The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/heathen)
Of the two divisions of deities in Norse mythology and religion, the Æsir are – largely thanks to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee – the better known in today’s popular culture. The Vanir, however, are just as complex and worthy of veneration as their Æsir counterparts.
Just as sane people don’t need to embrace the insanity of the Trumpies, Heathens of positive intent don’t need to take on any of the awfulness of the neo-völkisch haters and their ilk. We can make empathy a central point of what we believe and what we practice.
There are plenty of options for pushing back on this culture of weak man-children using anger to puff themselves up. One of them is to turn to myths of mighty Thor.
Lyonel Perabo looks back at four works of interest to Heathens from last year, including The Fool’s Mirror from Troll Cat Press; The Elder Futhark from Hyldyr; the first volume of the International Journal for Heathen Research; and Sif Brookes’s Valkyrjur, Servant or Master?.
One Halloween, when I was young enough to still go trick-or-treating with my parents, a pair of boys from my school ran around my block chanting “Nazi! Nazi! Nazi!” while I stood there in my out-of-the-box Darth Vader or Spider-Man costume. When my dad was the age that I was then, he was in an extermination camp.
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