Hearthside

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 ...

This is going to be something a bit different. I have been stuck on this thought lately. A sort of ancient thought half-formed in the collective consciousness of the ancestors, thousands of years ago. Before the beginning of agriculture. Or perhaps it was the beginning of agriculture. The awareness that a seed when planted in the belly of the earth would grow. But just a single seed from a single plant. Before the thought had been realized that the same could be done with a whole field of seeds. Perhaps the knowing that if you planted one of the berries instead of eating them all there would be more berries the following year. If you planted one seed of a plant for medicine then the medicine would be greater that next summer. The magic of the belly of Jord.  Before the thought of Jord by that name, but she had a name even then. Those ancient minds knew the power of the Earth, they knew her and venerated her. But Jord's belly did not just spark new life. It was the place where life ...