Family Rites

Swain Wodening wrote in his blog on January 19 of the important to modern Heathenism of family rites. He calls them the “building block of modern Heathenry” and I think he is right. In ancient days, the man and the woman of the house were the priest and priestess, not some stranger down the street. We know that as DuBois says (Nordic Religions in the Viking Age 1999:66) that women were “central to ritual practices occurring within the household.” Most of ancient religion took place in the home. This was particularly true of isolated farmsteads and communities. The big feast days were the exception rather than the rule; people didn’t tramp down to the local hóf every Thor’s day for a sermon and some wine and bread.

It is these household rites that will draw a family together and it is these that will teach our religion and also pass it on to the children involved. Swain Wodening says this as well, that “Children need something to do in the rites.” We don’t know what they did back in the old days; that information did not get passed on to us. Did they just watch? Did they participate? If so, when did this participation begin? Rights of passage were important in the ancient world even if they have largely lost their meaning in the modern world. Was this one of them?

Wodening argues that “Too, there need to be works that teach us adults how to teach our children Heathenry. In essence, we need books that show us how to worship as families.” This too is something I agree with. It isn’t something we are born knowing and it isn’t something that we learn while growing up by watching, not those of us who are the first new generation of Heathens in nearly 20 centuries. We have to figure it out as we go along, and that isn’t always easy. I’ve been a polytheist for thirty-plus years and a Heathen for much of that time, and I am still learning.

The Internet is valuable in this regard. We can share and learn from one another in ways we could not back in 1979, when only an infrequent social gathering might draw many Pagans together at one time, and when being too public about your religion could get you fired, evicted, or ostracized (and it still can, in some areas). Books are essential, and as I wrote recently on Digital Gods, eBooks offer a wonderful way for Heathens to obtain books they would otherwise never see, since bookstores tend to favor the fluffy material, New Age and Wicca, over revivalist or reconstructionists texts.

Wodening argues that “Family rites are very important. Our Heathen communities are now made up of families, and the only way to strengthen Heathen communities is for rites to be done at home.” He urged at the time that other authors explore this territory, something he was doing himself in a new manuscript. I think it is something bloggers should also discuss, and so I am doing that here, and encouraging others to do likewise. Our children will not pick up our religion through osmosis. We know from the epigraphic evidence that knowledge was passed on. The Rök Stone from the early tenth century, “calls for the reader to instruct the youth (ungemenni) in the history of various heroes of the past, detailing a list of at least thirteen pieces of sacred history that should be passed on” (DuBois 1999:42).

Of course, we don’t know what knowledge was being spoken of and that will be the situation in the future if we do not bring our families together, and particularly our children, and teach all of us together how to be Heathen, and what it means to be Heathen.  And as I’ve always said, you become a Heathen by being a Heathen. And what better way of doing that, when the possibility is there, than doing it together, as a family?