When I first moved to the Midwest, back in 2018, I had regular interactions with the brother of someone close to me who was… probably the worst person I’ve ever met. The story I tell to explain what I mean by that? “This is a person who can sleep at night believing he has smothered a human infant in its crib. He didn’t - he was high out of his mind and his mom had eyes on him when it supposedly happened, but he is genuinely able to sleep at night believing he not only killed another human, but a freaking baby. That’s who this person is.” He was technically my landlord for a bit. Local nuns wouldn’t even help him charitably until I smoothed things over because he had mistreated them so badly.
Around this time, I got deeply into decluttering and Swedish Death Cleaning (simplifying one's life with the knowledge that one could die at any time and someone else would have to look through your stuff, plus as you get older upkeep will not get any easier). I wrestled so intensely with some animism I couldn’t name at the time (which Marie Kondo’s actual Shinto side weirdly helped with) that I also wound up releasing my own attachment to having to be buried instead of cremated, and opening up to the idea of things like organ donation. I felt like a different person than I had grown up thinking I would be, but I had also lost myself. I started identifying with pure consciousness because some parts of me didn’t even feel human in the same way anymore. I burned bits of my past because it was too painful to remember what I had been, to remember hope.
I was in deep poverty, sometimes even living without working plumbing, all while trying to help a friend with severe mental and physical illness. That combination of living with someone so potentially dangerous while doing without so many things many in the US take for granted… taught me a lot about what some go through in the range of human experiences. But more recently, I got reminders of an even worse living situation, at least mentally if not physically.
Back in college, in 2010, I had rented half of an attic space that was finished and divided into rooms - two bedrooms with a bathroom and a kitchenette in between. The woman who occupied the other bedroom was incredibly mentally and emotionally abusive towards me. Once, she acted like she was going to hit me and then stopped her fist inches from my face, telling me that because her brother was a lawyer, and her uncle was a sheriff, she could “throw anyone in jail she wants, and I was lucky she let me walk around free.” She kept gaslighting me that parts of my social life and people I interacted with didn’t exist.
Telling Eric the story in 2021 made me think to google her for the first time in years, and that’s when I found out. She had finally abused the wrong person and… her abuse victim had killed her. I feel like a terrible person for this but… my first reaction was to laugh. Here I was, someone who used to judge others for reacting similarly to deaths of people they didn’t like, and I was essentially doing the same thing. I suppose even I am not as judgment free as the above essay… I felt like a monster, but I also felt relief.
But people like that, people worse than that…? Maybe that’s why I don’t feel it’s just a Christian idea to need… not hell, fine, but some sort of soul composting program in the afterlife for the people who treat others quite that badly. I wouldn’t pretend to know where the line is… but as dark and monstrous as I feel for laughing at a death like that, somewhere between feeling giddy with relief at the death of an abuser and, say, a genocidal dictator… there’s gotta be some kinda line where getting eaten by a dragon and shat out a few times isn’t an unreasonable prerequisite to getting any sort of rest, nevermind peace in the afterlife. Nevertheless, I learned something about the shadow I had judged in others.
When I was a Christian, because of my less literalistic and more mystical theology, I saw Satan not as the Bible described the character per say, but as an embodiment of True Evil. I saw it more like Kemetics see A/PEP - a howling void of a creature, not merely destructive or death bringing, not merely a tempter to sin, but a being whose ultimate goal was non-being. Death with no new life, fixed stagnation, full entropy - an end that cannot be come back from. No balance, no regeneration, just a destructive end to all things.
When I moved to being a Buddhism-friendly agnostic, this sort of thing was what I questioned last, but it really started to hit home with me. I had tried so hard to shoehorn in deeper and more mystical theology when so many people are so literalist. I realized, at first, that if anything I needed to be equally as mad at people trying to make Yeshua into “American Jeezus” as I was at demonolaters who didn’t seem to consider demons evil. I figured the only way this could be is if all they knew of Satan and Demons was “pop culture, literalism, and Milton-esque bullcrap.” To me, anyone who could do that had to be as understanding of the spiritual world as those who think pentacles are “symbols of evil.” At the very least, they couldn’t have the A/PEP-like associations with the concept of evil that I did.
My first step there, then, was realizing that at a minimum, I should have compassion and irritation in equal amounts for both, because as I saw it they were two sides of the same woefully theologically undereducated coin. I also wondered if it even mattered, if I wasn’t giving the entire thing more power than it actually had. As a Catholic it was weird to look to Martin Luther, but didn’t he and Buddha supposedly, according to folklore, have about the same bored response to the presence of Satan in the first case and the demon Mara in the second? “Oh. It’s just you. Don’t mind me if I turn over and go back to sleep.” Eventually, though, during this time as an agnostic, I got needed distance from just… not taking any of it seriously, I think.
If gods and demons are both made up, it doesn’t matter if anyone gets it “right,” any more than the pentacle thing matters if magic isn’t real. It took treating demons, Jesus (as a deity and not just some teacher), and the gods as not real to get me to just accept that what people think of them could be what they are. Even if pentacles aren’t evil, after all, people using them in exorcisms got them associated with evil through getting rid of it. I kept thinking “Oh, Christians who are jerks don’t know the real Jesus, all these keyboard witches don’t know what they’re doing…” and maybe to a degree there’s a lack of theological education.
Still, if 99% of people look at something one way, and academics look at it another, the realities you’ll have to face are going to be shaped at least in part by those 99%. And really, no one is going to give a theology exam when you enter the afterlife, anyway. If spirituality were based on what you know, head injuries like the one I had - to say nothing of other disabilities - would be a spiritual shortcoming. And that, hilariously enough, definitely doesn’t fit with what I know of theology.
Another thing I knew and considered one of the problems was how appropriative and racist some of this stuff was in its origins. While Crowley’s problematic nature is well documented, the entire concept of a “Left Hand Path” is appropriated from Hinduism in a way that completely disregards the meaning of the original term. The idea in the original isn’t about rejecting taboos, but ultimately embracing them and discovering why they were placed in the first place. It’s “getting sick of being sick.” An oversimplified “Left Hand Path” cure for cigarette addiction, for example, would be to force someone to smoke an entire carton until they were so sick they never wanted to touch another one ever again. Some may be trying for this however - and that’s the point, I shouldn’t assume.
One person I judged unfairly got into years of depression and bad relationships that had lead him down some dark roads. Another who did psychopomp work was assumed, by me, to be manipulating the dead. Just because I still think of Crowley as “Uncle Fester’s culturally appropriative bigot clone” doesn’t mean that some don’t manage to find a baby in all that bathwater, the same way some of my progressive Christian friends have. For those I unfairly judged who didn’t know I was judging them, I truly am sorry.
Others, though, are genuinely uncautious in how they go about things, and a bit self-blindfolded. I recall one Heathen who believed their deities wouldn’t let them get an STD while doing trance work because the deity in question was “in charge of their behaviors and wouldn’t do that to them.” Uhm… that’s not how any of that works. Another time, a branch of a well known occult group did a ritual at a large Pagan event, didn’t close it up well, and let a lot of very bad but minor spirits roam loose throughout the event. I still remember my then-Christopagan butt being called: “So, a priest is the wrong energy but… you’re Christian and have access to holy water and that might be helpful here.” (I had a few Catholic friends who also asked me about their haunted houses before the local priest… seemed to make me a go-to for weird things for both.)
Recently, on tumblr, it's been going around that there's a very obvious fascist / racist org called J0y of Satan that keeps sending people unsolicited DM's. Fewer on the left know of the ties The Satanic Temple has to racist and antisemetic people and orgs, though I will point them to QueerSatanic for more info on that. Thankfully all of this information is starting to see the light.
In my past though, I just focused on what I saw as theological ignorance in those holding these beliefs. A lot of them described Satan the way I would have once described Jesus - someone who came to free us from judgmentalism and hatred, who lifts up the people who are walked all over by society. I also misunderstood whole swaths of the community in other ways. To me, a necromancer was someone who forces the dead into doing their bidding - like one tumblr witch I ran into who wanted to force the dead to haunt the living who wronged them. Some, however, consider simple ancestor work to be necromancy, or even psychopomp work - helping the dead to navigate death and go towards the light, so to speak. By those definitions, Catholics praying for souls to leave purgatory and reach heaven are practicing necromancy, which has got to be one of the wildest potentials for interreligious miscommunication I have ever observed.
The Jewish version of Satan seems much more like God's District Attorney, "The Accuser," prosecuting criminal cases against sinners, but still able to come into God's presence to do so, as he did against Job. The Roman deity that the Romans synchronized with the Greek Apollo also gets called “Apollo,” because “Lucifer” has such baggage in modern scholarship. It's arguable that the traditional Wiccan Aradia as the daughter of Apollo-Lucifer often gets conflated with the mistranslated Biblical one. There's an entire rabbit hole here of different mythological and folkloric takes on Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, or whatever you wish to call it. We find even more when you get into the idea of "evil spirits" in faiths around the world - some as mild as tricksters, but some try to push humans to murder, and betrayal, and the death of all things.
It was in the midst of this line of thinking that I was blindsided.
A rift had formed between Eric and I. I won’t share his part in it here, except to say I know that the fault doesn’t only lie with me. My part in it, however, is relevant and important to what came next in my journey. At this time, I felt very alone. Not only was there a new distance between him and I, but Valki, one of my closest Heathen friends, was badly injured. Serilda? She was stranded, out of the country.
I will admit, a lot of the small things that nudged me towards the gods hinged on the patterns of changes Eric brought into my life and how they lined up. They seemed to fit with completely unrelated areas of life, with the odds of timing and coincidence being… not very coincidental. But here the path I had thought I was walking became obscured, shrouded. Circumstances had aligned to leave me newly alone before my gods. One thing from earlier I could still cling to was the Final Consolation, however. I don’t want an afterlife with my blood family nearly so much as I want one with friends, loved ones, and even a few people who influenced my path whom I nevertheless felt misunderstood by, whom I wish I could reach an understanding with, even if we never wind up liking one another. Especially for those who have felt close to my soul though, where they go, I go. I don’t need to know anything else to want that much.
In the last day or two before events shook me over Yule, I had taken to rededicating myself to, once again, becoming whom I felt I “Should” be. Eating right, walking the dog longer, keeping on top of my habits, actually making progress on projects I had started seven years or longer ago - including finishing the rune meditations on my blog. Anything I felt I “should” do but wasn’t. At least there wasn’t some false pretense of divine fire insurance this time. I just wanted a path forward - any path. I pushed myself to be as close to my best self as I could. I exhausted myself at times, but… good things happened too. In the six and a half months between then and now, I lost 45 lbs, managed to apply for, and get, disability based student loan forgiveness, and made more progress on my side projects than I had in the last four years. Also found out a mass on one of my internal organs that had been there for years had shrunk to the point where the doctor couldn’t find it.
The spiritual side was slower and more complicated. I found myself continuing to live out the meanings of runes as I wrote about them, and hoped this would mean that when I finished my runic work, good things would come. Through long walks with the dog, and cold, hungry mornings feeding the local corvids in offering, I put one foot in front of the other. I listened to viking metal at work, and started ignoring injuries I got there more, pushing myself to an unhealthy extent that got better over time, to be my best there as well, to the extent of my ability. It wasn’t always enough for my employers - I am disabled after all - but I pushed through as best I could. I took small consolations from the gods where I could get them, in being followed by the birds, or finding four leaf clovers like I sometimes did as a child or once when Loki first came around.
It was around this time that I realized something. For years as a Christopagan, A/PEP had been my go-to example of what I thought of when I thought of a Satan or Devil figure. If the deity of some Middle Eastern henotheistic tribes can take on the mantle of Ground of All Being, then the opposite of that needed to be a type of howling void, of not just non-being, but Never-Again-To-Be. No New Life, anywhere, of any kind. But… maybe that’s not what even A/PEP is? Maybe, considering how easily he’s defeated, A/PEP is a sign of the weakness of that fear of life not surviving. Humans - humans may not survive, but somewhere, now that it exists, most likely Life Will Survive.
It had also never occurred to me to compare him to Jormungandr until I read this link - and I never considered the World Serpent evil, merely a creature Thor tested his strength against because he could - much like wrestling Old Age Itself or trying to Drink the Sea. I had even speculated, given that viking era peoples likely had access to psychedelics, perhaps in some ways the struggle with that particular kind of chaos may be the struggle with meaning in light of ego dissolution when exposed to such substances, or certain peak spiritual experiences for that matter.
https://norse-mythology.org/cosmology/ginnungagap/
Then, I thought that maybe, just maybe, what I sensed as a howling Void was some echo of Ginnungagap. That emptiness had the possibility and potential of all creation within it, however. What happens when there isn’t any more potential, only entropy completed? I found myself wrestling with Tohu Va Vohu, and the idea that even El or Yaw didn’t create ex nihilo. I began to think of the “Spirit of God hovering over the waters,” of Shekhina, and of the now even more misunderstood Tiamet, much maligned by a certain Joseph Campbell wannabe in recent years. I thought of Ymir, perhaps, as a god of pandeism, the idea that a god ceased to exist to become the universe and that’s why it seems “abandoned.” Perhaps he is also a god of sacrifice to create anew, and perhaps there is something to gods, whether they be El / Yaw or Odin, creating and forming out of the primordial chaos they helped to shape in some way.
I let myself retreat into media related to the line of questioning I’d pursued before my Odinic Ordeal, as I call it now, began. Much like I did in the past with Maleficent, as I contemplated this, I let myself watch media I had previously considered some sort of horrible influence. In this case, it was “Lucifer” and the new Netflix “Sabrina.” I was pleasantly surprised by how much the show Lucifer reflected the differences between the Jewish and Christian versions of the Devil, and landed on the side of the former. I wouldn’t have ever known or watched that before.
For Sabrina, much like the Lil Nas X video that caused a stir a few years before, it almost seemed more like the Devil was something you challenged to gain knowledge, or XP, like a boss in a video game. I suppose it takes the Satan as Adversary role a different way than the “heavenly prosecution lawyer” route. Killing him and taking his place in order to… what, refocus the problem of evil where it belongs? On killing and hatred and brutal iron fist rules over others and not on people who just escape their pain with hedonism? I had often thought only children could really accept that view of evil, but the literalism of fundamentalists knows no bounds, and I suppose it fits as two sides of the same coin to not expect a much deeper response to it. Indeed, if part of my spiritual unpacking seems overly focused on the problem of evil, Satan, and demons, well, so are far too many fundamentalists. I’ll always be bugged by the people who use this or anything else to equate Loki and Odin to Satan, however. (Baldur isn’t Jesus, for that matter…)
My mother always used to cry when cats killed birds in the yard - but that’s the cycle of life. Thinking about the idea of a source of all evil, it’s worth remembering. Death in and of itself isn't evil. Yet my mother, with her own overfocus on evil, often talks about wishing she could just “go home and be with Jesus.” My mother is literally praying for death, wanting to die - and given how much she rejects medical help from actual doctors, I’m worried she may indeed find it sooner than she otherwise would.
But in thinking about how death is a part of life, my non-human centric spirituality (which was very Franciscan back when I was Catholic) makes me contemplate animals and plants in the afterlife. Wouldn't that suffer the same overcrowding without death? What makes humans, and possibly the species we evolved from, so darn special anyway? Elephants have funerals, though…
Rather than preventing overcrowding is it maybe that decay is a fertility method here, but not there? Multiple afterlives actually sort of helps solve this. Even multiple planets allow for more life than we probably realize even in this life, so it’s not about the resources in one space. It also occurs to me that aliens would probably have other afterlives too. What about beings that lived in other universes before this universe existed? The idea of these endless cycles and multiple universes does lend more credence to multiple gods... it's honestly the only really good answer, and it tracks well with my current polytheistic and multi-afterlife perspective. Space is, after all, more or less infinite. Infinite space.
When it came to the idea of purgatory, part of my belief in most people winding up there was based on the idea that perhaps God knew the way to get through, ultimately, to every heart. What would eventually heal and change and grow each of us into our best selves? The Interpretation Argument does strike at that a little though. https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/my6506/the_argument_from_interpretation/ In a nutshell, it argues that if God is all of the “omni” traits that Christians apply, then God would have the power and knowledge to make certain that the “Word” of God is interpreted correctly. If God as sustainer holds every part of every atom and every electric firing of our brains, well, an omniscient Ground of all Being would know how to persuasively get past any mental filters of what we want to hear whenever it wants to, not just eventually. But maybe you don’t have to have omniscience to have spirit be all-present, suffused through everything. Maybe the potential for consciousness and spirit is a property of all things, or at least many things, the same way the ability to catch on fire or melt in a hot enough heat is a real potential for many physical objects.
Maybe the “Ground of All Being” is just “Animism: Definition 2” with extra steps?
Animism ]'ana,mizam| noun
1 the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.
2 the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.
While I’ve had these revelations since, I need to bring it back to why I’m writing this. It sunk into me how much, despite decades of study, I still had yet to see about even entities I had known as long as Jormungandr. “Dropping my argument with the world” had deepend further into a different kind of intellectual humility. When I became Catholic, my mindset was in a terrible place. I was so desperate to be accepted, anywhere, that I would have said the sky was bright pink at noon, but moreover was genuinely concerned - as I was when I was an agnostic - that my perceptions may be so off that perhaps I am a bad judge of truth, even of objective things.
One night I had a dream that I had completely made up the English language and my entire life myself and everyone around me had been speaking Spanish the entire time, but I had had no idea. While that’s much more extreme - that’s sometimes how bad my self doubt got. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. For once, though, events had left me with some trust in experience, if not in intellect. That’s why in these writings I am turning, not to creeds, but to my life’s story, my family influences, my community history, and yes, sometimes my love life too. My thoughts on death, dreams, encounters with deity, moments that moved me, these are the things that mattered inside.
I slipped from Eric’s life too, as much as he did from mine. I did so, mostly, to write what you’re reading now. I tried, at one point, to make a joke on social media about the literalist stuff I just referenced… but it wasn’t taken as a joke. Among other things, when we were together, Eric noticed me engaging in a behavior I have since tried to work on. He thought, quite often I think, that my sharing with him of my takes on various Pagan authors, books, and other resources was me judging whatever he brought to the table, so to speak. I was also quick to jump down the scholarly rabbit hole. This had happened before, I suppose, with that crypto-folkish Kindred that kicked me out, when a newbie had asked a question about fylgia and I had launched into a discussion of the Heathen concepts surrounding the soul. They somehow considered that some sort of secret hidden knowledge not to be shared with newbies in that particular case, but simultaneously maybe I shouldn’t have jumped so far so fast.
Perhaps one of the more obvious times he felt judged was headbutting over translations of the Poetic Edda. Ironically, he chose Crawford’s for its academic take, even though I think Crawford’s work tends to treat the gods more as literary figures than as existing beings. If going purely academic, there’s a lot to say for Dronke’s work, though it’s difficult to access, but I chose Jeramy Dodds’ translation for casual reading. While Eric briefly asked which translations I had liked better, we never got into why. I like Dodd’s translation specifically because he is not a scholar, but a poet. Some things transcend words, and are an art, not a science.
With all my over-intellectualization and zealous discussion of topics, at the end of the day I like something I can access with my heart, not just my mind. There’s a sort of spiritual kinship between that translation and the bards of old, to me. I’m also not uncurious about Crawford’s work, and do follow it. We could have read each other passages, cross compared, gone over them together. But no, we had to focus on the negative like overly dramatic creatures of the night. We needed to let down our mental sword fencing and focus more on the moment spiritually, and try to see through each other’s eyes - and I was just as bad at that as he was. Still am, if his hostile reaction to a mere joke made in response to his meme about Satan is anything to go by. My laughter turned to poison in my own mouth, and I backed deeper into my solitude still.
I mentioned earlier that I used an unusual translation of the Bible when I was Catholic. It was done without reference to the Latin Vulgate at all, by a bunch of rogue Jesuits, going from the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic directly. While I considered this one of it’s coolest features at the time, the problem was, they left the names of God untranslated. Including Hashem, the Name. So out of respect to Jewish belief surrounding that, and also as a marker for where I've been spiritually in 2022, when I discovered insect damage to my primary copy of it (I had two, but the other had been in a safer location), I couldn’t just throw it out. So I buried it. It became a weird way to tend the grave of my past while also being respectful to the better people of those faiths.
There’s a goofy quote tossed around by fluff bunnies with various attributions for who said it, but it runs something like “If you take the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will be gone. Our bible IS the wind and rain.” The quote definitely occurred to me in doing this. It didn’t happen quickly, however. I thought it would take six weeks, but much like these writings, it took closer to six months. Not long after, somehow someone erected a little bit of a shrine - a sort of archway made of sticks leading to the grove I had buried it at the entrance of. Perhaps the gods had a hand in that, too. In many ways, the time I buried that Bible and the time it took to decompose has marked quite a journey of discovery. In that time, I lost and found community multiple times, and gained strength each time in the process.
Another marker of where I was in my path was a new Mjolnir. As the crows and ravens had guided me, I got one to honor them - and there are two of them on it. A book on the fae also sits next to the horn I use for offerings, a testament to how the Good Neighbors helped me keep faith when I had none. I eventually began seeking for community, however. I had burning questions, and a lot I needed an outside perspective on. I found it, too, but at yet another cost.
