Hearthside

I have been writing a lot about Heathenry from a female perspective, but how important is gender (and also sexual identity) to Heathenry? The answer is, not very.  I am talking about Heathenry from a female perspective mainly because when I was starting this blog I was not seeing enough women creating Heathen content even though as a religion there are actually a fairly large percentage of women in leadership roles compared to broader society. I felt a bit strange stepping into this role, while people around me seemed to think I was a good fit for it. Additionally, I have found in other Heathen circles that sometimes I am put into a position where the discussion is very male dominated, to the point that I have joked on occasion that perhaps I needed a beard to be a part of it. So I am pushing back against that, but it is really only a start. Gender is a construct from the broader over-culture. We cannot know what the elder Heathens truly thought about gender and sexual identity....

So I finished my last post on Nerthus and Jörð. I had been working at it for over a week but in the end it was one of those pieces that became all-consuming until I finally completed it. The writing took on its own life quite separate from the original direction I had thought I was going with it. With that completed I thought, finally I will get some sleep… And I fell hard, into a dream about the Thunderer in the Proto-Indo-European myths. Perk w unos awoke in my mind, forming a thundercloud that loomed over everything. When I finally pulled myself out of the dream it was past my alarm, and outside the Sky showered the Earth with rain. It is thunderstorm season here. I admit that Thor has been on my mind, since I associate the midsummer blot with Thor. The coming of the storms brings the water needed for the crops in their big growth time before the harvest. There are also the hot and humid summer evenings when all you can do is sit with a cool drink on a patio and tell stories until ...

It is not uncommon for me to pull from other sources for my Heathenry, looking at Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Baltic, or Slavic traditions to see if I can fill in some of the missing gaps in the Nordic sources. My interest lately has been going into pre-history, looking at the Proto-Indo-European root myths. In this case, I want to try to flesh out the Nordic “goddess.” There is so little preserved about goddesses, because I believe the Christians tried to intentionally erase them to take power away from Nordic women. Now I cannot reconstruct every goddess this way but I feel it is a solid way to construct the mother goddess, the earth goddess. In the Hellenic tradition she is the one known as Gaia. In Nordic traditions I would see her as Nerthus, and also as Jörð. Over time they became separate deities, but I think their roots both lie in the Proto-Indo-European goddess, Dʰéǵʰōm (earth) or Pleth₂wih (broad one). There is a huge problem in the Lore with goddesses being labelled as Jötunn, in ...