Hearthside

There are a lot of complex issues when talking about children in heathenry in general, and ritual is definitely going to be a main area of contention. Understanding the political landscape of heathenry is key to navigating this. There are several dynamics taking place that make this such a hot topic.  First of all, we cannot escape the folkish element of heathenry and their push to breed to expand heathenry. This seems to cause pushback in inclusive heathenry, where people and groups are hesitant to entertain family friendly ritual at all for fear of being lumped into a folkish category. This is highly problematic, since most religions are inclusive to families. This leads right into our next issue. The religious backgrounds of most of the heathen demographic have shaped their perceptions of family and religion. Many heathens grew up in a landscape where religion was forced upon them, and are hesitant to allow that to happen to the next generation. There are also some concerns that...

There is a lot of bad advice on the internet, and most women are well aware that everyone has an opinion on child-rearing. This does not seem to exclude sites on heathenry unfortunately. If you look for information on raising heathen children on the internet, you are sure to be disappointed. First of all you have to weed through all the instances where the word “heathen” is used in a different context from what you strictly meant. Perhaps, you choose to go the raising pagan children route instead, to see if that improves the content that comes up. You will soon see you are just replacing one unsatisfying result with another. If you do manage to sift through all the stuff that presents very clearly as garbage you still will not like what you find. We are really still at the building stage here with heathenry, and sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and write the rule book ourselves. If heathen women want information about heathenry and child raising, we really need to share our st...

This is just a bit of light-hearted fun really. This weekend has been a bit too stimulating for me, but that doesn’t mean my brain wants to slow down. Weekends make me a lot more aware of the wights, because I try to carve out more time to both engage them, and also maintain the order of my environment. (Yes, that is just a fancy way of saying that Sunday is usually laundry day.) This weekend I am also feeling the spring creeping in through my open windows and thinking about outdoor projects that may need to be started. Talking about wights in the modern world can get a bit strange. In some ways it is more believable that certain rocks or trees are beings, but a lot of the modern world is fabricated. How does the modern city-dwelling animist make sense of that? Can a computer or a printer be a being? How about a car? If there are housewights, what about work wights? Do apartments have one wight for the whole building, or one for each apartment, or both? How do you find landwights when ...

This one is not going to be super exciting. I have other stuff in the works, but this weekend my schedule has been a bit crazy. (Not that I have promised to adhere to any sort of schedule for posting anyways.) I have been coming back to this topic a lot lately, so let’s see if we can unpack it. Do you honour the ancestors in your personal practice? If so, who are you honouring? This seems like it should be fairly easy to answer on first glance, but it really isn’t.  Most people in heathenry seem to honour their recent dead primarily in their ancestor practice. I know that a lot of my ancestor practice is based on honouring and maintaining relationships with recent dead. It makes sense. Presumably, you knew them in life and then wanted to continue your relationship with them in death. That makes perfect sense. It is also very healthy to do in order to accept their passing.  Things get very complicated fast though. Ancestors aren’t just the recent dead. You may be doing lineage ...

I have trees on my mind at the moment, so I want to unpack a bit of the symbolism of the tree Barnstokk. If you have ever read the Saga of the Völsungs you will recognize that Barnstokk is the name of the tree that grows in King Völsung’s hall. There is a lot of symbolism that the modern reader may overlook to do with trees that could be relevant to the story. First of all, it is an old custom for a family to plant a tree outside their home that is their tuntre, or guardian tree. The tree, if nurtured well, holds the family’s luck. If something happens to the tree then the luck of the family will also fail, usually resulting in the family perishing. It is unusual for the tree to be protected inside the hall, as is the case with Barnstokk.  There are a few other strange things to do with this particular tree. Odin, disguised as an old man, appears and thrusts a sword into Barnstokk, declaring that whoever can pull the sword out of the tree will have it. King Siggeir tries to pull it...

       I recently saw this image appear in my feed on Facebook, and although I think it is better than a lot of illustrations of language trees that I have seen, it makes no sense that a primarily English illustration of a language tree fails to include Old English. For those of you wondering, the OE word for mother is “modor.” As such, on this diagram it should be the branch off of Proto-Germanic which is not the branch labeled Old Norse. (I will relabel the diagram below so you can see what I mean.)       There are a lot of perfectly terrible language trees out there, so by comparison this one is fairly good. The actual form of a tree really lends itself to illustrating the evolution of language as it splits into branches of varying lengths. I spend a lot of time looking at different languages for fun in my spare time. My current focus is Norwegian, but I have a background in Old English from my university years and I have studied Old Norse and ...

Depending on your background, you may be familiar with the omnis. (Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnibenevolence). Back when I was just an itty bitty pagan in college I first got introduced to these concepts in my 2nd year Philosophy course on Metaphysics. Now, my understanding from the content I have come across is that the omnis are a christian concept, or at least a monotheistic concept. That makes sense, because they really only fit into a monotheistic worldview. However, I really found building my understanding of the omnis helped me to understand my own worldview better and to express my thoughts about it.  So the basics, in case you aren’t familiar with these concepts: Omnipotence - The belief that gods are all powerful Omniscience - The belief that gods are all knowing Omnipresence - The belief that gods are all present (everywhere at once) Omnibenevolence - The belief that gods are all good In my philosophy course my professor posed the argument that god ...