Reclaiming The Heidhrinn Heart: Full Circle and Facing Myself
The seed that would grow into Norse Witch: Reclaiming the Heidhrinn Heart was first planted one year ago: on April 12th, 2017, if I’m being precise. On that day, I first wrote the words which many of you recognize from the first 12 pages of my book:
No, I didn’t run up against the “you’re doing it wrong” mantra until I started spending a lot of time writing and creating art for other Heathens. Those who follow the Norse Tradition are an interesting mix of straight Historical Reconstructionists (“screencap of where it says that in the Eddas, or it didn’t happen, dude!”), Pagans with a Norse base (“I’m surprisingly okay with Unconfirmed Personal Gnosis”), Ceremonial Magickians who “dress up” their practice in strictly Norse trappings (“A little bit of Chaos Magick applied to 13th century Runic sigils is perfectly apropos”), and Brosatru Tagalongs (“Look at me, I’m a Viking!”), to say nothing of the Aryan Poster Children (“If your ancestors were not of white/Scandinavian descent, you shouldn’t be here. No, I don’t just mean in this group; I mean, like, on Earth…at all…”). Pardon me for the over-generalization there, but if you’ve ever even stuck your toe into an online Heathen group, you likely recognize all of the above. You probably have also had arguments with parties from at least one or more of these over-generalized groups in which they’ve patently told you “you’re doing it wrong”. (For the record, the last group on that list–the Aryan Poster Children–are the only ones who are actually “doing it wrong”.)
And those words were followed by these:
Face it: “you’re doing it wrong” is why most of us became Pagans in the first place! One too many hits with the “you’re doing it wrong, and will be eternally punished for having done so” schtick is the number one reason why most of us decided to divorce ourselves from mainstream Religion in the first place, whether that religion was of the Judeo-Christian variety, or something else. So why in the heck would that attitude be suddenly “okeydokey fine” and perfectly acceptable, simply because it’s all dressed up prettily in Pagan/Heathen clothing? World’s simplest answer: It’s not!
It’s still not okay. And my passionate stance on that subject is what lit the fire in me to endure the year that followed, in the process of composing Norse Witch: Reclaiming the Heidhrinn Heart. Luckily for me, that fire still burns bright enough to help me endure its aftermath. Because believe me, there has been an aftermath! Thing is, I fully expected that, too. In fact, I said so in the first few pages of the book:
“This book almost didn’t happen. Two-hundred-and-six pages in, I hit save one final time on my word processor, and shelved this project. On the outside, aloud, to other people, my excuse was that our impending move of house simply made things entirely too hectic to maintain my current writing schedule. But on the inside, in those quiet places where the brain curls up and hides just before attempting to drift off to sleep, the truth silently simmered: I was terrified.
Terrified: If I release this to the public, I will be crucified. Public scrutiny is a frightening prospect for any writer or artist, I suppose, and a fear of it, I would reckon, is common among our kind, but the brand of terror I am referring to here surpasses any such normal fears that are the bane of we artistic types. No, I had already paid regular visits to this particular lion’s den, and I knew not only the size of its teeth, but the pressure of its jaws….The prospect of publishing this book would not simply mean being politely patted on the head and told ‘you’re doing it wrong’; it was going to raise an outcry of ‘how dare you call yourself a Heathen at all?!’ And it would all happen very publicly, and it would be very, very ugly, before all was said and done. No, best to crawl back under the rock ‘neath which I’ve been living for the past twenty-four years, and salvage what little bit of dignity I have left.”
Except: I didn’t.
The book became a reality that I could hold in my proud little hands, and the initial feedback that I received was glowing and incredible and better than anything I had ever dared to dream. But then, just as I had feared, I received my first bad review, in which someone proudly proclaimed in my direction, yet again: “you’re doing it wrong“.
And, yes, initially, it came like a punch in the gut. I’ve always prided myself on being honest on this blog, and I refuse to start lying to you all now. But note one very important word in that first sentence: initially. That gut-punch indeed doubled me over, like a prize fighter in the ring, but it didn’t knock me down! Instead, it became fuel: that one bad review told me, conclusively, that I’m definitely doing something right! As I stated quite clearly in the book, my journey might not be everyone’s journey, but it is honestly mine, and if it helps others in even the remotest of ways to likewise find their paths up the mountain, then I’ve done what I set out to do. I know with conviction that my historical research is sound, my citations are iron-clad and thorough, and that I backed up every single thing that I presented as facts with proper anthropological foundations (to the best of my ability). Ultimately, that is all any author writing within this field can ask of themselves, and I am more than a wee bit stoked about how confident I feel in that.
In fact, as winter fades into spring, I can say that I am confident enough to write yet more books about what it means to be a practicing Norse Witch. Some of that is because for every one “you’re doing it wrong”, I’ve gotten three “Wow! This book is great”s. I’ve touched the lives and practices of other people, and that has profoundly touched me. The journey down this many-colored path has just begun! And I pray that many of you will continue to walk with me as, like Freyja searching for Her beloved Odh, I wander ever further seeking the magick within our Heidhrinn Hearts.
