What are we to think when we read comments like this, “Either we might think of Christ purely as God, in which case he is no longer human, has no share  in our human experience, and becomes a divinity in the sky like Zeus or Thor, or else, in contrast, we focus so much on his humanity that we underplay the divine element and deny the Incarnation.”[i]

“Divinity in the sky”? Zeus? Thor?

Philip Jenkins, the author of those words, is a professor of the Humanities in history and religious studies at Penn State University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author of several books.

You might expect him to show a little more awareness of Pagan realities, even if his real subject matter is Christianity.

Zeus and Thor come off in this comparison as remote and unapproachable. YHWH would have been a better example.

Why drag our gods into it?

The fact is that the gods of polytheism could not be more approachable. After all, their worshipers believed them to dine with them at the sacrificial feasts, right there among the mortal diners. In the ancient Middle East, gods would actually go traveling, visiting other countries with their attendants.[ii] In ancient Greece, gods were clothed and perfumed and anointed.

YHWH was remote. He didn’t even have an image. He was invisible and lived behind a curtain. The gods of polytheism were very visible and very approachable.

To simply call them “divinities in the sky” is to do them an injustice.

But I suppose that is how someone brought up in a Judeo-Christian worldview, and probably still part of it, might view things. After all, it is difficult to take idols seriously, and the gods are no more than this to monotheists, unless they are demons.

I doubt very much that my own ancestors viewed Thor in such a way. Stories abounded about the Norse gods participating in mortal life here on Midgard. The Greeks told similar stories of their gods. YHWH, on the other hand, remained aloof in Heaven and did not walk among humankind. Jesus did, but only briefly. And then he became like his father, or himself, or however that whole trinity thing works out.

The issue may be a small one in the grand scheme of things, but it goes to illustrate the vast gulf that still exists between monotheism and polytheism. We polytheists are all too well aware of how the god(s) of monotheism is perceived, but monotheists remain completely uninformed and unaware of Pagan realities.

Our spiritual landscape is invisible to them.

Still, as I said, you would expect a distinguished professor of religion to be better informed.

Clearly, too much attention can be given the old Indo-European Sky God routine. Just because the sky father is a sky father and the earth mother is an earth mother does not mean the earth mother is more approachable.

A note to monotheists (and professors of religion), our gods are benign and approachable, to be contrasted with a god who is remote and ill-tempered.

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[i] Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (2010), 2.

[ii] Amanda H. Podany, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (2010).

Since Akhenaten’s failed experiment with monotheism in the fourteenth century B.C.E. monotheism has waged war on mankind. It was not enough for Akhenaten to simply install a cult devoted to one god, or even as one god as the only god. He had to demolish the other gods and their worship.

It was the same with Moses. “Thou shall have no other gods before me,” YHWH is to have said to Moses. At once an acknowledgment that other gods lived and an injunction against them, this rabid and unreasoning intolerance of alternatives to itself has been monotheism’s hallmark for close to thirty centuries.

That’s a long time to hate.

And it’s a lot of insecurity.

Polytheism never had a problem with other gods. Just plug another god into the pantheon or add a pantheon and worship one, two or ten. It made no difference to the worshiper and it made no difference to the gods. Jealousy is a thing felt only by a god who wants to be the only one.

Or, at least, by his followers. After all, as the emperor Julian said in the fourth century, it’s a libel upon god to accuse him of such shortcomings.

When Jesus came around the same problem cropped up. But now the focus was not on YHWH but on his son, and it was his turn to be the big cheese. Everything was about Jesus; it still is in Christian culture. YHWH belongs to the OLD Testament.

Mohammed offered the same stark distinction: there is no god but Allah.

None. Zip. Cancel Jesus’ claim and push him out the door. And all the other gods with him.

And on and on polytheism persisted, accepting every god that came along and rejecting none. The Romans thought people who believed in just one god were a little odd but there was no legislation against it, let alone a persecution that lasted centuries.

But monotheism has never been content to live and let live. Its entire history is one of holy wars, persecutions, book (and people) burnings, and inquisitions. Monotheism is by its very nature intolerant. It is part of the package.

And after all the long years we’re stuck with three of them, all hating each other and the rest of us, demanding that their own system of belief be privileged above all others and claiming unique access to the divine. Everyone belly-up, kneel, or bend over and praise god.

Millions have died over a question of divine jealousy and insecurity. It is rather difficult for a non-monotheist to imagine anybody wanting to honor a god who is capable of such childish motivations, but monotheists thrive on it.

Banished are the benign gods and welcomed is the angry sky god with his wrath and threats of eternal damnation. It’s difficult to find something monotheism doesn’t hate.

Choice, the first fruits of a liberal democracy, is a bogeyman. There is a reason that choice is equated with heresy, because choice negates orthodoxy. There is only one thing to believe and there is only one way to go about believing it. Any veering from the path leads to catastrophe.

A polytheist can only throw up his hands in wonder. Everybody knows, after all, that there are many truths and many paths, and that each culture has the religion that is right – and true – for it.

People have a right to believe anything they want, including nothing at all. As Thomas Jefferson said, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

That is the assurance we have from the United States Constitution, ratified by every state in the Union.

And now under attack by conservative Christians who have decided that since the history of the United States is not to their liking that it should be re-written and our nation established retroactively as one made by and for Christians and Christians alone.

And only a specific type of Christian.

We’re even being told that Islam isn’t really a religion and therefore First Amendment protections do not apply to it. Who is making this ruling after the fact? A conservative Christian. And of course if the world’s second largest religion isn’t really a religion, you don’t have to work your brain very hard to figure out where everyone else stands.

It is to prevent such madness that the First Amendment exists. It is for that reason that conservative Christians are re-writing our nation’s history, and interpreting the First Amendment and the Wall of Separation out of existence.

As Sarah Palin says, the Ten Commandments trump the Constitution. Sharron Angle wants to legislate Old Testament law.

You don’t have to be a genius to see the outcome for those who, as George Carlin said, give the wrong answer to the god question.

To polytheists, atheists, secular humanists, liberals, progressives, and everyone else who might worship one god but not in the approved way, bend over and kiss your golden idol goodbye.

Christians are always asking themselves, “What would Jesus do?” though there is no real evidence they ever answer the question; perhaps because they don’t want to know. It would likely oppose what they’re so eager to do.

How often do I ask myself, in a similar vein, “What would my ancestors do?” It’s a question that is bound to come up among those who adhere more strongly to historical standards in the reconstruction and revival of ancient religions. We tend to be very ancestor oriented and traditional minded, even as those traditions are being reconstructed and reinterpreted in light of the passing of a thousand years or more.

Of course, I’m not a reconstructionist but a revivalist, if I must take a label. Heathen reconstructionists are no more able to reconstruct the past than Christian reconstructionists. The main reason is that it’s gone and past. Many centuries have passed and the world has changed.

That’s just my opinion and you’re welcome to challenge it. I know there are some pretty strict reconstructionists out there. But look at the context of the past for starters. The climate has changed – twice in some cases, perhaps more if you go back far enough. We’ve had a Little Ice Age and a global warming periods and now an upward trend in temperatures that make a solid case for anthropogenic global warming.

In that respect alone the world is different. Some ways of living will be more or less difficult as a result. Whales are on the decline and protected and my Norse ancestors loved to hunt whale.

The world has also gotten smaller. Communications and technology have changed everything. The three-tiered universe has been discounted. There may still be people who believe the gods are up and the dead below and we humans are in the middle. I suppose a case can be made in a metaphysical sense that there are other ways to look at this point, or maybe multi-dimensional physics could take care of it.

We mostly live in larger communities. We’re not isolated by geography and climate. There is no place we can’t go, no influence we can entirely avoid. Things just aren’t the same.

We can’t even raid monasteries anymore. But then, on the flip side, those Christian reconstructionists, though they might want to, can’t burn us at the stake or pour molten metal down our throats to make us convert either, so there are some trade-offs I can live with.

But my point in all this is to say that I can say, “What would my ancestors do?” in a given situation except that the situation in question would probably never have arisen in my ancestor’s world and he would be ill-equipped to deal with it now, were he here.

We have no idea how our ancestors would have coped with some of the changes of the past ten to twenty centuries. We can try to imagine but there is simply no telling, not with any degree of certainty.

That’s not to say we should just throw up our hands and surrender to a world culture. We have our gods and we have our beliefs and we treasure the wisdom passed down to us by our ancestors. Across the centuries, they have something to tell us, some important things.

Like honor and ancestry, like family and clan, like courage and moderation.  Some of these things are timeless and will serve us as well as they served them. Our ancestors were a pragmatic lot, not given to violent swings of ideological or religious fervor. You might get outlawed like Hjalti Skeggjason, a proponent of Iceland’s conversion, for calling Freyja a bitch, but you wouldn’t get hounded into death and long-term persecution because you refused to abandon Christianity. The Norse ruled in Ireland and Norway and other places without forcing everyone to become Heathens like them.

Historical lessons like this tell us something about what our attitudes towards other religions should be. Respect and honor our gods and defend that honor, but do not impose your beliefs on others. There are other lessons we can learn, which give us some clue as to how our ancestors might respond today. For example, our Heathen ancestors practiced exposure of infants. It might be suggested from this that they would be pro-choice. It seems a reasonable assumption, since they themselves practiced what might be termed abortions after the fact.

But our ancestors also engaged in violent feuds and held entire families accountable for the actions of a single member. These are things most of us would likely not do today. In a small, isolated community such a practice might make sense. It kept social order by forcing clans to police its own. But in today’s world it makes no sense, and most governments discourage feuds. We have laws and courts for such things. So that would be an entirely wrong lesson to learn. My ancestor might draw his sword and kill the man who insulted him. I would not want to do that.

Sometimes you have to ignore the little ancestor on your shoulder. Sometimes you would do well to listen.

But that is largely why I am a revivalist. Our customs and traditions are important, but they must make sense in the context of the 21^st century, not the first or the seventh or the ninth. Even the Amish, isolated as they make themselves, have to abide by the law, and those who oppose being bound by the Ten Commandments or Sharia Law would do well to avoid proposing the enforcement of old Pagan law codes.

So ask yourself what your ancestor would do, but keep in mind when he answers that this is the 21st century America (or wherever) and not 9th century Norway, and if somebody tries to tell you what Jesus would do, remind them that this is 21st century America and not first century Judaea, the Romans are not our overlords and that neither of you are Second Temple Jews.

This is a long overdue review of Diana Paxson’s Essential Ásatrú, a book mentioned by S.M. Stirling as a resource for his Emberverse series (previously reviewed here). Diana Paxson is both a Pagan and an author – not only of speculative fiction but of nonfiction works relating to various aspects of Paganism.

Essential Asatru: Walking the Path of Norse Paganism (Citadel Press 2006) is billed as an “accessible guide” to Ásatrú, as well as a “practical guide for its modern followers.” Obviously there is need for such a book. It cannot be denied, as the back cover says, that Heathenism is “often misunderstood.” It is no secret that I feel many works by Heathen scholars fall far short of the mark.

Obviously, there is wide latitude in the reconstruction or revival of any ancient religion. Our sources are always incomplete (in the case of Heathenism deplorably so) and people come at it from a variety of directions, including Germanic (often Saxon) and Scandinavian. Ásatrú has been classified as “Wicca with homework” and I think this fairly assesses the degree of dedication to reviving ancient customs existing in modern Heathenism as opposed to say, Wicca, which is a new religion, or a “reincarnation” as one Wiccan priestess has put it. For that reason alone no single guide can be everything to everyone. That does not mean it cannot provide a useful (and necessarily general) starting point, and that’s what I’m really interested in here.

Essential Ásatrú is divided into three parts:

1) Heroes and Ancestors (which I think is a very good place to start as a Heathen);

2) Gods and Goddesses;

3) Toasts, Boasts and Oaths (which any Heathen knows is very much a part of our ancestral customs – and oaths are generally holy, not only to Heathens but to Hellenes and others as well).

Ms. Paxson begins at the beginning, as it were, tracing history from the Stone Age through the Migration Period and Viking Age before looking at the “conversion” and the modern revival. Again, I think this attention to the historical record is something that sets Heathenism (as well as Hellenism and others) apart from more modern religions like Wicca.

I thought her treatment of our gods and goddesses to be good. Ms. Paxson correctly points out that a man is effeminate if he is submissive in sexual matters, not if he is attracted to men. This is a point often missed even by Pagans today (the same is true of the Romans, where the male is seen as the penetrator). Again, this is a topic I have covered here in some depth.

She also points out that Loki is not necessarily a god at all, though some Heathens treat him as such. On the other hand, I do have a problem with Ms. Paxson’s discussion of “Hella.” There are interesting gaps in Ms. Paxson’s bibliography; for example, she completely ignores Rudolf Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology. This, to me, is inexplicable. As Simek points out, Hel (or Hella as Paxson calls her) is “probably a very late poetic personification of the underworld Hel.” Simek concludes that “On the whole nothing speaks in favour of there being a belief in a goddess Hel in pre-Christian times.” Granted, Davidson states that “a we have a persistent tradition for a goddess of the dead” but this only goes to demonstrate that the matter is far from an open and shut case.[1]

Ms. Paxson admits that Hella is a “shadowy figure in the lore” but points out that “she has become an important deity to a number of heathens today.” This may be, but it seems to me that we should not ignore evidence that Hel was not a goddess at all in the minds of our ancestors, but a late poetic device. People interested in returning to the customs and traditions of their ancestors ought to know where there are doubts about the existence of specific deities (as with Loki). Obviously, there is room for both interpretations and if people want to include Hel in the pantheon an argument can be made for this but equally, an argument can be made that Hel is no goddess at all. In the interest of historical accuracy both possibilities should have been mentioned.

In the second part of Essential Ásatrú, Ms. Paxson offers a brief discussion of sacrifice. I’m not entirely satisfied by this, not only because it is very brief – a mere five pages are devoted to sacrifice and 25 to magic – and sacrifice – not magic, unless you consider all religion magic – was the essence of ancient religion. Ms. Paxson admits this, saying (p. 100) that sacrifice “was universal in the ancient world” and correctly points out that most modern Heathens lack the requisite skills to kill animals and that therefore “our festal food usually comes from the grocery store.”

The discussion of a Heathen altar includes a “Thor’s hammer” which seems here to substitute for a Wiccan“ wand”. I suppose people can put what they want on heir altars but there is no historical evidence for hammers that I am aware of. Gold ring dedicated to Thor, yes. His hammer, no. There can be no doubt that the hammer as an altar implement is a modern, not an ancient, convention.

In the third part of her book Ms. Paxson addresses the subject of toasts, boasts, and oaths. Here she leads us on a discussion about Norse cosmology, wyrd and orlog and afterlife, where she correct points out that “In the lore, we find a variety of possibilities depending on time, place, and even individual preference.” She also discusses the all important virtues, courage, truth, honor and the rest. She does make an interesting comment at the end of chapter 10: “Heathenism is a religion that prizes self-reliance and personal responsibility.”

This is a rather broad and general statement and it does not pay enough attention to the historical record, in my opinion. If you’re speaking of the Viking Age, I would say the focus on self-reliance is closer to true but even then, as Robert Ferguson writes, “Viking Age ethics were based on the opposition of shame and honour.”[2] Our ancestors lived in small communities and the myth of the rugged individualist would have struck them as alien. These small isolated communities put people in great dependence upon each other. It was an age where in the law a family member was responsible for everyone else in that family. You could not be a “rugged individualist” and get by. If you did something wrong, anyone in your family could suffer as a result; the whole community could suffer. The Viking Age broke these old barriers down and so yes, speaking of that later Age I would find some truth in her words.

As James C. Russell writes,

Since the early Germans could not rely upon the protection and assistance of a bureaucratic empire when they were threatened with attack or famine, it was incumbent upon each man and woman of the community to adhere to the fundamental sociobiological principle of group survival embodied in the bonds of familial and communal solidarity. One’s status in society depended upon how closely one adhered to this fundamental  principle. Those who behaved honorably, thereby contributing toward the advancement of their community, were materially rewarded and thus increased their wealth, power, and influence. It is likely that the coalescence of honor, wealth, influence and power within Germanic society inhibited the spread of status inconsistency and its potentially anomic effects, and served to further reinforce Germanic group solidarity.[3]

If there is something modern Heathens ought to be bringing into the present it is this idea of group solidarity and community, not to mention family.

In Chapter 11 she moves on to a discussion of questions and conflicts, discussing UPGs and lore and variation in practice due to time and place, as well as the applicability of the term “earth religion” – all important topics of discussion. She concludes the chapter with a discussion of various approaches to Heathenism, from folkish to tribalist to universalist and makes a comparison of Asatru and Wicca. I find myself in agreement with her statement that while some Heathens denigrate Wiccan-style practices as “Wiccatru” she doubts that “the gods themselves care about the style in which they are worshipped” though she believes (as I do) “that they can be more completely understood and perceived more clearly when honored in a Germanic cultural context.”

The book concludes with an examination of Heathen organizations, online and elsewhere, and she includes a useful piece called “Surviving Your First Heathen Event.”

On the whole, I find Essential Ásatrú to be, if not essential, then close to it – certainly very helpful. Ms. Paxson presents a clear, coherent picture of one possibility of modern day Heathenism and while she picks and chooses from among her sources, which of us do not, for one reason or another? If we know little about the details of ancient Heathen worship, we do know that there were many different types of Heathenism based on considerations of chronology and geology. It would be impossible in the span of two hundred pages to discuss every possibility. In the end, we must all make decisions about what we do and why. We must do the best we can.

If you are new to Heathenism and are looking for a helpful guide to get you started, you can do far worse than this introductory work. It is a step above – several steps in some instances – of some of the books put out by Llewellyn, and better too than some of the books Ms. Paxson includes in her bibliography, which only goes to show that the results of her work are greater than the sum of its parts. Buy the book, read it, use it, and don’t be afraid to broaden your studies outside of it lest you lock yourself into one particular way of being a Heathen without examining the alternatives.

Perhaps best of all, the book is short and easy read, and Ms. Paxson illustrates her points with modern day examples, of how a group of Heathens go about being Heathen. And that, after all, is what Heathenism is all about – not philosophical discussions, not talking about it – but doing it, being it. As I have always said when asked for advice, the best way to become a Heathen is to go out there and be one, and this book, I think, will help you with that.

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[1] Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (D.S. Brewer 1993), 138; H.R.E. Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (Greenwood 1968),  75.

[2] Robert Ferguson, The Vikings (Viking 2009), 31.

[3] James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (Oxford 1994), 120.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to come to grips with my mortality. We all live; we all die. We just don’t think about it much when we’re younger. It seems so far away. Think about how we experience time: It always takes forever for Yule or your birthday to come when you’re a kid; summers seem to last forever – as does the school year. But where once it took forever, now it’s here before you know it – before you want it. What, another birthday, already?

The time just seems to start flying by, and pretty soon ten years have gone past, or twenty, and you wonder where they went. Hours become minutes, days become hours, and years…well, some days you wake up feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Is it really more than 30 years now since that rainy afternoon when I first saw Star Wars?

Now too I’ve been told that I am having heart problems. I have known of my mitral valve prolapse for many years – it kept me out of the Army when I tried to enlist back in the 70s (I was going to Berlin as part of the Third Brigade – an artillery spotter). But it’s never really been problematic until recently, when shortness of breath and fluttering led me to the cardiologist, who, after some tests, informed me that my heart was too big, too weak, and that the valve leaked too much.

Surgery was always inevitable, he told me. It was just a matter of when. Well, when was suddenly upon me. “It isn’t the news we wanted, I know,” he told me, “But it is what it is.” That may be a tired old expression, but it has the virtue of always being true.

Two tests later (heart catheterization and transesophageal echocardiogram, or TEE), I have been told that my heart is less weak than previously thought (which is good news), and that because I am fit and healthy in all other respects – no diabetes, etc, I am in good shape for surgery.

The heart surgeon came into my room after the catheterization. He told me that he loves doing mitral valve repairs. He had a childlike gleam in his eyes as he told me he has been doing this for 15 years and that he is successful 90% of the time. If he cannot repair it, he said, he will replace it. I told him I chose the synthetic valve over a pig or bovine valve – not because I don’t dig on swine or cows but because both those would wear out over time and require, as he put it, a second, even more dangerous surgery.

He gave me all the percentages, which is only fair. It turns out I have only a 2% chance of dying. Not bad really. Think about it: climate scientists say with 90% certitude that we are experiencing anthropogenic global warming (AGW). As James Hoggan says in his Climate Cover-Up (2009), if somebody told you that there was a 90% chance the plain you were on was going to crash, you would seriously consider making other plans.

Well, it works both ways. 90% is pretty close to 100% – and you can’t have 100% certainty in science or in most other aspects of life. If there is a 90% certainty that he can repair the valve, I’m going in pretty confident. The 2% seems trivial by comparison – except that if the repairs can last decades, running afoul of that 2% lasts – forever.

I’ve had a lot of time – and many opportunities – to think about death. My brother was killed when I was 10. My grandparents died in the 80s, and I was holding my grandma’s hand as she died.  My ex-father-in-law died in the 90s and I was very close to him. Both my parents died a few years ago. One of my ex-sisters-in-law suddenly died last year. She should have outlived me. As you get older, you start losing people. It’s simple math. I don’t think anyone should become accustomed to the idea of people dying, but perhaps exposure to it makes you a little less afraid of it.

I’m 53. By any generous estimate I’m at the half-way point. When your gas gauge dips below half, you start thinking about a fresh tank. There aren’t any fresh tanks in life, so we should start thinking about our legacy instead, if we haven’t already.

It’s probably no surprise then that I’ve thought about my own death as I’ve grown older – the legacy I want to leave behind, the awareness that time to do the things I want to do is not infinite. Particularly now, with the heart problems.

I’m not afraid of dying. Even before I became a polytheist I liked what Socrates had to say about it. He provided an example for us all in his Phaedo, when he told his friends that there was nothing to fear:

[E]ither death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

My Heathen ancestors had a great many conceptions of death, and to what road it led: to the halls of our ancestors, to Hel (nothing like Christian hell but just a place you go when you die), to Valhöll if Odin chooses you. Skjöldunga Saga speaks of “going to King Odin” and “the underworld,” and there is some sense of going “into the mountains” to join your ancestors. There is also a limited appeal to reincarnation, as Ellis-Davidson puts it,  “belief in the birth of the souls of dead ancestors into the living world again, in the persons of their descendants.”[1] And of course, there are the dísir, who are female ancestors who have stayed behind to help the household.

Who knows? It is difficult to know what to make of all the various ideas surrounding death. Islamic traveler Ibn Fahdlan, when watching a Varangian funeral,  spoke of “paradise” which was the best he could interpret the Norse word as he was made to understand it. But anything that smacks of paradise cannot be bad.

Outside of the claim to Valhöll (a claim no mortal can make) the poem heard by Ibn Fahdlan at the chieftain’s funeral, and re-rendered by Michael Crichton in the 13th Warrior, captures the essence of Heathen ideas of death:

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.

My ancestors did not live their lives towards an afterlife, or for a hope in some afterlife, though ideas of joining their ancestors shows that they expected them to be there already, waiting for them. They lived their lives as part of a continuum, inheritors but also progenitors, descendants and ancestors to be. And they lived their lives for life, for what mark they made on this world, what they did for their families and communities – and for their gods. And for what name they left behind them. As I quote in every email I send out:

Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
oneself dies likewise,
but good renown
will never die
for him who earns it.

- Hávamál, 76

I think this is true. And who does not want to be well thought of when they are gone? Who would choose ill-renown over good? We all want to have had a good impact on those whom we love and care for. We want that “son of” or “daughter of” to mean something.

So how have I done? Too soon to tell. As another Norse proverb tells us, “Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”

And I think that is as it should be. We should not be judged on our accomplishments until we are done with the opportunity to affect change – that is, when we are dead. I hope that when the day comes that I have shaped my final fate that I will have done some praiseworthy deeds. That is what we should all hope for.

Followers of the White Christ hope for some form of eternal salvation, a nebulous form of afterlife in which they will enjoy the fruits of their devotion to their god. I find there is a disconnect between “up there” and “down here.” But our gods, like us, are of this world; there is a connection that is very real between we mortals and the Otherworld.

It is only fitting that as I have lived “down here” that I be judged “down here” and by the people I have lived among, whose lives I have in some way impacted and whose lives have impacted me. I hope that my deeds will have been found worthy of my ancestors, that the good will have outweighed the bad, wisdom foolishness, and piety impiety. I would very much – like Theoden King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – to go before my ancestors unashamed, just as I have hoped to live my life unashamed.

We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we are not proud of; say and do things we regret later, or fail to say or do things we feel we should have said or done. We don’t have to apologize to our gods for those oversights. Instead, we redeem ourselves here. It is redemption – not salvation – that is meaningful.

But in the end, as each of us shapes our own fate, we have nothing to complain about. Our decisions, our actions, have brought us to where we are now. If sometimes (as in my case) genetics jumps in with a “surprise!” then there is still no reason for complaint, no reason to rail against gods or fate.

So in the end, my concern is where it should be, not with some nebulous and unknowable afterlife or paradise but with the world I leave behind, the world I belonged to, and whether or not I’ve done enough to have made it a better place.

The gods will know, but they will not judge. That will be left to my fellow mortals here on the little island in space we call Midguard.

(I have my surgery on March 8. I will be missing from the Internet for a few days. I am told a couple of days in ICU, completely cut off, and 5-10 days in the hospital after that, during which time I will probably write but may or may not be able to get on the Internet. There will be some limits on my activities afterward, but none that should keep me offline or from writing – 3 weeks without driving, six weeks until I can perform ordinary household tasks on my own, 12 weeks before returning to work, and several months before full recovery. At the end of it all, I am promised I will feel better than I have in a while, which is something to look forward, and something, I should add, more tangible than beliefs in an afterlife. I will continue to post up until March 7 and I will look forward to seeing you all again after that – Hrafnkell)

Notes:

[1] H.R. Ellis-Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968), 145.