to, for obvious reasons.

But I've become weary of labels. I use them because people expect them, but I don't use them with any real gravity. They are just so many words to me- what is real to me are the Gods, the spirits I have felt and seen, and the "other sight" that allows me to find guidance for my life, and healing for myself and others. How does a person label that? I have no choice at this point but to use the term "reconstructionist" for my religious label, but being of mixed ancestry and worship, many won't have me- which is, of course, fine; I wouldn't want to be a member of their narrow-minded clubs, anyway. So long as my family and friends are well, all is well.

But damn! Communication is hard, because everyone wants a label that they can look up in the dictionary or online, to figure out "who and what you are". I hope people will, one day, have the power to see through labels and realize that we read far too much into the labels we give other people, and into the labels they give themselves.

Recon Culture is useful insofar as it gives people a platform to build a relationship with the Gods, and helps them to be better people. But the issue has deeper angles, which will need to be explored by each in his or her own time. Until then, when people ask me "what I am", (meaning religiously) I have little choice but to tell them a polytheist- a person who worships the Gods and Goddesses of his ancestors from ancient Britain and Ireland. I am also a vision-seer, a shamanic healer and worker, but that's not something a person often gets around to asking, nor me telling.

Approaching the Gods Anew: Organic Religious Traditions and the Journey Beyond Mythology

Asatru, like all reconstructionist religions, greatly treasures the myths, sagas, and folktales which are the central written repositories of its Ancestral lore. In the Eddas and Sagas we discover countless valuable examples of how the Ancestors worshiped, handled the hard situations that arise in everyday life, and how they situated themselves in this world. The Eddas and Sagas are especially valuable to us because their source-country, Iceland, not only remained Heathen till the year 1000 CE, but was always proud of its Heathen past. Because of this pride in Ancestry, the wise Icelanders didn't feel the need to adulterate their forefathers' myths and stories by removing things that were "too Pagan", and they didn't feel the need to enmesh Christian values and ideals into these stories. As a result, we have relatively uncut examples of myths and tales that communicate to us the essence of an important stream of the Heathen religious and cultural past.

When we study the mythical themes in the Eddas, we can gain a very vivid image of who and what the Gods were to the men and women of a late period in Heathen history. While the Eddas do not speak to the entirety of the vast sweep of time in which the Germanic people were Pagan, they do present us with a directly descended organic result of countless generations of Heathenry. It is equally important to remember that the Germanic peoples were never "one" people as much as a very large grouping of tribes that were related linguistically and culturally- but variation always existed, and it still exists. This variation extended to religion. It is well known that the many continental Germanic peoples did not originally worship Odhinn as the "highest God", as much as they did Tiwaz or Tyr, and in other places, Thonoraz or Thor. These "sky" Gods, Gods of strength, martial ability, justice, light, and weather were the original "high Gods" of the Indo-European peoples as a whole.

It was a later time that the cult of Odhinn grew to a position of power, at least in northern lands. I understand that Odhinn was not a "newcomer"- his primordial presence can be tracked a good ways into history, but his ascendancy as the God of the ruling class was a relatively new cultural change in some places. Thor and Frey always remained the Gods of the "common man", even in Iceland, the country that gave us the Eddas in the first place. It so happens that the class of rulers and princes in Scandinavia (from whence came the Icelanders) had accepted the kingly cult of Odhinn, as had the intelligentsia embodied by skalds and sorcerers. Odhinn's position as God of War also gave him power in the warrior class, and they etch the politics of any nation with their swords and spears.

I have no doubt that Odhinn's presence has always been among the Germanic peoples, as it was among all peoples, for he is the shaper of the Nine Worlds and the gifter of mankind with beauty, sacredness, and inspiration. But the secret presence of this uncanny shaper does not ensure that he will be recognized and worshiped by all peoples equally- it only makes a large measure of sense that originally, the primordial peoples of the world would look to the most obvious powers- Great Sky and Earth- for their seed-pantheons. It would take many ages for mankind to evolve culturally and mentally enough to understand what qualities are truly the "kingly" qualities- that of cleverness, cunning, wisdom, and creativity. These qualities always trump strength and force, and without them, strength and force are misguided and unreliable. That a certain God should come to the forefront in human communities at some time later, when the realities of human life have changed, is in no manner a mystery or a scandal. It's just the nature of organic, healthy human religion that such a shift is possible.

There are some people out there who are bothered by the notion that human mythologies- such as the Indo European myths- are clearly influenced by human cultural changes and politics. It's humorous that such a thing would be of concern in the modern day, where the "bible", itself a 100% obvious product of human culture and human politics, holds such sway, but these people have a point that should be addressed- did humans just make all these myths up? Are the Eddaic myths just reflections of values and ideas that Scandinavian princes forced into place to honor the Gods that they felt upheld their authority?

I'm going to cover some new and somewhat unsettling ground, but I think it's high time that someone came out and said these things. Many of my fellow Asatruar have already considered what I am about to say, and the wisest of them were not bothered by it at all. Here goes:

The Gods are not confined to what we know about them owing to what mythology has survived to us in the present day. The Gods were never confined to the cultural stories told about them, in any era of history, and they are not so confined today. It may sound scandalous to some, but things with the Gods are never so simple.

I will develop this idea greatly, and cast some light on what sorts of perspectives we are forced to take when we understand what mythology is, and where it came from.

Let me start by saying something else that may bother some people- we don't know who or what the Gods really are. The Gods are certainly real; our ancestors certainly knew them and experienced them in many ways. The myths that our ancestors created to capture something of their experience with the Gods is valuable because it tells us, in many direct and indirect ways, something about the character and personality of the Gods and Goddesses. But however sacred they are, the myths are not the Gods. The myths do not tell us everything about the Gods. The myths that we have- and our collection of myths from the past is far from complete- are only snapshots of moments in human history in which humans told stories and shared them, regarding important mysterious events of Godly and otherworldly contact.

The myths do not tell us everything about the Gods; they don't even tell us most things. They tell us enough to approach the Gods in certain ways, ways that are similar to how our ancestors at one time did, but the myths are not "sacred scripture, exhaustive and complete" in the way that some people think the Bible or the Koran is.

For modern Heathens, as with ancient Heathens, our relationship to the Gods, and our understanding of them, cannot be limited by partial historical records or even by collections of myths from one time period or another. While it is true the myths present the valuable starting point that we need, and they present the context in which we must try to understand the Gods and Ancestral religion, they are not balls and chains of dogma that weight us down. This goes for all myths that all reconstructionists of any stripe may use.

There is a tendency for modern people to try and "type" the Gods. To an extent, this is unavoidable, because the reality is that not all Gods or Goddesses take an active role in all human activities. But there is a tendency to go further, and oversimplify the Gods and Goddesses, forcing them into neat categories of activity that never actually existed in the past. Victorian scholars loved to try this, forcing all pantheons to fit into their chart telling who was the "war god" and who was the "sun god" and so forth. When you really study the myths and lore of Gods and Goddesses, however, you see that such over-simple categorizations are not realistic.

The God Frey, for instance, was a God associated with fertility, but also with the life-giving powers of the sun and weather- but he was also a God of martial prowess and war, as well as peace. He was a king in Alfheim, the land given to him as a "tooth-gift", and lord of the burial mound or the Howe, and the Alfar or Elves in Alfheim- themselves related to the spirits of the dead, or the mound-dead. This God was a bringer of fruitfulness, an Earth-related God with hallowing powers, a God of Kingship and ancestor to the house of the Ynglings, and with his title "The Shining One", even a God of light and the sky. How can you try and pigeonhole Frey? It cannot be done. The same can be said for so many other Gods and Goddesses- things are not simple with them. These great spirits, these mysterious beings, are magnificently and broadly spread throughout the web of Wyrd, influencing many things and capable of being approached and known in many ways.

I would like to turn now to one of my favorite scholars of Heathen History: H.R. Ellis Davidson. In her essential book "Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe", she discusses the Scandinavian and Celtic Gods and the realities of Godly mythology in a very clear and penetrating way. Speaking of the myths of the Gods and organic traditions, she says:

"Gods and Goddesses appear in popular mythologies in a fossilized and static form. From the way in which they behave in various tales, often simplified in their turn, they are assumed to be deities of certain fixed types. As to which these types are, this depends on the prevailing theories about early religion.

However (when approaching the variety of presentations in mythologies) we are dealing here with many different levels of belief, and also with confused traditions, which may have been worked on by earlier antiquarians long before modern scholars began their reconstructions. Tales and poems about the Gods may also have been influenced by outside traditions and suffered considerable changes by the time they came to be recorded.

We cannot hope to get evidence at first hand, and even if we could, it is all too likely that we would find it confused and contradictory. Men are capable of holding concepts about the supernatural world which, from our modern viewpoint, seem to be opposed to one another, but which nevertheless worked reasonably satisfactorily for them. As long as traditions were passed on orally, those which no longer fitted could be given up while those which could develop along with changing ways of life were retained.

Once recorded, however, new confusions were created as it became essential to make a choice between the old and the new. Yet while all this must be borne in mind, it hardly justifies a refusal to search for an overall picture of the Gods of the Celtic and Germanic tradition from such evidence as is available. There is, after all, a considerable amount of information, complex and uneven though it may be...

There is no doubt that ideas about the Gods were constantly fluid and changing. Traditions and customs are remoulded along with changing ways of life, as is abundantly clear from the study of folklore, where recent work has highlighted the difficulties encountered in defining popular beliefs and drawing conclusions about them from oral tradition."


I will give more quotes from Davidson, but at this point, I felt the need to stop and point out the essence of her statement: oral traditions and organic traditions are fluid and dynamic. This is because the nature of the Gods and the Otherworld, in common with the nature of every living being, is fluid and dynamic. Living beings, like living wisdom, partake of a healthy chain of adaptions and adjustments, whenever the demands of Fate and life make their presence known. In this web of Wyrd, ever-changing and interactional, there is little or no room for people who wish to "codify" things, call them "truths", and expect them to remain so.

This is not an invitation to fall into the trap of relativism. The value of human life, the worthiness of the Gods, the nobility of heroism, the need for reciprocal respect between humans and the world they live in, these things (and other things) are unquestionably good and worthwhile, regardless of the many changes and life-situations that humans will find themselves in, or the situations the Gods may find themselves in, or the situations a hero may find him or herself in. It just so happens that a certain flexibility of mind must accompany all of our efforts towards being noble and wise- what is good and noble in these Nine Worlds will remain so, even if the forms and situations through which we know them as good and noble must undergo constant changes and transformations.

Flexibility in thinking and behaving is strength; it is the power to adapt and overcome. Without it, neither wisdom nor victory is possible. Having this sort of flexibility of thinking and behaving is not the same as saying "give up on your ancestral traditions"- it is saying "understand the context in which your traditions are embedded, and don't over-calcify the Ancestors, nor the ways in which they experienced the world and came to know the truths that they discovered."

Truly throwing away all that we know about tradition in the name of flexibility would be a travesty, but ignoring the demands made by the shifting web of Wyrd, ignoring the demands that Nature herself puts on us to adapt in the name of some "set-in-stone" cultural ideal that probably never existed in the past, is equally as bad. A person has to balance their need for certainty (which contains in itself the dangerous seed of dogma) with wisdom's request that we live our lives the best we can, never allowing the blindness of inflexibility to paralyze us mentally or spiritually.

In some way, this is the central conflict faced by reconstructionists today- balancing the need to revive an organic tradition of spirituality from within ourselves, which includes a personal and ongoing experience of the Gods and the Otherworld, with the need to respect what we do know about the Ancestral past and to situate ourselves, as wisely as we can, within the context of the same.

It is obvious to everyone who has ever really practiced a reconstructionist religion that simply reading books is not enough. It is not enough to read a description of a God from some scholar's book, and grab a horn and fill it with ale, and drink to the God.

The spiritual awareness we seek, the experience of the sacred tradition of the Ancestral past, does not begin until a person gets out of books and engages the Gods actively in their lives. There is an "open space" of types, between the life of the modern Heathen and the mystery of the Gods or other spiritual powers- and in that space, which is impossible to pin down, impossible to explain, and hard to imagine, a spiritual meeting takes place, a meeting that can hardly be explained or described to another who didn't experience it.

In that meeting, a person finds a religious identity, and finds a direction which belongs to them alone, but which can be harmoniously blended with others who share in that person's family or religious community in many positive ways. To get into this "space" where the Gods can be met, or the Ancestors can be met, a person has to stop imagining that they know beforehand what they will see or experience. They have to bear in mind what the Ancestors said, but they must also bear in mind that the lore of the Ancestors, so crucial to us today, was not put there to exempt a person from their own experience. Ancestral lore has not exempted any person from the duty to find their own experience of the Gods and of life.

A person has to approach the Gods and the spiritual powers with an open mind, a frame of reference that is flexible and receptive. To give up on so many things that give us certainty and to trust in the Gods and Ancestors is difficult, but it is the only way to really get into the "space" I have been describing. The lore that you have read will always be there for you, to support you, and to supply you with a context and a way of understanding your experiences, but it cannot live your spiritual life for you.

There's no need for worry here- the Gods and Ancestors know their own, and when you make the leap into the "open space", they will be there. They will situate you and you will engage them, and from that point, whenever and wherever it comes, you have the spiritual experience-base that allows Heathens to avoid the trap of "faith in the unprovable" which is so common in monotheistic religions. Heathens don't "believe" in the Gods and Ancestors even though they can't see them; Heathens know their Gods and Ancestors. Heathens experience them in many ways. Heathens who experienced them before left us many sacred tales and wisdom-packed stories; from that, we can know that our search is not unique to us, and many men and women before us have succeeded, to their great joy and satisfaction.

The question of "which Gods?" will doubtlessly come up- which Gods will meet you? Should you want to meet any in particular? Returning now to Davidson, she says, regarding the Gods and the organic traditions of the past:

"The Celtic and Germanic peoples worshiped a number of Gods through the centuries. There were many changes in their way of life, and much movement of peoples over a wide area of Europe, so that their religion could hardly be expected to remain static. Although there were priests and teachers to pass on the old traditions, there were no sacred books to establish a main outline of myths which might be used as a final court of appeal. They had come into contact with many cultures before they finally accepted (or were forced to accept) the teaching of the Christian church and abandoned their early religious practices, and one powerful influence was the sophisticated culture of the Roman Empire which in the end they helped to overthrow.

Much of our knowledge of their Gods comes from altars and inscriptions to native deities which have been identified with Roman Gods, given Roman names, and depicted in anthropomorphic form in accordance with Roman custom and style. While Roman religion in its turn was not static, there was a strong tendency to organize and rationalize supernatural figures, fitting them into an elaborate scheme in which each was responsible for some special department in life.

Our familiarity with this way of viewing the Gods has led to the assumption that Germanic and Celtic deities must be specialized ones also. As Marie Sjoestedt pointed out: "When we are tackling a strange mythology, we seek instinctively an Olympus where the Gods abide, an Erebus, kingdom of the dead, a hierarchy of the Gods, specialized as patrons of war, of the arts, or love. And, seeking them, we do not fail to find them."

She goes on to point out the lack of definite functions to differentiate the Celtic Gods. The most powerful deities were characteristic tribal ones, presiding over many aspects of life, such as fertility, craftsmanship, battle, law, and magic. She felt that it is not possible to find a "common Celtic" period in mythology, with clearly defined central deities: "What we know of the decentralized character of society among the Celts and of the local and anarchical character of their mythology excludes that hypothesis."

This has to be borne in mind when approaching the myths, and no doubt much of the same can be said of the Gods of the Germanic peoples. Odin, Thor, and Freyr were many-sided Gods. Odin may have reigned supreme over the battlefield, but also possessed special skills such as poetry, oratory, divination, and the secret of gaining wealth, while he was an expert in the magical arts and had entry into the Underworld realm of the dead. Thor was the god bearing the thunderbolt, defender of the Aesir and of mankind, yet also had power over the fertility of the earth, while he assisted travelers and protected the homes, laws, and boundaries of men. Freyr was one of the fertility Gods, yet seems to have been regarded as a war God by the Swedes, who placed his symbols on armor and weapons.

No one of these three possessed sole dominion over the sky, the earth, or the underworld. Odin rode through the sky as well as under the earth; Freyr was associated with the sun but also was a power within the burial mound; Thor had dominion over storms and winds, but his hammer could protect worshipers in the grave.

However the character of each God is recognizable, and the choice of one as a divine protector was likely to depend on the kind of life a man led. Kings and warriors turned to Odin; those holding land and responsibility were likely to select Thor as their friend; those who wished for luck in hunting, rearing of beasts, cultivation of land, and the bringing up of healthy children would seek help from the Vanir."

Sjoestedt's quote above, given by Ellis, is powerful- we WILL see what we want to see, when we bring our own assumptions to any mythology that we study. This is important because I've seen too many people butcher the mythologies of the Northern people with their half-baked assumptions about the way the Godly world or the Unseen World works. The Unseen world is primarily a mystery to us, even if it is a perfectly natural aspect of human life and the structure of the world.

Davidson does the best job I've read of reminding us that our Ancestors' Gods were not things sliced up with cookie-cutter shapes and served in some rational, structured way to their followers. The Ancestral approach to the Gods is one of experience and engagement, which takes us beyond our expectations of structure and rationality. In this manner, the Gods can be truly present to each and every moment in time, or person who seeks them; by not fitting into some narrow theory or theology, they are infinitely able to be real to us, and to affect the world.

This brings me to my final point: Ancestral myths. What can we make of those? Some of the myths we read in the Eddas (and I should point out here that "myth", to me, in no manner implies something that is "made up") present a pretty structured view of the Gods and how they created the world. We know that the Eddas come from one time period, late in Iceland, so what should we conclude from this? Davidson writes:

"The Gods as represented in surviving literatures form a group, and there are no indications of an earlier concept of one supreme deity. The Germans and Scandinavians worshiped the Gods as a company at their regular feasts, although a toast might be drunk or a sacrifice offered to one particular deity. Two or three are mentioned together in such oath formulae or curses as have come down to us. In Eddic and Skaldic poetry two or three of the Gods have adventures together, while they are pictured in larger companies feasting together or meeting to decide on judgments at the Thing. Voluspa, admittedly composed somewhat late in the pre-Christian period, gives a confident picture of the Gods as a group at the beginning of time, establishing order, making objects of fine workmanship, and setting up buildings.

As we have been reminded, it would be foolish to reject such testimony out of hand, and the creation of a pantheon in Asgard cannot be due to Snorri, although he may have added a few details to regularize the vague and often confused relationships between various deities, as when he makes Odin the father of Thor. The Gods are also seen as established in families, with sons who play a small but significant part in the myths, and are married to Goddesses who appear to come from the Vanir, and are said to be daughters of giants.

...The idea of a company of Gods is supported by the language of the poems. Regin is used of the Gods, in general, although it may have referred originally to the chief Gods, those in particular who possessed power over the fates of men. A similar Gothic term ragin is used to mean "counsel" or "decision" and the word is found in the German Heliand with the meaning of "divine power". In the Hakonarmal, composed in the tenth century, the dead king Hakon is welcomed to Valhalla by "all the council and the powers" (rad oll ok regin).

...The conception of a divine company of Gods seems to have been well established among the Germans by the time of Tacitus. In his Germania he mentions Mercury and Mars, the "Supreme God" of the Semnones, who may have been Tiwaz, twin Gods known as the Alcis, the divine ancestor Tvisto, and the Goddesses Isis and Nerthus. He refers to the Gods in the plural, reporting that men believed they should not be confined within walls or portrayed in human likeness, and that they could communicate by means of sacred horses and other methods. Similarly, Julius Ceasar insists on a plurality of deities among the Celts in the last century BC."


Many sources tell us that the Gods were many, and they help us to understand who and what the people of their time believed about the Gods, but one thing stands out clearly: as Davidson said in the beginning, these accounts are snapshots, fossilized in time, of a "way of knowing" that was current to those times. We can and should take these things into account, but we can't forget that people in those times "rounded out" their understandings of the Gods in many ways that were relevant to the needs of their people and their lives. Snorri certainly comes to mind here.

Here is the essence of the message I am trying to communicate in this essay: The Gods are real; they are the Gods, long-lived and mighty, forever protectors of the world; but reports of the past, and even sacred myths, are only starting points to discovering who and what they are.

Yes, it is likely that Thor was the chief God of the Germanic peoples in many areas, for many centuries, and it is likewise that Tiwaz or Tyr was the chief God of many others. It is true that people all over the Germanic world didn't always believe that Odhinn was the chief and ruler of Gods- this is a later evolution of Germanic religion, though to see modern Asatru, you'd never guess that.

The reason why this is okay is because the Gods don't care how we understand them, so long as we recognize them and seek their company and friendship. The Gods DO understand how mortal politics, cultural evolution, and the sweep of Fate and history can bring many people to think many things about them, and they do not place those things before the simple truth of their own existence and the need mortals have for them, nor do the Gods (who seem to be more broad-minded than mortals) care whether or not we think this-or-that God is the son of this-or-that God.

They do care about us as mortals, because they protect our world from destructive powers, and they are our kin, for we are all sprung from the massive web of Wyrd, and the myths also present a notion of direct Ancestral connection, as well. The Gods concern themselves with us as family, and again, this sort of bond goes far beyond some insignificant point of shifting cultural theology.

At one time, people may not have believed that Thor was the son of Odin. In another place, that idea was evolved. I have defended this evolution in understanding Odhinn as a natural evolution that had to occur as people came to more awareness of the power of cunning and wisdom, and how such things were the true power behind rulership and thrones.

Either way, people's changing understanding of the Gods and the relationships between them is secondary to the reality of the Gods and the ability of humans to have relationships with them. That's that. We Heathens don't have "bibles" in our Eddas; we have books presenting some sacred understandings of some people who lived some hundreds of years ago- it's good to have their understandings, and we are just as capable now of basing a reconstructed religion off it.

But we go seriously wrong if we think that the Eddas (or any presentation of mythology) are "true, unalterable, and beyond question." A person can have a religious relationship with Odhinn, or Thor, or any God or Goddess fully in isolation from any mythical understanding of them- knowing the God or Goddesses' name, having an experience of them from the inside, engaging them with your heart and mind, toasting them and sacrificing to them will be as sufficient now as it was centuries ago. What the Ancestors had that many of us don't is a community that gave a context to these sacred activities and shared them in unique cultural ways; today, Kindreds and congregations of Asatruar can still experience that, when they worship the Gods and Ancestors together.

I'd like to end this by pointing out that I, personally, do have my own ideas, based on the Eddas and other sources, about how the Godly family of the Aesir and the Vanir are related to one another- a theological family tree, as it were. But I recognize that these understandings of mine, and of the Eddaic writers, are just that- our understandings of the mysteries of the Gods themselves, and that there's a hel of a lot more about the Gods that we don't know. Building such an understanding of the Gods as I have is a way of honoring my Ancestors, primarily; when it comes to straight theological thinking, I'll be the first to admit that the primordial Gods are mysterious and hard to understand, and their relationship with humanity goes so far back, that all of our mythical ideas and understandings of them are reflections of reflections, passed down to us through immense ages of time.

For me, it is far more important that I pray and sacrifice to the Gods than it is that I get my "facts of relationship based on the Eddas" right. I think the Gods must agree, considering the many blessings and great luck that has been poured out into my life. They'll be here for us all as long as we approach them with open minds and hearts, and with full knowledge that they are both real, and the worthy protectors and helpers of mankind.

Are we not simply living and doing what our ancestors always have done? We are born here in our world, we hear tales from the past, learn of the Gods from Ancestral lore, and we take those learnings and we integrate them into our lives as best we can, bearing in mind the needs and realities of our modern day. This is a "theology of everyday life", as opposed to some "theology of the book"- our ancestors were not burdened by scriptures, and neither are we. Getting out of books and into personal engagement with life and the Gods is what we are meant to do.