Experiential liturgy

I’ve been giving a thought lately to ritual.  There’s plenty of scripted ones out there, and books of blots, and our Lead Kindred Mama (I don’t know what her official title is) enjoys writing them. 

What got me thinking this time was at first a blog post from Sannion’s “The House of Vines” blog.  Sannion is a priest of Dionysus, and he promotes Northern Heim SoCal often.  I don’t remember the entry; it was some months ago, but he put up a rather nice photo, probably from the early 90s at the latest, of a fuzzy bearded naked man lying on a bed in a very ordinary looking bedroom.  Under the window behind him were some bookshelves with books and cassette tapes.  Sannion observed that many pagans would have noticed the books before they noticed the man, and that was the problem with paganism today.

I had noticed the man all right, in an “ACK!  I can’t read this blog at work!” sort of way.  Nonetheless, he was a very appealing naked man.   It took me a second, longer viewing to see the books.  I like to read, but the point was taken.

This morning, I was reading a thread on an Asatru and Heathenry FaceBook group about over-ritualization.  Some of the readers liked more scripted rituals, others liked more free-form rituals.  Obviously there’s no right or wrong answer.  Then one of the readers commented, “Trust the [name of religious group redacted] to take all the fun out of drinking.”

ZWOT!  Images of the fuzzy naked man reappeared in my head, along with a lot of stuff I’ve been reading and hearing on podcasts about paganism as experiential.  What that means is while yes, we need to read texts and understand texts and possibly even write about them, the true religious experience lies in our encounter with the gods. 

This goes back to my previous blog post about the body as the site of religious experience.  Odin gave us the runes for our use, and I’m sure he has a veritable Library of Congress up there in Valhalla, but reading about Odin isn’t where we encounter him.  Like Dionysus, Odin is associated with drinking, ecstasy, being out-of-your-mind and leading the Wild Hunt.  A good meeting with Odin can still be had here in San Diego, on a December night when the wind is blowing, it’s not-quite raining and the weather is still enough to chill you and make you glad to come indoors.

(Maybe too much of a good thing.)

More typical is what I wrote about when recounting our Winter Finding/Winter Nights ritual where we felt the presence of the landsnisse (aka vaettir) all around us, especially when Sven tossed them his apple core as he’d always been taught to do.

“Ceremony is there to make an event beautiful,” said my friend Don’s yogi, back in the day.  Yes, as long as it adds to the experience.  I recall being in Toronto’s Ratha-Yatra event with Don, walking with hundreds of changing Hare Krishnas and taking a turn pulling the cart that carried Lord Jaganatha and his friends.  There was even an elephant, on loan from the Metro Toronto Zoo.   We can’t usually go that far out for our rituals, but it’s something to aspire to!  Even in an apartment we can have candles and movement, song and drumming. If you are outside, take all that and add communion with the land, the trees, and the animals.  Kindred Mama always makes sure everyone has something to do in the ritual, and that’s important for the hands-on aspect.

I once saw a video on YouTube of some heathen in liturgical garb, standing behind an altar, reading ritual from a book.  The ceremony even included him reciting the runes.  I’m usually not one to say, “Dude, you’re doing it wrong,” but in this case…yeah.  You are.

Experiential Liturgy

I’ve been giving a thought lately to ritual.  There’s plenty of scripted ones out there, and books of blots, and our Lead Kindred Mama (I don’t know what her official title is) enjoys writing them. 

What got me thinking this time was at first a blog post from Sannion’s “The House of Vines” blog.  Sannion is a priest of Dionysus, and he promotes Northern Heim SoCal often.  I don’t remember the entry; it was some months ago, but he put up a rather nice photo, probably from the early 90s at the latest, of a fuzzy bearded naked man lying on a bed in a very ordinary looking bedroom.  Under the window behind him were some bookshelves with books and cassette tapes.  Sannion observed that many pagans would have noticed the books before they noticed the man, and that was the problem with paganism today.

I had noticed the man all right, in an “ACK!  I can’t read this blog at work!” sort of way.  Nonetheless, he was a very appealing naked man.   It took me a second, longer viewing to see the books.  I like to read, but the point was taken.

This morning, I was reading a thread on an Asatru and Heathenry FaceBook group about over-ritualization.  Some of the readers liked more scripted rituals, others liked more free-form rituals.  Obviously there’s no right or wrong answer.  Then one of the readers commented, “Trust the [name of religious group redacted] to take all the fun out of drinking.”

ZWOT!  Images of the fuzzy naked man reappeared in my head, along with a lot of stuff I’ve been reading and hearing on podcasts about paganism as experiential.  What that means is while yes, we need to read texts and understand texts and possibly even write about them, the true religious experience lies in our encounter with the gods. 

This goes back to my previous blog post about the body as the site of religious experience.  Odin gave us the runes for our use, and I’m sure he has a veritable Library of Congress up there in Valhalla, but reading about Odin isn’t where we encounter him.  Like Dionysus, Odin is associated with drinking, ecstasy, being out-of-your-mind and leading the Wild Hunt.  A good meeting with Odin can still be had here in San Diego, on a December night when the wind is blowing, it’s not-quite raining and the weather is still enough to chill you and make you glad to come indoors.

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(Maybe too much of a good thing.)

More typical is what I wrote about when recounting our Winter Finding/Winter Nights ritual where we felt the presence of the landsnisse (aka vaettir) all around us, especially when Sven tossed them his apple core as he’d always been taught to do.

“Ceremony is there to make an event beautiful,” said my friend Don’s yogi, back in the day.  Yes, as long as it adds to the experience.  I recall being in Toronto’s Ratha-Yatra event with Don, walking with hundreds of changing Hare Krishnas and taking a turn pulling the cart that carried Lord Jaganatha and his friends.  There was even an elephant, on loan from the Metro Toronto Zoo.   We can’t usually go that far out for our rituals, but it’s something to aspire to!  Even in an apartment we can have candles and movement, song and drumming. If you are outside, take all that and add communion with the land, the trees, and the animals.  Kindred Mama always makes sure everyone has something to do in the ritual, and that’s important for the hands-on aspect.

I once saw a video on YouTube of some heathen in liturgical garb, standing behind an altar, reading ritual from a book.  The ceremony even included him reciting the runes.  I’m usually not one to say, “Dude, you’re doing it wrong,” but in this case…yeah.  You are.

B is for Body

(Another entry into the Pagan Blog Project)

Bodies.  Everyone has one, and it is the source of our knowledge of everything.  As a divinity student I became aware of the enormous amounts of writing about the body according to religious writers.  The Greeks loved to think about the interplay of body and soul, and this thread has been taken up for millennia by philosophers and theologians. 

So of course I became a Norse Heathen where there is no wide field of philosophy to delve into.  Although the Norse had the runes, they didn’t use it to write down much, and this is very much indicative of how they thought about life and body. 

Life was to be lived, and life was good and desirable.  “It is better to live, even to live miserably,” Odin says in Havamal verse 70.  In Havamal 71, he adds that “no one gets any good from a corpse”.  Even life in a damaged body is better than being dead.  Crippled?  Ride a horse.  Deaf?  You can still be brave in battle.  Blind?  Even in a harsh climate and conflict-filled culture it’s better to be alive than dead, especially if it’s later in life and you have your family around you.

Popular imagery of “the Vikings” usually portrays big, hearty people, laughing, drinking, fighting and eating large roasted animals.  In other words, the qualities of the Vikings that appeal to us in the modern era are qualities tied to their physicality.  The appeal of the gods is secondary.  A Norseman would find this completely understandable and be puzzled by asceticism.  Why would anyone give up food, drinking alcohol and having sex in the name of religion?  That is why Odin, Thor, Freya and the other deities enjoy feasting, partying and having lovers—because that’s what life is for!  When you do want to encounter the gods and the land-spirits, you don’t need to meditate quietly in a temple but to go out and experience them face to face.

The word “heathenry” points to it being a religion of people who spent much if not most of their lives outside, that is, on the heath.  We may speak about ours being “the religion with homework”, but to really be doing it right we ought to be outside, and not necessarily doing ritual.  Asatru should be experiential.  The building of a Heathen spirituality should come with just enough reading to make us eager to close the book, go outdoors and feel the forces that are embodied by the gods.  I believe that the best prayer we can offer is to go hiking, being constantly aware of what we feel, see, hear and smell.  I don’t live in anything resembling the forests of Scandinavia (and no, going to Ikea doesn’t count), so Sven and I like to go walking in the deserts near our home.  When we do, I like to wear athletic shoes with toes that allow me to feel the textures of the trail as if I were barefoot without having to worry about cactus spines or burning hot sand. 

I also believe that physical fitness should be part of heathen practice.  Most of the heathens I know are a fit and outdoorsy bunch, which is what I would expect from people who are reviving the religion of a set of cultures where everyone had to work their bodies hard just to stay alive.  We may not have to hunt, raise all our own food, build our own shelters, invade and battle off invaders, but we should develop strength by which we could.  If we cultivate the strength and skill, tracking, farming and building are good things to do in order to both experience nature and get a feel for the lives of our ancestors.

That the Norse enjoyed life is made evident by the fact that the afterlife wasn’t a preoccupation of theirs.  When they did think about it, it was a continuation of the life they had lived on earth.  After death most people went to sit with their family members who had gone on before them.  I’m not sure how many people actually believed in Valhalla or their chances of ending up there, but it was a never-ending round of fighting and partying with all wounds healed by evening and nights spent with plenty of meat and booze.  In contrast to the Christian heaven where the saved spend eternity bodiless and in perpetual praise of God, the heathen can look forward to a very physical afterlife that reflects the joy of being alive and embodied.

Go outside and feel the sun, the rain and the snow if you have it.  Submerge yourself in the oceans or lakes.  Smell the air and feel trees.  I wrote earlier about giving thanks for your food; add to that by paying attention to the flavours and textures in your mouth.  When you drink alcohol, be aware of how it makes you feel.  I took up yoga in the past few months and while it’s very obviously not a Norse practice, I do appreciate the way it makes me think about how I move, what the limits of my range of motion are and what perspectives I get when I’m doing the poses.

Asatru is not a religion of withdrawal from the world.  Embrace it.

A is for Ancestors

I've decided to participate in the Pagan Blog Project.  The 26 letters of the alphabet are the prompts, one for every two weeks.  I have until Friday to get this in.

The subject of ancestors is going to receive terribly short shrift in one measly column.  Ancestors, exchange of gifts and land-spirits are at the heart of Asatru, and all of which will be discussed in the next year.

Family ancestors are recalled in Asatru as the alfar (males) and disir (females).  We can also have ancestors by choice, as with friends or heroes who have gone before us.  The gods are honoured as our eldest kin, and   the royal families of Sweden and Denmark claim lineage back to them.

Ancestry is one of the things that draws people into heathenry.  I've heard more than one heathen or druid tell their spiritual journey as beginning when they realized that Christianity was foreign to them, imposed on their people by kings or invaders.  I think this is an excellent realization; cultural roots run deep, and for Scandinavians, Christianity has only been around for a millenia or less.  Before that, lines can be traced from there, to central Europe, to the Baltic and all the way east to India.  When you realize that the traditional gods of your people have a lineage stretching back to time immemorial, it's a powerful thing.

For my husband Sven, religious ancestry is very immediate.  He heard stories of the Norse gods at his grandpa's knee and watched him set bowls of milk out "for the cats" when they didn't have any cats.

For me, it was a harder reach.  I consider King Arthur, Gawain and Guenevere as ancestors of a sort, because it was through their stories that I first started feeling the existence of what I would later realize was paganism.   I first went to England in 1987 and going to Glastonbury was absolutely life-changing in that Avalon, the Chalice Well and the thorn tree planted by Joseph of Arimathea were real.  I could walk there, drink the water, and touch the tree.  It made me feel as if an unseen, spiritual world were only just barely out of reach, and I never saw reality or spirituality quite the same way again.

In our home practice, ancestors are quite important.  Sven has photos of his grandpa, a statue to house his family's hjemnisse and a cabinet that recalls his mom on or around our hearth.  I have a separate shrine to my family with small items belonging to my grandparents.  I don't know what my own family would think of what I do now religiously.  They were very Catholic, but at least they were on the liberal side.  I like to think that with all the shenanigans going on in the Church right now, they might not blame me, or actively approve.  If nothing else, heathenry has a lot of drinking and feasting going on, and most of us have had family gatherings that are all about that!