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"You come to us and say there is a stirring and a seething in the heart of things, from which their own self doth self-rebel, and from such self-rebellion cometh strange surpassings of the self. You speak as if you bring a new truth, yet of this we have long known. The Well of Wyrd bubbleth and seethe, and from such source all things arise ; and yet they come as in a dream, and methinks ye have neglected such. We too know of vast spirit-wars ; they tell us, the old ones, that giants and gods do battle. Ever were it so. You say there was a time when earth was not, when seas were not, when trees were not, when beasts were not. Yet what man knoweth not the verses of the volva, who tell us of such times? You say we have grown from beasts, in a wondrous metamorphosis through every form, yet ruled by chance and happening. A strange and marvelous enough doctrine ; yet, look upon our glyphs and runestones. See there how beast to beast transforms, and Wyrd, of course -- what you call chance and happenstance -- rules all. Indeed there are seers amongst our Irish cousins who say we emerge up from every form. I cannot see what is new in what you speak, except ye say around the world you've scoured all the bones within the mountains, fetched and found them, tracing all this legacy of metamorphosis. Our bones you can see in the hands of a lizard. So, you say, we should leave our spirits, abandon our gods, and believe we are nothing but corpses, fire trapped in a dead frame fated to extinguish. I think no man knows by the light of day what doom his death shall bring, yet we have songs of wise men, who have said they've tread those darkest tracks beyond the fog and darkness where extinguishment is seem ; a little tread alone, they deem, will not beyond the darkness see. They say there are lands of melissine sun and trickling mead where we may meet our ancestors, be rejoined in ancient halls with loved ones. Many who have fallen then returned speak much the same. Can we know by light of day? Perhaps not, but we shall not dismiss the testimony of our tribesmen. You scoff at our hallowings of mead and wood, asserting that life is a temporary, new beginning of time, hardly old ; that all things started from a single point that burst, expansions and contractions in spasm hurling out the stars, and in those furnaces all the stone and steel we know was cooked. It is no secret that the world was born between fire and ice, nor that there from a single seed burst forth Yggdrasil, in whose canopy sit the constellations of stars. We know thus. Yet we know further than you, it seems, for for you, all your eyes behold -- yes, augmented by great instruments of smithy-work, indeed, as you have told -- seems dead, while we know that tree whose root no one fathoms is alive, through and through, alive throughout ; and perhaps you dwell too long upon the hardwood, then neglecting its xylem and its sap. This whole world lives ; it breathes ; it seethes, and even rivers, seas, and slowly moving mountains (we have heard, the home of dwarves) live. The stars are fruits ; they live. Their glowing golden, coming ripe, restores the gods from ages old and weariness, and many say a soul is but a falling star, a seed from Yggdrasil. We see you look upon our speech as quaint. You shake your heads. You cannot fathom our barbarian speech. You seek to turn us from our ways, but we shall not be turned, no, not unless by Wyrd herself, and she shall turn indeed. But her turnings are strange and intricate, never obvious, ever enigma, while we sense you are prisoners of wordlock, ever lined in lines. We shall learn your lore. Our sages shall eat it. There, our great folk-stomach shall corrode your truths and break them down until they are assimilable. We love to learn, and honor what gifts you bring, but do not come to conquer, nor seek ye to convert. We too have tales to tell and lore to learn ye. You are much an orphan, you have lost thine heirlooms ; an empty air surrounds you ; you are hollow, cannot see. We have heart and pith and strength, which we might share, if you came with lilies and laid down swords. Yet we see you are still quickened to insult. You ask our sages, great song-smiths lofted in the billow of inspiration, how we know there are gods, whom you scoff. You are a feckless upstart : where are your rhymes? How many winters have you lodged in a wizard's woodschool? How many songs do you have under your belt? How long have you reared and nourished your wonder? Amongst us, it is a duty. We observe, just as you do, but you seem to have forgotten the world has an inside as well as an outside. That inside may be sensed by those who are sensitive. Do you have dreams? What comes to you at night? Do you heed and hearken? If you did, then, when you came to a wood, some feeling would be borne within you, and at night, some dream would speak. Dunce, now I tell you, our lore is such archive of dreams, shared severally and collected by the seers, o'er countless years of ages, that your libraries have no rival. We know how to make what seems dead to you speak, for you see, it speaks in our hearts. Our poets know how the heart may speak ; they have spent long years training their tongues to ancient rhythms. They have sat beneath the stars and sipped their mead. You say this world is but one of many. Look up at the night sky and tell me, how many fruit of that tree do you see? We know this world is one of but nine, but see, we have a way of speaking : nine is to say nine thousand, nine thousand to say nine million. Nine to us is a countless lemniscate. You point to the gravel. You say to us, you are this sand. Oh yes, our bodies indeed uptake the ancient mill-grist of giants ; so we are told. But it is all shaped on a lathe you cannot see, whose spinnings you can only trace in sand. We are such sand and more. Blood and breast and breath of holy powers live within our sand-seem tree-flesh. We have ways of understanding you, may encompass you within the many steads of lore. But you? What place hath your wisdom for our knowledge? It seems all fool to you, heimsk. Many emissaries have come to us over time. We are now used to their arrogance. They come not to gather together the ancient runes shaved into the spilt mead ; no, poetasters all, minor skalds and fools, they think they've supped the cup entire, come to bring us light. Bring us light indeed! And we shall string it to our own. We can ween the value in your words, but ask, have you the heart to ween the worth in ours? No doubt our lore shall change, the world shall change, and nothing may withstand the tides of Wyrd. Yet we are all connected in a web. I wish that you could see. Dreaming was in this world long before we were, and it has had time too to "evolve", as you say, and it has shaped much of that inwardness who we are. For ourselves, we shall continue to listen. No, ambassadors, we shall not exile our poets for your sake."

The oceans are dying!  The oceans are dying! The oceans are dying! The oceans are dying!!

Did you get that? In response to an earlier ocean tragedy, I wrote a mythic response to the Deepwater Oilspill Catastrophe , but this time I'm just going to be straight up.

Read this article :

The Ocean Is Broken . This is not a conspiracy site. This is being carried by Yahoo.

If we pagans care about the sacredness of the earth, this is big news.

I want to know : why are we allowing business-as-usual to continue under conditions where the oceans are dying? Why aren't we out in the streets all the time, rapping at the doors of corporate, government, and UN representatives and demanding radical change?

Seriously. Do we believe in the sacredness of the natural world in which we live?

Do you really believe? Is this a play thing to you? 

I want to make a serious appeal to people to STOP EATING FISH. This article makes clear that the industrial trawling of fish is one of the very strong factors killing the life of the ocean. GOING VEGAN -- or at least cutting down or even better yet STOPPING FISH CONSUMPTION -- is a GIFT you can give to the ocean. To Njord or Yemanja or Neptune, or however you conceive the sacredness, numinosity, or divinity of the ocean. This doesn't mean one has to do so for all time. We can have the Vegan argument later. But for now -- under these conditions --that is the least you can do.

But going beyond personal gifts, we have to stop the JOTNAR, the Giants, the Megamonster Fishing Conglomerates who are NOT observing the Gift-Relationship of any indigenous/pagan culture : you don't just take, take, take. A gift calls for a gift. You take what you need and nothing more. And right now, for most of the consumers of fish, you don't need it. You may like it, it may help supplement your nutrients and mostly your taste buds, but you don't need it. So let's get some radical changes placing some CHAINS ON THIS FENRIS trawling the oceans with its Sky-To-Seabed Open Jaws and SHUT THIS MONSTER DOWN.

This is not playtime anymore, but just about everything else is, yes, including beloved, always-loved, in-the-pocket-of-Gullveig business. Don't talk to me about anything else when the ocean is at stake. Don't talk to me about anything else when the very poetry of our waters is in peril. I want to see widespread, collective action that makes the "Arab Spring" of Egypt look like child's play. If we pagans mean anything, if we are actually engaging in worship rather than frivolous entertainment, we need to put our money where our mouth is and get this going. No, I'm not just talking about donating to a cause here and there, although that's good, too. I mean getting people out into the streets over this. [This is not the only Earth-related cause we should be doing this for. There are impending extinctions of important species, toxic pollution, etc., that all must be attended to. But we must switch the discourse so it is no longer a "minority" issue. We have to turn the tables on the entire way this is looked at.] This means getting tough. This is like rallying for a war. This means no longer allowing protest and in-the-streets to be ridiculed, marginalized, pushed aside by those comfortably numb who are just trawling around living a bullshit existence while the very sacredness of the planet is at stake.

And while we're at it, two fucking years ago I also wrote about the complete disaster that is Fukushima , and here , and here , and here . This thing is STILL GOING ON! I can't believe this : we've got a disaster that rivals CHERNOBYL, and it has been going on, unstopped, for TWO FUCKING YEARS. Not only that, but business as usual has just kept on going as if nothing has happened! Our government representatives tell us it's nothing to worry about -- "nothing to worry about"? We expect the representatives of industry to spit out such lies, but the government replication thereof demonstrates, if nothing else did, how in the pocket of industry all our governments are. Fukushima is serious, folks. It was serious TWO YEARS AGO. It is now EVERY DAY pouring out TONS of RADIOACTIVE WASTE into the oceans. I mean, as we speak!! POURING RADIOACTIVE WASTE INTO THE OCEANS!

At this point in time where we are at on this planet, we should be doing nothing but writing in all caps, bold print, and italics, but there simply aren't enough to underline the importance of what's going on here.

I will quote some things I said earlier (in the links above). These statements apply now more than ever :

"And no one raised a peep. Not a whine, not a whimper, not a stamping of the feet. The shields, long dusty, were kept upon their posts. The spears were snapped in two and thrown on heaps and burned. And all the while the wolves devoured.."

Do you hear what I am doing here? Let me make it explicit : I am calling you fucking cowards. I am invoking the warrior ethos, and accusing you, here, in public, as a matter of your sacred honor, of neglecting to raise the fight about the things that matter most. Do you get what I'm saying here? This isn't just rhetoric. I have just on the world wide internet called out every person who thinks they believe in warrior values and asked why they are not raising the banners to mobilize for this cause. (I'm not discussing, to be clear here, literal weapons-war, but I am discussing serious mass campaigns.)

"I kneel down on the wet sand to kiss the shores, and beg Njord forgive those who have mired them, and realize, I cannot ask him forgive! For you cannot forgive those who have not repented! They have not paid their gild, they have not turned their ways!

The gods are made of chocolate, and actually inhabit a triangular realm of bells, living in rapture-wigwams of aromatic steam. Snorri quotes the skaldic line, "The mouth-savory regin, melted brindle honey-blend, dwell in bane-of-branches' water-kiss," for which the commentators add the bit of archaeological trivia of an unearthed stash of cacao found in a post hole outside a farm in Iceland, discovered in the 1800s, where were also found horse bones and a feather. Further, Saxo, speaking of Drvin's dream-journey to Asgard (called there the "star-castle of assembled sorcerors", but it's clear what he means), says that Drvin, in a kind of ecstasy, instead of bowing (as was wont), rushed forward in the hall to touch the feet of the gods, whereupon "their substance clung to his fingertips as of melted wax", and curious, he licked his fingers of the "earth-colored dew" that had deliquesced from their feet, "astonished to taste a meal marvelously like honey" (Elton translation), whereupon the entire castle "began to ring like a thousand bells", and he ran from the castle, which "was gabled, but moreso as he fled, he saw, a gable of gables"? Was the castle in fact a pyramid, and this Saxo's only way of describing? We can't know for certain, but that it was triangular is beyond question given his description. Now, as to whether all heathens of this time literally believed the gods' flesh was cacao, or whether this was a conceit on the part of various chieftains in the west who had received envoys from South America (evinced in the post hole evidence), we can't be certain, but it does seem an imported notion, as we know chocolate was called in its native realm "flesh of the gods"; how much more so, we might imagine, to late Dark Ages Scandinavians, who had never tasted it! This was a late development, no doubt, but we can only speculate, had heathenism cohered even a few centuries more, how much more our talented skalds would have played upon this metaphor. The "rapture-wigwams of steam" is evidently a blend of the notion of the Vafur-flames that surround Asgard, combined with an image of mist from waterfalls, but the imagery is at base American, and PreColumbian, depicting votive shrines around a stepped pyramid complex. Was such merely the description of the traders who came out of the canoes carved out of giant hardwood logs, or does it indicate in addition that some Vikings had reached, or been blown by storm, to the Americas even prior to Leif Ericsson? We can't know for certain, but the small traces we have are at least suggestive.

    Outside, it is windy, and a moonlit night. The tall poplar tree tinkles its golden leaves in the breeze, and as I look up at it, and see the stars behind it, I feel in the presence of an epiphany of the World-Tree, and I feel the presence of the Gods. I feel in the presence of profundity in which quotidia must be situated and given perspective.

    Oh, Lords and Ladies, Honored Elder Kin, I have been humbled. I have had hopes tossed and dashed. I have stretched myself towards goals which have met with defeat. And yet, in your presence, under the stars, under this epiphany of the Cosmic Tree itself, I feel, all is happening as it will, and that perhaps it is not the universe which has diverged from its path, but I from it : a risk of taking a gamble. To have taken the gamble is no dishonor. Risk is our business. But not every risk will be rewarded. That is the adventure of a venture.

    Thank Gods you give me the perspective to see this is ok. There is still a fundamental rightness to the universe underneath my despair if I will attune to it. So I did not succeed fully in my hopes? So what? It may be that is not meant to be, or it could mean that it will bear different fruit than I thought, or it may be it will take longer, and perhaps different tending and pruning, to come to what fruition it may. I am not in control of fruition, only of ripening. I ripen what I may, and open my hands to let the Gods complete it according to its Wyrd. If I become attached to specific results, I lose the magic of the world.

    I may not have gotten what I wanted, but look, behold : the world is still beautiful. The wind and moon say, life is still infused with something sublime, and isn't the ability to experience sublimity and incorporate it into one's life a higher definition of success? The world is an arena of struggle, of dynamism through the working out of contradictions, in which risk stands a chance of making good on a gamble, but that chance is never guaranteed, nor can we ride too much on that chance, however much we may need to feed it in a gamble. Yet we must conserve our better part to ourselves, to our devotion and service, rather than to the rewards. We give the gift -- that is our job, and what comes of it, though we may throw in our two cents and more here, ultimately, is not in our hands.

    I came here to experience profound things. Much has been given. In large part, that is why I am a praiser. Existence calls out for psalms. True, it also calls out for my active kritik, and that is a gift I also will give. But I have been given profundity -- if I will take the time to attune -- and this naturally, if we are healthy, calls for gratitude.

    So I thank all the Holy Powers and ask that they will deepen my abilities to serve in devotion, that my life might more and more become an incarnation of the Gift.

    To be in service. To dedicate oneself to life, to the divine process of living the human challenge, with devotion that looks to service as primary, intrinsic motivation, releasing external rewards as motivations, understanding they may come as they will if they will, but the process of living, and being in service, is enough. This is fundamentally what it means to understand "sacrifice". It is a giving up, a letting go, a release of attachment to result, and letting the divine process adjudge on its placement and value. For us, the worth is in giving, as it is with the divine powers who are the bestowers of gifts, who give when and as seems wise, according to their wisdom, and not according to behaviorist notions of punishment and reward.

    From this standpoint, "success" has a much different understanding than the common externalist viewpoint, and even heathens can meander into error with their pragmatist viewpoint, tempted into thinking thereby that success must correlate with external rewards in order to be success. Yet think more profoundly on the theme that Odin takes the best of heroes for himself. In other words, they die on the battle, or to put it more bluntly for those too caught up in externalism, they lose. In fact, and listen carefully here, an external defeat becomes a Victory of the Soul. Contemplate that for a little bit.

    I frankly don't think the Gods have much to do with external events in this world. I think that's unfolding of Wyrd, and they interfere very, very little with that. The main advantage they provide is the advantage of consciousness. (And perhaps tilting of probabilities, subtle "riggings of the game".) They Tend to Soul. And sometimes Soul is best attended to through Humbling Events, not Rewarding Events, particularly if the Soul tries to cheapen itself by taking on a thrallish attitude towards rewards and punishments, rather than seeking intrinsic motivation. To be entirely extrinsically oriented is to lose inherent worth, and hand one's power over to others. It is not that others do not matter religiously -- we are a social creature -- but the others that matter are those who are capable of perceiving inherent worth, and it is Those people who are our fellows, and none others. From the standpoint of consciousness, those who are not capable, and hanker after externalisms alone, are metaphysically speaking, in the evolutionary position of thralls.

    Life is about gift, and service, and devotion, and when we forget that, and fall into slaving after externals, we join the thralls, even if our personal ambition is to be king of the thralls. The king of the thralls is still a thrall, and will never actually be a king. Many, many positions in this world, including quite high ones, are only stacking and ranking of thralls. True masters without slaves or slavishness are quite rare.

    This does not mean that the body does not need to be fed, nor that we should cease to struggle for that which will feed our needs and the needs of our folk -- and humanity -- and the planet -- but that spirituality gives us the ability to put things in perspective.

    And sometimes not winning, not getting what we wanted, even when it was something for which we really yearned, is precisely what we need to recenter, regain perspective, and humble us to tune back into the beauty that is, rather than beauty as we imagined it might be. This is no bad faith towards the imagination, which can reveal a great deal of the virtual potential of the world, and when combined with rational planning, can be a good guide to human action and creativity. But what it does say is that reality always overwhelms hypothesis, and it is to the wellsprings of reality to which we must return again and again. Admitting defeat can be a spiritually victorious moment, one that washes away despair, and reminds oneself what one is all about, and to look towards inherent value rather than external rewards.

    If we spiritual people can get our heads out of our asses -- and come now, let's admit how often our heads are way too firmly lodged up there -- and stop taking literally what was always meant to be symbolic stimulation of deeper perception and appreciation of life, we have a great deal to contribute towards the people, and toward the process of history and progress. For the values of service and devotion -- free service, voluntary devotion, not thrallish service (although we'll get to that in a second, for those who are confused on this topic) -- are some of the key psychological concomitants of the Gift, and if we are ever to evolve our societies to function more like our images of the divine, we must move them away from Gullveig's realm of greed and obsession with gold bullion, and more towards the Gift. There's always going to be pragmatists who lose their sense of principle and cave in to more degenerate and backwards aspects of people, and try to motivate people solely through material interest and the incentives of reward and punishment, in other words, to tend things solely towards externalist behaviorism. That mode may be proper to thralls, but it is not towards free people, nor even towards thralls who you are intending to manumit and emancipate. What must be in command is service, devotion, and intrinsic motivation, with reward and punishment as a tactic to be reserved for the more thrallish. Who are such thralls? Those who will not give freely. But wait -- if those who do not give freely may be coerced to give, then how is that giving free and voluntary? Because those who give freely are not coerced. The alternative to taxation is voluntary donation. (This suggests that a state that taxes people thinks of them as thralls who would not in and of themselves raise themselves up to the honor of community contribution and public service, and who therefore constitute a tax on the Gift, and thus may be in turn taxed.) Those who think they owe no service or devotion to others do not deserve to receive such service and devotion, and to correct them, they may be made to serve. This is an undignified giving that gives little honor, appropriate to a low level of honor and dignity, while free and voluntary giving merits much greater honor, from those able to value that which is intrinsically valuable. In other words, thralls are on probation, which ritually speaking has always indicated someone on their way to a higher status who must, as we see in the term, "prove" themselves, while those whose service and devotion "speaks for itself" are under no such probation and do not require such exacting terms. Under what right would we assert such a right to subject people to such probation? Under the right of ensuring that Gullveig's realm does not swallow up the world, and that the Gift may have a chance to remain in command, rather than being exiled to the furthest margins of the world -- as it now, in fact, is. Things are backwards. The songsmiths have given us poetry that indicates the manner in which we may reverse this, and follow the divine order of the Gift. Here, those with intrinsic worth are placed in a leading position over those who can only think of themselves, and who can only think of external rewards and punishments. Well, if external rewards and punishments are so sacred to them, then let them be under that law which they hold so dear, while those who hold to a dearer law may also be accorded that law which is dear to them : a gift for a gift.

   Rigsthula is fairly clear and severe in this regard. The God visited three (eponymous) homes. These homes were awarded with offspring or consequences according to their openness to the visitor --- how willing they were to open their doors to inspiration -- and according to how many of their gifts they had developed and could thus share. The first house's doors were closed, and they had little to give. The second house's doors were half-open, and they had some to give. The third house's doors were wide-open, and they had much to give. The latter were made the leaders, the second the place and honor of the majority in the People's Assemblies, and the former were made to serve the rest. Let us be clear. This was a spiritualization of a social custom that in its literal societal enactment led to much mayhem and trouble. When captives of war may become your slaves, you now have a motivation to go to war in order to obtain more labor. Let's be very clear here : that's fucked up, and has no place in a civilized people. But the spiritualization here modifies the terms and takes them to a new, transformed level. Those who fail to give all they have the potential of giving -- perhaps because they have not developed that potential enough -- and whose doors are closed to inspiration -- may be made to serve others, others who naturally serve in the very sharing of their gifts. Otherwise, if this order were reversed, the truly generous would find themselves in the most disempowered and penurious positions -- as, well, in fact, many find themselves these days! The paradox is that in a society aligned with the divine, those who give without thought of reward would be those who found themselves, sooner or later, rewarded, while those who always moved with calculated manuevre in mind, acting out of stinginess and only according to expected reward, would find themselves far less rewarded. Ideally we work towards a situations where the thrallish are finally evolved out of existence, through minimizing their influence more and more.

  By emphasizing spiritual values of service and devotion, which support the consciousness and practice of the Gift, we can counteract the more cynical policies which are presently in command, and become a force towards renewing and healing the world.

    The word "aesir", which has come to denote the Gods, has originally a meaning of "inciters", "agitators", those who stimulate and whip up against stagnation, because there can be such a tendency towards stagnation in people, specifically in relation to home and comfort and so forth (and as much as heathenism values home and hearth, there's a reason why the word for fool is "heimsk" -- homebody. It is the viking that makes an adult out of someone, by removing them from parochial stagnation and showing them the ways of the world). The goal must be to find a way of making a home and establishing comfort in such a way that it remains dynamic, electrical, and alive, so that it is not killing the divine force of life and creativity that flows through all things. Relative to values of stagnation, they are troublemakers who stir things up in order to get the blood flowing more lustily. (No wonder Loki at first he thought he might make a home amongst them! But note his error : not troublemaking for mayhem, but for the prime spiritual good of keeping life in motion.)

    Nonimperial pagan peoples, at least within the Indo-European provenance and concentric circles radiating therefrom, do not exhibit divine codification of social mores and customs, which remain the provenance of the Thing process, or in other words, the People's Assemblies. The People's Assemblies have a divine function, that of judgement, or kritik in the old sense of jury-judgement, with all the critical consciousness that involves, towards custom, and the negotiating of that into law. The negotiating of that into law : it is a dynamic process that respects custom and usage, but not in a reified sense ; a sustainable, but not a reified sense, and that is an important distinction. There are thus two terms here : custom, and judgement. Custom may tend towards law, but it is not law in a full sense until kritik, critical jury-judgement, with all its full assessment, audit-powers, and full appreciation of the good and the bad, is applied, whether that be through the legislative power of the assembly or the judgement power of a jury more specifically. The divine function is exercised in the process of kritik, but not in ever-evolving custom. But we do see such attempts to divinely codify custom in some religious traditions. We see this codification in Judaism in the Mosaic Laws. We see this codification in Islam with the laws of Allah and the Sharia law. We see this codification in the Bahai faith in its codes of morality. All this does is reify forms which are themselves social compromises or treaties from previous social developments, while not facilitating their further development, as things are always in development, and even providing for amendment processes, which is very important, if not done in a dynamic way, can still be obstructive. Usage, habit, which people fall into, is part of life. Habit and courtesy are the ways in which societies primarily regulate themselves, and only secondarily with oversight by state organizations (when they develop to the state level), but it's important not to reify this, yet codification does this in an obstructive sense. The customs of the people are not divine. They are human. They are understandable compromises made in the process of social struggle over meaningful arenas, but since everything is in motion at all times, Wyrd will not remain confined to customs, and therefore custom cannot remain so confined. This means that Gothis or priests of the Aesir must also be inciters of their people to social movement and dynamism. When we think in these terms, Socrates' service to Apollo, whose oracle of Delphi told him he was the wisest man in Athens, consisted precisely in his being, as he put it, a "gadfly", which was a kind of fly that bit horses and woke them up with a "sting" when they were sleeping. Inciters awaken, and not always pleasantly.

    The observations of Caesar and Tacitus that the Germanic people as a whole were just beginning to move from a pastoral stage to an agricultural stage is very important. Even if archaeology indicates a long tenure of agriculture in the area, the classical observation suggests that there was some sort of pastoralist movement that was fairly prominent amongst the Germanic peoples of that time. What exactly caused this we don't know. There may have been various movements of people, and so forth, in which people were uprooted, that supported some movement towards pastoralism, but it would appear there was a fairly strong thrust towards it. Now if we look at what Morris Berman has provided us with in his synthetic analysis of pastoral peoples is that pastoralism, while being derivative from agriculture, is often a movement against agriculture, in the sense that it is a movement against the stagnation and settling down that is a tendency of agricultural societies, and a movement towards agitation, social mobility, and freedom. The fact that this was on the move in some of the formative periods of Germanic paganism is significant inasmuch as it has impacted upon the theology of these peoples. In fact, it has. It has a long history and rooting in the ultimate pastoral origins of the Indo-European peoples that can be seen across many Indo-European branches. The very concept of "wod" that we see incorporated into Woden indicates this storming, moving, dynamic kind of energy, which in and of itself might be anomalous to find in a fully settled, agricultural nation, and it may very well be that the notion of the pact between the Vanir and the Aesir may be a reflection in the religious realm of compromises between pastoral and agricultural modes of production, with the pastoral, mobile, nomadic element in the ascendancy, even though, as we have seen, in the war between the Aesir and the Vanir, the Vanir prevailed on the field, actually. They held the dominant forces, as might an agricultural nation that was invaded by a minority of pastoralists -- assuming that that is what happened, although it is one recurring theory -- another is that pastoralism developed as a revolutionary movement against agriculturalism, and those two theories are not mutually exclusive -- they could have happened together in various forms. Yet despite the dominance of the Vanir in terms of numbers and therefore the infantry on the battlefields of that war, ultimately Odin, after a period of exile, was accepted back in, because the people saw the value of the Aesir. There was an exile of the nomadic elements, but they were brought back in because they were seen as valuable and essential to the divine alchemy, and this is surely, in the ideal realm of virtue, a reflection of social forces. This is very significant, because it infuses Germanic-Scandinavian paganism with a dynamism that is very important, and which imparts to it an almost modern feel. We understand that the dynamism of pastoral, nomadic peoples is very different than the dynamism of an industrial system, and yet, there is a degree to which industrialism, on a higher level, stimulates and integrates to some degree a nomadic mobility , which is why it has been opposed by so many settled forces. Revolutions have built themselves upon this mobile basis, whereas fascist organizations have always tried to support the more settled modes. This may be why it was under the domination of the Vanir during Odin's exile that Ermanerich, a more imperialist, dominating king, was able to come into such power and dominance. There may be archetypally here, symbolically, impregnated a very important message, that we need to be careful about too settled a way of life, that the "peace" of the Vanir tends towards a more settled kind of peace which, taken to an extreme, can become its opposite, by becoming a compelling towards domination, which as we know, can generate war in a civilized dynamic.

    The existence of a priesthood, and specifically a priesthood of poets, or songsmiths, as Ynglingasaga puts it, is the concept of rallying the people around a more inspired segment of the population, more inspired and therefore more advanced. There is a kind of dual relationship, or bicameralism, if you will, between the vanguard function of the priesthood, whose job it is to stay inspired by the dynamic, inciting forces of life, and the people, particularly as assembled in their sovereign People's Assemblies, so that the people make their decisions, but they are guided by the inspiration of the more advanced segments of the population. They are not advanced in the sense of being elitist, but just in the sense of being more forward thinking, more on the pulse of dynamic turbulence, and so forth, in which everyone can come into the movement. It is a nonexclusive kind of advanced segment. It aims at rallying, rather than excluding, other segments, and of course, debate happens over this in the People's Assemblies, and through this kind of debate, there will come to be a social and legal dynamism, as more conservative forces struggle against more advanced forces. And we need that struggle -- and not only do we need that struggle, but more specifically and critically, we need that struggle to be led by advanced elements, the songsmiths, inspired by the Inciters. This is how life is driven onwards towards progress.

We must learn to remember that growing old is an honor ; we earn those grey hairs as we grow and entwine into the world. Oh, Grimnir knows we may need our masks to move about in the world of unfriends, but all old things rejoice and come to recognize us, the new kids on the block, as we grow old. Done right, done properly, our maturity properly pursued, we ripen, we become the effervescence of conviviality shared in dozens and hundreds of symposia and sumbles, if we let our heart feel out and access what free expanse large mind is capable of. The more I pray, mind-drift love to love in adoration and will to hale in whole, how I mature.

Singers of Soma! Songsmiths of the sweet, fennel- and camomile-fed mead! Wax thy windswept minds, gyrate in the cosmic tumble, dilate thy expanses with rippling-out horizons sweeping past the stars! O ancient ones, who long ago the heavens' open portals contemplated, letting mind become big mind, and heart big heart, you found the skaldic speech to sing the divine in every thing, sing on, and speak our hidden wizard-riddles found in day or from beloved night! Hallowed, held in awe, and venerated -- rightly so! For noble is the mind that freely wanders in its wonder. Wondrous are riddles laid out in sweet verse! Royal is that heart taking its lotus throne, surveying all in blissful leisure and benevolence! Rightful is that high, human place, lord of stars, humble servant of divine expanses, made noble with breadth of love extended out to embrace all things! Web-tenders, strumming on the tendril-harp that hangs between the stars and every thing within the heavens' grasp, attending to attunement to beyonds beyond mundane and everyday concerns! Not that those are unprofound, O sages of the mystic mead, but when opaque, conceal their essence : you encrystal, open eyes transparent to their window-skin, within which spin the wooly, tangled lights of heaven's torches!

It is necessary to resist and struggle with someone you love over important issues, where it matters, and not simply cave in order to create peace. Peace, while important, is not so important it is worth caving over where important values will be sacrificed in the process. If you let someone you love do something stupid or counterproductive without even so much as a struggle, how much do you love them? It may sound "authoritarian" to speak of "letting" or "not letting" someone else do something, but sometimes you need to exercise the authority you do have, from within your power, to do good, and here it would be foolish to not do so, because people do not always make the wisest choices, and people often need to be strongly challenged to bring out their best -- or at least their better.

Attunement and misalignment figure as important factors in our happiness or lack thereof : some of the world's problems are external and economic, but many have to do with people not finding their home,  and remaining estranged from their nature(s), placing themselves where they do not belong rather than where they do. This "where" is not just a matter of place in space, but navigation of the web of possibilities. Many things that present themselves ought to be sidestepped, disidentified, left aside. We belong where we belong. Love is basic. There is a place in the heart where you are home, and one must use this as a homing device to move closer to where one belongs.  There is the distribution of the world the way it is, and there is the distribution of the world the way it could be in the future -- a vast pool of sacred sharing --, but the former is all we've got for now, the material out of which to weave our lives. And from that distribution, we have to pick the best elements and best people to collage into our bouquet. For time is not infinite, and we ought not impoverish ourselves, nor our potential happiness. If there are people out there who could enrich our finite life, then we ought to seek and be with that enrichment, and not impoverish ourselves out of some narrow sense of charity whose effects are uncertain. Many live surrounded by wealth but partake of none of it. Many hunger globed about by fruit they either fail to recognize or disdain to allow themselves. Happiness is not a given, although much may be given, for we may squander the resources we do have, or drown the spark of light within us, instead of feeding it, nibble by nibble, with oil to fuel its illumination. Yet it is imperative we give those we love the greatest, truest happiness we can muster, for then the happiness may be multiplied. There is no guarantee that in dark times, prior to the restoration of Frodi's Frith, all our talents will be recognized and utilized, so we must do our best to disseminate our gifts the best we can, and preserve them. They are a net with which we may draw in many akin to us. Beauty that is genuine, especially that which comes from within, ought be respected, and given its due weight. There is an arrangement in which we can flourish, even under bad times, if we will seek it, and let it unfold out of our soulfulness, rather than let the world's warpings poison our imagination ; nor ought we think all arrangements equal, plunging ourselves in with indifference. Who we call to us, how well they will hold and preserve the treasury, holding every investment, endowment, and subsidy therefrom as precious and not to be squandered, but utilized to enrich capacities, so the treasury might be added unto and further enjeweled, makes a difference. Those who come who would waste from our treasury, and drain it to no good end, feeding the worst and not the best in themselves, feeding their withering and not their furthering, ought not be allowed to be sinks. For it is by pooling the best of what we have, and not our worst, that we enrich each other. But if there are toasts to be had, whereby gathering we might pour our smiling into each other and drink of our laughter, then that ought happen, and it is a gift unto the world, however small. For things are pulling together or fraying apart, and that which shall cohere shall prosper. That which drains not but drinketh full to fully feed has earned what subsidy we might afford, aside from our self-reliance, and that of our kin and what kith we have pooled, but that which would scatter to the winds what has been carefully gathered treats vital glume as mere husk, and belongs not in our silos. There are silos of the heart whereby those willing to save the circle, nourishing and nurturing its vital cycles, may feed. But those who would break the circle should not be given vittles, other than castoffs, what bread a beggar might be given from hospitality. But let even the lowliest beggar observe the mutual regard of hospitality, and turn not thief upon the house. Even the lowliest, if of good will, has something to add to that treasury from which he might seek to feed. A gift ever calls for a gift, not as petty payment, but to fund the sacred circle itself. Let one take full stock of one's treasury, and account for every use thereof, as if a gift from the Gods, for all is. If we would tarry a while a hoard from the Great Flows, we ourselves ought render reason for such grant, and what good may come therefrom. The Gods are ever willing to fund what good may be eked from the world, if we will render good and due account. Much is given on credit whose dividends are carefully watched from within the heart of things, who whisper back and give account to the Earth, and all the Gods. Frith may be enlarged, and its treasury extended to all who are capable of it, but let not a cent be rendered unto Utgard, or any who hail therefrom. All initial gifts are loans, returned in coin of good will ; he who returns ill for good will is no friend. A mistake, small in effect, here and there is no big deal, for all stumble, but he who falters with the precious is more risk than gain.

Great healing is possible through love : turn your shamanic abilities inward, and love this beautiful animal. Your care and tending it needs. Be true to the love within you. 

    Odin encompasses transparadigmal multiplicity, which is not a unity, at least not in any sense that we understand it, but an actual nexus of incompatible, simultaneous hinges between various either-or worldviews. The wizard is as close to a con-man as you can get, except one with integrity, dedicated to vagabondage, the passionate abandon into multiple-level, progressive brainwashings. The wizard knows that only with enough brainwashings can the mind get clean, being wrung out through one paradigm after another. The wizard is an enormous practitioner of "as if', gaining depth through exploration and commitment -- 100% commitment, yet at the same time, commitment with an ironic detachment. The wizard knows that the best way to know something is to throw yourself into it 100%, in order to know everything you can about it, and then, almost abruptly, to throw the whole thing out, to kill it, discard it, and forget about the whole thing. Only when it has died will anything good begin to grow from it. Only when you gain the ability to call "bullshit" on that which you most believe will you finally earn believing it, as it sneaks up from you and welcomes you arisen from the grave. Each new perspective, each new worldview, each new paradigm is taken up, eventually cast down, and then weighed against and woven into the others, so that there is a rich, resilient, polyfibred weave. No one knows precisely what the wizard believes, as the wizard is in the process of knowing, which requires not knowing. The wizard as a matter of course goes into beliefs and perspectives which seem beyond the pale -- dangerous, forbidden, absurd, taboo, outrageous, beneath notice, beyond possibility -- and often with greater furvency and earnestness than a true believer, having suspended for that time all other background paradigms, however they may conflict, until it has been so imbibed and assimilated that it may be killed and allow digestion and fermentation to do their job, pulping and yeasting it into useful, delirious mead. This immersion, requiring suspension of loyalties while at the same time maintaining essential integrity, is not easy, and involves tremendous amounts of struggle, for unlike the con-man, for the wizard, there are things that really matter, and they have to do with life, and so holding together all the conflicting strands in creative, perilous abeyance is a tormenting work for such a reflective being, who must learn also to forget, knowing when to forget and when to remember, having set up, however haphazardly, various cues in diverse nested ways, to trigger recollections that reset from present brainwashing parameters, all while learning all one can from each, towards some great work that is not yet fathomed but greatly intuited deep within. The wizard is a viking surfing out on the greatest sea of all, the great tempest of chaos, willing to risk those waves in order to assimilate to them, and enrich one's being with the infusion of vibrant untamedness, whereby one can create a far more dynamic order. One elevates structure and plan -- but then lets them go to seed, and there, in that jungle reclaiming the urban project, there one sets to work, sets to art, loyal to neither chaos nor order but only their intertwined, bastard synthesis, never perfect, letting chaos nourish rationality, and giving the hillbilly, or the wild man, the keys to the city. The wizard learns the weird lesson that only by being willing to risk betraying everything you love can you learn a loyalty beyond loyalty that can sustain you, and nurture that which you love the most. This, again, is not some easy formula ; it must be achieved, throughout, with some code of honor, however askance or mercurial, maintaining basic integrity throughout the full course of shapeshifting. Yet shapeshifting is impossible while maintaining rigid notions of integrity, at least those that keep one locked in limited self-definitions. The ability to play the fool -- to be the fool -- to even be the outcast  -- is important, because only within that which is considered absurdity from  a rigid point of reference promises any escape-velocity from that fixed perspective. (And obviously the point is not to do any absurdity or to compulsively, unintelligently lust after every transgression as many anticonformists do, losing both sense and heart.  Linearity in either direction -- for or against -- lacks the squirming quality that is yet the integrity of weird. One must have the puckish love of an itinerant scholar for Stanislavskian truth that seeks, however unlikely the direction, value, and value to benefit, ultimately, the commonwealth. The Wiccan Rede here is a tremendously wise guideline, however one may wager the perilous. Many things lie close to weird, or seem to -- some are scary, some are creepy, some are wacky, but only weird is weird, and there, in that weird place, that weirdness only s/he can be, full of the virtues of both mystery and plethoric laughter, will the wizard discover what it means to trust. And from trust -- a deeper trust than betrayal and loyalty -- the love for life that animates the wizard at every turn can manifest throughout and despite all the conflicting panoramas.)

I just drove past an old delapitated mall in my neighborhood where for decades they had a beautiful open grove with grass surrounded by tall Eucalyptus trees that I always loved going to. It was, you might say, one of my "special places", a nice retreat right in the middle of the urban environment where you could commune with nature. I loved that place.

They've just bulldozed the whole thing and replaced it with parking lot.

It's not as if there weren't parking lot all around it before hand. It's not as if people used the existing parking lot much anyway.

Why?

It's because this town -- like most towns and cities in America -- is a heartless place run by business people, developers, and their lawyers, and the feelings of people for place, for memory, for the natural life around them means nothing next to their almighty dollar. Gullveig, as always, rules everywhere.

And because "private property" -- that very unsacred sacred can't-touch-this in our society that was originally an usurpation from the common clan and tribal land -- rules everywhere. And where something is planted on "private property", it is under the dictatorship of that supposed owner. It doesn't matter how public that property is in actuality, in real life, as a part of the community. It doesn't matter how anyone feels about it. It doesn't matter if it is alive. It only gets to exist at the whim of the tyrant who holds the title. And if said feudal lord weren't bad enough, of course, in our society, even the lord is required by tax structures to make sure that property is generating cash, cash, cash. Because that's all that matters : cash, cash, cash.

I believe laws should be passed declaring old trees past a certain age -- regardless of whose goddamned "property" they're on -- to be public treasures beyond the pale in most instances, and only appealable on the basis of very specific due process involving public hearings which would include -- and even be strongly organized by -- local historical societies, as keepers of community memory, and ecologists and natural historians.

I guess I "have" to accept that living in an urban society, sometimes some things are going to have to be torn down to make way for something else, although I don't like that all. But Gods damn it, not for profit, not to worship Gullveig, and entirely to serve the public needs!

And I get my Gods-damned hearing. The trees get their hearing. The wildlife gets its hearing. The community gets its hearing.

And they have to advertise and summon the people well in advance. And workplaces have to give time off for these meetings, or they have to be held at times people aren't working. And there would be a quorum, a minimum number of people in the community below which the hearing isn't valid and therefore no contractors can proceed any further.

And at that hearing we can assess, as a community, jury-style, the competing claims of public interest  : public interest for something new? public interest to preserve memories? public need of new facilities? public need for open, natural space? And we can weigh these weighty issues on our scales, and Gullveig be damned!

That is never going to happen in a society ruled entirely and through and through by money, which ours is. So we have to do something about that, to concretely change that, and not just in rhetoric, but in actuality, which means taking on all the money interests who will fight like wild jotnar to preserve their privileges against our Thing-systems whereby we will retake sovereignty over our collective lives.

The only way this kind of heartbreak -- which just happens again and again, callously, without notification, often in flagrant violation of loud, vocally expressed community opposition -- is going to stop is through the power of law.

As a new heathen, I used to imagine great scenarios where I would show up at a disputed site, where construction was about to commence, in traditional costume, as a godhi or in druid robes, with a staff and other accoutrements, and declare my religion of nature, declare for the indigeneity of the land, and how their activity was violating my first amendment rights of religion ...

Yah right. Beautiful fantasy. I still love it. I wish it could be -- and indeed, one day in the tribal past, it was. But it ain't anymore. Where did I think that my declaring indigeneity in traditional costume would do any more good than it has done for Native Americans?

We need to grant trees, and particularly stands, groves, and forests of trees, legal standing, whereby it would involve a colossal public process to overturn their rights -- and in turn, our rights to them. Grimm pulls up an old Teutonic law that mandated intestinal evisceration for anyone who cut down the old, sacred trees, and there's a strong part of me that can identify with the meat and bones and muscle put behind that law. But of course, such a law is already a sign of degradation, of greed having been bled in -- the fact that such a penalty would have to be stipulated is a sign that there were already forces in society tearing apart from a recognition of the sacredness of those trees. Those forces, nascent then, are now so wildly out of control -- watch the inchoate jaws of Fenris on the near-horizon -- that they have overturned our old laws and outlawed our sensibilities of the sacred. The law was the tool Tyr gave to us to bind the Wolf. But it has now been used by the Wolf to bind us.

Many years back, they cut down the oldest Eucalyptus trees in California, the trees from which all other Eucalypti in the state were taken. They were huge trees, old grandfather trees, wrap your arms around and it would take three people so doing to embrace them trees. They radiated wisdom and presence in unrelenting ripples.  And some bioautistic asshole didn't like them, and so they got rid of them with a dismissive sweep of the hand as quick as you can say "bulldozer". I want these fuckers to have to justify themselves before neighborhood councils. Without ability to bribe. If their project is truly in the public interest -- I'm not against the public interest, when it's real -- I'm community-minded -- then let them convince me. And not only me. But the rest of the community. And moreover, let them convince the elders -- yah, the ones with memories. The ones whose memories stretch back and have some interest in there being intergenerational continuity and valuing memory. Remember? That was the origin of the word "senate" -- the council of the senex -- the old people, the elders? Let them convince us. And let them see our tears, hear our emotions, listen to our poems about things we love, places we cherish, memories we treasure.

Because one of the worst things about these experiences is that they remain undocumented so that the real anguish -- these things always feel like I'm being stabbed -- and I know I'm not alone in that -- is never fully heard, acknowledged, registered, or recorded, so it doesn't even weigh into the public record. It simply vanishes. As if it never mattered. What could be more sacrilegious than for something that matters tremendously to vanish as if it never mattered?

For our ancestors, religion was law -- in other words, law was the concrete expression and mandate of that which was most valued and of most worth.

Where is your law? Only with law can we prevent this tremendous heartbreak. I am crying. I feared this might happen someday, and I prayed it wouldn't. My prayers did not have power of law behind them, and those who worship the saboteurs won this battle.

Jord forgive us, if you can ; chide us as you must ; goad us as we need.

It is difficult to have faith in holy powers seeing as we are separated from them as by a veil (for it would seem maya is but another name for wyrd), the veil of what turns out out of the churning of possibility and potential, which is just brimming, but then we, the collective actors (all of us, not just humans, although the animals and plants and rocks tend to have more set routines, while we are more wild cards), select out of those our choices, and from what has been selected churns out as well as restricts the potential range of what may then turn out. In this churning lottery of fortune, things do not always turn out as foreseen or desired, and often terrible things happen. This makes it difficult to trust.

Fold up these woven webs

Hail the hall-stone, high-pillared gem-gens,

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Why did Odin keep Loki around? Did you ever ask yourself that question?


When you're a leader, you need contrary as well as highly unique positions close to you to use as a foil. You have to be the one to hold things together in council, but having someone who will speak up for the obnoxious or extremist position is extraordinarily useful, because then you can moderate them, but utilize the force that lies in their argument to press for more radical changes within the council.

See, any group of people have a basic goodness inhering in their community frith, but there can be a tendency towards stagnancy, and if you represent an essentially dynamic force, then you need an agent to stir things up so you can get forward motion, if you can keep that agent on a leash.

For the time that Odin was able to keep him on a leash, Loki served well. He kept people on their toes and tested their wits, sometimes, even often, to wits' ends.



But everything has its limits, and every fool is a fool. Chaotic forces worked through Loki, and he became the undoer of everything he had served. A tangler, he became entangled in intrigues from which he could not extricate himself, where every move took him deeper and deeper into a sinister web. (Let us remember that all jesters are not benevolent! Remember Tom Skelton, Fool of Muncaster:



This lovely sadist of a jester would hang by the roadside as visitors came along the path seeking the castle, and if he liked them, he sent them on the way towards the castle, and if he didn't, he directed them off to the quicksands and bogs, where they could drown in the marsh. A carpenter who stole a couple coins from him ended up decapitated, his head thrown in wood shavings, upon which Tom allegedly said, according to legend (which is all this may be : ghost story around legend, but certainly a folk-figure form of a sinister jester in any case), "He'll have less luck finding his head than he did my shillings," or something to that effect. Mad as a hatter.)

Loki himself was driven mad.



We hear the refrain several times in Lokasenna. Heimdall tells him he is örvita, "out of his wits". Both Odin and Freya, call him ærr, "mad" or "frenzied". Of course! He had swallowed the heart of Gullveig, whose crazed angst (Angrboda) was well-known and ill-famed, and everything in him began to turn inside-out. He was the best of jesters, turned into the worst of jesters, with a sense of humor that could kill. He turned the elves against the dwarves, masterminded Baldur's death, and set men on earth to war against each other, with an increasingly sociopathic caprice and devil-may-care jollity in line with Tom Fool's sadistic lacksadaisy. Deeper and deeper into the net that he wove, tricked into his own trickery, mad, crazed, fool, and interestingly, as Snorri attests, he was caught in the pattern of the very net he made. A telling metaphor.




And it is not that Odin did not see this possibility, but sought to use as thoroughly and deeply as possible even those who might one day turn or be turned, in order to drive things onward, and implant unforeseen, unpredictable possibilities in unseen seed-forms into the fabric and texture of wyrd, there to unfold as creative surprises.

The rabid fool, frothing at the mouth in frenzy, out of his wits and outwitted, still has fool's proverbs to share, bitter half-jokes and crazed prophecies, quarter-bits of wisdom, and fragments of old satires to bring the mirth of gall. But still mad.




Yet up to this very limit, a fool is a wise man's best friend, because a fool allows a wise man to play the fool while remaining wise. Everyone needs a good idiot, someone not afraid to make an ass of themselves, particularly in the pursuit of an important aspect of truth that everyone else is neglecting to their peril. This may be a dangerous truth that no one wants to touch, an aspect too controversial for a leader to propose outright, yet which moderated, might prove catalytic. Having such a foil is very useful indeed ...

Perhaps you have sorely felt at times the absence of an asshead, who will leap into the center of the circle and cry outrageous things, for then it saves you the ridicule and opprobrium that come as jester-costs, while allowing you to wisely draw out what kernel lies in the scandal or controversy they dared expose publicly. A king and his court fool.

    In a certain sense, death could be celebrated by the poets as the rising-up from these wolf-meat bodies to be able to join a more eternal battle in the heavens. Blake distinguished between earthly and heavenly battles : in the heavens, such battles are spiritual and keep the universe alive, with the clash of contraries and the ever-overcoming of ill funding luck for us all. Many Hindu pundits have interpreted the battle of the Mahabharata, which features in the Bhagavad-Gita, as being an allegory for the spiritual battle. Although one hesitates to take this too far --- after all, there are earthly battles that in their fight for important values -- freedom, autonomy, defeating tyranny and evil -- also in fact enfold spiritual battles as well --- it can be a useful trope to be able to make the important distinctions between "carnage for carnage' sake" and the meaningful battle.

    With all this said, I suspect there is still a fair amount of syncophantage going on in the court poets, although it is probable that the best of skalds combined a secret symbolism we still have yet to fully unlock, whereby on the surface they would be praising their earl for his battles, while underneath a much richer symbolism was at work praising more cosmic battles. This is akin to the idea that every local tree is in fact the World-Tree for its local inhabitants. From this perspective, poets might treat every battle as if it were the last and final one, the one that matters.

    However, I do think we have lost the main of those poems,for which the skalds probably received their name as scolds, which are the satire-poems that we know every indigenous European poet wrote. We have examples from the Irish, where kings stepped out of line from justice and from authentic connection to the land, and were lampooned in a way which could result in the extreme in their losing their kinghood. We do know from Heimskringla that kings did lose their lives in Norse society from time to time due to this stepping out of line from the land and justice, and so we must imagine that perhaps at the spear-point of such popular resistance were satiric poems from disapproving skalds. Here was an opportunity for the skald to become a critic of such wars as seemed unjust.

    The Anglo-Saxon maxims, from the Exeter Book, have an interesting perspective to add into the mix on war, which I've taken the liberty to translate here :

god scop gumum,      garniþ werum,
wig towiþre      wicfreoþa healdan.  (127 - 128)

"Good poet for the people, spear-battle for men,
war of resistance to hold peace amongst the dwellings (villages)."

    This emphasizes battle as a defensive war of resistance to protect and hold the villages, so they may stay in peace.

    The maxims also give their viewpoint on what kind of creature revels in carnage for the sake of carnage :

ne huru wæl wepeð      wulf se græga,
morþorcwealm mæcga,      ac hit a mare wille.
(150 - 151)

"The grey wolf certainly does not weep over carnage, the murderous destruction of men, but ever wills more."

    There is also this, which because of the close mythological parallel, I have taken a slight liberty in the translation (but which translates better for our mythology than the manuscript's Biblical allusion). The story of the brother who killed the other brother, and from whom strife spilled out into the world speaks to the heathen mind as well :

    Wearð fæhþo fyra cynne,      siþþan furþum swealg
    eorðe Abeles blode.      Næs þæt andæge nið,
    of þam wrohtdropan      wide gesprungon,
195
    micel mon ældum,      monegum þeodum
    bealoblonden niþ.      Slog his broðor swæsne
    Cain, þone cwealm nerede;      cuþ wæs wide siþþan,
    þæt ece nið ældum scod,      swa aþolwarum.
    Drugon wæpna gewin      wide geond eorþan,
200
    ahogodan ond ahyrdon      heoro sliþendne.
    Gearo sceal guðbord,      gar on sceafte,
    ecg on sweorde      ond ord spere,
    hyge heardum men.      Helm sceal cenum,
    ond a þæs heanan hyge      hord unginnost.

(Maxims, 192 - 204)

and my translation, with note :

"Came into the world enmity for kin, since the earth first swallowed Baldur*'s blood. Nor was that only one day's hate, for from those strife-drops sprang far and wide great wickedness for men, and bale-blended hate for many nations. Hodur* slew his own brother, who was protected from death ; afterwards it was widely known that hate ever scathes men, as citizens. They busied themselves in strife with weapons around the wide earth, invented and hardened the dire sword. The shield must be ready, spear on shaft, edge on sword, and point on spear, courage in the hard man. Helm shall be for the bold, and ever the courage of the dishonorable shall be a most unample hoard."

* "Abel" and "Cain" in the original manuscript, respectively.

    This suggests a perspective whereby warfare and lust for carnage exponentially increased after Baldur's death. This needn't mean in heathen minds that battle and struggle were missing before this time, but that Baldur's presence mellowed and softened the impacts, because of his great peace-making abilities. It was, as it were, kept within the circle, and quickly settled, to not get out of hand.

    The way I square most of this away is that the Age in which we now live, both us and the skalds of just before Snorri's time, is the Axe-Age, and shall be for some time. I think so long as the poets always remember that there was a time before, and there shall be a time after, so that the people's vision is never robbed of the imaginative alternative to this sometimes-sad world, everything is ok.

    In fact, the poets may in effect be saying, "Mourn not that which is the meat of wolves, but cleave instead to honor, which immortal wins a better home."

            A good thing becomes more and more congruent with itself, in the process of integrating its contradictions. It becomes more whole and thus more wholesome. It becomes complete not in itself but through its relations with the environment, both that of the vicinity and that of the outside. A good thing has found its Archimedean place of leverage, the fulcrum upon which it may do its best.

            All things may be made good, although they do not begin that way. It often takes hard work, and confrontation, and facing things head-on. It takes intelligence and sometimes even genius to figure out just how to make a home for that which is strange, so it may become familiar in its weirdness and contribute as it genuinely longs to. Every good thing was once a mixed bag. But in time, with love and good work, it flourishes. This is the way of the world that our lore mythopoetically narrates.

The more I come into the gift paradigm, which is the genuine archaic heritage of our ancestors -- all our ancestors -- the more I come to see that the Gods are apprenticing us in communism. I am never one to shy away from speaking frankly because it might generate controversy or rattle the ignorant. No, my heathen heart inspires boldness. I see that there is a long learning curve tending us towards communism, which is nothing but a consistent, socially institutionalized affirmation of the gift-spirit, and we're allowed in this apprenticeship our half-way houses, and we can stay in the ironwoods under Gullveig's spell as long as we wish, but it will do us ill as we do so and delay us in reaping fruit beyond our imaginings. Life is about learning to grow yourself into a gift, and giving with all your heart. It's about getting fed so you can feed. It is about asking for everything you truly need to make yourself the best you you can be, so you can give that best back to the community.

            But once agriculture monopolizes an area of land, nothing good will happen unless one intentionally makes it happen, and, as before mentioned, anything happening other than the good hoped for is almost automatically seen, by nature of the situation, in a paranoid fashion as an enemy. In the forest (or the wild meadow, etc.), the law is : Doing nothing, wandering about, one finds fruit. But this law is overturned in agriculture. In agriculture, this becomes : Doing nothing, wandering about, one starves. And, For anything good to happen at all, great effort is needed, and care, because the universe conspires against our plans. Where wandering exists at all in agrarian societies, it is usually in the form of a rural proletariat, or hired farmhands who wander from farm to farm, particularly at harvest times, who are indispensable, and yet who, instead of being masters of their own serendipity like the foragists, are often terribly exploited. There is as well some marginal hunting that happens amongst farmers fortunate enough to have retained some outlying wild lands, and in fact, amongst peasants who still maintain some connection to the older, more communal forms of land tenure, "the commons" are tenaciously defended -- pastures, meadowlands, and woodlands -- and there, to a limited degree, some of the older evolutionary possibilities can find expression. But the class dynamic in peasant societies often creates contradictions whereby the commons are increasingly whittled away, if not barred altogether by landlords who encroach, expropriate, and monopolize them. People in general face an increasingly domesticated landscape where the yields may prove much greater per acre (and yet we might pause here to note the fairly productive capacities of permaculture, which combines some of the serendipity of the old foragist systems with some of the design and planning of agricultural systems) than in wild forms, but often with less variety, and certainly without spontaneity. The crops do not grow on their own. (Although they once did : the Middle East/Fertile Crescent area was once home to wide swathes of meadows of wild wheat, which was so abundant that families could work at harvesting the wheat for two weeks a year and have enough for the rest of the year! And as long as the demographics stayed in proportion to what was wildly available, this remained the condition of the people. But once population expanded to the point that people needed to move beyond the range where wheat grew wildly, but where they wanted to continue to eat wheat, rather than changing their diet to suit the new environments, then intentional cultivation became a relative necessity.) The result of this agrarian revolution and its urban exudation (which then reacts back upon its base and takes charge through coordination) is that it clears the meshwork of nature and replaces it with linearity, identifying only the most mechanical, and obviously effective levers in the system that will serve the ruling interests. Anything not mechanical and obvious becomes the realm of fickle fate, of cruel chance, of perilous fortune, and so forth, which reduces more and more to superstition and its specialists. Those not immersed in superstition eventually separate out the mechanical, obvious effects of nature, and these eventually become codified into science, culminating in Newton's laws summarizing all the known mechanical effects of the world. And yet since the advent of electromagnetic theory, relativity, and quantum physics, we know that we are in fact enmeshed in three-dimensional (and beyond!) webworks of forces, distributing themselves in a differential flux governed by various probabilities, with the resultant vectors emerging out as the mechanical laws identified by Newton. In a sense, energetically, we know now that we are still in the trees, in the webwork, and that webwork holds all kinds of unseen opportunities for us through scientific creativity. There is thus an opportunity to reclaim the bodily, kinesthetic sense of the brachiating monkey swinging through the forest searching for opportunities, and we can see how this outlook is in emergent struggle with the other historically-developed ways of looking at things, the agrarian and urban ethos. If the cosmos is a meshwork, how can we design our societies in ways that more correspond to these opportunities? These musings provide a font for creativity in action.

One often hears the statement, "We keep the dead alive by remembering them." But what if this is, once more, a mortal arrogance bred by our fitful myopia, and in fact, the dead keep us alive by remembering us? What if this world of matter is held together at the quantum level by a strong force deeper and stronger than the strong force, the will and memory of the ancestors? What if this world flows out of the Well of Mimir and only therefrom maintains its strength and longevity?

There are times -- granted, they are only times, and you might say it is just a mood, yet it is such a strong mood, overpowering -- when I can feel the aliveness of my friend who took his life three years ago. I will grant you that I do not feel this all the time, and sometimes I doubt, and think, this is just wishful thinking on my part, and who am I fooling. Yet I must say that in these times when I can feel him so strongly -- and it is not so much a "psychic" feeling as it is a feeling in the heart, a feeling of love -- it does not feel like how denial feels. It does not feel like I am fooling myself to console myself. It feels as if this world of ours is but an echo of a subtler world, and we hold hands across the abyss.

It's like the feeling you get in moonlight, when you are bathed in a lunar ocean of fluorescence, and everything feels not only eerie, but eerie in a way that opens the door to uncanny. Seldom blatant, yet pulsing with some secret heart, one can feel, this is a different kind of time, a different kind of moment. And peace can overtake your heart, and you can feel, wow, this is the norm ... all that strife and doubt and anguish is but some strange, momentary aberration that overcomes me.

Yet when it does, how it does consume us, yes? Seized by anguish and strife, somehow in that moment, we think that is the all of reality.

The human heart is a mystery. Somehow in the heart of love there is no death, and yet the world's bodies still ever turn in the mill, shredded back into the soil. What does not prove fertilizer for the tree's roots must sing in the sap-halls of the root-world, and the echoes of that song hold the foundations of this earth together. That is the world-view that emerges out of our ancestors' poetry.

What to do with metaphor, eh? Do those poems express a literal place, or do those images capture an essence that is experienced as a feeling-state? Does the Tree and its roots express something astrally experienced on that level, or does one's lovebody after the dissolution of the primate-form no longer exist in that way, but drifts evanescent in states of subsistence at the root of things where our metaphors of Tree and Root, Well and Sap, speak as well as any analog might, and we must simply understand that for a growing primate, and mortal to boot, that's as close as we're likely to get? These poems were distilled from thousands upon thousands of shamans' seances, after all.

Can you trust the human heart? Does the world reflect our love, in the final analysis, if not in the immediate? That is a question of faith. It is a question of what level of confidence you can glean from those special moments when you can really feel it, and how far you can extend those strange perceptions back into a zone where more normal concepts rule. Can you withstand the silliness of seeming quaint in a world of lasers and computers and honoring the tribal heart, and bringing it back home?

Wherein does truth reside? In simple things, in stones or carvings, atoms tinkertoyed to make such stuff as we everyday see? Or does it walk the halls of our hearts, leaving traces in its footsteps, ever wandering, like Odin, named Saðr, "sooth"?

My ancestors tell me that it is the well between fire and ice that brings wisdom. The atheist materialists tell me that matter is all I can trust, or ever have. The dogmatic spiritualists tell me that spirit is all I can ever trust or really have. Like fire and ice, I can hold each in one hand, and like the scales of Libra, balance them in the still point. No angst towards matter, no angst towards spirit, and blending them as one in the middle place, my heart. That sounds as close to wisdom as I am liable to get. And I am grateful if I will prove worthy of getting it.

 What Scyld heard from Heimdall:

But if their hearts are hardened, void of love
For one another, gifts now foreign, strange,
Uncertain, then these craven souls shall be
Enthralled that they might give again, constrained
Against their stinginess to recompense
The doors upon their hinges closed where doors
Ought open be, to welcome guests. For fear
Has overtaken many, spoiled all
The networks gift-for-gift in Yuletime mood
That everyday took care of vital need.



Tacitus, Germania :

Frumenti modum dominus, aut pecoris aut vestis, ut colono, injungit.
"A certain measure of grain or cattle or clothing was imposed upon them by their lord, like a tenant-farmer."

The thralls, who had broken the chain of the gift-redistribution cycle which Tacitus previously described :

Mos est civitatibus ultro ac viritim conferre principibus vel armentorum vel frugum, quod pro honore acceptum, etiam necessitatibus subvenit.

"It is the custom of the communities to voluntarily and man-by-man bestow on their chiefs cattle and crops, which are accepted as a mark of honor as well as to assist them in their needs."

To break the gift circulation that is the heartblood of the community, and how it feeds needs -- whether under mark of fear or of greed -- reduces the wealth of the community, creates strife, closes doors, and the Gods wish open doors. Those who do not come up to their full robustness, the fruiting of all fertility within their grasp, particularly those talents Gods-given, may be compelled to give where they are stingy. This interferes with some people's tainted, corrupted notion of freedom, but this just shows they do not understand freedom at all. It is a fullness meant to fruit the larger folk.