Hello and welcome to the Ginnungagap blog where I shall be blogging about all kinds of crazy stuff related to the roles of magic workers and woo woo inspired folks in the Heathen and Asatru communities.

This I believe is something that needs to be addressed.

Firstly I would like to say that I place a great deal of value in the lore. Just because I'm one of those magic working types doesn't mean that I disregard the lore in favour of UPG or whatever. No, I simply recognise that sometimes I get pulled in directions that aren't necessarily consistent with the lore as I understand it at that time. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to come across a fresh piece of information in the lore that complements my woo woo type experiences. Other times I'm not so lucky. Do I disregard the UPG/experience and put it down to a bad day/not enough coffee/too much coffee/being slipped a rufie? No, I just try not to draw any conclusions and file it away in the 'Just Plain Weird But May Come In Handy One Day' drawer in my brain.

I never try to win a debate with UPG as a trump card!!! You will never hear me say 'Odin made me do it!'

I believe in taking personal responsiblity for what I do.

I'm also the kind of person that has to go find, try replicate and figure out any strange noise or effect that she hears or experiences. Like most of us, I wonder if I'm insane quite a lot too.

However in spite of all of this, in spite of all my ghosthunter-type investigative tendancies and love for the lore - things do happen to me and I go out and do stuff too. I do the sitting on burial mounds, the trances, the magic. I see all kinds of stuff that I'm not sure how to identify or interpret all the time! I have dreams with deities in (not all the time) only to find in waking life that something comes of what I have dreamed.

I also don't really talk about this stuff in the community. I don't feel as though I can. I don't care about not talking about this stuff on expressedly lore-based sites. After all, to do so would be like going to a Chinese restaurant and trying to order Italian. However on more general sites I think there is a place for both lore and experience in a forum for religious discussion.

I know that not all agree with the idea of Asatru or Heathenry as a form of religion and in the case of atheist Heathens, I would agree with this disagreement.

In Thomas DuBois's book 'Nordic Religions In The Viking Age', there is a quote from Karl W Luckert that defines religion as:

'' man's response to so-conceived greater-than-human configurations of reality''

So bring Gods into it and you have a religion, right?

With religion comes religious experience, right?

Luckert further classifies a human's experiences of the world into several categories.

  •  Elements or experiences that the culture or individual regards as being less than human are 'handled', controlled, analysed, conquered and dismissed.
  • Elements or experiences viewed equal to human are treated as such:shared and communicated with, or competed against.
  • Finally elements or experiences recognized as being greater than human evoke some sort of religious experience be it mild (fascination), heightened (terror, awe) or extreme (mystic or physical surrender).

So be it mild or extreme religious experience, surely it should be recognised as being part of Asatru or Heathenry?

Or what are we then other than a bunch of dry scholars that like to play viking dress-up now and again?