Ogmios

1. Meaning of Name: Not known. Olmstead tentatively suggests “supporter”.¹
2. Pronunciation: AWG-myaws.
3. Other Names and Epithets: None
4. Interpretatio Romana: Hercules.²
5. Irish Equivalent: Oghma.³
6. Indo-European Equivalent: None. Note that the common Neopagan identification of Oghma and Ogmios with the Vedic Fire God Agni has no scholarly support of which I am aware.
7. Realm: Andernados/Under World God
8. Iconography: The Roman poet describes Hercules depicted in Gaul with his Classical lion skin and club, but as an old man drawing behind him a band of men attached to him by thin, gold chains linking their ears with his tongue.⁴
9. Significance: Ogmios is the God of Eloquence, but also of strength, a deity patronizing both intellectual and physical pursuits. He is, however, a deity often invoked in Gallo-Roman cursing tablets, which make clear that He was a servant of the Chthonic Gods, with a dark and dangerous aspect.⁵

Brigantiâ

Segomâros Widugeni in Nemeton Segomâros

1. Meaning of Name: Olmsted gives us “The High One” or “The Exalted One”. Kondratiev gives us the more complex but essentially similar “She who raises herself on high, who is exalted”. Mackillop gives us “High One”.¹
2. Pronunciation: Brig-UN-tyaa, with the “u” sound like in “Gus”.
3. Other Names and Epithets: Briginidona, Brigintona, Brigana, Brigia, Brigana, Briginti.²
4. Interpretatio Romana: She is identified with Victoria in one inscription.³
5. Irish Equivalent: Brigid.⁴
6. Indo-European Equivalent: Wéstyā, the Indo-European Hearth Goddess.⁵
7. Realm: Ueronadâ/Upper World Goddess
8. Iconography: Brigantiâ is depicted as a typical Romano-Celtic Minerva, with shield, spear, and helmet.⁶
9. Significance: The key to understanding Brigantiâ are her identification with the Indo-European hearth Goddess, and with the later Irish Brigid. Brigantiâ is in origin the hearth Goddess, but becomes identified with fire itself. In Ireland, she is the Goddess of Poetry, Smithcraft, and Healing, all of which are associated with spiritual fire or heat. These attributions all apply to her earlier Gaulish form to some extent. She is the Goddess of the Hearth Fire, but also of heat, energy, warmth, purity, and protection. Her patronage of the hearth gives her a role as a patron of the household, as well. Noémi Beck, in Goddesses in Celtic Religion: Cult and Mythology: A comparative study of Ancient Ireland, Britain, and Gaul, points out that Brig- names are very often associated with highlands and highland sanctuaries, thus definitely proving her to be a Goddess of high places, including mountains and hills. My own personal gnosis suggests that she is the daughter of Taranis, which would help explain her patronage of fire and high places alike.⁷

Polytheism and Metaphysics (IV): Divine Action

Edward P. Butler in Noēseis

Thinking about a myth, we can choose to focus either on the Gods and other beings involved in the narrative sequence, or on the sequence itself, on the actions in it, and by this choice, make either the former, or the latter, primary. Concerning ourselves with the persons in the myth, we relate it to other myths involving those same persons, whereas concerning ourselves with the actions, we relate it to myths where the same or similar actions involve different persons. Similarly, thinking about a ritual, we can choose to focus on the God(s) invoked, and the relation between Them and the ritual operator, or we can focus instead on the form of the ritual action, which might be performed similarly for diverse Gods. In treating the action as primary in such cases, we establish or recognize a singular plane transversal to the agents involved. This transversal plane, the plane of action, provides the basis for ontology, the inquiry into the nature of being.

Hence Aristotle, who in the Hellenic tradition has given the most thought to being qua being (to on hē on), orients himself according to ousia, which in the later European tradition has sometimes been translated as ‘substance’, sometimes as ‘essence’, and has acquired many associations for us in those forms, most of which have little to do with its proper nature. Ousia is, in the first place, the participle formed from the verb einai, ‘to be’. Thus ousia is truly ‘be-ing’ or ‘beingness’, so to speak, which is not static, but the primary form of action. The first and constant action of whatever is, is simply to be, that is, to be what it is. For with being, comes whatness. I have discussed elsewhere the distinction between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of things;¹ building on those discussions, we may see whatness as expressing the actions basic to things.

In an authentic understanding of Hellenic philosophy, the inquiry into ‘being’ always sends us back to the things themselves, and the way(s) they are, rather than to something we might label ‘being itself’. Being Itself would, in any event, be a being, and we would still need to grasp its way of being. The Greek phrase which is most strictly translated as ‘essence’ in later thought (ousia is also translated as ‘essence’, a bit more loosely) is to ti ēn einai, which literally means, ‘the what it was to be <something/what it was>’. In other words, something’s ‘essence’ is its extended act of being. The past tense here has a broader sense than merely temporal. A thing extending itself, whether in time, or in relation, or in analysis or synthesis, acquires through this extension its ‘essence’, its characteristic way of being what, or who, it is. At the same time, the past tense here reminds us that nothing is wholly reducible to its actions or its relations, because these are in a sense in the past, whereas the agency of things, unpredictable in principle, is their future; and this is especially true of the Gods, who are the freest agents.

The theological basis of ousia can be discerned in Aristotle from the very definition of metaphysics which guides his inquiry: ‘first philosophy’, that is, metaphysics, will be either that which seeks to know the nature of the best objects, and hence the Gods and the way They are; or that which inquires into the best way of knowing any object, which would be how the Gods Themselves know things (Metaphysics 983a5-10). Similarly, the various schools of Vedānta ground themselves in the concept of brahman, which is at once action, coming from the root bṛh, ‘to grow’, but also specifically divine action, in that brahman, which in the later philosophical tradition means, loosely speaking, Being, means in the Vedas ‘prayer’, that is, it refers originally to the transversal plane of invocation itself—for just as the fire receives offerings to many Gods alike, so too the flow of devotion is the medium in which the many Gods are encountered, and this original sense is never withdrawn in the later speculative tradition, which rather founds itself upon it.² Hence, neither in Hellenic nor Indian metaphysics is the nature of being primarily a being, but rather the way of being; and in both of these high theoretical traditions, this nature is sought through engagement with the Gods, and through intellective reflection upon this engagement.

Similarly, in the dominant traditions of Chinese metaphysics, what grounds ontology is the ‘way’ (dao) things are (for Daoism), or principle (li 理) as such (for Neo-Confucianism), that is, the order in the way things are, and hence, again, the plane of action transversal to the many things and the many Gods, rather than a totalizing entity itself. But when sensible and quite straightforward precautions are taken against treating this plane as a thing in itself and supreme being, as in verse 1 of the Daodejing of Laozi, which states that the dao which is named, i.e., treated as a discrete term, is not itself the principle, this is treated as paradox-mongering, as though there is a Dao with all the characteristics of a discrete term, save that it is mysteriously unnameable. To attribute such a feeble and unphilosophical doctrine to any great thinker ought to be recognized immediately as a breach of hermeneutical charity, but it will surprise no one familiar with the incapacity or unwillingness of modern scholars to grasp the equally straightforward denial of existence or singularity to the Platonic One, which “neither is, nor is one” (Plato, Parmenides 141e). We are told this is to be taken as that the One actually very much is, and very much is one, only in a very mysterious way, and in fact that this mystery, rather than anything intelligible, is the entire point of the doctrine. In this fashion, Western monotheist intellectual hegemony at once appropriates such doctrines by rendering them ideologically compatible with monotheism, severing their ties to the polytheistic traditions that gave them birth and never ceased nourishing them throughout their history, and at the same time strips these doctrines of their intelligibility, ensuring that the authority of reason shall remain solely within its own hands. Efforts will persist, undoubtedly, to find ever new ways in which to colonize non-Western metaphysical systems and make them safe for monotheism. The project of interpreting the prime term in Chinese metaphysical systems as a Spinozist substance or a substantified flux à la Whitehead’s ‘process metaphysics’, for example, has recently expanded, to attempt the annexation of Nahua (‘Aztec’) metaphysics and the alienation of it from Nahua polytheism.³

Aristotle never takes the Gods as his subject of inquiry, never asks, that is, ‘What was it for a God to be a God?’, but rather refers to mainstream positions in Hellenic theology as support for theses in physics and metaphysics.⁴ This approach, which is the common course of development, I would argue, of speculative or theoretical traditions of ontology in all of the polytheistic civilizations I have studied, is easily misinterpreted by modern readers as a turning away from the Gods. Beyond merely recognizing this methodology, however, and guided by the Platonists’ affirmation that the Gods Themselves are hyperousios, or ‘beyond ousia’, we may ask whether there is an intrinsic limitation to ‘whatness’ embodied in its very ‘was-ness’, so to speak. That is, does not the very separability in the mind of the action-character of action from the agents involved, which grants to this transversal plane its relative autonomy and is the condition of the possibility of ontology, also institute and enforce, at the same time, the limits of ontology, and especially insofar as we are concerned with the Gods, that is, with the ultimate things? A line of thought similar to this led in the late 20th century to a ‘theological’ turn in French phenomenology, which sought a breakthrough from the ‘givenness’ (Gegebenheit) of things as they are, to what (or who?) gives them,⁵ but its results were decisively impaired inasmuch as the researchers involved could not resist using the inquiry merely as a means to acquire the status of philosophical results for as much of Christian theology as the market, so to speak, would bear. It is no accident that a fresh attempt by monotheists to appropriate the philosophy of the supra-essential, which was historically and inherently a polytheistic project, should end once again in impasse, as it did at the end of the tortured course of medieval thought. I would not claim that polytheists alone can make progress in the phenomenology of that which lies beyond essence, but I do believe that progress in this project, when and if it arrives, will of necessity take the form of a doctrine radically more congenial to polytheism than anything undertaken so far in the modern era.

Links to the previous columns in this series:

Grannus

Segomâros Widugeni in Nemeton Segomâros

1. Meaning of Name: Olmsted gives us “God of Hot Springs”, but has trouble justifying it. Green is not so optimistic, merely wanting to note that it, “probably derives from the name of Grand in the Vosges”.¹
2. Pronunciation: GRAN-us, with the “a” like the “u” in “Gus”, and the “u” like the “u” in “put”.
3. Other Names and Epithets: Very many. Olmsted gives us: Amarcolitanos, Anextlomaros, Atepomaros, Belinus, Belisamaros, Bormo/Borvo, Cermillos, Glanis, Matuicis, Mogounis/Mogonts, Nerios, Siannos, Toutorix, Veletudo, Vindonnus, Vindoridios, Vindovroicos, Virotutis, and Vroicos. He may also be related to Olmstead’s reconstructed proto-Celtic divinity Nectonios.²
4. Interpretatio Romana: Apollo.³
5. Irish Equivalent: None. The Dian Cecht performs a similar function, but is a radically different deity.
6. Indo-European Equivalent: If the association with Olmsted’s Nectonios can be believed, then he equates to Xákwōm Népōt, the “Nephew of the Waters”, and the “God of Fiery Water”.⁴
7. Realm: Ueronados/Upper World Deity, but, in role of God of Hot Springs, has Andernados aspects.
8. Icongraphy: Grannus was worshipped in typical Gallo-Roman healing shrines, often associated with healing springs. He is depicted with horses, a sun-chariot, and on one occasion, the “head of a radiate sun-deity”.⁵
9. Significance: Reasoning from the above, we can see that Grannus is a solar deity, possibly God of the Sun, certainly God of Light. Even more, he is a healing deity, called on to cure injury and illness. He was also called on for health and protection. As a deity at once solar and watery, hot springs are especially sacred to him.

Defacing Sacred Images for Fun and Profit

Tess Dawson in Spring and Stone

Image Credits: Photograph by Rama, used under Creative Commons License. Egyptian Stele Depicting Min, Qudshu, and Rashap, circa 1295-1069 BCE, in collection at the Louvre. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Resheph#/media/File:Stele_of_Qadesh_upper-frame.jpg

There has been a matter on my mind for a long time; a grievance that has long needed addressing and it’s been one that to my knowledge no one has touched. Before I get to that, I would like to talk about a holy image, displayed above, which holds many layers of meaning, many depths, many mysteries and Mysteries. Words do not wrap well around the splendors in this image and it is an image that crosses at least two pantheons.

There are a few versions of this Egyptian-made image but the image has three Beings in common, the Egyptian god Min or Amun-Min, the Canaanite and Egyptian god Rashap, and the Syrian goddess Qudshu. The particular version of the image I am looking at is currently housed in the Louvre, and this one is dated to about 3310-3084 years ago (1295-1069 BCE). It is a bas relief incised, carved, and painted on limestone.

The image so bursts with symbolism it is difficult to know where to begin describing it, so I will start the same way I read English, from left to right. The figure standing on the left is the Egyptian god Min or Amun-Min. He wears a tall two-feathered crown with a long ribbon trailing from it, he carries a flail in his right hand. He has a very pronounced phallus. Next is the Syrian goddess Qudshu. She stands on a lion, and she wears a horn-and-disk crown. She holds lotuses to the figure on her right (Min) and she holds a serpent to the figure on her left (Rashap). The figure to the right of the field-of-view is the Canaanite and Egyptian god Rashap. Rashap wears a tall crown with a tiny gazelle head on it. He holds a spear in his right hand, facing Qudshu, and he holds an ankh in his left hand. Rashap is especially notable in this image because, unlike most of his other images in Egypt, he is not in an aggressive warlike stance in this image.

In the most simplistic and basic descriptions possible, Min is a god of sexuality, fertility, potency, and abundance. Qudshu holds within her influence–because of her associations with ‘Anatu and ‘Athtartu–femininity, potential, sexuality, warriorhood, and transitional states. Rashap is a god of war, plague, healing, and protection. Min, a god of sexuality, procreation, and the powers of life holds in his hand a flail representing strength, force, and authority—a symbol of kingship and of the kings’ power, but he also bears the life-creating phallus. As Min holds the fertile Nile-watered lands of Egypt, Rashap’s reign is over the dusty desert lands, the wild dry hinterlands where few things grow. With the flail and the phallus, Min is in a position to ensure the protection, keeping, and proliferation of the kingdom. Rashap, by contrast, carries a weapon, acting as a guard in this image, and in the other hand he holds the key to life, an ankh. With the spear and the ankh, Rashap is a position to ensure the protection, keeping, and wellbeing of the kingdom—his situation is different from Min’s situation, but the goals are similar, and both teeter precariously in balance with Qudshu acting as fulcrum.

Qudshu stands between them on the back of a mighty lion who is tranquil at the moment. She is balanced very carefully on that fierce lion, and poised between these forces of life and death, abundance and restriction. In one hand lifted towards Min, she presents lotuses of beauty, of life and a fading of life, of impermanence, and of renewal, and of sweet breath and perfume. In the other hand, towards Rashap, she holds a serpent, which symbolizes protection, holding-together, threat and protection from threat, death, rebirth, and renewal. Both the lotuses and the serpent in their own ways represent changing states; life and death, rebirth and renewal, permanence and impermanence, boundless and bounded, the temporary and the eternal, the ever-flowing and the restricted.

This is just a small, small exploration of these many symbols and their meanings that this image encompasses—it is literally impossible to explain all of the depths of meaning, interpretations, and mysteries in this image. It is a holy image representing the careful balance of powerful forces held in check, one to the other, both ever-present, ever-necessary, in this world simultaneously. It is an image which is deeply sacred and meaningful, and I hold it in reverence even as the ones who created it viewed it in reverence as something sacred and meaningful. It is an image that if altered suffers a loss of meaning, of depth, of symbolism. If there is stuff added or changed, then the message is more difficult to read and is rendered less meaningful. It is like a sacred sigil calling forth the careful razor’s-edge balance of these beings and their mastery of these potent forces which cause things to function within parameters most beneficial for humanity. Sigils, for those who practice magic, do not function the same when they are altered. An alteration to this image is also like changing several letters in a word: it is a misspelling which causes a misreading and therefore a miscommunication. This holy image also does not function the same when it is altered and it would not carry the same message or hold the same space.

If someone wants to appear to other people as having respect for Christianity, that person will not typically make fun of communion in front of a Christian who is taking communion. If someone wants to make good with their Muslim neighbors, that person will not burn a copy of the Quran in the yard. Making lewd gestures at a Shinto shrine is also not the best way to start a dignified dialogue. So, when a person claims that he is being respectful about other religions and respectful about the deities, and respectful of the people who worship these deities, that claim is unsubstantiated when there is a defaced holy image serving as a banner on his blog.

In the adulterated image I am speaking of, Qudshu is digitally modified such as to be holding cutesy daffodils or yellow flowers of some sort. Worse than that, Rashap’s spear, the very spear he uses to safeguard this balance, these forces of life and death, is edited out and a box of disposable tissues is added in. The hand with which Qudshu would have held the transformative serpent is now reaching for the box of Kleenex which is destined to be filled with filth and thrown away in the trash. Daffodils are not the same depth of meaning as lotuses in this Egyptian image, and a Kleenex box instead of Rashap’s spear and Qudshu’s serpent? Wow. That’s not just insulting, it is dangerous. A smart person does not disarm a soldier and expect that soldier to act as guardian with a box of Puffs Plus with Aloe. A compassionate, decent person does not expect a soldier, a veteran of many wars, to wait on him.

The blogger basically projects himself into the image, positioning himself like Qudshu—a goddess whose name means Holiness—in the scene. In this adulterated image, Min is either handing the-blogger-as-Qudshu flowers, or the-blogger-as-Qudshu is shoving the flowers back towards Min because the flowers make the-blogger-as-Qudshu congested and s/he can’t stand their pollen. Keep in mind that pollen and semen serve the function of procreation, so in this image Qudshu is painted as symbolically rejecting abundance. Furthermore, as Qudshu, the blogger pictures himself as having a god of war and plague aiding him in wiping his nose. The priceless gifts that Qudshu would give are replaced with worthlessness: unwanted flowers in one hand, and paper trash filled with mucus in the other. The image may seem on the surface to be harmless and playful in its adulterated form, but it is not harmless or playful. The original image has been violated, robbed of its meaning.

Since the title of the blog in question alludes to its creator’s allergies, I can only assume that this is meant to poke fun at these circumstances while adding an air of borrowed ancient sophistication, an air of legitimacy, and pseudo-intellectualism to the blog. It is also warping a holy image to participate in the blogger’s self-deprecating joke about his allergies, a self-deprecating joke that looks more like a bid at false modesty to boost a human ego at the expense of the deities themselves.

In addition, the messed-up image probably acts as a mere nod–a nod which is actually the equivalent of the middle finger–to some supposedly-forgotten dusty ancient deities who the blogger may think no one on earth still takes seriously and which, to him, mean nothing more than puppets for his own amusement and mental musings. In messing with this image, he has taken these individual, real, living, viable, thinking, feeling, cognizant beings, and sets to erase them of their strength, depth, agency, and majesty. He pulls them into a pale, shallow, private world of impotent shadows of human thought.

With the altering of this image, the deities are treated with less dignity or thoughtfulness than an insect which a person may actually think twice about before swatting. This holy, powerful, ancient image is rendered into a thin watered-down joke about some human’s sniffles. The only thing here laughable is that we’re expected to believe that the person who would do such a thing would ever take our deities and our ways seriously, even when he says he does, and say something important about these things. If comedy and tragedy come together, then the tragedy is in allowing this blogger our time and our good faith, because his works only seek to erase the beings and the things we hold dearest.

I could go on about how hurtful this is to the deities themselves, to the ancestors, and to these deities’ people from priest to layperson, and to myself. I could go on about how much I cherish my relationships with my deities. I could go on about how meaningful the deities are, how meaningful the deities are to the world general, and how meaningful the deities are to me specifically. I could go on about the depths to which my gods have suffered on behalf of and because of humanity—a terrible, soul-aching, gut-wrenching suffering which I have witnessed. But what’s the use? My words will only be either ignored or twisted and used as verbal ammunition in this war that blogger has against the deities themselves, a war that blogger cannot and will not admit he has started. It is a war he has created out of his own fears and distrust of the deities and his own discomfort at being less powerful and occupying a stratum lower on the hierarchy than the deities.

Every time I go over to that blog, I am faced with the very glaring insult to my deities. The blogger in question has bastardized a sacred image, has kept it up there for a long time, and has done it for his own gain. Even if he took it down now, the damage is done. When he doesn’t even bother to treat a sacred image as valuable, he cannot convince me that he has anything of value to say about the deities whom he does not value and whom he has actively devalued in thoughts, in words, in deeds, and in imagery.

If it is not an “archaic” extremist militant group like Daesh trying to erase the gods of my tradition and my heart, and all of the gods of the lands of the Middle East, with propaganda, machine guns, jackhammers, or explosives, it’s “modern” and “rational” persons in the media or, as in this case, in mainstream Neopagan blogging, desecrating and trying to erase them through subtler, less obvious means. These latter are dirty and insidious means, which generally slip past modern audience’s emotions and critical thinking “radars” when the explosive damage of Daesh is more likely to be noticed and treated with the horror, the anger, and the acknowledgement the deities deserve, the ancestors deserve, and frankly we deserve, too. (I wonder sadly, though: is this notice because the explosions draw the attention of the “modern” West because of the horror done to the gods, or because of the statement of cowboy defiance against the West implicit in these acts?)

We all — beings from deities, to ancestors, to humans, to many other beings — we all deserve better. We deserve to see these situations made better as best we can manage for all involved. We can’t do that without seeing the truth of these assaults for what they are first; assaults not merely on remnant history or symbols but on the fabric of meaning and upon our gods themselves and the relationships held most sacred in this world. (And these matters certainly extend well beyond the deities of the Near and Middle East, but the scope of this writing specifically addresses these desecrations.)

There exist in our world many harms, and some are very obvious. Some are much more subtle harms, which can cause the same damage and erasure that Daesh can wreak, often without present notice at all. No bombs, no jackhammers, no machine guns aimed at the ancient artifacts which are images of the gods… “funny” manipulations and desecrations of an image accomplishes a similar goal of erasing the deities and desensitizing us to the wrongness in one blow.

Seeing either expression of harm, subtle or indelicately explosive, with too much frequency and without the guidance to recognize critically these horrors for what they are, has a desensitizing effect, an anesthetizing effect, on whole societies and ways of viewing and responding to the world. Over time it gets to be — has gotten to be — “no big deal”, when people act in these manners and further wreck the very relations we seek to heal, restore, and reestablish. We can’t fix these things when we can’t recognize that they got broken and are continually getting broken in the first place, and in the second and third and fourth as well. This misunderstanding of what is sacred and how to treat it combined with a desensitization to desecration, is the lasting symptom which continues to drive a wedge between ourselves, our deities, and the ancestors who could help us heal these matters within ourselves and our societies. It is a symptom of relationships which were poisoned long before we got here, and it is a symptom that we must learn to overcome lest we continue to live in the poison and propagate it, thus poisoning future generations. I pray to my gods, I pray to all our gods, that for all our sakes and the sake of the future that this is a matter which we, each and all of us, can overcome so that there is at least something sacred left for today’s children to inherit tomorrow.

Lokasenda Ritual

Dagulf Loptson in Ørgrandr Lokean

I created this ritual both for myself and for others as a structured way in which to honor Loki and Sigyn, and to feed the gods. To understand Loki in the context of the sacramental fire, and the importance that burnt offerings holds in strengthening the holy powers, I recommend my previous articles: A New Place for Loki part I and II. This ritual was primarily inspired by the Vedic ritual of Agnihotra, a ritual of burnt offerings with Agni (fire) as the central focus.

As Loki is the vehicle through which the gods are fed, this ritual can be used to honor any god or goddess, and can also be used effectively during blót. As I am presenting it here, it can be used as a simple daily or weekly practice to honor Loki and Sigyn, pray, and commune with them, and to empower and strengthen the gods and their influence in the devotees life.

What you’ll need:

A fire-pot or other flame-safe container for your fire. I’ve used a fire-pot with fire-pot fuel inside my house, and have used a fire-pit with wood when outside.
Incense. I find that Loki favors dragon’s blood, but any kind will do.
A bowl and spoon or small branch to sprinkle your oblations with.
Vodka, mead, or some other hard alcohol that will burn easily without putting your fire out.
Powdered Birch bark and a container to hold it.
Runes (optional).
An image to represent Loki is optional, as the fire is his literal personification.

Step 1:

Light the central fire and the incense.

Step 2:

Sprinkle birch powder into the fire while saying the following invocation:

Welcome, now, Loki,
and take this crystal cup
Full of ancient mead.
Loki, Lord of heaven’s fire
Lightning swift Loptr, come
Greet me kindly Gammleið
Great priest of sacrifices
Fill my heart with your flames
First among the sons of Muspell
Cunning one, carry my prayers
Across the Ása Bridge
Through your mouth the gods feast
May they ever grow in might
Mighty king, clothed in red and gold
May there ever be frith between us
Hail Loki

The birch bark is representative of Laufey, Loki´s mother, and the wood that Loki (the sacred fire) emerges from. Lafuey (“leafy one”) is the tree from which the sacred fire from heaven is born when she is struck by Farbauti (“cruel striker”) the lightning. I personally associate Laufey with the birch, which as her name and the Berkana Rune Poem’s suggests is a leafy tree. The Norwegian Rune Poem for Berkana is also the only Rune Poem that specifically mentions Loki.

Step 3:

Use your spoon or twig to drip the alcohol from the bowl and into the fire while saying this incantation:

Sigr Sigr Sigr
Sigyn grants sure victory
To the gods and to the folk
Through your hands pour all oblations
Bring our blessed offerings to the
Bright burden of your arms
Gateway through which the gods
Gladly feast and grow in strength
Gift for Gift may we ever gain
The grace of our elder kin
Hail Sigyn

Through this process, the god’s offerings are poured from Sigyn’s bowl and onto Loki: the gift bringer and messenger of the gods. The spoon or twig is representative of the serpent: traditionally a symbol of transformative power and healing. Sigyn’s name, “victorious girlfriend”, is invoked for victory for the worshipper/s and the gods, just as Svaha, Agni’s wife’s name, is chanted with oblations to Agni during the Agnihotra.

Step 4:

The rest of your time in this ritual is spent praying, meditating, pulling runes to ask for the god’s advice, or whatever you feel. Ideally, you can sit in prayer or meditation until the fire burns itself, upon which the ritual is complete.