Hearthside

Something they told me in teaching college was work smarter, not harder. How does a busy full time working woman balance that, running a household, and being the Chieftain of her tribe? The answer is, any way I can! I was talking to one of my Kyn earlier this year about how he uses Chat GPT to brainstorm when ritual writing, and then goes in and edits from there. You wouldn’t know, unless you know. Technology is the future and the future is now.  Our Kindred does mostly in-person rituals, but also the occasional online ritual, and quite a few hybrid rituals. We use Zoom for meetings. We use social media to get ourselves out there. I have recently started experimenting with Chat GPT for rituals, poetry, or just helping me to think through complex Heathen topics. I am also working on mind-mapping my Heathen practice using Obsidian. For those of you who remember the internet of the 90s where you could start researching one topic, and 2 hours later find yourself reading something entir...

So you may have heard of the terms universalism, tribalism, and folkism in heathenry. A lot of people don’t like them as labels, and that is fine. I do think they have value though, in trying to convey complex ideologies, so bear with me. Universalists believe that anyone can practice heathenry and usually in any way they think is right, while the folkish belief is that heathenry is an ethnic religion with traditions that shouldn’t be appropriated by other groups. Now, obviously folkism is very clearly a not so polished veneer for white supremacist and bigoted ideologies, but universalism is also not without its problems. The problems are not so much that anyone can practice, but that if anyone can practice any way that they want that it waters down practice until it loses its meaning and value.  Tribalism is often presented as the middle point, but that is an oversimplification. Tribalists believe that you are only heathen if you group practice or are oathed into a heathen communi...