I recently read an exchange online between a polytheist (what type, I do not know) and a Heathen that to my mind, highlighted what I consider to be the biggest issue in Heathenry. The exchange was a simple one. In the course of the discussion, the Polytheist commented that he was seeing a lot of people talking about human sentiment and human feelings but he didn’t see anyone considering what the gods might want, or what They might feel about the topic at hand, one that had the potential to significantly impact ongoing religious praxis. The Heathen fired back that this errs into the realm of UPG — unverified personal gnosis– and was better left undiscussed.

I could not disagree more strongly. Those are precisely the questions we ought to be asking, ever and always: What do our Gods want. This is where divination comes into play. This is where your mystics and spiritworkers are essential. This is where we are all served by cultivating a strong practice of prayer and discernment. Whenever I hear Heathens disparaging UPG — and this happens quite a bit–I just shake my head. All religion is unverified personal gnosis, if we look at it objectively. Of course community practices evolve out of a need to find some way of approaching and engaging with the sacred as a community. If enough people are having the same experiences then we might get a common range of accepted, mainstream praxis. Those community practices, however, will only ever be the reflection of the lowest common spiritual denominator, those areas of experience where the most number of people can participate with the least effort expended. Personally, I’m deeply ambivalent about this. I’d like to see that bar held higher, but that too comes with its inherent problems not the least of which is alienating a number of otherwise good folk. That being said, personal gnosis is sacred. It’s the fuel that keeps a religion vital and alive, relevant, and sustainable. It reminds us that the point of what we’re doing is right relationship with the Holy Powers. It places Them at the center of the equation, and encourages us to fuel the fires of our own devotion.

I often think that part of the ongoing hostility toward gnosis, i.e. toward direct experience of the sacred unmediated by community ritual, is the mere fact that one person is having experiences that another isn’t. It’s often a matter of ‘you’re doing something I can’t, so you must be wrong, bad, perverse, not Heathen, or [insert epithet here]. It comes down to two equally vexing things: spiritual envy and having one’s personal prejudices and world view challenged. I tend to think that if the latter isn’t happening fairly regularly, then maybe something is amiss with the depth (or lack thereof) of our spiritual praxis; the first however, is one of the most hurtful and destructive spiritual issues that I’ve encountered; and it’s hurtful not for the one being envied, but to the emotional and spiritual integrity of the one consumed by it. Given our Protestant-influenced worldview, it seems that we all too often we ascribe moral superiority to intense gnosis, we impose a hierarchy of value where in fact, none exists. There’s a lovely story told by St. Therese of Lisieux in her autobiography that touches on this. She recounts that as a small child, she asked her sister if God loved saints more than regular people. The sister — in a moment of inspired brilliance–got a wine glass and a thimble and filled them each to capacity and asked the little Therese, ‘which is more full?’. The child got the point that we each experience the sacred to our capacity and “more” is a very subjective matter.

I also believe that part of the aversion is a problem with authority. Someone having direct engagement with the Gods is a danger to human structures of authority. A mystic, a spirit worker, a shaman, even a priest who has a strong devotional life (as all priests should ,but sadly don’t) is a specialist. A specialist is, by experience and training, an authority in his or her field and that is problematic when that field is religion, a field where we’ve been taught to eschew standards in favor of subjectivity. If something is subjective then it doesn’t really lend itself to external evaluation and challenge. Beyond your specialists, someone, — your average jane and joe– having direct engagement with the sacred has the potential to challenge the comfort of our unexamined practices, to argue for piety over dubious ‘progress’, authenticity over personal comfort, and engagement over ego. Those direct experiences upend our value system, the value system of middle working class *Protestant* America, the value system mired in its own lack of vision.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think part of it also comes down to the inherent distrust our modern, post-Reformation world has with the deeply spiritual, particularly when it touches the emotions. Devotion is not only déclassé, but suspicious. We’d rather pathologize it as a culture than accept that the Gods are powerfully real and can and do interact with Their devotees in ways that mirror every bit the mysticism experienced by some of the ancients. Instead, we all too often avoid the experiential, fearing to look foolish, primitive, fearing to make the mainstream uncomfortable and the result is that we cull the depth out of our practices until what is left is at best a shallow shell.

With this restoration, we are charged with resacralizing our world. Personal experience, what Heathens call UPG and what many other religions refer to as mysticism is central to this process. An anti-experiential attitude goes hand in hand with a desire to purge every bit of mystery out of our traditions, to render them as dull, mediocre, and ultimately as shallow as we possibly can, to render them innocuous, to render them profane.(1) It is our mystics who keep the rampant desacralization of our world from devouring the budding flower of our traditions wholesale. It is those who embrace their own potential — however great or small–for experiencing the sacred who hold a line with their very minds, hearts, and spirits against this excision of the sacred.

We need our mystics desperately. We also need those who are not mystics, but who have a deep piety and desire to maintain right relationship with the sacred. We need that tension to force our own evolution and healthy growth. We need our mystics to remind us to keep the Gods central to our praxis, to ask “what do the Gods want here?” and we need our devotees, who may not be having deeply intense religious experiences but who love the Gods and ancestors, to remind us that there’s a human equation too. This organic balance isn’t happening in Heathenry. Instead, the mystics (and I’m using this term broadly as a gloss for those whose praxis is primarily informed by direct experience with the sacred) are marginalized and the human-centric raised up in place of the sacred to the extent that I’ve even seen it posited that the Gods don’t interact with us anymore, that this was something that happened only to our ancestors, long ago and far away.

People who are intent on venerating the Powers and on active, experiential engagement have the potential to be living windows through which the sacred may seep back into our traditions, and ultimately into our world. Not only is it important to ask, as we go about restoring our traditions, what the Gods want, it’s crucial; and if that upends the world of many gnosis-phobic Heathens out there, then so be it.

Notes:

1. I use the term profane in a similar way to Mircea Eliade: as the mundane balance to the sacred.

What is this thing called Heathenry? What is this body of religions that many of us are trying so avowedly to restore? I suspect if you asked ten Heathens, you’d receive ten different answers but I’m going to explore this question a little bit here, as I see it, because over the twenty – plus years that I’ve been Heathen, my understanding of the nature of these religious traditions has changed dramatically.

Note, by the way, that I try very hard to avoid referring to Heathenry as one religion. I don’t think it is, nor do I think it would have been so during the times of our polytheistic ancestors. Today we talk about religions having different denominations, each with different theological foci; in the past there would have been regional cultus. The way “Heathenry” was practiced would have varied, sometimes quite drastically, from locale to locale with different Gods taking precedence, different social mores, perhaps different ritual structures at the very least. This is a good thing too. It lends color and texture and vibrancy to a tradition. I think that Heathenry then and now is big enough to encompass such dramatic diversity; in fact, I think such diversity to be one of polytheism’s greatest strengths.

It’s also worth pointing out that neither would the word “Heathen” have actually existed as a specific religious identity. We moderns have taken a word that was used as an insult – Hæþen – hearth dweller–in much the same way that modern Pagans seized upon ‘paganus, a, um’ or country dweller.(1) These words weren’t always used in a derogatory fashion. Once they simply meant someone who lived in the country, but with the advent of monotheism, and the advance of Christianity across Europe (which went hand in hand with the scouring and destruction of indigenous traditions), those who had abandoned their ancestral ways for the new religion of Christianity needed a way to diminish and condemn those who held onto their traditional beliefs and so they called them the equivalent of hillbillies or hicks. It was an effective rhetorical weapon for transforming a complex religious tradition into silly, outdated superstition in the minds of the people. It was a means of erasing the power of a generations-old set of practices.

Moreover, until the coming of Christianity, there was no need for people to use any type of name or word for their religious traditions. This was what people did. It was what their parents did, their grandparents, their great grandparents. It was the natural way of being within one’s community and tribe. Differentiation of one’s sacred identity from one’s tribal identity happened only at the hands of the enemy. Today, living in a very different time and place from our polytheistic ancestors, the need for differentiation is a useful (I hesitate to say important, though I think in many ways it is) part of building, repairing, and restoring our traditions. Now, we seize on these terms to tear ourselves away from the dominant religious culture, the Abrahamic faiths, specifically in the US, Christianity. It’s a way of marking our territory and slowly but surely redefining space for these battered traditions to re-emerge. Words of self definition have become a tool, a lever by which the window to restoration might be cracked open just a little bit wider and I find this rather ironic, given how once the very same tool was used to crush our ancestral ways. But I digress.

When I think of Heathenry today, I recognize that I’m engaging with the modern permutations of what were once indigenous traditions. To be indigenous means to be native to a place. When most of us hear that word today, we think (not incorrectly) of First Nations Peoples. Each one of us, however, came from somewhere. If we look far enough back, before Christianity, before monotheism, we each came from a tribe and each tribe had its ways, its beliefs, its practices, the lens through which it engaged with the world. (2) All of those practices and shared worldviews that make up what we would today call “Heathenry” were once part and parcel of the indigenous traditions of numerous peoples occupying what is now Germany, England, Scandinavia, Iceland, and perhaps even parts of Switzerland.(3) The practice of these traditions was rooted in tribal consciousness, and tribal places. You see this with many ancient polytheisms: there was a certain  geographic positioning to their praxis. The way a specific Deity was honored might change depending on where that Deity was honored. The way Odin was venerated in what is now England, for instance, was vastly different from the way He was honored in the forests of what is now Bavaria. The land was an important means of translating and ordering praxis for the people.

I personally believe that there is a certain amount of tension and anxiety within contemporary polytheisms in the US, perhaps most especially Heathenry, because we now lack that self-same tie to specific ancestral pieces of land. I have, over the years, come to believe that many of the more fundamentalist expressions of Heathenry have at their root a certain geographic insecurity. Whereas our ancestors’ practices would have developed in relationship with tribal lands, with the land itself an interlocutor for us and our Gods, contemporary Heathenry has developed in the United States, in uncomfortable relationship with US culture, at its heart, a fundamentalist, Protestant Christian culture. Nor do I see a resolution of this tension in the future though I think the key may lie in engaging deeply in ancestor cultus. I think our dead are able to bridge those gaps for us, as they likely did for those of our ancestors who traveled far from their native homes as well. We carry our ancestors with us, after all, bound to us through blood, bone, and DNA. That’s not a connection that can be severed, regardless of whatever other locational disconnect we might experience. Given that our presence in what is now the United States comes with a tremendous blood debt, it’s no wonder that there may be some unconscious and existential anxiety present in rooting our native traditions here.

As we work toward our restoration of our traditions, I think it’s important to keep these things in mind. All of us are coming to this work from modern cultures diametrically opposed to the mindset of our polytheistic ancestors. We have been patterned to respond to the world by means of that modern mindset. Part of that modern contamination is an unconscious positioning of the ins and outs of our ancestral religions as ‘primitive.’ (4) As we work toward restoration, I think we need to be very careful to explore how our culture has taught us to engage with the sacred, to position the holy in our lives, how we’ve been taught to respond to emotional experiences, and the idea that one may directly experience the Gods. It’s all too easy to respond in a way that makes us comfortable (condemning mysticism, fixating on the written word, i.e. the lore, holding to modern gender, racial, sexual orientation biases and so forth) but that would have been quite alien if not in direct opposition to the way our ancestors approached their world and their traditions. It’s all too easy to allow our comfort zones to become what determines overall Heathen praxis instead of having the courage and integrity to allow ourselves to be uncomfortable while at the same time looking past the lens of modernity for the way our ancestors would have actually related not only to their world, but to their Gods as well; and if that sounds like a challenge, it is.

Modernity after all has taught us to be very dismissive and exclusionary to our Gods.  This has only been exacerbated by the Academy and social thinkers like Emile Durkheim (perhaps one of the most influential minds to the development of both Sociology and Religious Studies) who defined religion as little more than an expression of the social glue that binds a people together.(5) Religion has come to be viewed through a social lens rather than a devotional or pious one. Yes, religion can serve as the binding force of a community; yes it can bestow tremendous benefit on a community, and yes, religious festivals and observances are a chance for a people to come together in shared experience of the sacred but that is a far different thing from positioning the community at the apex of importance in things religious. This is one of the places where I think modern polytheisms, including Heathenry (perhaps most especially Heathenry) get things really, really wrong. As moderns we betray the authenticity of our traditions in so many ways, but none more egregiously than this.

In my opinion, putting anything but the Gods first in a religious tradition is a betrayal of that tradition, just like we see with the Christian right that pushes a conservative political agenda above the gospel message. That’s not to say that we can’t enjoy socializing and coming together in celebration and sharing our experiences. There is a difference though between focusing on the Gods during religious rituals (and not truncating those rituals so one can get to the socializing faster) and then socializing before or after, and using the time of a ritual as an excuse to socialize. It’s been my experience that little thought is given to what the Gods might want (and yes, one can know…that’s what your spiritworkers, your shamans, your diviners are for). A sense of respect, reverence, and awe for the experience of the holy is not cultivated amongst our folk. Perhaps because large swaths of Heathens (not all but many) look so doggedly toward the lore instead of toward the reality of their own devotional experiences as the be all and end all of their religion, the Gods for far too many seem to remain solely ideas in a handful of medieval tales compiled by a pissy Christian politician who happened to be a poet too and who did not want the poetic metaphors, stories, kennings, and allusions of times past to be lost for up and coming  poets of his generation.

I think above all else, it’s important, no matter where we are in our faith: a newcomer, or someone who has put in twenty, thirty, forty years or more, to cultivate a sense of awe and reverence for the Gods, for the sacred, for the interactions that we are in fact able to have with Them. These things should be given priority over the lore because we are not, in fact, religions of the Book. We are religions of lived sacred experience and there is a vast difference in worldview between the two. At the heart of any viable and sustainable restoration must be the reclamation of that ancestral mindset, one that valued (and perhaps feared) the Gods, but never doubted Their presence, or the possibility of Their attentions.

We’ve lost our way in two thousand years of Christian hegemony. We’ve forgotten what it is like to live in sacred trust with our ancestors, our land, and our Holy Powers. The most important facet of restoration that we can do, over and above reconstructing any particular ritual, over and above almost anything else, is to work like hell to restore and relearn *that* once more and the way to doing that is not going to be found in the lore. It’s going to be found in the laughter and tears, the trembling and terror of our own devotional experiences, those moments when we connect in utter vulnerability with our ancestors, and hopefully eventually with our Gods. It’s going to be found when we are able to translate those experiences back into public praxis. The hostility toward the sacred, toward the mystic, toward ecstatic cultus is not something naturally ingrained in Heathenry itself; it’s an offshoot of the poison of our own entrenched modernity, a modernity poisoned by monotheism and a disconnect from our dead.

Notes

1. paganus, a, um: of or belonging to the country or two a village. May be used substantively to indicate villagers, peasants. It’s also used as a contrast to military life and in this case may be translated as civilian. See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=paganus&la=la#lexicon.  The etymology of “heathen” is not too different. A search of several etymological sources noted that it was of Germanic origin (Old English form is  hǣthen) and as an adjective meant ‘inhabiting open country.’ Our word ‘hearth’ comes from the same root.

2. Native American activist John Trudell talks about just this thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-qO4pIK1Bg

3. This in no way means that one can only be Heathen if one’s ancestors came from those places. Firstly, the Gods call whom They call; secondly, ancient polytheisms were phenomenally flexible. They by and large lacked the xenophobia that has crept into contemporary reconstructions (a response, I think, to the need to both wrench ourselves free of monotheistic oppression and to differentiate ourselves from various Paganisms and other polytheisms–we lack the regional ties, the binding locus of cultus that would have been integral to polytheisms of the ancient world. Instead we’ve substituted in many cases, a hostility and fear of “dual tradition,” something that would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors). One venerated the Gods of one’s people and ancestors, the Gods of the place where one might live (if that differed from one’s ancestral traditions), the Gods of one’s household (then as now, I’m sure blended households existed–Christianity certainly used this to spread its poison via maternal/wifely influence in mixed marriages), and then the Gods of whatever mystery cultus one might choose to initiate into. It was remarkably polyvalent. To use one’s Heathen identity as an excuse for racism of any kind is not only not supported by the lore so many Heathens love to deify, but goes against any polytheistic notion of piety. It’s a modern misunderstanding of the role of ancestor cultus, a misunderstanding rooted in the fractures, damage, and racism of the modern world.

4. I very much believe this is at the heart of such rabid, raving hostility toward devotional work, Deity possession, God-spousery, and ecstatic ritual of any sort — these things not only challenge the known status quo, but we’ve been taught, by a school system and culture infused with Protestant ethics and white privilege to view anything remotely outré (to Protestant Christianity) as ‘what those superstitious savages do over there.” and we believe at a gut level that we’re better than that. It is a triumph for the Filter that we denigrate and denounce the very medicine we need to do this restoration cleanly.

5. See É. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1912])

In this, my inaugural column for Polytheist.com, I want to talk for a bit about why I became Heathen. There were many reasons at the time, twenty plus years ago, that I did not wish to make that leap. I love my Gods more than anything else in my world. I am especially bound in service and devotion to Odin and that happened quite a bit before I became Heathen. It may seem overly facile to say that it’s all Odin’s fault but well, readers, it really is all His doing! He called and I answered. He’s got a very seductive ‘voice,’ after all, and I’ve never regretted my devotion to Him. When He directed me to Heathenry I balked quite a bit, but in the end I went where He bade. It’s been, over the years, a rather interesting journey. Looking back, Heathenry has changed quite a bit (in many ways for the better) since I first entered the religion, and in many ways it remains sadly much the same.

When I first became Heathen, it was all but taboo to discuss or give any personal credence to what was (then as now) termed “UPG” (unverified personal gnosis). In good Protestant fashion, anything remotely smacking of mysticism, experience, or messy, messy emotional engagement was frowned upon, strongly. As a religious studies scholar, I find this not particularly surprising but ironic and very, very amusing given that all religion is, at its heart, UPG, but I digress. All emphasis was placed on a body of non-religious texts termed “the lore.” This included the “Poetic Edda,” “Prose Edda,” Icelandic Sagas, Anglo-Saxon medical charms, historical and legal accounts as well as contemporary scholarship. The idea was to reconstruct the religion of our ancestors as accurately as possible and to that end, Heathens would comb through the extant sources looking for evidence of how rites and rituals were performed. Validity of an approach or practice rested on its presence in the lore. The Gods were, by and large, an afterthought. Certainly there was very little sense of the terrifying immediacy of devotional engagement, and rituals were largely constructed to keep the actual rawness of the sacred at a distance.

The reasons for this textual focus were many: the majority of our converts come from Protestantism, quite often fundamentalist Protestantisms in which the written word is given tremendous credence; there was a strong desire to do things right — and this I fully understand. We should want to do things the proper way for our Gods; there was a desire to separate oneself from Wicca and other non-historical forms of Paganism; and from its beginning in the States, Heathenry has attracted a doggedly blue collar demographic, with a powerful work ethic but an ingrained aversion to contemplation of that which wasn’t immediately apparent or immediately accessible to a community. Moreover, Heathenry attracted a majority of people who were fairly conservative in their views and who had a keen interest in their forebears, their ancestry, the “old world.” It rarely attracted those called by the Gods (not surprising given the extreme hostility toward devotion in those early years).

Then something happened. I actually think a confluence of things happened over the better part of two decades. A group in CA (now y’all know I’m no fan of CA anything, but I have to give credit where credit is due) began practicing a reconstructed version of a spae-rite, a ritual centered around a seeress who plumbs the other worlds for knowledge. Despite criticism of their approach, the practice itself was clearly grounded in lore. This led to a greater awareness of the more esoteric aspects of practice, including Deity possession. While deeply controversial, ever so slowly more and more people started speaking up about experiences that they had. Early on several writers (Edred Thorsson, Freya Aswynn et al) shared their knowledge of rune lore further laying the foundation for an alternative way of approaching the religion. The spae-group, of course, had already been working for years when I became Heathen, and while I disagree with many, many aspects of their practice, I think they laid some very useful groundwork for what was to follow after 2000. In the early two thousands, Raven Kaldera started his work publicly as a Northern Tradition shaman and at the same time there was a growing interest in the Jotnar, what some groups call the Rokkr–Deities like Loki and His family. This highlighted a serious fault line within Orthodox or mainstream Heathenry and a growing awareness of how different various “denominations” might function. More and more people began getting actively called by the Gods and having that as one’s driving force for coming to a religion, is a far, far different thing from wanting to engage in what many of us dismissed as little more than historically oriented role play. Those more gods-focused also became more vocal.

Now obviously, I’m glossing over quite a bit and the community was and remains intensely polarized. What happened though over the last decade is something that has, I believe, been happening in polytheism and paganism in general: a chasm has been highlighted between those who are Gods-focused and Gods-motivated, and those who would put the community and other people over any sense of piety or devotional obligations (rather than seeking to build a community rooted in those latter values). All of these slow, incremental changes, despite the ensuing suspicion and hostility (sometimes intense hostility) created a fissure in the lore-based fundament. It created space through which our Gods might slip.

For all its faults — and in my opinion, Heathenry still has many (I haven’t even touched on its insularity)–now it is a community where to varying degrees people will talk about their devotion, about the ways they honor the Gods, where direct experience isn’t quite so objectionable. Now there are models, very vocal models throughout the various community denominations clearly showing an alternative to staunchly lore-based methodology and more importantly, that it’s not an either-or. Lore can be a useful tool *and* one can be deeply, experientially devout. Now there are those working and teaching and praying and living their faith in ways that clearly show how to do this restoration in a way that emphasizes our devotion to the Gods. Moreover, across denominations (and despite disagreements) I’ve seen a growing awareness of the importance of ancestor work, of honoring our dead, and that fills me with joy. We’ve a very long way to go however.

Now I’m a polytheist and Heathenry is the flavor of polytheism that I practice and it’s been odd to see some of the same shifts and transitions happening in polytheism as a whole, that I’ve watched and participated in over the years within Heathenry. Looking at polytheism as a whole I can’t help but think about where I would like to see Heathenry in another twenty years. Part of me worries that in order to grow into a tradition that truly places Gods and ancestors first, that has an awareness of devotion and piety and that has eschewed the indoctrination of contemporary Protestantism, humanism, modernism, and any other ism diametrically opposed to the mindset of our ancestors, we may have to first tear down what foundation we’ve built. Ragnarok. I hope that isn’t the case. I hope that we are wise enough as a community to build the foundation of this restoration on devotion. I hope that we will as a group root out the intolerance and xenophobia, the insularity and deep suspicion not just of mysticism but of education as well (for all that Heathenry calls itself the religion with homework, there is a deeply ingrained, working class suspicion and disregard of intellectualism within the community).

A friend of mine recently told me about a state wide processional to a particular Goddess. The image of this Goddess was carried by people from one particular Heathen kindred all around the state, stopping wherever there were Heathen groups so that She could be venerated …except that’s not what actually happened. My friend was present at one of the stops. She wanted to pay her respects to this Goddess. She told me, disgusted, that the statue was put on a table. No prayers were given. No acknowledgement that the image of the Deity was present. It was placed on a table and then people socialized for an hour. For this, we might as well all be humanists. It betrays a remarkable lack of priorities. I can’t help but think that the purpose of the processional was to improve the status of the kindred and people doing the procession and not in fact to venerate the Goddess and that has to stop.

We as devotees of the Gods are better than that. We have on our shoulders a heavy, heavy weight, that of restoring the threads of our traditions, threads that were sundered often violently with the spread of christianity across Europe. We have an obligation to our Gods and our dead. We have an obligation to those who will come after us in this tradition to get our shit together and do this restoration thing well; and we can. It is something that is well within our means. All it requires is a shift in mindset. Why are we doing this? For Whom? Tradition building includes community building but that latter should never be done at the expense of proper veneration. Durkheim be damned, religion is not socialization. It’s about a shared experience of the holy. I think if we keep that in mind, if we school ourselves to think first of what is right by the Gods and the dead, and do that instead of worrying what others will think, or jockeying for position, or a thousand other human-centric foibles we’ll be ok. Certainly the one thing that we can all agree on, regardless of our denomination or position, is that we want to see our traditions restored.

And that, my readers, is what this column is about. Over the next few months I’m going to be talking about Heathenry: what we do well, where I think we should improve, and what the way certain religious structures have been allowed to develop means for us as a global community. Moreover, what does it mean to be doing this restoration work in a world so different from that of our ancestors, a world poisoned for two thousand years by monotheistic oppression? What does it mean to be breaking free into the traditions of our ancestors and into a sense of our own indigeny? How do we do this well, respectfully, sustainably?

I don’t have answers to all or even most of these questions but I know they need to be asked and I’ve seen enough transformation over the past two decades in Heathenry to have hope that by working together, intra-faith as well as interfaith with other polytheists, we can figure it out.