It feels like, within the last year, the gods have given me everything I ever wanted, only to take it away. I’ve used the time since then to try to embrace that I needed to sort out my spirituality without pressure. I felt the gods were leading me through an ordeal path, and I became The Hermit to contemplate. I got off most of social media, anything not directly related to creative projects, only really checking in for notifications - and even then, not on everything.
In all of this, I don’t forget how mental health issues, especially my OCD, can mess with relationships in general, both human and divine. Extreme ritualization, unwanted unwarranted obsessive worries, intrusive thoughts, and fears that you may be worse than you are, or some monster… fearing doing things you don’t want to… all this is part of it. To give an example, with my OCD, I used to be scared my hand would slip while shaving and that I would slice my eye. I would never do that on purpose, obviously, I’m not Odin over here, but that’s life with OCD. To be honest, instead of “eat, pray, love,” my journey was more like “eat less, make offerings to the old gods, and then grab a sword and stick your problems with the pointy end.” Fast, Sacrifice, Fight? One way to put it. Ha!
I don’t feel that this is just a do-over of when I became Catholic. While I still have some guilt over how I handled things, the Aesir certainly aren’t trying to punish me for any shortcomings. That’s also not the only reason I’m choosing my solitude these days. When I said that I was content with how I am, I meant it. There’s small things to enjoy about where I am - living with a good friend and two fluffballs. I may not have a family, but I don’t have the irritations that come with one either. I don’t have to worry about anyone else's sleeping patterns interrupting my own, and don’t have any new household routines to get used to.
Possibly being with someone I had known as well and as long as Eric, and having a family with him, won over that hands down. If that isn’t in the cards for this life, what I’ve established about my life for now isn’t worth giving up at the moment. I carved out a niche for myself as best as my broken mind and body were able. It took effort - literal blood, sweat, and tears. I’m not giving up the little I have unless it’s for something better. The afterlife I’m choosing though? I can count at least eight or nine friends who will also turn up there, and each and every one of them means something to me. It will give me a chance to spend time with all of my found family, eventually.
It’s a question of belonging, to an extent, and no one is an island… but…
I didn’t choose this just for an ex - which I did when I became Catholic. I didn’t choose this out of overcorrecting after religious abuse - though a religion of self directed control made sense after a religion of only self sacrifice. That’s what I did when I went Wiccan. Heathenry is both for me, encouraging self control and self sacrifice from a healthier place, and I didn’t choose it from pressure from the scars of my past.
I chose it, initially, even when Loki first turned up, to heal.
The beliefs themselves accommodate both sides of myself, the uncertain one who needs to just follow, and the confident witch priestess. There are ways to pluck good advice from the lore, even when one feels they stand alone, and ways to increase one’s ability to stand strong. There are also solid, good communities out there, even if some of the ways to make them are very poorly defined. A strong connection with the gods also provides guidance when other friends are few and far between.
Heathenry lets me indulge the mystic trance worker who “felt her soul and Knew.” It’s also enough for the inner skeptic who is grateful to Snorri, because an unwitting Christian gave future doubting agnostics an out. Some of the very things he did to try to make it acceptable for Christians to read the myths ironically make a good fallback for agnostics too, such as connecting the gods to the families of legendary humans. Plus, rune magic is ultimately the magic of the written word, and libraries are certainly the agnostic’s temple. If I’m basically just toasting the beloved dead, and the main “magic” of the runes is that the gift of books lets our ancestors leave their voices and knowledge to us in very literal ways, then... So what?
Admittedly, with my OCD, I’m the person who always had less anxiety reading the end of the book first. It never bothered me knowing how it was going to turn out. I honestly felt comforted by spoilers, and felt like it increased my enjoyment, instead of ruining things for me. Maybe my newfound hopes regarding an Afterlife are me trying to do the same thing for life, but who is that way of getting closure hurting?
And yes, along the way in this life I found out my ex-husband “Andy” is Heathen and now wears a bindrune that means roughly the same thing as his Saint Christopher Amulet did, which I think is hilarious. I discovered he’s not the only loved one Odin has “collected.” I can think of at least three or four, if you count close friends.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned the last year though, it’s that I need to love the things I love because I love them. Eric sang my song back to me, for the first time in a long time. Around 2018 through 2020, I was surrounded by so much noise - people playing tv’s and music loudly, yelling, and more. I took most of 2021 to just… embrace silence, now that I had it. I realized eventually that I almost never listened to music at all anymore, let alone music I loved, and I hadn’t since at least 2017.
When I was growing up, I missed out on a lot of normal life experiences for people in modern society. I wasn't exposed to modern music, or most modern shows or games. I was forbidden to listen to rock music - it was of the devil. Mom only realized her mistake when she joked about turning 64 only to realize I didn't know the Beatles reference she was making. It wasn't the only one. I was the kid who had her mouth washed out with soap for calling something - not even someone - stupid. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons ever, or even movies like Home Alone until I was ten, because of the swearing in them. Most of my media exposure came through friends or relationships, and got heavily associated with the people involved. Some things stuck as people moved on, other things didn’t.
Being a homeschooler and raised outside of pop culture didn’t help with having an autistic brain. When I sort of found the goth community as a teenager, it was nice because I found people who in many cases shared both the Catholic-ish and Pagan-ish parts of my aesthetic, both the modern and Victorian, and often struggled with similar mental health issues to my own. They saw beauty in similar things to myself - the bittersweet that is almost more beautiful for its fragility. Because the music was so niche, as well, there was a lower barrier to entry into getting the subculture and its references than dealing with the thousands and thousands of back catalogs of popular music, much of which I couldn’t relate to intellectually or emotionally because it felt too shallow, at least to me.
Even the ones that didn’t quite have that issue… based on my upbringing, I had difficulty singing along to songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I kept skipping the line about the devil, because I took those things that seriously. I would get things stuck in my head easily back then, so I would look up lyrics and select songs based on them before adding them to playlists, rarely listening to entire albums unless I really liked the musician in question. Fitting in wasn’t hurt by the fact that in singing along, I could pretty much voice-match Siouxsie Sioux when I really threw my full lung capacity into it. I also started out already having a ton of black velvet, and synthetic fabric that was similar to it, in my wardrobe back then, which didn’t hurt either. If anything, I’m more comfortable with the goth community as a Heathen than I was as a Christain though. At least I’m not heavily judging every song with “evil” themes and folklore references anymore.
It’s worth mentioning, though, that in being raised with Classical and Celtic music, one of the earliest musicians I truly loved from the age of eight was Shelley Philips. When studying German in 2012, I discovered the band Faun, which played some of the exact same tunes, as well as a few pieces in Old Norse. I fell in love with their music, too. When I watched Vikings, and Faun eventually did crossovers with Wardruna, it never occurred to me that some would see this as problematic. Apparently, some think the main influence that brought about bands like Wardruna or Heilung is some sort of culturally appropriative Primitivism. As near as I can tell the origin of this criticism is no less a figure than Beofeld, better known as the author of the Declaration of Deeds. Trying to figure out why this is even a hypothesis, the most I find is “there are drums and skulls and general dark themes. Ancient Norway didn’t have drums.”
What we know of Norse Paganism, however, is mostly by way of Iceland - and Iceland Did have Drums that were not like Sami or Swedish drums. As Arith Harger pointed out, it’s also likely that Volva’s used their buckets or staves in a similar fashion. Drums were not used precisely because the Swedish used them, and those two cultures have always had a rivalry and tried to differentiate themselves from one another. Also, Ireland had the bodhran - which likely evolved from a tool used for gathering peat, much like the "bucket" might have. Bluegrass, which some claim is a “more true” descendant of what music the Vikings may have had, is actually more Irish in origin than Germanic. Tunes like “The Devil Among the Tailors” are found in both Old Time and Irish folk tune collections, showing migratory footprints right to the Appalachians.
One of the few advantages of being raised almost exclusively with fiddle and violin music is that trying to tell me that Norway and Germany invented Bluegrass would be like telling the average person that John Lennon was a member of Journey. No. Just no. Bands like Wardruna evolved out of the metal scene, and their “darkness” and animal skulls and whatever other theatrics evolved from that. Metal has been a Thing in Scandinavia, and has been embraced there in a way they definitely made their own. Drums, too, are more focal in metal than in classic rock. Viking Metal is seen as fine, somehow, but Wardruna, Heilung, and Skald (which is practically at home side by side with Shelly Philips but with Old Norse lyrics) are seen as appropriative.
How is this possible when their supposedly appropriative elements are metal based, and metal has completely different origins than drumming from other continents? It’s like saying anything based on rock music is ultimately appropriation because of syncopated rhythm. At least Heilung tries to go out of their way to engage with local indigenous communities, recognizing that local land spirits may not be the land spirits they’re used to and may be used to different forms of respect. That, in its own way, is at least an acknowledgement. They try, even if their way of trying may be over the top. Still, it reminds me of when I tried to tell off a Wiccan for using actual white sage once, only for someone from the reservation ten miles up the road to tell me off for telling off the person using it. Real life isn’t the internet, and we don’t always know the steps someone has taken, or what their actual influences and sources are.
There’s a reason two of my favorite ways of looking at things in communications across groups are often two sides of the same coin:
1) Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
2) Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
True healing doesn’t mean avoiding the best of the past. If I avoided everything that reminded me of Eric, I would lose most of what I enjoy doing in this life. I don’t have those likes and interests because he introduced me to them - we met in many ways through those things. And most of the rest of it? A lot of my other favorites are things that remind me of the best parts of my mom, when she wasn't as afraid of life or people and had more intellectual curiosity. I remember the woman who taught me Dickens and Conan Doyle and Mozart. She loved the acting of Patrick Stewart, and named a cat after Earl Grey tea (before we had to switch it to Lady Grey), and had a crush on Data after my dad died. I choose to remember her cooking, and the best of her values, and her music, and how she made home feel like home. I try to dwell on this, and not on the worst of her. Honoring ancestors includes her, and means taking the good, without the bad, and being better.
It's entirely possible it's all coincidence - from the first Pagan I met in real life being a Lokean, through Odin and Thor collecting my friends. It could be a coincidence that when that didn't work, they got my attention through those I loved most over the years. It could be a coincidence that when I forgot who I was, someone sang my song back to me. It could be a coincidence that the family he offered and goals he encouraged me in, were everything I had already wanted, and needed to do for myself, and that we were the same little niche religion now. The spellwork matching, the time off as a cook who never gets time off, and the support for a relationship without a legal marriage from the woman who thought losing my virginity was like robbing a bank could be a coincidence.
It could also be a further coincidence that during that time I lived the meanings of the runes that I wrote about as I picked them back up. I had birds following me everywhere when I never did before, and started finding random four leaf clovers in the dead of winter, for the first time since Loki crashed into my life years ago. It could even be a coincidence that during this time, I found exactly the group of Heathens I needed to make me a better Heathen, and that it was partially from a conversation with Eric months before that I thought to seek them out.
It could all be coincidence. I mean, at least I made huge progress on my goals. Once they’re done I can safely retire to a less emotionally taxing outside of work side project, like goth karaoke or beating every SNES game ever made, finding every dragon shout and mask in Skyrim, learning German fluently, or possibly shooting Eric in his favorite PC game since I have that now too. I was worried for a bit there that I would fall apart, take shrooms to try to force the gods to prove their existence, come up with nothing, and become a rabid anti-theist. Utisetta seems like a better plan than shrooms though.
I later found out, yet again, that some don’t like That concept as many modern practitioners have interpreted it. Utisetta, literally, “Out-sitting,” is sometimes somehow seen as appropriating vision quests, even though it is attested to by Icelanders who had never heard of Native North American tribes. If anything, based on description, it sounds less like a vision quest and more like the concept of a vigil. Awake, fasting, praying, just outdoors, not in a Church. Maybe it’s as much inspiration for the Christian practice as the Garden of Gethsemane was, if one backtracks to the concept of converts like Snorri Christianizing cultural practices to keep them. Meditation of this sort is also common on some Buddhist retreats as well. The brain does weird things without sleep. To paraphrase a Babylon 5 quote:
Marcus Cole: … anyone who wanted to get a straight answer out of [Odin, in this case] was to look at every reply in a mirror while hanging upside down from the ceiling.
Captain John Sheridan: Did it work?
Marcus Cole: Oddly enough, yes! Or after a while you passed out and had a vision. Either way the result was pretty much the same.
At the end of the day, though, it boils down to this… I thought all the pain of my life had finally been worth something, and maybe that's more latent Christianity. Maybe suffering is just ... suffering sometimes.
At the end of the day, maybe it is madness.
I’ve worried religion and a lot of other things I wanted may just be bad for me. After all, if so many members of my family have been so blind to reality, maybe that’s what I’m doing by believing in anything religious at all. But it didn't take much for me to be guided to heathenry this time around. I knew I was ducking religion in general, and avoiding dealing with my spiritual baggage. In a lot of ways, ignoring the gods felt like getting calls from collection agencies and pretending they didn't exist or had the wrong person. I even did still celebrate some holidays that aren’t even religious to most, like one for Loki in July. Unlike Yule or other holidays that loosely line up with the more Neo-Wiccan inclined, there wasn't really much social pressure there, even from other Pagans. I treated that time as Sacred, year after year for over
nine years, even in the midst of doubt and avoidance, because deep down I wanted to.
——
I managed to, for a time, find a community on the same road I was on, even among a diversity of paths. They were solid about avoiding some of the same pitfalls in the Pagan community I had learned to look for. Like me, they were politically left of center, but not tankies or ecoterrorists or anything like that. Many were hurt by Christians but didn’t have “Varg Syndrome.” (I learned, just before finding the community that helped me, that a local kindred near me makes people wait a year before joining to weed out precisely that sort of reactionism. Getting preachy about Paganism is apparently often a sign of heavy latent Christian baggage.) Nerding out with these folks, so to speak, about so many things… I finally felt like I fully belonged somewhere as all of who I am. It seems I was too enthusiastic, while taking too long to learn the social rules. I think a couple people took me as too weird or parasocial, like some get with content creators, but I wasn't approaching it that way. I was approaching it as a spiritual home, a place I felt like I belonged when I haven't felt a sense of home in decades. Even the CUUPs group I loved that was my spiritual home after leaving Christianity the first time around… they were Pagan yes, but leaned more pantheist than polytheist on the spectrum, on average. It also didn’t help that in 2022 I’ve found myself having to work during their meeting times - one more way I was isolated when this year began.
And you know, after getting kicked out of The Keyboard Hall, as I'll call it, I still kept friends. I still got likes and conversation on other social media from some of its members, even if there were others who blocked me. Even there, I’m choosing to look at it as… as long as I stand with them on some issues, hopefully they stand with me, part of the same shield wall within Heathenry, even if we have to be on different ends of that formation because of their boundaries. I guess some of them didn't understand where my heart was, or why I felt so deeply, and that’s okay. The gods do, and others did.
While I was there I got so many questions answered that could only be answered by other Heathens. I know, now, that I'm not "doing Heathen wrong" just because one stupid kindred that was basically cryptofolkish kicked me out - or even because the Keyboard Hall did. No one can take that away from me. It also helped me to re-ground in my faith away from Eric’s influence. While I had been Heathen long before him, my newfound attempts to focus on experience over academia had made me feel bad about my theological pursuits. The Keyboard Hall taught me that I wasn’t wrong to seek the gods with my mind, too - I just needed to rebalance it, not cut it out. I also had been made to feel “not Heathen enough” because of some of the Christian books on my shelves… but seeing someone unquestionably Heathen who had my admiration as a thinker discuss Thomas Aquinas during a chat one day, when no one in the conversation was anything like Catholic, made me feel so validated in trying to have interfaith philosophical discussions. The Tao Te Ching got mentioned too, and finding out other Heathens and animists had also benefited from it, without considering themselves “eclectic” as a result, was amazing somehow. Even after nine years and so much study I still had so much imposter syndrome from so many interactions in real life, but no longer. Something healed in me.
At the end of the day, if I hadn’t been through all that, I might not be as content with the little I have. There’s so much I’ve gotten out of this journey that has improved my life. I have friends who get me, a sense of belonging (even if it’s not with an easily defined group), and a rediscovery of things I love. I’m not just copying bits of those around me onto my personality like an autistic chameleon where only a few things actually stick. I even have an idea of how to contribute to the next generation - if only down the line, and only financially - ironically the one thing I usually don't have. As someone from the Keyboard Hall put it, in addition to a few folks on twitter - the story of the Widow’s Mite still counts as a philosopher talking about the economy of offering, and fits with what we Heathens know of Gebo and the gifting cycle.
It’s worth examining where I did screw up basically every gift I was given in this time. Twice over the past year, I was so worried about being rejected yet again upon finding somewhere I belonged, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. With both the Keyboard Hall and Eric I put my worst foot forward to test if the ground was safe. Heck, I didn't just put it forward, I practically put that worst foot right up their butts. They never got to see the best of me and only assumed the worst. All because I'm so used to rejection.
It didn’t help that, in the fall of 2021 I was still pretty unstable. While I had gotten on new meds last summer that have helped my mental health, in the fall, dosages were still being worked out and didn’t stabilize until around January. A lot of that was about affordability of the right dosage - it took changing my car insurance policy and cell phone provider to make getting the correct dosages less of a struggle.
The stronger some of my mental health issues are the more Pantheist/naturalist my spirituality is, as well, so the meds affected that too. These meds also lessened the intensity of my chronic physical pain issues, because of how tied in pain circuits are in the brain. So even if someone thinks this is the only life we have, better to live that with less pain, no?
To be fair the next time I find that kind of acceptance, I can just embrace it now instead of questioning it, hopefully. At least now I know it’s possible. Either way, I’m tired of being defensive around every new person. Dissecting where this came from, I found myself wondering if, other than that one roommate who put her fist in my face, I really had a reason to get that defensive until I moved to the Midwest? My own family, I guess, is a plausible source. My mother views the “outside world” as completely irredeemably evil for psychological reasons as much as religious ones, so it’s possible my subconscious inherited that, even though I’m markedly more trusting than she ever was. But then, where did it come from for mom? Then, I realized…
Her dad.
Suspicion of outsiders makes sense when even your own family can’t be trusted to not be cruel when you are weak or vulnerable or in need, I guess. At the same time, I’m far too easily influenced by others. I think part of why I keep to myself in my down time is to avoid running off down bunny trails because life can already be overwhelming enough with things to focus on as it is. I want to keep my path my own.
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