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Guardian of Asgaard: The conversion of one man to gods of ol
14 years ago
What are all you whipper snappers doing here...?
To me never having doubted your faith makes your belief a hollow shell of what it would have been if you lost your faith and went searching for it. The blind adherence to the faith of your youth, without having had a choice otherwise, means you’ve never had the chance to understand why that faith is best for you. Perhaps it isn’t. The loss and regaining of faith is a theme of parables in many religions, but yet it’s rarely encouraged by their followers.
On the longest night of the year a friend of mine returned from Basic Training in the Army and we spent that night hanging out. We’d gone to a local liquor store and bought three bottles of impressively strong alcohol and were in the process of drinking the first bottle, a beer called Triple Expulsion with Thor’s hammer on the bottle, while we watched a film called Valhalla Rising.
The film came to an end and we decided to get things started. I went to my kitchen and retrieved a bottle of Viking Blod mead and my drinking horn from its resting spot. Upon filling it I raised the horn and in a firm voice I gave welcome to all attending, toasted Thor, god of Thunder and my personal patron, and took a drink. To which my friend replied “Hail Thor.”
My friend took the horn, raising it as well, toasted Odin, the all-father and god of warriors, and also took a drink. In response I replied “Hail Odin.”
The next round I toasted my ancestors and my friend did likewise, each time ending in a “Hail.”
After that we boasted of our future deeds – which on the night of Yule is a strongly binding oath. I boasted to finish my education and took a drink. My friend, unsure of what to toast, swore to no longer be single by next year, and took another drink
I came into my own belief in a convoluted path that began by never fully believing in my Presbyterian upbringing. By middle school I rarely attended church and by adulthood I was an avowed Agnostic. My scientific mind had trouble justifying what the church tried to tell me so outright rejection was easier than trying to reconcile them.
Even then not believing in something isn’t as easy as it sounds. Ignoring the strongly theistic society we live in, regular life events like birth and death are hard to put into the context of science. While medicine can explain the process it can’t explain anything more. Merely combining genetic material doesn’t make life, there’s a spark that gets things going. Causes cells to divide. A finely choreographed balance between the mother’s endocrine and immune system and this alien cell that it will nurture instead of destroy.
Death, likewise, is difficult to understand. In my 25th year I witnessed the death of three people in my life – a friend from the Boy Scouts, my grandmother, and an elderly family friend – and that year is probably when my religious life changed.
My friend from the Boy Scouts had committed suicide. His mother and loved ones were understandably distraught and their faith couldn’t help them. Their dogma taught that suicide was a grave sin and those who did it were condemned to eternal torment. I refused to believe my friend, who I’d known since I was 7 year-old and was a good man, deserved that afterlife. I saw in my long-suffering grandmother that living could be worse than death. And Homer taught me to accept death as a part of life, even while lung cancer ravaged his body.
That year I began writing a fiction story involving elements of European paganism in modern day America. Research for the story lead to me understanding the beliefs of pre-Christian Europeans and an online conversation lead to me opening my mind to that as a religious path to follow.
At first I followed what I consciously thought I wanted to. I research and attempted to understand the beliefs of the Pagan Celts. The main problem, however, was very clear – they never wrote anything down. Their religious leaders maintained an oral tradition to the end, which was never recorded before it disappeared forever. Between Julius Caesar fighting the Gauls and Christian missionaries wanting to convert there simply wasn’t a record to be found. Most of what was “known” about them comes from those two sources or the conjecture of 19th century romantics – none of them reliable.
At the same time every time I read or was exposed to the Norse gods I felt an attachment. The wily wisdom of Odin. The righteous anger of Thor. The beautiful and fierce Freyja. Frey, her brother who watched the harvest. Loki, whose antics and acrid tongue kept the other gods in line, while also getting himself in trouble. Knowing they were all as flawed as and, in the end, as mortal as I was made them much more approachable. So I decided to accept that attachment.
People in the Neopagan community joke that Asatru, the modern reconstruction of the ancient Norse beliefs, is the religion where you have to do homework and its a very apt observation. There are few guidebooks on the process of worship – most focus on understanding the gods and the Norse cosmology – and what is accepted are little more than guidelines. A follower is expected to read the source material, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, on their own and come to their own conclusion about what it says.
What does stand out among Heathens, and separates them from many other Neopagans, is the acceptance of the practical and real. While a Wiccan might decide against war as violating their mantra of “harm none” a Heathen is likely to be on the battlefield. While a Neodruid might try to protect a random grove of trees for the sake of nothing more than protecting them, a Heathen would be the one happily shopping at the mall they were cleared to build. While a Chaos Magician might find manual labor beneath them, a Heathen is framing a house or working in a factory. To a Heathen, hard work, self-reliance, bravery and honesty are ideals to live by.
Perhaps the most telling of my process of changing faiths has been the final, total, rejection of my earlier upbringing. On an early June day in 2009 I walked into a wooded area near my childhood home carrying a courier bag. When I found a nicely secluded spot I removed the contents of the bag – bread, cheese, meat, a bottle of juice, a bottle of strong beer and a small sledge hammer. After having a pleasant, ritualized meal I held the hammer high and called upon Thor to bless and protect what was to follow. I then called upon the other Aesir and Vanir – the tribes of the Norse gods – to come and stand witness. While holding the hammer above my head in one hand, I announced my intentions for that day.
In a loud voice I said, “I reject the works of the Christian god, his son the White Christ, the unholy ghost and all their agents. I renounce my baptism and accept the Aesir and Vanir as the true gods in my life.”
I took a drink of the beer, a strong Irish red with a bearded warrior wearing mail and wielding a sword on the bottle, then held it up announcing “to the gods” and poured some into the bare earth.
Probably no one understood when I left the park that day, and drove out of a neighborhood which I’d known for decades as home, why I felt like I was seeing it with new eyes. True religious conversion seems a rare and poorly accepted event in the world today. But having come along a path of decades and a lifetime of doubt into something I firmly, truly and unwaveringly believed I suddenly felt whole.
On the longest night of the year a friend of mine returned from Basic Training in the Army and we spent that night hanging out. We’d gone to a local liquor store and bought three bottles of impressively strong alcohol and were in the process of drinking the first bottle, a beer called Triple Expulsion with Thor’s hammer on the bottle, while we watched a film called Valhalla Rising.
The film came to an end and we decided to get things started. I went to my kitchen and retrieved a bottle of Viking Blod mead and my drinking horn from its resting spot. Upon filling it I raised the horn and in a firm voice I gave welcome to all attending, toasted Thor, god of Thunder and my personal patron, and took a drink. To which my friend replied “Hail Thor.”
My friend took the horn, raising it as well, toasted Odin, the all-father and god of warriors, and also took a drink. In response I replied “Hail Odin.”
The next round I toasted my ancestors and my friend did likewise, each time ending in a “Hail.”
After that we boasted of our future deeds – which on the night of Yule is a strongly binding oath. I boasted to finish my education and took a drink. My friend, unsure of what to toast, swore to no longer be single by next year, and took another drink
I came into my own belief in a convoluted path that began by never fully believing in my Presbyterian upbringing. By middle school I rarely attended church and by adulthood I was an avowed Agnostic. My scientific mind had trouble justifying what the church tried to tell me so outright rejection was easier than trying to reconcile them.
Even then not believing in something isn’t as easy as it sounds. Ignoring the strongly theistic society we live in, regular life events like birth and death are hard to put into the context of science. While medicine can explain the process it can’t explain anything more. Merely combining genetic material doesn’t make life, there’s a spark that gets things going. Causes cells to divide. A finely choreographed balance between the mother’s endocrine and immune system and this alien cell that it will nurture instead of destroy.
Death, likewise, is difficult to understand. In my 25th year I witnessed the death of three people in my life – a friend from the Boy Scouts, my grandmother, and an elderly family friend – and that year is probably when my religious life changed.
My friend from the Boy Scouts had committed suicide. His mother and loved ones were understandably distraught and their faith couldn’t help them. Their dogma taught that suicide was a grave sin and those who did it were condemned to eternal torment. I refused to believe my friend, who I’d known since I was 7 year-old and was a good man, deserved that afterlife. I saw in my long-suffering grandmother that living could be worse than death. And Homer taught me to accept death as a part of life, even while lung cancer ravaged his body.
That year I began writing a fiction story involving elements of European paganism in modern day America. Research for the story lead to me understanding the beliefs of pre-Christian Europeans and an online conversation lead to me opening my mind to that as a religious path to follow.
At first I followed what I consciously thought I wanted to. I research and attempted to understand the beliefs of the Pagan Celts. The main problem, however, was very clear – they never wrote anything down. Their religious leaders maintained an oral tradition to the end, which was never recorded before it disappeared forever. Between Julius Caesar fighting the Gauls and Christian missionaries wanting to convert there simply wasn’t a record to be found. Most of what was “known” about them comes from those two sources or the conjecture of 19th century romantics – none of them reliable.
At the same time every time I read or was exposed to the Norse gods I felt an attachment. The wily wisdom of Odin. The righteous anger of Thor. The beautiful and fierce Freyja. Frey, her brother who watched the harvest. Loki, whose antics and acrid tongue kept the other gods in line, while also getting himself in trouble. Knowing they were all as flawed as and, in the end, as mortal as I was made them much more approachable. So I decided to accept that attachment.
People in the Neopagan community joke that Asatru, the modern reconstruction of the ancient Norse beliefs, is the religion where you have to do homework and its a very apt observation. There are few guidebooks on the process of worship – most focus on understanding the gods and the Norse cosmology – and what is accepted are little more than guidelines. A follower is expected to read the source material, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, on their own and come to their own conclusion about what it says.
What does stand out among Heathens, and separates them from many other Neopagans, is the acceptance of the practical and real. While a Wiccan might decide against war as violating their mantra of “harm none” a Heathen is likely to be on the battlefield. While a Neodruid might try to protect a random grove of trees for the sake of nothing more than protecting them, a Heathen would be the one happily shopping at the mall they were cleared to build. While a Chaos Magician might find manual labor beneath them, a Heathen is framing a house or working in a factory. To a Heathen, hard work, self-reliance, bravery and honesty are ideals to live by.
Perhaps the most telling of my process of changing faiths has been the final, total, rejection of my earlier upbringing. On an early June day in 2009 I walked into a wooded area near my childhood home carrying a courier bag. When I found a nicely secluded spot I removed the contents of the bag – bread, cheese, meat, a bottle of juice, a bottle of strong beer and a small sledge hammer. After having a pleasant, ritualized meal I held the hammer high and called upon Thor to bless and protect what was to follow. I then called upon the other Aesir and Vanir – the tribes of the Norse gods – to come and stand witness. While holding the hammer above my head in one hand, I announced my intentions for that day.
In a loud voice I said, “I reject the works of the Christian god, his son the White Christ, the unholy ghost and all their agents. I renounce my baptism and accept the Aesir and Vanir as the true gods in my life.”
I took a drink of the beer, a strong Irish red with a bearded warrior wearing mail and wielding a sword on the bottle, then held it up announcing “to the gods” and poured some into the bare earth.
Probably no one understood when I left the park that day, and drove out of a neighborhood which I’d known for decades as home, why I felt like I was seeing it with new eyes. True religious conversion seems a rare and poorly accepted event in the world today. But having come along a path of decades and a lifetime of doubt into something I firmly, truly and unwaveringly believed I suddenly felt whole.
