Sworn beneath the old gods (and new).
Carried like iron under the cloak.
Faith · 2025-12-23
The beard sits where policy can see it. That is the plain trouble. A religious practice kept privately can be misunderstood, ignored, or tolerated by accident. A visible practice has to pass through other people’s eyes every day. It becomes inspectable. [more]
Faith · 2025-02-04
Forn Siðr is a dangerous phrase if it is allowed to become pretty. Old Custom sounds stable. It sounds like something received whole, cleaned by age, and carried forward with both hands. That is not the religion I practice. [more]
Faith · 2024-02-13
I pull the books down one at a time and spread them across the table. Tacitus. The Eddas. Sagas written after conversion. Law codes. Translations with arguments buried in the footnotes. Archaeological reports describing buckles, graves, burned bones, and the dark stains where wood used to be. [more]
Faith · 2023-10-17
Calling Týr my patron saint is useful in exactly the way a borrowed tool is useful: it reaches the nut, more or less, and then reminds you it was made for a different machine. The phrase explains something quickly. [more]
Faith · 2023-09-19
Fragments are not trash. They are also not whole buildings. That is the first discipline of reconstruction: refuse both contempt and fantasy. The surviving pieces of Germanic Heathen religion are uneven, damaged, regional, late in places, Christian-filtered in places, archaeological in some places, poetic in others, legal, linguistic, folkloric, comparative, stubborn, and incomplete. [more]
Faith · 2021-08-10
The comfort in Ragnarök is not that everything burns. Any fool can admire a fire from a safe distance and call the wreckage profound. Destruction is easy to make impressive if the reader is not the one standing in the ash. [more]
Faith · 2021-07-13
I wipe the shrine surface with a cloth and the cloth comes away slightly gray. Not filth. Use. A fine film of dust that settles on every horizontal plane in a lived-in house, plus the faint stickiness that follows drink offerings and the dull bloom that candle heat leaves when wax has been warmed and cooled a hundred times. [more]
Faith · 2021-06-15
I set the offering bowl down before it holds anything. Olive, ash, and pine under the fingers, three woods joined into one working object that has already outlasted several clever theories about what an offering is supposed to purchase. [more]
Faith · 2021-05-18
I keep a small stack of books and printouts near the shrine, not as decoration, but as working tools. Some pages are marked. Some arguments have been crossed out after better evidence arrived. [more]
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