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 ...