infographic on norse mythology weapons done for class! it’s a pretty big file so tumblr is probably going to trash the quality so click for full quality :^)
You don’t have to believe in Pop Culture Paganism. You don’t have to practice it. You don’t have to agree with it.
But you aren’t better than those who do practice it. You aren’t “more spiritual”. And if you are disrespectful to those who practice it, they don’t owe you a fucking thing.
All texts and experiences of the gods are, necessarily interpreted through the perceptions and biases of humans. All perceptions perceived by humans are also filtered through cultural and social biases of the perceiver.
This means that all texts and by extension all experiences are interpretations.
Thusly, there is naught we can say, do or experience without bias.
We, as moderns, are not unbiased. We immediately class things such as gender ambiguity/fluidity as queer. We read certain relationships as hetero or homosexual.
We immediately look at a story which has been given the English title, in a painting as The Rape of Persephone and some of us immediately cast Persephone as powerless victim of sexual assault. However, Persephone is a powerful goddess, acknowledged by the ancient Greeks as Queen of the Underworld. The interpretation of her as ‘rape-victim’ comes from an English title, and takes little account of Ancient Greek marriage customs.
The modern categorization of ancient texts and myths is just that – modern. The categories we use today may not even have existed in the time when the myths originated. This is to say, that while there are people who might fit our definitions of queer, gay or straight, those individuals would not necessarily identify that way.
Now, regarding the behaviour of the gods in Norse lore, several things must be considered:
1. The majority (if not all) of the texts we have are post-conversion, which is to say, they were written down by Christians. Snorri himself indulges in the practice of Euhemerism – he casts the gods as powerful mortals, rather than gods. Even if he were copying them down from oral sources, there is a gap of several centuries – and hence those sources would have been raised in a Christianized worldview which may not have been entirely friendly to the Heathen figures and events found in the myths.
2. Gods are gods. In the same way governments do terrible things in order to preserve ‘order’, so may gods. The morality itself is almost secondary – the key is doing what needs to be done to keep the universe running. Some might argue that it is the gods behaviour which brings about Ragnarok, in that they mess things up and the contracts, oaths and practices which hold society (and hence the kosmos) together get broken. It is this breakage, some may argue which brings about the end of the world and the beginning of something else. Thus the myths might be said to be ‘cautionary tales’. Exemplars of societal issues and dilemmas writ large.
3. Perhaps a more esoteric angle: myths depict a different kind of reality, one where symbols and actions have multiple layered meanings. The gods themselves, while depicted as human are not, in fact so. The relationship between a symbol and its audience-perceiver could be described as ‘charged’. Meaning emerges from the symbol’s interaction with the mind of the perceiver. Metaphorically speaking, it is a hieros gamos – a divine marriage. The imagery of the gods meets the mind of humans, evokes memory, emotion, thought, physical sensation.
The feelings regarding murder, the sensations regarding the thing we consider ‘horrible’, these are different sensations and reactions perhaps, than those of the original audience. Bear in mind, the creation of the world being murder is our interpretation. It may very well be that for the ancient Icelanders, Ymir and the thurses fate was not murder but mere killing. This putative distinction might exist because murder could be seen as specifically killing another who has committed no crime against you, whereas, the thurses, seen as a threat to all life and order, were not capable of being murdered because they were not human/existed outside the walls of the garth.
As regards Billing’s daughter: If we regard this as simply a tale wherein Odin sets his eyes on a pretty girl and pushes things when she turns it down, ignoring her consent, this is reprehensible.
If we regarded it as something with multiple layers, then could not we see this as an illustration that even the master of magic can be bested, his lusts thwarted? Or that the maid in question is somewhat akin to Scherezade – able to bewitch (in a non pejorative sense) and prevail against a powerful male figure through cunning? Does she not then become an exemplar of women not to submit to unwanted attentions? Or could the story be a warning to those young men who seek to have their way with women against their consent?
A kind of, do this, and not only will you get shat on by the woman in question but strung up by her fathers, brothers and friends?
I’m not defending any of these actions, merely offering alternative ways of looking at them. Myth is multivalent – that is its beauty and its terror. An evocative realm that provides access to fundamental truths, no not often straightforwardly, particularly not to those who have a distance of nearly a thousand years from the original audience.
There is no doubt that Odin was seen as an oathbreaker – a dark and shadowy figure, and yet a being of immense power. In this he accords with many ancient culture figures the world over – powerful precisely because of his ability to break and operate outside of, the rules. Powerful because he has his own rules which he sticks to.
The numinous rarely has time for human morality, even if human morality develops out of contact with it. – and in some sense defence against it. After all, what is following the will of the gods but a) trying not to piss them off, b) doing as they say because it is beneficial for you and your people and they want to help, c) trying to preserve your people by having some powerful entities onside to protect you – or some combination thereof?
(The above is intentionally reductionist – of course. It’s different in every culture, and is far more nuanced.)
Perhaps it’s useful to think of things in terms of survival? Today we foolishly believe that not much can touch our culture. We have technology, medical advances and weather prediction which make life fairly stable and smooth for a good chunk of the Western world.
We have, in a sense, lost the idea that the universe is bigger than us. It’s only when we face significant disruptionthat we begin to realise just how perilous life is. In December, my city lost power due to flooding, for four days. No light at night save for candles, streets pitch black, stars so very bright. No frozen food. No hot water – or even water at all for those of us in my block of flats because it’s pumped electrically. No cell phones. Just emergency broadcasts on the radio for where people could gather if their homes were flooded or without power. Friends walking between houses in the dark to carry messages and bottled water between hubs of people huddled by candlelight, cooking on camping stoves.
Small things that needed to be done, so as to look out for the vulnerable, to strengthen ties of friendship tight, to avoid people preying on those rendered defenceless and alone in their homes.
The ties that bind, strengthened by hospitality and kindness to strangers. The things needed to be done, to help you survive – old rules straight out of the Havamal and other wisdom from pre-technological cultures. Humans are very small, the universe is big and we are not were not the masters we thought we were.
That was for four days. Imagine months of that darkness. Imagine life without technology. How long would this veneer we call ‘civilisation’ last before the pragmatism of survival meant a whole other kind of morality, a new-old way of living. A morality where you were kinder to strangers, to travellers, and where those who banded together with you were the reason you were alive.
No faux bullshit Innagard – just your kith and kin, helping each other live, survive and prosper. Bound together by the threads of wyrd, reinforcing, generation after generation, the need to help each other.
Cautionary tales of what happens if you don’t. Recognition that you are not the mightiest thing, that there are unknown lands beyond the boundary, things on the edge of the firelight, as powerful as shining stars and running rivers.
Things that, if you’re lucky, you might want to look on you kindly, or at the very least leave you alone.
As an experiment, read the myths in that context – in a world of strange and wonderful forms of being, where things are far more fluid and the night is alive.
Gods and men, wights and ancestors, all together throughout an endless flame-flickering star-filled eternity, stretching right back to the beginning.
Hunting in the wilds with her soul split into two, ever prowling and watchful. Sweep across the old places, filled with dead silence as the ‘Poisonous Rebirth’ patch is equipped to you. These screen-printed patches with light grey ink on black fabric are now available in my @etsyshop! @catherineharasymiw and I had a lot of fun printing these together at her amazing studio too. Go check them out, before your under the set of her teeth.💀🌿🌙
Planting tulips feels like you’re burying a dead body that’s going to reanimate in 7 months. I suggest planting them with individual intentions that you want to set for the spring. Once they come up and bloom, so too will you be ready to make your new changes.
‘Within the witch’s craft many apparently mundane objects are considered to have both magical and mystical virtue, one example being the humble nail. Although some, on basis of morphology, ascribe to nails a phallic virtue, they also have a fixative power, i.e. the ability to bind one thing to another, for good or bane. Nails also partake in no small measure of the powers ascribed to their material, which is normally iron, that heavenly metal linked in the occult mind with blood and the virtues of redness.
When a thing is brought into contact with another it makes an alligation. The basis of alligation is that all things created, whether by the hands of man or nature, are bestowed by the Soul of the World with virtue, which is harnessed by bringing the virtuous object into contact with people/places/objects. Included in this is the binding of two things together in alligation by a nail, so that one might influence the other.
The thing or power being fixed by the nail to person, place or object can be manifold; even celestial powers corresponding to the time at which the nail was struck into its medium can be bound into workings. Herein we understand the basis of hammering various amulets into the lintel above the threshold, such as the apotropaic images of the sun, open hand or ubiquitous horseshoe.
Contrary to popular belief, nails are as protective as the horseshoes they affix. Indeed, Pliny the Elder advised hammering three iron nails, not horseshoes, into the threshold’s lintel to protect the home, likewise Paul Huson in Mastering Witchcraft advocated driving three iron coffin nails into the door, one above and two below in triangular formation. Similarly, protective enclosures are fashioned by striking nails into their four corners and wandering spirits are stopped by hammering nails into their coffins, whilst Romans averted plague and misfortune by driving nails into house walls. Thus is it axiomatic that the number of nails found within a horseshoe affects its potency, the more nails the greater the luck, although some hold true to the custom of fixing the shoe with three nails by means of three blows, alluding to the kinship betwixt nails and the number three.
Horseshoe nails have long been held to possess an array of powers, e.g. the crooked horseshoe nails hung as amulets about the necks of Irish children, and the horseshoe nails driven into the hearth by Teutonic peoples to draw back stolen property. Traditional witch Robert Cochrane recounted that “a horseshoe nail dipped in spring water was considered a prime remedy to use against the ‘little people’ when they grew bothersome”, which relies also on the well-known enmity betwixt the Fair Folk & iron.’ …
‘The most familiar witch tradition concerning nails is their use to pierce the witch’s manikin with benevolent or malevolent intent, yet there is equal tradition in using blackthorn spines, which like nails have an innate warding virtue. Thorns are often used alongside or in place of nails in the magical arts, e.g. in the famed witch-bottle or being tied into the end of the curse cord in place of a rusty nail. We might thus consider them as ‘wooden nails’ fashioned by the green hand of the Faerie Smith, to which Schulke alludes in Viridarium Umbris when he says, “the Thorn is both punitive & binding, the Holy Nail of the Greenwood executing the grim sentence of Crucifixion at once harnessing the forces of binding & torment”; it is in the crucifixion that we discover the nail’s apotheosis.’
may the bridges I burn light the way 