The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/old-norse)
I know I’m in a tiny minority, but – as a practitioner of a tiny minority religion – I’m used to caring about things that are way outside the mainstream of our cultural discourse. And I wonder what we practitioners can offer during this cultural moment in which the majority of us are passively experiencing a major paradigm shift, in which most of us are just unquestioningly along for the ride.
What does Ásatrú theology have to tell us about end-of-life issues? How does it help us to understand our experiences as we care for those with growing cognitive issues and as we develop those issues ourselves?
As both musician and writer, I’m drawn to Odin as an embodiment of the creative force. As a practitioner of Ásatrú, I can’t support companies that steal the work of human artists to generate disposable dross.
Maybe it’s not such a great idea to turn to writers from 1,000, or 2,000, or 3,000 years before the United Nations publicly published the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for teachings on the universality of human rights.
Here is the lesson. Without positive action, comparative mythology is (at best) a dry academic amusement and (at worst) an exercise in colonialist cultural appropriation. Rather than taking from Hinduism and calling it Heathenry, I suggest that we learn from a closely related tradition that has much to teach us.