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I spose I ought to jump in and support this thread really, oughtn't I. This is about how I had a religion, but I lost it, but it was okay on the end because I found another one.
Okay. I started out as a Roman Catholic. My mum was raised Catholic and my dad was recieved into the Church as an adult (a bit before they got married, I think). Until I was about six or seven we went to church every Sunday. I went to a playgroup where they sung hymns as well as nursery rhymes. I had Ladybird books Bible stories and coloured pencils that said God Is Love down the side and everything. Then my parents had some kind of big crisis of faith and we went from being Catholics to being (officially at least) a family of atheists. I maintained a sort of sketchy, private theism which I kept very much to myself. I prayed sporadically, and even experienced a couple of episodes of religious ecstacy.
When I was about 9 or 10 I discovered the Wiccan worldview, the whole mother-Goddess, horned-God concept. It didn't quite seem to fit right somehow but it made a lot more sense to me than the male-centric monotheistic model I'd been raised with. It also seemed to address certain restrictions and taboos that I had come to think of as cruel and unnecessary. As I got older I was given things like Graves' The White Goddess to read, also any number of appalling fluff-pagan and -magic texts. (Magic has always been an enormous and intrinsic part of my spiritual life. I can find no way to separate them and refuse to try.)
Weaving in and out of all this were the various religious, magical and spiritual activites of other family members, aunts talking about their Spirit Guides or ghostly visitors, my mum's stories about her Catholic childhood, glimpses of ritual and faith that seemed both profound and superstitious.
So I sort of beetled along for years in a kind of half-baked paganism, not really knowing what I was doing or what I believed or what I was for. Most of the books I had access to dealth with either Christian mysticism or the Celtic deities; despite the fact that I loved Their stories and took to mooning after Brigit for months at a time, I never really felt a sense of connection with that pantheon and magical workings evoking Them were always a bit lacklustre. By my early teens I was getting a sense that there was something I should be looking for, but I couldn't find it.
I got into the runes at about age 14 and fell in love with them; that naturally lead me to a desultory study of the Northern pantheon (or what I could glean fourth-hand from cheap rune texts anyhow). And that became my main focus, such as I had one, for the next seven years or so. In my early twenties I decided to start 'working with' the Norse Gods (having taken on board the rather tedious Great'n'Powerful Mage propaganda that treats worship as a dirty word).
I petitioned Odin for help with my poetry. Fortunately He ignored me completely--my poetry still sucked but on the plus side I didn't get tricked out of my firstborn or anything. Having not been appallingly stupid enough for one lifetime I then put together an evocation to Loki, who I petitioned for 'change.' This last was a resounding success, fucking everything up royally for about a year and resulting in ripples of suckitude that even now reverberate across my life. Despite having got precisely what I asked for I was very upset, and got in an even bigger state when following the working He wouldn't leave me alone. The final straw came when He started hijacking my Walkman. I shut down completly, no more petitionary pray or evocation, no more deity work of any kind. That was me, for about a year. I think I did a couple of Tarot spreads in that time.
Following my year of shutdown, I got into chaos magic as it offered a way to practice in an entirely secular format. Evoking pop-culture figures seemed a heck of a lot saner than Gods. As time wore on I began, very tentatively, to engage in spirit-work again, and eventually began practicing ancestor worship. This became my spiritual focus, and I was perfectly content. I had a small shrine in a box, I burned incense and offered drinks of water or tea, spoke to them every night and had a special long chat on Sundays. It was the most meaningful spiritual activity I could remember engaging in, and left to myself I would never have looked for anything else.
But about a year later I had my big religious experience. Loki reappeared in my life, and this time He wouldn't be got rid of. My first serious Loki working was intended as a polite kiss-off: Here's your seat at the party, here's some nice food and a few beers, now goodbye. It... kinda didn't work out like I planned.
Instead I had Loki announced that He was my patron, the Aesir (plus Vanir and several Jotnar) were my pantheon, He liked strong coffee and orange-flavour Tang as libations and the sooner I got used to the arrangement the better.
I got religion. I may have needed to be lamped over the head repeatedly before I got it, but I got it in the end.
At first I was kind of clueless but I began making a serious study of the myths and legends associated with the pantheon. I began reading the extant literature dealing with Them and the people who once worshipped Them. I read texts on modern NT worship like Kveldulf Gundarsson's Teutonic Religion, and generally started hoovering up every scrap of information I could. I constructed harrows, and now I make regular offerings. And Loki was right; They are my pantheon. They talk to me. I commune with them. They have enriched my life in countless ways, some small, some large. Ancestor and landwight worship remain at the heart of my spiritual faith, but that's okay--they were at the heart of the NT paleopagans' lives too.
So far I've been content to identify as a heathen, because it's a nice loose term with lots of wiggle-room (although people still challenge my right to use it). Recently though I have begun to think that the term Ásatrú might actually be more appropriate.
I find myself largely at odds with mainstream heathenry. Firstly, I am nonFolkish--I emphatically do not subscribe to the odious but all-too-common belief that only people of Northern European ancestry can or should worship the Tivar.
Secondly, magic. Magical practice is not an intrinsic componant of NT worship in the way it is a part of, say, Wicca, but the current trend to reject all magical practice entirely is a mistake IMO. I am a witch and mine is a magicoreligious practice. I perform ecstatic rites. I perform divination and runic magic. I am what's called a woo-woo heathen.
We are not popular.
Thirdly, Loki. Opinion is divided over Loki. On one hand you have people like me, who argue that while He's not an unmproblematic figure He's a God, very holy, and entirely worthy of reverence. On the other hand you have practically every other heathen on the planet, who think He's TEH EVAL. Trickster, liar, kinslaying pervert, Jotun, etc, etc. Apparently it's not a proper religion unless you have some heretics to shout at and a Satan-analogue to alternately spit on and cringe before.
Still, there ya go. I can justify everything I do and believe from lore, and therefore have no problem with calling myself a heathen--or even Ásatrú, since my primary dedication is to the Aesir. Which is more than a lot of the Folkies and Loki-bashers can do.
So there you go, that's me. |
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