Hearthside

So I have lots of bigger stuff underway for the blog but it just isn't quite ready yet. This has been weighing on me lately though, and I just needed a rant.  Canadian Heathenry. There are only 13 inclusive Heathen kindreds in Canada that I can confirm on my inclusive Heathen group list . (If you have another one please contact me on social media or by email to have it added.) That is 13 groups. We have 13 provinces and territories in Canada. These groups are not evenly dispersed across all of them. In fact, many of them are multiple kindreds within the same cities even. The result is that the Canadian Heathen landscape is very isolationist. If you aren't able to travel you might never meet another Heathen or if you are lucky enough to be a part of a kindred, you may never meet another kindred.  But wait... Didn't I just say many kindreds are in the same cities? Yeah. That is the point of this rant actually. This isn't about how isolationist Canadian Heathenry is, altho...

(Part 2) If you made it through Part 1 and came back, congrats. It was a tough slog. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I suggest you start there , and come back. This is the tougher of 2 parts, certainly the toughest for me to write, and reading my previous post will help lay the groundwork for understanding where I am coming from.  I want to open this part very clearly with the statement that racism is not acceptable, and we should not tolerate it in any aspects of our lives. We should definitely not tolerate it in modern inclusive Heathenry. I want to say we shouldn’t tolerate it in modern Heathenry at all, but since modern Heathenry grew out of white nationalist sentiments that ship has sailed. Rather, we must work to uplift inclusive Heathenry, because the reality is that the majority of modern Heathens today are inclusive Heathens and that number continues to grow rapidly. To me, racists aren’t Heathen. No fascism, not in my Heathenry. But ignoring history never goes well either...

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...