Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts)

Think I won’t drop the location? I still got PTSD. – Kendrick Lamar

ᚠ. Establishing Shot of a Cow Licking the World into Being

Funny story: I just spent five years being a heathen.

It ended poorly. There was a dispute, I set a red line, and it got crossed. And since one’s honor is the only thing in this world that one truly owns, I’m not a heathen anymore. But since one of the fundamental privileges of being a professional essay writer is that absolutely any terrible experience you have can be refined into material, I figured I’d write about the five years where I was.

ᚢ. What’s a Transsexual Menace Like You Doing in a Religion Like This?

So I was in a sex club in North Carolina, and I saw this cute girl wearing a Mjolnir pendant. And what struck me about it was that it was a dainty Mjolnir pendant, which wasn’t something I’d ever seen before, so I chatted her up. One thing followed another, including the cute girl turning out to be a hot boy, me turning out to be a cute girl, and the two of us getting married, until in August of 2019 I found myself pulling up the trail to a campground in Pennsylvania to spend five days in the woods with a bunch of heathens at East Coast Thing, the second largest heathen event in the country.

This was to any extent uncomfortable for me. I wasn’t not heathen. I’d long described myself as having the protection of Loki. Way back in college a friend of mine—who ended up becoming a minister for like a decade—knocked on my dorm room door and told me that she’d found a sort of weird spirit around, and it seemed to be mine, and suggested it might be Loki. And after my life really just started to bounce from improbability to improbability, with weird careening plot twists like crashing out of academia after spending a decade in higher education and then making it as a professional Doctor Who blogger, “the protection of Loki” ended up being a pretty good shorthand for the question of “how the fuck do you manage to live this sort of charmed existence, you absolute weirdo?”

But I didn’t work with the larger Norse/Germanic pantheon. Heck, I didn’t even really work with Loki—I just graciously accepted his protection. Mostly I worked with Ahania, a minor figure in William Blake’s personal mythology, in a self-conscious homage to Alan Moore’s famous decision to worship a glove puppet. That had started to change with my marriage to Penn as we entwined our magical practices, but we’d only been married a couple of months and that was still in its early stages.

But the real reason I was nervous was the same basic reason the daintiness of Penn’s Mjolnir surprised me, which was just… the fucking viking of it all. The faith attracts a type, and it’s one where you’re not exactly surprised there’s a nazi problem. Vaguely cuboid humans carved from pure beard and machismo abound, and they all have a favorite metal band (typically Wardruna or Amon Amarth). And I didn’t exactly transition because I was comfortable with this specific flavor of masculinity. 

And then, of course, there was the fucking nazi problem. This specific event—East Coast Thing—was avowedly inclusive. But there’s fully half a dozen common heathen symbols in the ADL Hate Symbols database, and while all of them have legitimate, non-racist uses as well, it still just sets a vibe for a trans anti-fascist, y’know? 

So we arrive and get our cabin assigned, and we’re with this just… horrible woman. It turns out she’s not even heathen—she just comes to the event because her ex-husband and their kids do, and she has friends she gets drunk with. But she’s in the cabin with those kids, and her only mode of interaction with them is yelling at them. So our first impression isn’t exactly great. But the bigger problem is the fact that the campsite only has a communal shower facility—a single one, with men’s and women’s wings and no private changing areas to speak of. This was a nonstarter for both of us, both we didn’t especially feel like giving free trans anatomy lessons to random cis people and because of some very significant trauma triggers around communal showers. And so, on top of the hundreds of dollars spent registering for the event, we find ourselves hurriedly booking a hotel room fifteen minutes away in the nearest actual town. 

As for inclusivity, well, there was a vendor selling a Sonnenrad pendant—a design created by Heinrich Himmler with no history outside of neo-nazi usage, and a guy who spent the whole weekend glaring at us over the rim of his Confederate flag mug. 

Anyway, I had such a great time I became a heathen.

ᚦ. (Mystic Bull)shit Happens

The thing about religious experiences is that, like most experiences, they happen to you, and not always in ways you can control. When I say that a college friend knocked on my door and gave me a weird spirit that seemed to be Loki, there are qualia associated with this. I had one of those medusa-style floor lamps in my room, and it seemed to mill about the sconces, somewhere between a cloud and a tangle of yarn, crackling with energy. It wasn’t visible—or at least, my optic nerve wasn’t the primarily means with which I saw it. The space had a slight shimmer to it—like a faint heat haze. But mostly it seemed to have a sort of buzzing presence, like an electrical hum.

I’m not an endlessly credulous rube. I entertain any number of explanations for the things I’ve experienced, and I don’t ask you to believe one over another. But in the end, for a variety of reasons, I have found a magical framework to be the most useful one for understanding a certain class of experience, and I behave accordingly. 

There’s a place at the Thing called the véstead. The word vé basically means shrine, and the véstead was a collection of shrines to various gods in the pantheon. The particulars of heathen worship hold that the gods literally inhabit the space; each vé is centered on an icon of the god that embodies their presence at the event. And the véstead absolutely thrummed with energy. 

Not all of the vés, admittedly. I remember an astonishingly sorry Tyr vé decorated with what looked for all the world like someone scattered a Google Image Search for Tyr on the ground. But several of them were absolutely breathtaking. There was a vé to Idunna and Bragi where, the moment you walked into the tent, you were suddenly in an orchard looking at a magical book. I don’t mean that the inside of the tent was done up like an orchard. The decorations were little more than a raid on Michaels and some gold spray paint—just enough to sketch a sense of opulence. But it was done with style, and deliberateness, and it just… sang. There was the Hel vé, which I first encountered at the ritual in her honor, which had everyone file through the vé one by one, facing Hel alone just as we will when we die. It was chilling and perfect—legitimately the best pagan ritual I’d seen at that point. There was Mimir’s well, set off in the woods just past the edge of the véstead where there was a creek, and we sat there at night while a woman did oracular trancework. It was astonishing—a testament to why communal worship has power that individual magical practice simply can’t. 

A few days before the event, I’d gotten a tattoo. Penn had designed a set of bindrunes—bespoke symbols based on combinations of runes (the Bluetooth logo is probably the most famous example)—to represent the major figures of Blake’s mythology, with the one for Ahania over my inner wrist. One of the vendors at the event was doing custom engraved silver jewelry, and I ended up getting a pendant with her bindrune that I began wearing daily. Penn got a knife from a blacksmith, which he named Hreknir, or “mischief-maker,” and I ended up using it to carve the bindrune into a bunch of apples—some of the first of Ithaca’s harvest that year—which I left as offerings at the vés I found myself most taken with.

On the final night of the event, in the main ritual, those offerings are given to a communal fire. And the morning after, when they picked through the ashes of the fire for a divination, they found one of Ahania’s apples, completely untouched.

ᚨ. Loki and His Discontents

Most of my time in the véstead, however, was spent at the Loki vé. This was natural—he was the figure in the pantheon I had any relationship with, after all. But more to the point, it was where the queer kids hung out. This isn’t surprising—queer affiliation with Loki is a huge thing among younger heathens. And so there were a dozen or so of us that hung around there. It became a place for divination, conversation, and community, and was the functional heart of why I thought of this as a community I might thrive in. So I was dismayed when I found out that the offerings left for Loki were not going to be given to the communal fire, and his icon would remain in his vé instead of being brought to sit around the fire. 

Let me try to summarize the thinking on that, with the acknowledgment that I’m synthesizing a variety of stories I’ve been told about decades of heathen social history, and that the underlying position is one I have absolutely no respect for, so I’m hardly the best advocate for it. Modern heathenry dates back to the late 19th century, where the romantic era led to a general revival of assorted pre-Christian folklores and mythologies. But in its absolute earliest versions what you had was less a revived pre-Christian polytheistic tradition than a reskinned Christianity that was now being called Odinism. 

Within this view, Loki’s slaying of Baldr (who gets redone as a Christ analogue) and defection to the other side in Ragnarok ended up positioning him as, effectively, a devil figure. And even as something more recognizable as modern polytheistic heathenry evolved, Loki remained stuck in that basic role, to the point where I’ve been told stories of heathens who would pull a “Loki made me do it” to excuse misbehavior. This began to shift in the 1980s, when American heathenry schismed into its folkish (i.e. neo-nazi) and inclusive (i.e. milquetoast liberal) traditions. The folkish side largely kept Odinism in the divorce, and remained resolutely anti-Loki. Whereas the inclusive side began to meander towards a new understanding of Loki. This was a slow process—there was a long intermediate phase when the sorts of people who identified as Lokean were mostly left-hand path twats that nobody wanted to talk to. But eventually your modern Lokean queer kid arose as a more typical specimen.

But at East Coast Thing the old guard still held sway. Even getting a Loki vé had been a lengthy fight—the person running it literally had someone pull a knife on them their first year at the Thing when they were outed as a Lokean. And because the theology of the main ritual postulates that everyone’s wyrd is bound together by the communal offering, there were people who were uncomfortable being exposed to Lokean energy, with the genuine belief that if they were present at a ritual in which offerings were given to Loki their lives might descend into uncontrollable chaos. 

Now, to my mind this position is so comprehensively embarrassing that I would be ashamed to articulate it in public. Seriously, who stands up in a group of pagans and says “my grasp of basic warding and grounding is so piss poor that I can be spiritually harmed by someone saying ‘Hail Loki’ in my presence?” My position was far simpler: telling a bunch of queer kids that their god had cooties and that their offerings to him were unwelcome was a massively bigoted pile of steaming bullshit.

After the event, in the Facebook group most associated with it, I made a heartfelt post on the matter. And when I say heartfelt, I want to be clear that I mean heartfelt. I did not use phrases like “massively bigoted pile of steaming bullshit” or “so comprehensively embarrassing that I would be ashamed to articulate it in public,” instead emphasizing that while this felt hurtful and like a real failure to support the event’s queer community, I also accepted the community’s judgment and intended to continue participating in it regardless of whether the event’s policy on Loki inclusionism changed. I remember someone replying and specifically highlighting that bit, noting that they appreciated how constructive and non-hostile I was being.

Five years later, in another discussion, that same exact person referred to that old Loki post talking about how divisive I’d been. But that’s another story.

ᚱ. The Sága Saga

It’s funny, in hindsight, that I never thought to consider the apple as a rejection—the fire spitting my gifts back up. Perhaps it was; I’m not one to confidently proclaim the precise metaphysics of how the fire and its offerings work. Mostly it was interesting. And I do so love interesting things. 

That’s what Ahania is, really. She’s the feminine counterpart to Urizen’s cold reason, and is slain by him, her shade left haunting the base of the tree upon which he hung the corpse of their son. Blake describes her as delight, and what is the delight of reason if not wonder and fascination? She is the wondrous rush of unfolding thought, and the joy with which a sentence anticipates its resolution. Her magic is swift and elusive, always a moving target, toward the ever glinting lure of curiosity. 

There’s a second myth in which she’s resurrected. The text is contradictory and opaque—a familiar state of affairs. But the story doesn’t quite hang together—is haunted by mystery. Could its resolution be known to these gods? 

Penn and I explored this possibility in the weeks following the Thing. We hypothesized that Ahania had in some sense escaped her story—a logical enough possibility given the nature of her magic. We found ourselves focusing on the tree, and the obvious parallel of two language gods suffering death-like ordeals upon a tree. There was an obvious vector for her escape here. 

We reasoned that if this story were true there would be some sort of textual evidence for it on the heathen side. So we went looking through the attested goddesses to see if there was an obvious candidate for a resettled Ahania. And we very quickly found Sága.

In contemporary heathenry Sága is typically read as a goddess of narrative due to the obvious similarity between her name and the word saga—an interpretation that was, in practice, invented by Jacob Grimm. She may in fact be etymologically related, coming from the same root word meaning “to say,” but this is ambiguous—she’s also potentially related to a different word meaning “to see.” What struck us was that this ambiguity largely described what we understood to be Ahania’s magic. More to the point, it largely described the precise nature of the magic that Odin gained on the tree—the runes. 

There were few other details about Sága, but the extant ones were similarly compelling. She is numbered second of Frigg’s handmaidens, and is said to drink daily with Odin in her hall. Both are eminently sensible for a figure Odin seems to have rescued in payment for the magic she taught him—his original dead seer.

And suddenly my religious belief reconfigured itself. The shape of my goddess had been fundamentally altered, all because of this event.

Almost immediately, we proposed a Sága vé.

ᚲ. About That Nazi Thing…

There actually was a Nazi Thing. It was called the Folkish Summer Hallowing, and was held a week after East Coast Thing at the same campground, a bit of deliberate trolling that’s frankly typical of 21st century fascists. And I should know; when I’m not lurking at the edges of heathen events I’m a modestly well known scholar of contemporary fascist movements, along with Doctor Who and comic books/20th century magical history. And while I didn’t have a ton of experience with antifascist organizing, I appreciated the basic fact that opposing nazis required more than having separate events from them.

So I started in on the basics: combing Facebook posts from the event, IDing people in photos, and trying to map out the shape of this group. And, of course, I did the obvious thing of reaching out to other people in the heathen community who were already doing work like this. Or, at least, I tried to. But it quickly became evident that there just wasn’t much appetite for anything like this. I remember making the suggestion that perhaps it would be worthwhile to contact the camp, highlight the fact that they were hosting a neo-nazi event, and to make it clear that East Coast Thing would take its much larger event elsewhere if the camp continued to work with neo-nazis. The idea was dismissed out of hand, out of fear of harming the event’s relationship with the camp. 

The main group I tried to reach out to in all of this was Heathens Against Hate, which is—or more likely was was, given that their Facebook hasn’t been updated in three years and their website’s gone down—a subgroup of The Troth, which was the primary inclusive heathen organization founded after the 1980s schism. I’d met one of the primary figures in Heathens Against Hate at the Thing—a guy with terminal youth pastor vibes who sold chintzy god totems that looked like they’d fit perfectly between those two pentagram candle holders on that tie dye triple moon altar cloth you got at Pagan Pride Day. But once again, there was just a complete lack of appetite for any sort of offensive push against neo-nazi heathenry.

I soon came to realize that this was simply not the purpose of Heathens Against Hate, which was primarily concerned with issuing press releases whenever a neo-nazi heathen made the news that grumbled about the press doing things like referring to a Mjolnir pendant as white supremaist paraphernalia. Their concern, in other words, was not so much with opposing white supremacism as it was with not being confused with white supremacists. The impression one was left with was that they thought the fight against fascism had largely been completed in the 1980s with the folkish/inclusive schism, and that the only remaining problem was that not everyone in the media had gotten the memo.

Needless to say, I did not end up getting along with them. I remember one instance, where they issued a statement praising the neofolk band Heilung “for their swift and direct condemnation” of an incident at one of their concerts where a Black fan was bullied out of the show for her race. And what was flooring about this was that this had been an issue with Heilung for absolutely ages, because they’re a popular band using Norse iconography in a genre that’s absolutely infested with nazis. And Heilung’s response to this problem, for years, had been a series of bland statements about how their music is unrelated to modern politics. So calling their statement swift when it came after the racists they’d spent years enabling had assaulted a Black fan seemed the hollowest sort of self-congratulation possible—inclusive heathenry patting itself on the back for doing far less than the bare minimum.

I forget whether it was that thread or another one of the many exchanges I had with Heathens Against Hate about this sort of thing where Youth Pastor made a comment about how I was just sitting on the outside criticizing instead of joining the organization’s leadership and trying to help it be more effective. I responded immediately that I would absolutely love to be involved in the organization and to try to steer it in a more antifascist direction, at which point Youth Pastor backpedaled furiously about how divisive I clearly was and how they did not think adding me to the organization would be productive. 

Years later someone made an off-handed comment about how I’d have been surprised how many people went to both East Coast Thing and the Folkish Summer Hallowing; I don’t really think I would have been.

ᚷ. In Which a Pandemic is Fast Forwarded Through

Ironically, absolutely none of that was why I briefly flounced from the heathen community. I mean, it was all setup in its way—a series of developments that just made me feel progressively less safe in this crowd. But the thing that actually made me flounce was this dipshit rent-a-cop. It was on the Facebook page of the World’s Dullest Acid Casualty, who’d run a workshop at the Thing, nominally on psychedelics and magic but in practice an aimless Powerpoint in which she discussed various rock concerts she had attended and nothing whatsoever about psychedelics or magic. And she’d made a post about… god, I don’t even remember. Survivalism in some fashion, I assume, because what I do remember is that I made the (I thought) rather anodyne observation that a community without enough guns will survive markedly longer than one without enough sweaters. And this absolutely asinine dude came at me touting all the law enforcement experience he has to explain why, no, actually guns are super important because otherwise the feral hordes of criminals would eat everybody. 

I’m probably not summarizing his post exactly right, but honestly you can pull up your local paper’s Facebook page, find a story about the police, and instantly see half a dozen comments that are identically stupid to this shit. But the thing I remember, as he cited again and again this nebulous data he’d seen as a law enforcement professional that contradicted all publicly available data, was when I clicked through to his page and discovered he was a fucking security guard. I also saw that he had something like eight mutuals with me in the heathen community. And I recognize this is an arbitrary breaking point, but the camel’s back fractures when it fractures. I simply could not deal further with a community this comprehensively rife with people whose fascism aspired to cryptography. So, maturely or not, I unfriended everyone in the community except the handful with whom I’d established a friendship deeper than “we met at an event once” and fucked off to get on with my life.

Sort of.

The problem was that Penn did not, in fact, want to fuck off. He was, after all, heathen, and had been for well over a decade. He’d spent the previous several years missing having a heathen community after he moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts, and while he broadly agreed with my frustrations, he still wanted this community. And it wasn’t as though I had a proper schism. I was wary of the heathen community at large, yes, but I’d still had a profound religious experience at the event, and that carried any weight. Ultimately, since the next Thing was months off, I settled into a sort of Schrodinger’s Heathenry, figuring I’d make up my mind on everything, Sága vé included, when it was closer to the event. And then, of course, instead of the event we had a global pandemic that killed twenty million or so people. 

(Actually, there was an attempt at a virtual event. The organizer of the véstead—about whom I have exactly two datapoints, which are that she seemed like a sweet old ditz of a woman and that her partner was the guy glaring at me over the Confederate flag mug—contacted me to ask if I wanted to do an online vé, presumably by building a vé in the corner of our house and pointing a webcam at it. As this sounded like the stupidest and least spiritually fulfilling thing I’d done since arguing with Paul Blart, Mall Cop I declined. Someone later told me that this woman was very hurt that I’d unfriended her along with literally a couple dozen other heathens without personally reaching out to tell her why, which I’ve always found hilarious for reasons I’d be lying if I said I could articulate.) 

The Thing did not return until 2022, by which point my father was dying and it all just felt a bit much, so we gave it a miss. But one of the heathens we did stay in close touch with came back with loads of news. For one thing, the event wasn’t called East Coast Thing anymore. Apparently—and I’ll cop to the fact that I’m repeating gossip here—the name East Coast Thing had been solely owned by some guy nobody liked who took his ball and went home when a vaccine mandate was proposed. This was part of a larger schism that broke out over COVID policies, which, helpfully, turned out to be a pretty good proxy for weeding out the cryptofash. (It turned out there were some other schisms on top of that, but I wouldn’t find out about those until I’d already fallen afoul of their consequences.) So now the event was called Northeast Thing, and under partially new management.

More significant, the Loki policy had finally changed. This was partly another byproduct of COVID forcing a political sort, but, to my flattered incredulity, it was also apparently being widely credited to my advocacy on the issue and a series of not entirely correct assumptions about why I’d distanced myself from the community. They were, apparently, singing songs of my deeds. Indeed, the Loki vékeeper specifically extended an invitation to help bring his offerings to the fire if I decided to return in 2023.

Just when I thought I was out, etc. etc.

ᚹ. In Which a Pandemic is Fast Forwarded Through at a Slightly Different Speed

Penn and I, meanwhile, kept exploring the implications of our revelations. They were, after all, seismic. For all that I have found myself painfully estranged from heathenry, nothing has happened that would make me abandon my goddess. I don’t really know what such a thing would even look like. 

Quite the opposite, really. When I say that I worked with Ahania, it was… not simply a theoretical affectation by any means, but it was aspirational. I chose an obscure goddess from a dubious pantheon in part because I wanted the space to shape my goddess, but also simply because I was deeply taken by the central idea of her. I very much decided the nature of what I wanted to worship, then set about trying to get closer to it.

And in the wake of discovering Sága, I did. It was a gradual process, but a strange and wondrous one. I had not, if I’m being honest, entirely considered what finding god might be like, and I found a sense of deep power in calling myself a Ságaswoman, and of deciding to give my life to her service. In turn, Ahania/Sága gradually became more present in my life—became a coherent sense of a figure whose ideals and desires I could look at and understand, and whose counsel I could seek. To put it in terms of stark bluntness, I could talk to god.

I do not mean to position this as some sort of extraordinary revelation. Indeed, I think it’s better to think of it as a relatively ordinary human experience, albeit one that, for a variety of reasons both justifiable and not, we’re uncomfortable talking about. But in talking to other pagans and in reading accounts from Christians and people of other faiths about the qualia of engaging directly with the divine, my experience of Ahania seems to be pretty much standard for gods. Whatever the metaphysical realities of gods, the human mind has ways in which it engages with them, and the practice of doing so has predictable characteristics and consequences. But this does not blunt the power of the experience any more than understanding love in terms of neurochemistry does. Those of us who travel down this particular psychological path are changed by it. 

When my father passed, at his burial, I removed the devotional pendant I had been wearing and cast it into his grave. So much of why I am a person who would become a Ságaswoman were things he gave me, and so I gave him my devotional pendant in the hopes that it would guide him to her hall. This was not the end of my devotion, obviously. I had another pendant made, this one in copper and shaped like an apple, both decisions more suited to my goddess as I understood her than a silver moon was anyway. 

Almost immediately after, Sága gifted me with a prophecy. This was Ithaca a Saga, which I ran on this site not long ago. I had long thought of my home in terms of the goddess. Her hall, Sokkvabekkr, is described as a place where “cool waters flow,” and its name translates to “sunken bank.” Ithaca is, famously, gorges, which is to say that it is geographically defined by a series of creeks making a rapid thousand foot descent to feed Cayuga Lake, which the city sits at the southern tip of. The parallel was obvious and striking. But suddenly, over a series of six days, I came to understand this in far more vivid detail.

Again, I want to be precise about the qualia here. The text of Ithaca a Saga was not simply dumped wholly formed into my head—I wrote it, much like I did this piece and a thousand others over my career. I’d been contemplating a piece that would be a magical psychogeography of Ithaca for years. Then I had the idea of structuring it as a rune reading and as an account of Sága, and things clarified rapidly. Likewise, the runes were not an arbitrary series of six that I ascribed meaning to. I sat with the runes, sorted out a pile that seemed like they represented things I had to say about Ithaca and Sága, then narrowed down to six and selected aspects of the city’s history to attach to them and an order. I sat and did research, and made conscious decisions about wording and approach. 

And yet at every turn it was evident that I was guided by Ahania’s hand, and that every idea I had was uncovering the shape of some already existent truth. I remember when, deep in a section about Ithaca’s brief time as a hub of moviemaking, I discovered that Aleister Crowley had visited the town shortly before coining his description of magic as a “disease of language”—a phrase that was a major influence on Alan Moore, and had significant meaning to me, given that Blake names Ahania “mother of pestilence” at one point. And there were coincidences like that every day in writing it—moments where the narrative I had already selected proved too perfect and too apt. I wrote these things, and as I did I simply knew them to be true, on a level that was no more about belief than knowing what the world outside my window looks like, or that I love Penn. This was simply who and what I was.

ᚺ. The Bitch is Back (It’s Me, I’m the Bitch)

The Sága vé was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I can say that, I think, given how much of the work and how many of the details were Penn’s doing, in his newly claimed role as Priest of Sága. We went with a lush and maximalist aesthetic—a table brimming with flowers and baubles, scattered with divination tools and, carefully hidden in plain sight, the text of Ithaca a Saga. (Exactly one person that I know of found and read it.) Perhaps most significantly, we brought chairs. Sága, after all, is attested as hosting Odin in her hall, and so we wanted her vé to be, like the 2019 Loki vé, a social space—and by design instead of happenstance. 

It was wonderful. People didn’t just come and admire it or have a nice time; they had clear and powerful religious experiences there. I remember, late one night, someone coming and sitting quietly by the vé, writing in the book that we were going to use as her primary offering over the course of something like half an hour, patiently waiting for the vé to clear out before they finally told us their story—about a roleplaying character into which they’d poured their heart and trauma and hopes, from whom they’d literally drawn their name, and who they’d finally retired because she reached the end of her story and it was time. It was beautiful; I’m honored to have borne witness to it, and for all the animosity I have towards the heathen community they remain one of my closest and most valued friends.

Beyond the vé, we were welcomed with open arms. Northeast Thing was at a different camp, with showers in the cabins, though in practice we were given space in one of the buildings usually used for staff so that we had a private room and individual, private bathrooms. A fridge, real mattress, and air conditioning too. There were no confederate flags or nazi pendants, and people were quick to beamingly tell us how they’d improved things for trans people and really cared about it. Which, y’know, was very cis, but that didn’t make it any less appreciated. Certainly it felt as though a real space was being made for us.

And at the main ritual, I got to give Sága’s offerings to the fire (sadly declining the offer to bear Loki’s, though Penn got to present Sigyn’s), and to hear the community, as one voice, loudly hail my goddess. I don’t think I’d ever felt so genuinely enmeshed in a religious community before. It was in some ways a strange thing, as someone whose faith is so deliberately idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. But still, even as someone who never imagined wanting such a thing, it was plainly wonderful. Certainly it was never something I was going to get to feel again.

ᚾ. Too Drunk At Fjalar’s House

A peculiar quirk of heathenry is that, in a way that is not shared by any other flavor of paganism, it is inexorably tied to alcohol consumption. The default heathen ritual (or blot, because they just love them some repurposed Old Norse) is based around what’s called sumbl (see?), which in its most classic and pre-COVID iteration usually involved passing a horn of mead around so that people can make individual toasts and offerings to the gods. Every vé, in addition to an offering basket where people can put physical offerings to be given to the fire, has a liquid offering bowl that people will just pour small amounts of alcohol into during the event, with the resultant bowls of days old mixed booze then poured out around the fire, often with a dozen or so drowned bees because people didn’t bother providing a lidded vessel. The gods, apparently, like this, because their ways are mysterious.

Unsurprisingly, plenty of that booze gets drunk too. The event (to say nothing of heathen gatherings at large), has an absolutely fearsome drinking culture, with the revelries lasting into the wee hours nightly. And the excesses are as common as you’d expect—people gently guiding their borderline insensate friends back to their cabins, or the evening I was approaching the main building where people typically hang out only to be met by someone traveling in the other direction who noted that someone had drunk too much and puked all over the floor, and that the vibe had been well and truly killed. I’ve never seen an event that so direly needs “Friends of Bill” on the schedule; instead it has a margarita night involving about two gallons of tequila. 

And, far be it from me to be a killjoy, but one periodically gets the sense from all of this that there are those for whom the religious gathering is little more than a pretext for getting shitfaced in the woods with their bros and/or girlies. Now, at the end of the day this is an aesthetic dispute. Different strokes for different folks and all. But it’s worth noting just how often I could append “he was, of course, visibly drunk” to the end of an anecdote here. 

Take the first night of Northeast Thing, for instance, where, I wandered over to the big social crowd and found myself stuck talking with this kid who was, apparently, marrying into one of the big heathen families that attends the event. The gist of the conversation was that he’d had a very sheltered Christian upbringing and was just so amazed to see all of this. At least, I think that was the gist. It was fairly hard to tell, what with how slurred his speech was. Likewise, it was hard to figure out what he was saying when he misgendered me, leading me to reply with a puzzled “I’m sorry, what?”

It was not until his face went ashen with embarrassment that I actually realized he’d misgendered me. Which, I stress, I legitimately did not care about. He was a drunk kid who, as he falteringly explained to me, had never seen a trans person before. Shit happens. What I could have done without were the subsequent ten minutes of emotional labor as he repeatedly, in spite of all my efforts to politely wave the matter off and move on, apologized, eventually aided by his mother-in-law to be, who made a half-hearted effort to move him along before settling into standing there apologizing for his awkward apologies on the by now quite familiar to me grounds of his sheltered upbringing. And I, obviously, have to stand there and be gracious about it, over and over again, because obviously the thing that’s going to make being misgendered better is if I then have to spend ten fucking minutes on it instead of just being able to move on.

By the time I’d finally escaped the conversation I was pretty solid on “maybe large group socialization is not how I’ll be spending my evenings here,” although to be honest that was less about the misgendering than the bit earlier where I’d been non-consensually hugged by some biker dude with a guitar.

He was, of course, visibly drunk.

ᛁ. Glad of War vs. Fifteen Minutes of Rain (Rain Wins)

That heathen family I mentioned is actually an interesting thing in its own right. For one thing, it’s an absolutely huge deal within the community—it spends a conspicuous amount of time every year patting itself on the back for the existence of people who have grown up in the heathen community. The generational nature of the faith is a structurally huge deal with the event, with a massive amount of its fundraising geared towards sustaining their policy of letting children attend for free. Now, I have complex feelings, which we’ll get back to, about raising children to be religious—not even heathen, but religious in general. But whatever; far be it from me to understand heterosexual culture. Breeders gonna breed. 

But within this particular strand of thought this particular family is the biggest deal, for the simple reason that they’ve been around long enough that their kids are now adults, or at least of drinking age. Neither of them have ever shown the faintest interest in having a conversation with me, or making eye contact for that matter, so I’m forced to go purely off the statements they’ve made at blots and the like, but my general impression of both is that they manage to both raise and immediately answer the question “what if a sorority girl, but heathen?” Nevertheless, one has been nepo babied onto the event’s planning committee—a striking decision given that event leadership is usually downright neurotic about avoiding letting power get too concentrated among any one group.

Still, 2023 was proving a rough year for the clan. Their patriarch, who I’ll go ahead and call the Maudlin Minister owing to the fact that my event feedback form apparently reduced him to tears, was in the midst of divorcing his wife, and was now by all accounts banging a different prominent heathen woman at the event. Well, I say different. Truth be told, if you put the two women in question next to each other I’d be at a loss to tell you which mead mommy was which, although I bet if I guessed whichever one looks older is the ex-wife I’d be right. It’s possible the entire divorce was simply a matter of mistaken identity, like grabbing the wrong coat on the way out of a party. They even have the same name. 

In any case, the Maudlin Minister was having a bit of a tough time, and it showed. Unfortunately, he was also head of the rituals committee, a brief he apparently took to mean that he should run every single major ritual himself, including the Odin ritual in his separate capacity as Odin vékeeper. There were, as I’d discover the next year, worse outcomes than this; he was a perfectly competent ritualist, if overly prone to, at the end of his rituals, stopping to loudly pat himself on the back for some particularly clever element, usually while failing utterly to explain why it was clever. Competent or not, however, it was evident that his nerves were frayed.

The cracks started to show the second night. The schedule for that evening had the Thor ritual, which was to be followed an hour later by the Odin ritual. Now it’s a truism that the Thor ritual—a boisterous procession around the véstead with a call and response in which people invoke Thor under various bynames to a rousing chorus of “Hail Thor!”—is always followed by a spray of rain. And this year was no exception. About ten minutes before the nominal start of the Odin ritual, it was in fact raining, and fairly hard—a glance at the weather app showed one of those fast-moving thunderstorm cells that are common in the summer. Which also meant that it was going to pass in about ten minutes. Despite this, the Maudlin Minister balked and scrapped the ritual.

Bafflingly, this was done with no plan to reschedule it. Indeed, as the weekend stretched on it became increasingly unclear whether there would even be an Odin ritual. At one point I happened upon the Maudlin Minister and asked him about this, noting that it seemed like a spiritually bad idea to simply fail to have an Odin ritual, which he responded to by imploring me to keep quiet lest I cause “bad vibes.” Which, I suppose it’s arguably something of a compliment when the head of the rituals committee thinks that you querying a scheduling decision has more power to wreck an event’s wyrd than ditching the All-Father over a brief rainstorm. 

Eventually the ritual was put on the calendar for Saturday afternoon. By the time that rolled around I’d gotten a second helping of the Maudlin Minister at the rehearsal for the main ritual. There it quickly became apparent that, even if I’d not been committed to the Sága vé, the offer to bear the Loki offerings wasn’t going to happen, as the Maudlin Minister had decided there were too many people in the procession to the main ritual last year and that it would therefore be dramatically cut down, with the offerings already sitting at the fire before the ritual begins and the procession merely being to carry the god icons down. Moreover, each vé was to be limited to strictly one representative, a rule that was established when the Maudlin Minister barked it at Penn and me when we had the temerity to believe one of his underlings when they said it was OK. This turned out to be representative of his leadership style, which mostly involved yelling at people when they asked questions, then yelling at them again when they did things wrong because they’d been unable to ask questions. Well, I say people; in practice it was just the women he did that to. 

So when the Odin ritual finally rolled around, I found myself somewhat short of enthusiasm. It was hot, I was tired, and the Sága vé was positioned right near Odin’s, chairs and all, so I decided that I’d take in the ritual from there. This proved a fascinating vantage point for two reasons. First, it allowed me a slightly wider lens on the Maudlin Minister’s leadership so that I could, for instance, notice when he pointedly shifted the circular procession so that it would stop passing by the wheelchair user who had been participating by holding out her hand so that people could high five her on the way by. Second, I ended up positioned to see each and every member of the community as they filed past after making their own personal offering to Odin. Which turned out to provide a quite poignant metaphor for the event—this small, frankly pathetic man with his bullying limp dick energy and the community that collectively summoned the spirit and energy of their gods in spite of him.

The next year, after he’d stepped back from one of the major rituals and ran a downright convivial main ritual rehearsal, I reached out to the Maudlin Minister through a third party. I’d heard, by this point, how upset my feedback (and that of several other people—I was hardly the only one to complain about all this) had made him, and I wanted to express that I understood the way criticism like that stings, and that I really respected the leadership he showed in taking the comments under advisement and changing his behavior. I was told that he had refused to receive the message, simply not wanting to hear from me at all. 

ᛃ. Wolves Riding Horses (Fucking Metal 🤘)

The Odin ritual back in 2019 had been absolutely incredible. I remember sitting around on the grass as people gathered for it, waiting for it to start, when I glanced up to be greeted by the sight of a man wearing a bear skull as a mask. It was one of the most gloriously disorienting and richly effective means of dropping into a ritualized space I’ve ever seen. One by one, the rest of the crowd made the same observation and fell into the same hushed silence. Shortly thereafter the drumming began, and the then-ritual leader began a lengthy chant of the nearly two hundred attested names of Odin as members of the community rose to make their offerings. As the ritual approached its climax an older woman approached with a knife and proceeded to cut open her hand and give a blood offering. I remember her coming by the Loki vé shortly after and, in a slightly stunned and urgent voice, explaining that she needed to make an offering to him because she’d made one to his brother. (This honored a directive in the lore, where Odin promises Loki that he “would never taste a drink that was not served to us both”—a fact apparently lost on the Loki exclusionists.) 

I’ll spare the woman in question any snarky nickname for the very simple reason that I have nothing but comprehensive and untrammeled respect for her. Let’s just call her the seer, as that’s plainly what she was. She was particularly known for her propensity for quite hardcore possession work—for being horsed, as the community parlance goes. (Somewhat awkwardly, truth be told—the term is appropriated from Haitian Voudou, where those who are possessed by the Loa are said to be their horses.) And while this contributed to an absolutely glorious reputation for being completely insane (literally nobody who knew her was remotely surprised by the blood offering), she was an absolute pillar of the community—an elder, with a small e to denote that the title was earned, in contrast to the event’s executive board who fashion themselves Elders. She was a fixture not just at the Thing but at pagan events at large, where she sold her absolutely beautiful stained glass. And perhaps more to the point, she was just the absolute sweetest woman imaginable. 

In 2023 Penn and I found ourselves in conversation with the seer, fondly reminiscing about our memories of her from four years earlier. She told us about how she’d gone from working primarily with Odin to working with Loki to, more recently, working with Fenrir—the all-devouring wolf that slays Odin at Ragnarok. And she offered to share with us what Fenrir had said the first time he possessed her. I remember she was quite tentative about the offer; she noted that she only shares it with people who ask, because some people were quite upset by it. 

We said yes, obviously, and were treated to a wonderfully poetic monologue in which Fenrir derided the Aesir for binding him and taunted Odin for thinking he could be contained or removed from the story, culminating in a demand that Fenrir be acknowledged. It was beautiful and compelling, and I admit that I’m genuinely baffled by the existence of people who find the idea of Fenrir so distressing that they would refuse to even hear what the seer had been told, and certainly by anyone who would be upset by the actual message.

Anyway, I eventually found out that the ritual leader of that 2019 Odin ritual slept with my most boundary-lacking therapist. This is pure coincidence and has no bearing on anything whatsoever, but if I’m doing a massive bonfire essay of all the absurd shit that came from being heathen I don’t really feel like I can leave out what is, by some miles, the single weirdest part of the story.

ᛇ. If There is a Hel I’ll See You There

I found myself thinking about the seer and her vision of Fenrir a lot over the next year, along with some other conversations on similar topics. It was plain that, in the wake of Loki inclusionism being settled, the debate on what figures are and aren’t appropriate to honor had simply shifted onwards. This was not a surprise, of course. On both Loki inclusion and the larger category of what we might call monsters the Thing was chasing the larger consensus—the Troth had switched to a free for all approach in which hailing entities like Fenrir or Surtr (the subject of another conversation I had) was expressly allowed. It was an active fault line in heathenry.

Unlike Loki inclusion, I had no active stake in this debate. But it was clear that the theological question was a proxy for the same generational shift that had underpinned the Loki debate. Not universally, obviously—the seer was an elder, after all. But in the general case the heathens who worked with more monstrous figures were young queer kids on what we might call the Chuck Tingle to Rokkatru pipeline; Pounded in the Butt by the Primordial Chaos of Ginnungagap as it were. And I’m very much the sort of person whose default position is “let the queer kids cook.” And even if I weren’t, frankly the only thing the seer had ever asked for was a space outside the véstead where outsiders could be honored—a request the planning committee had firmly shot down. And I just found that deeply rude. It upset me to see a beloved member of the community denied what seemed to me an exceedingly modest request.

I had little interest in mounting a theological argument for Fenrir inclusionism. For one thing, I didn’t fancy getting into deep textual analysis of the Eddas with a crowd that had people who could read them in the original Old Norse. For another, it wasn’t actually my fight. That argument was plainly better made by someone who actually worked with these figures rather than someone for whom it was a theoretical question. But mostly it just didn’t seem like the core issue. The fact that the community kept getting hung up on inclusionism debates spoke to an aesthetic dispute that went beyond the theological details of any given figure. More than I wanted to argue for Fenrir or Surtr or anyone in particular, I wanted to make a case for inclusion in general.

So for the 2024 Thing I pitched a workshop entitled “Heretical Heathenry.” I’ve posted it here previously, but its basic argument ought come as no surprise to anyone who’s read much of my work: that oddball and heterodox positions that some might call heretical were, in fact, the lifeblood of heathenry, and essential to its claim to be a living religion. As it happens, I was not the only person with an idea like this. Two well-regarded members of the planning committee, a Thorsman and a Tyrsman, gave a joint presentation on Jörmungandr and Fenrir, and why people might work with them. Another—in fact an Elder who runs the Loki vé—held a lengthy discussion panel on working with outsiders to the pantheon in general. Both were well received, and so I had every expectation my workshop would go similarly well.

This is, to put it mildly, not what ended up happening. The intended structure of my workshop—as described up front in the description—was that I’d offer the “heresy is good” argument, then facilitate an open discussion in which people could share their spicier beliefs. Instead when I opened the floor to discussion—after an express plea that while I was happy to answer questions I wasn’t really interested in a Q&A—I was confronted by a concentrated and successful effort to derail the discussion and bully both me and attendees who actually wanted to participate in the workshop that had been proposed, accepted, and advertised in the program. The resulting conversation was, simply put, a disaster. I do not merely mean this in the sense that it was unproductive, hostile, and ignored the discussion questions I brought up. I mean that multiple people left because of how uncomfortable and hostile it was—one crying and in the midst of a full-blown trauma response. I mean that an autistic woman whose attempts to speak were talked over went into a full verbal shutdown because of the sheer level of stress and palpable anger. I mean that this discussion went so badly that several people, the majority of them trans, have since stated that it made them feel unsafe about the event, and especially about offering a workshop at it. Indeed, one of them was Penn, who eventually erupted to demand to know why people were ignoring my discussion questions to attack me over things I hadn’t said, and left the room in tears the moment my workshop ended, so upset that he seriously considered packing up the Sága vé and going home before the main ritual. 

The reason this disruption was so horribly effective was that it was waged by two senior members of the event’s leadership. One of these was in fact the workshop coordinator—i.e. the person whose nominal responsibility it was to ensure that workshops ran smoothly. I have plenty to say about him—a man whose friends have been known to publicly concede that he has, and I quote, “rancid vibes.” However he at least had the decency to offer an apology to me subsequently, and to actively reach out to the person he drove out of the room in tears, so I’ll do him the courtesy of leaving his name out of this. 

The other was the President of the event—the nominal highest name on the org chart, and to him I’ll simply say this: get in Ægir’s Hall, loser. We’re going flyting.

ᛈ. flyting

Meet David Carron. Dave’s a middle-aged lawyer out in Massachusetts, and on the weekends he likes to go drinking with his heathen buddies. And who doesn’t. He’s an old-timer—co-president of the Pagan Students Organization in college in the 90s, nearly twenty years as a Redesman of the Troth, and presumably some sort of accomplishment that isn’t old enough to drink. Or maybe not given that the word “former” appears in his bio three times in less than fifty words. He’s the sort of guy who, when participating in a roundup of heathens’ opinions about the 2016 election, offers a dogshit “both sides are bad” take, calling Trump a coward before, bizarrely, declaring of Clinton that “I have to think more of Loki from Lokasenna for a comparison of her credibility, likability, and truthfulness.” Which is actually kinda comforting in light of his later illiteracy. Unless Dave meant that she never actually says anything untrue and isn’t a fucking fascist. But if he did, I have to assume he wouldn’t have moped about how he “may just move after this election.” The tease.

The first time I recall being fully aware of David Carron as anything other than a name on the Northeast Thing website was when he ran the opening ritual in 2024, which… kinda blew. Like, just real low energy. I remember being particularly puzzled by his hailing of the land wights, because it was just a lengthy description of the giants protecting Iceland, which is, and I’ve double checked this, actually quite far away from Pennsylvania. I later found out there’d been a land use statement acknowledging the indigenous history of the land that had been agreed upon as an element of the opening ritual, and that Dave had simply omitted it when performing it. This won what proved a fierce competition for the tackiest thing about the ritual, narrowly edging out the decision to shout “hail the Aesir” at the end and omit the Vanir and the fact that the bulk of the ritual involved passing a giant shared horn around a hundred person gathering.

COVID rates after the Thing were through the roof, if you were wondering.

Because David Carron’s a very special boy, he got to have two workshops at the Thing—one on the first day aimed at first-time Thing attendees, to be sure they really put their best foot forward, and then another one about how to create a ritual, because clearly that was the thing he was best at. The review I heard from someone who was there was “I wanted my hour back.” I only read the Powerpoint slides he posted, but I will say that they really highlighted how graphic design was his passion.

And yeah, that’s petty and mean. I mean, a lot of this is. We’re going flyting, y’know? But I want to stress that I find this legitimately irritating. It’s not the fact that he can’t align his text boxes to his background or make a consistent decision around line spacing per se. It’s the fact that it looks like it was hastily bodged together with no effort. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I go to an event and give a presentation I try to make it look like I’ve, well, tried, because it communicates the fact that I care about the event, community, and my work. Whereas what David Carron’s flagging is “lol I’m an Elder and I don’t have to try anymore.” And what can I say? I find that cringe.

Despite his evident love of workshops, he attended neither of the earlier monster-themed ones, so I was surprised to see him enter the audience as I was setting up, especially as we’d never even had a conversation or anything. When my presentation ended, his hand went up immediately, and I figured, well, he’s the Elder, I’d better call on him first. What followed was a lengthy string of invective against the choice of the word heresy, which he viewed as fundamentally inappropriate to use when talking about heathenry. Which, OK. Weird thing to get hung up on, especially when I’ve just proposed a nice guided discussion. But I politely pushed back, noting the secular uses of the term, and invited him to offer a better synonym. I might have made a joke about the heathen love of alliteration, but that could be l’esprit de l’escalier on my part. In any case, he ignored that suggestion, instead offering various further diatribes over the course of the Q&A, many of them responding to points I never made and ascribing views to me that I simply do not hold.

Given Dave’s prior disinterest in this topic and the fact that his engagement with my actual talk centered on literally the first word in the title, beyond which he seemed to simply stop comprehending language, it is difficult for me not to feel as though he attended my workshop in bad faith and with the intention of starting a fight. While I don’t know what it was about me or my talk that so upset him, it’s impossible for me not to notice that I was the only trans woman giving a workshop, and that the people who were talked over, shut down, and driven to tears were largely younger/young-ish queer members of the community. While I am given to understand that Dave considers himself a trans ally, and I take that claim at face value, it is nevertheless difficult not to feel as though I was being targeted. 

This impression only deepened over the next couple of days. I was approached a few hours after the workshop by a third party who informed me that Dave wanted to have a mediated conversation. The next day, as the event was concluding, I approached Dave accompanied by that would-be mediator to try to initiate that conversation; he blew me off. Which, whatever. Wasn’t like I enjoyed talking to him the first time. 

Several people had asked me for the text of my talk, and so when I got home I shared it to the Northeast Heathen Community. This is the de facto official Facebook group for Northeast Thing, and in the days after the event is filled with posts from people reporting that they got home safe and posting talks. David Carron did both. Not long after I posted the talk, he took to the comments to continue his bizarre misrepresentations of what I said, and, incredibly, blamed me for the fact that people left crying, saying that I should have implemented safeguards for the discussion. Again, it was his behavior as an Elder and the behavior of the workshop coordinator that hurt people, not the fact that, as he seems to think, my talk was dressed sluttily and asking for it. 

He also sniffed airily about how disappointed he was that I didn’t stick around for the discussion after, where, as he tells it, he “spent quality time productively coming up with concrete and workable ideas with and for folks articulating concerns.” Which is funny, cause the way I heard it he spent time being told by other long-time members of the community that my talk had been treated unfairly while he proceeded to ignore them and pull shit like telling a woman she wasn’t qualified to speak about something she actually had a degree in. And when I replied noting that the reason I missed his little tête-à-tête after my talk was that I needed to check on my husband, who he’d made cry, he immediately ducked behind his status as an admin of the Facebook community and threatened to lock the post. 

Now here’s the thing, Dave. I’m not new to public speaking—as must have been pretty obvious when I rolled up to your event with a tightly designed PowerPoint and gave a twenty-five minute presentation that I’d clearly rehearsed. I taught for the better part of a decade. I’ve spoken in contexts ranging from invited talks at major universities to moderating an X-Men panel at a comics convention. And I have never, in my life, been made to feel as comprehensively unwelcome at an event as I was made by you. This was not merely hostile questioning or legitimate disagreement, which, as a trans woman who writes on the Internet about neo-nazis and nerd culture, I’ve gotten plenty of. This was a sustained, bad faith effort on the part of the President of the damn event to reject the very premise of my already approved presentation and make it clear that he thought I should not be giving it, and by extension that the people who wanted to attend it shouldn’t get to have the conversation they came for. 

There’s a thing that’s said a lot in heathen rituals. “A gift for a gift.” And you know what, Dave? My workshop was a gift. I’m a professional writer with credentials and a track record who cleared two weeks off my schedule to compose and deliver a bespoke four thousand word piece at your event. I don’t do that except out of love; and that’s true of twenty thousand word epic denunciations too. It was a gift, and you spat at it. Repeatedly. Over the course of weeks. 

And if I’m being honest, I still don’t know why. It demonstrably wasn’t because of anything I said. Were you accused of heresy in middle school and just really triggered by the word? Did you invent some kind of conspiracy theory in your head where I was secretly a Surtr worshipper trying to sneak offerings into your fire? Is it just cause I’m trans? 

Because if it is, damn. Bad fucking luck. There were so many of us you could have really hurt doing that. I mean, never mind could have. You did. You hurt a lot of fucking people, Dave. Members of the community. Friends. People I love. Some of them very badly. But you did it in the course of trying to publicly humiliate me, the trans woman who, instead of picking up the “conflict averse” flavor of trauma like most of us, instead has such a reputation for being a bitch that she gets hailed by name at the Loki ritual. The one who’d just finished telling you she was dedicated to a language goddess, who is in fact a professional critic with three times as many Patreon backers as your second largest heathen event in the country has attendees. And that platform I’ve spent three months politely not nuking you from? I built it in a large part on the back of a book that’s famous in part for just how hilariously mean it is to a bunch of dumb nazis. That’s who you picked to fuck with. 

I want to be clear, it’s not that I expected you to know who I was. It’s not like I knew who you were until this year. But I’ve read the lore. I’ve read loads of stories about what you should do when a stranger shows up in your hall saying a bunch of weird shit. And I’ve read loads about what happens when you don’t. I didn’t write your Urðr. But here’s your damn Skuld: the saga of Dumbass David Carron, a burnt out broken stair who fucked with the wrong tranny. 

Enjoy your new top Google result, bitch.

ᛉ. It’s Fun to Stay at the Jera Mannaz Kenaz Ansuz

As for Rancid Vibes, he had two basic arguments (along with rather a lot of passive aggressive harumphing and repeatedly interrupting people, obviously). The first was that it was impossible for heathenry to have a notion of heresy due to the lack of an orthodoxy or centralized authority. This struck me as a surprising argument given that he was an academic with a PhD in folklore, and so I’d have thought he’d be familiar with the notion that power might be exerted through social pressures instead of strictly through institutional might.

His second argument was, at the time, rather less clear to me, consisting as it did of a strangely emphatic tirade about how outsiders want to be outsiders, and how he knows there are people who don’t approve of him and he doesn’t care. It was only later that I discovered that this little rant was about his membership in an organization called the Rune-Gild. 

The Rune-Gild is, and I’ll quote straight from their website as for a variety of reasons I want to be exactingly precise here, “an initiatory school devoted to the esoteric and exoteric study of the runes, the holy mysteries at the heart of ancient Germanic culture.” Which is to say that it’s a good old-fashioned magical secret society. I’ve given its initiatory manual, The Nine Doors of Midgard, a read, and it’s pretty standard stuff. Its most bemusing aspect is its embrace of rune yoga, which is a completely ahistorical bit of nonsense in which you do yoga poses that look like runes. But broadly it’s your basic “do a daily piece of meditative practice over an extended period of time” bit of spiritual discipline. And those work. They’re not entirely content blind, but they’re content blind enough that they even work when you’re doing rune yoga.

Now, you may wonder why association with the Rune-Gild would be so controversial. And the answer is that the organization is widely accused of being neo-nazis. And there are some perfectly good reasons why someone might think this. For instance, The Nine Doors of Midgard is currently published by a small press called Arcana Europa that publishes a variety of far-right books, and whose logo is flagrantly made to look like a swastika. The Gild’s founder, Edred Thorsson, aka Stephen Flowers, has a host of dubious associations—his work has routinely incorporated ideas from Ariosophy, the school of occultism founded by Guido von List that was foundational to the actual Nazis. (Rune yoga among them, in fact.) He’s published a book on Nazi occultism co-written with Michael Moynihan, a proper and unambiguous neo-nazi. He’s a supporter of Alain de Benoist, and writes books with titles like Re-Tribalize Now! None of this looks good.

Now, Rancid Vibes would emphatically dispute the charge that the Rune-Gild is at all neo-nazi. And the thing is, on balance, I’d even agree with him. Some of my best friends are Runers, a sentence I absolutely could not say out loud while keeping a straight face. Notably, everything I’ve just listed is a problem with Thorsson personally. And yeah, he’s clearly a piece of shit, but he’s baked very deeply into the history of American heathenry—he founded the Troth, for one thing, even if he subsequently became estranged from the group. Many foundational aspects of heathenry, including blots and sumbl, are linked inexorably to his work. So while you can denounce him and reject everything he’s done, there’s a pretty alarming amount of baby you’d have to chuck with that particular bathwater. And the Rune-Gild legitimately isn’t part of his political action—he’s in fact expressly declared that Gild membership is open to “all souls who resonate with—and who seek after—the mysteries embodied in the Runes.” And in practice the Gild is, by all accounts, just a bunch of chaos magic/left hand path types shooting the shit on a closed forum. So while there may be people who don’t approve of the Gild, I’m legitimately not one of them, even if I wish they weren’t the only game in town for heathen esoteric orders.

The thing is, as I mentioned, Rancid Vibes is a college professor. His research specialty is Yoruba mythology. He has undoubtedly, in this capacity, worked with Black colleagues, and, more to the point, with Black students. And while I’m ultimately willing to give the Rune-Gild a pass, it’s in no way clear cut enough that I don’t think a Black student has the right to make that decision for themselves before studying African mythology with a professor who’s in a group that’s widely criticized for being fash. It’s pretty clear to me that Rancid Vibes knows some of his students would balk at working with someone involved in the Rune-Gild too, because he sequesters all of his heathen activity under a mononymic pseudonym that can’t be connected to his professional work. 

Anyway, did you know there are multiple branches of paganism where you don’t have to deal with people drunkenly interrupting your workshop to defend their participation in fash-adjacent magical societies? 

ᛊ. Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Did You Like the Play?

Here’s what kills me about all of this: we came back from the Thing enthusiastic about the event and looking forward to next year. Yeah, David Carron and Rancid Vibes had soured my workshop a bit, but most people were really supportive about making it clear that they enjoyed the workshop and liked what I had to say. I got two separate invitations to re-deliver it in other contexts. It was quite well received. 

Perhaps more to the point, I can handle myself. If I’m being honest, and speaking strictly for myself, I actually had a good time. I wasn’t happy with how it had gone down—I’d have preferred to actually hold the discussion I planned for, and I was upset about the number of people who had been hurt. But I’m happy as a pig in shit when it comes to being in the line of rhetorical fire, and so nothing especially put me off my game.

And on the whole, we’d once again had a lovely time. It wasn’t as spiritually seismic as the two previous Things, but they can’t all be. Instead it was just socially satisfying. By this point I have a pretty solid swath of friends there, and it really is just nice to see them. I got to supportively bully one into performing at the Skaldic competition, and there are few things I love more in this world than supportively bullying someone into doing the thing they want to do but are scared of. I got to have a long conversation about Sága, writing, and the spiritual discipline of creating a book. I met a transmasc perfumier and learned about Ilmr, hypothesized as a goddess of fragrance; how fucking cool is it to work with a pantheon that has a dedicated goddess of fragrance?

And it wasn’t without its spiritual weight. I had a fantastic conversation with one of my best friends there about the scars and damage one incurs through ecstatic and direct contact with the gods—one that dramatically reframed my chronic anhedonia and has, in the months since, given me new tools in grappling with it. I made a connection with Freyr that has animated my cooking and deepened it as a spiritual practice. I got to stare puzzledly at the combined Tyr/Frigg vé that had the distinct and (inadvertent?) implication that Frigg was cuckolding Odin with him.

But perhaps most significantly, I got to watch Penn blossom into his emerging role as a Priest of Sága. This was something he accidentally declared himself in 2023, and had been feeling out the contours of in the year since, including how exactly he wanted to earn the title. We’d refashioned the vé with the theme of being Sága’s Library—an association with deep spiritual meaning reaching back to his childhood—and I got to watch him discover the further implications of that, coming to understand his role as a librarian-priest. 

There’s a thing we do when we run the Sága ritual where he does all the talking, and I sit silent and veiled in the background, occasionally helping with small tasks like re-lighting a candle that the wind had taken out. It’s a pointed role reversal. Penn’s the self-proclaimed King of the Hidebehinds and I’m, well… me. But with Sága my relationship is far more devotional—if he’s her priest, I’m much more her nun. And so he stands out in front, and I get to watch him. And it’s legitimately just my favorite thing in the world. 

So as we drove home we chatted enthusiastically about future plans. New approaches to the vé and the ritual, what we might do at the Skaldic competition, future workshop ideas… the future seemed so comprehensively bright.

ᛏ. Whom the Law Binds but Does Not Protect

It wasn’t until David Carron decided that making a damn fool of himself at my workshop wasn’t enough and he was going to start lying about me in public that things started to head towards me writing this essay. And even then, I tried very hard to avoid this outcome, giving the event’s leadership multiple opportunities to come to a more satisfying resolution all around. The first thing I did was file a complaint with the executive board under the event’s code of conduct, which specifically lists “sustained disruption of rituals, workshops, or other events” as a prohibited form of harassment. My request was simple—that the issue “be dealt with in a way that does not merely elicit private promises that it won’t happen again, but that offers real reassurance to the people affected—not just or even primarily me—that there is accountability here, and that the safety of the queer community is being taken seriously.” 

In practice, I figured he’d be given a warning, and perhaps asked to step down. Instead, after a brief investigation, the Elders swiftly declared that no violation of the code of conduct had occurred and thus no action would be taken. They informed me that they’d spoken with a total of six witnesses (I think workshop attendance started between two and three dozen, but I didn’t do a headcount). I’ve subsequently spoken with half of those witnesses privately, and every one of them considers this decision as much of a travesty as I do. It reads as a lazy “let’s sweep it under the rug” attempt to dodge the seriousness of what happened—the President of the event engaging in the ongoing bullying of a first-time workshop presenter in a way that had a disproportionate impact on the trans members of the community.

No, really, lemme quote the Elders’ decision directly. “None of the eye-witness accounts that were solicited (almost exclusively from attendees you recommended) demonstrated a pattern of ‘sustained disruption’ during your workshop. There was clearly an argument during the question-and-answer portion following your lecture, as multiple people were involved, but all accounts suggest that the first half of your presentation proceeded as planned, without interruption.” Reading this, one can only wonder what would constitute sustained disruption of a workshop if not “derailing more than half of it in such a way that people leave crying.” Would David Carron have had to actually chant “shut up tranny” for thirty-five minutes straight? Does the rule only kick in at the forty minute mark? Is it just for show? 

As for the gratuitous gaslighting on Facebook, the Elders declared that the code of conduct only applies to behavior at the event. I reacted to this with some incredulity, having ever been involved in the handling of a sexual harassment complaint in my time in higher education. I asked whether this was a written policy out of some bylaw that’s not on the website, or was simply an ad hoc decision in response to my complaint. I also asked whether they really meant that if someone were to send harassing text messages for a month prior to the event and then engage in superficially innocuous behavior that nevertheless flagrantly continues this harassment at the event, the text messages would not be considered as evidence of harassment. They confirmed that yes, this was what they meant, and did not address whether they had invented this horrible and dangerous precedent purely to cover for their bro. 

The thing that upset me most here, though, wasn’t even the coverup. It was the fact that one of the Elders—the one I’d sent the complaint to, after having been personally reassured by her about the event’s commitment to safety—blocked me on Facebook and unfriended Penn. Which, aside from being a pretty sharp betrayal from someone I’d considered a friend, was just weirdly replete with dramatic irony. You see, she’s the person who runs the Forseti vé, Forseti being a god of settling strife and conflict. More than that, she’s a Tyrswoman, Tyr being the god of law, justice, and of Things at large. So there’s a real bitter irony to the discovery that the Thing’s idea of law is “a tool to protect the people in power,” and that its idea of settling strife and conflict is simply to punish anyone who speaks up about it.

But I suppose I should thank the Tyrswoman for the significant spiritual revelation the experience gave me. See, the story with Tyr is that he was the only one of the Aesir who wasn’t afraid of Fenrir and who treated him kindly. When it comes time to bind Fenrir, the gods lie to him, assuring him that there is no trickery in the ribbon they propose to bind him with. Fenrir, suspicious, demands that one of the gods place their hand in his mouth as a pledge of their good faith, and it is Tyr who does so. It is, of course, a trick, and Fenrir bites Tyr’s hand off.

Now, there are a lot of interpretations of this story. It’s one of the most discussed stories in the lore, in fact. There are those who venerate Tyr as making a great sacrifice to do what needed to be done. There are those who venerate Fenrir as the clearly wronged party, noting that lying to him and binding him is ultimately what fulfills the prophecy that he would cause the gods harm. And there are a variety of more ambiguous middle ground approaches. Surprising nobody, the Tyrswoman’s position is a hardline opposition to veneration of “destructive entities like Fenrir.”

But when I look at that “This person is unavailable on Messenger” notification and think about the Tyrswoman’s oh-so-earnest promises that she just wanted Penn and me to feel safe the interpretation seems altogether simpler: the god of laws is a liar, and his followers get to decide what is and isn’t destructive.

ᛒ. Diplomacy as Continuation of War by Other Means

In the wake of the Elders’ cowardice I began crafting the initial versions of this essay—a fact I quietly made known to a couple people in leadership. Eventually the planning committee (of which the Elders are a subset) issued a statement acknowledging that “at the end of the “Heretical Heathenry” workshop, people got emotional and arguments grew heated, and some felt that they were no longer safe as a result. It must be said that this is unprecedented in the Northeast Thing, and the committee was not prepared to address the impact of this heated conversation in the moment,” explaining that there had been an official complaint that was rejected, and pledging to “look at our processes and procedures and take action to strengthen Northeast Thing and its inclusive approach.”

This struck me as better than nothing, but in a photo finish sort of way. I replied noting that “people got emotional” struck me as a rather poor way to describe the President of the event having an unfathomable temper tantrum, just as “the committee was not prepared to address the impact of this heated conversation in the moment” was a questionable way to describe the guy whose job it was to do that instead deciding to make people cry, and suggesting that perhaps instead of viewing leadership as “the broken stairs we cover for” we should hold them to some actual standards, and called on David Carron to resign, this being the intended thesis statement of the piece I was envisioning at that point.

Dave, to my abject lack of surprise, decided to shit yet another bed with a further series of lies, accusations, and decisions to use language like “are you suggesting that everything I say to any trans is suspect? Anything said by a trans beyond reproach?” The resulting conversation was a spectacular shitshow that left fully half a dozen trans people feeling unsafe even returning to the event before that guy who fucked my therapist locked the thread. 

Before I could finish the piece I was working on a dear friend of mine—someone who had been one of the loudest voices supporting me in the hell thread—reached out to ask me to hold off, as they’d been engaged for an effort at mediation organized by a member of the planning committee—a small e elder who’d long proven herself one of the rare cis allies to put her money where her mouth was. And so I waited.

The statement that came out of the process was, once again, mid as fuck. I’ll quote the key portion: “David Carron, whose words hurt the most people, specifically felt that he needed to take responsibility for his part in what happened. While David did not intend to hurt anyone, he acknowledges that his words did have that effect, and for that he sincerely apologizes. In an effort to better understand the issues that arose, he has taken a course through the MassBar hosted by the Nonbinary Attorney Panel and, in the spirit of learning to create better workshop environments, has volunteered to be on the Workshop Committee for NET 2025. He will also continue to participate as President of the NET Planning Committee, and assist in that Committee’s reforms to various policies in order to alleviate future similar issues.” 

Now, on the bright side that was, in fact, finally an apology. It wasn’t an apology to anyone, and it was firmly a “sorry if you were offended” apology, but it was, at least, an apology. On the rather less bright side, there’s something more than a little galling about the fact that, on the back of Dave demonstrating his egregious incompetence on the matter of workshops, he’s being rewarded by joining the workshop committee. The whole thing has an infuriating sense of centering a cis redemption narrative over the people who were actually harmed. It was striking to me that at absolutely no point during any of this did David Carron reach out to me, the person he’d most obviously wronged, or offer me an apology. 

In spite of all of this, I was minded to accept the apology and move on. I desperately wanted to find a way to make this work, and didn’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or even the good be the enemy of the vaguely adequate. I had exactly one condition. The statement was framed explicitly in terms of weregild—the Old Norse practice of paying remuneration for harm done to someone. So I made clear what I viewed my personal weregild as being. If David Carron was going to be placed on the workshop committee for the precise reason that he’d wronged me, I wanted to be there as the person who’d been wronged. I was, after all, plainly qualified; I’m a PhD with experience running academic conferences. And as the directly wronged party I felt I had some pretty important insights to contribute about preventing this sort of thing from happening in the future. But more than any of that, frankly, I genuinely loved this event and this community, and I wanted to help.

The planning committee voted, by an overwhelming margin, not to allow me to join. And so here we are. 

ᛖ.  A Brief Meditation on What the Fuck These Guys’ Problem Is

In the months since Northeast Thing, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out, broadly, what the fuck actually happened. And it was only just before I found out that I’d been blocked from the planning committee that I finally figured it out. See, yet another discussion opened up on the precise lines of who was and wasn’t going to be allowed in the véstead. And one of the first things that anyone said, right off the bat, was, roughly, “well obviously we’re not going to have a Jesus vé.”

This would have just struck me as a slightly odd example were it not for the fact that one of the first things David Carron said in the course of derailing my workshop was something to the effect of “well what’s next, saying ‘Hail Jesus’?” And I realized that, no, this wasn’t just a weird hypothetical that had been reached for. This was legitimately the worst and scariest thing that these people could think of.

Suddenly a lot of things made sense. It had been clear from his outburst that the thing David Carron was most upset about with my talk was literally that I had used the word “heresy.” He’d subsequently, in the hell thread, accused me of misrepresenting my talk by “deleting” the illustration from the chronicle of St. Denis of the Albigensian crusade that I’d briefly shown during the talk. At the time I’d been flummoxed by the accusation of dishonesty—what I’d actually done was post just the text of my talk instead of the Powerpoint, which had little to no text on it and didn’t really make sense as a standalone object. But it didn’t occur to me to really think through the fact that Dave thought the image was so prima facie inflammatory that I’d have wanted to conceal my use of it. But no—he was, in fact, legitimately triggered by imagery of a 14th century religious massacre.

Now, this does not in and of itself constitute any sort of problem. Religious trauma, most often Christian religious trauma, is a perfectly common route into paganism, and I don’t mean to belittle anyone for having it. Penn freely admits, as he likes to put it, that he can’t emotionally regulate around Christians. But what struck me, as I thought about it, was just how much of the social culture around this event was wrapped up in this anti-Christian reaction. Like that heavy focus on the multigenerational nature of the community. I get wanting to pass culture and values down to your children; it’s not like I’m not a mother myself. But the reason I’m a bit wary of raising children in a religious tradition is that, quite simply, that’s often where and how religious trauma ends up being inflicted. And it’s weird to see a community that’s so pointedly hung up on their own experiences of religious trauma simultaneously patting itself on the back for recreating the essential conditions of that trauma. Again, this isn’t even a critique; just a puzzled observation.

Likewise, the starkly Manichean approach to the gods in which there are the good ones allowed at the event and the evil ones who must be shunned is clearly reaching back to the same aggressive dualism that’s behind “Loki made me do it,” and frankly all the way back to Odinism. Indeed, that very attitude is still well in place—there are people who, in all seriousness, blame the rancor around my workshop on the fact that when the offerings to Loki were given to the fire this year his vékeeper omitted a bit of boilerplate acknowledging people who are uncomfortable with Loki. There really is a belief that these “evil” gods will bring bad jubies that contaminate everybody—a belief that’s structurally indistinguishable from your good old fashioned Christian fears of witchcraft.

But perhaps the real tell is just how utterly determined so much of the event leadership is to police the boundaries of acceptable practice. More even than David Carron’s need for content warnings about medieval crusades, I think this is what animated the backlash to my talk. I wasn’t even using the word heresy pejoratively—my whole point was “heresy is good actually.” But the very suggestion that heresy might be a thing that existed within heathenry exposed the reality that a lot of people in event leadership are extremely eager to put themselves in the position of dictating canon law. And I don’t just mean this in the sense of policing the acceptable gods, where they’ll pearl clutch at tedious length about how they don’t make any rules about people’s private practice, just about what happens at this particular event, as if creating such rules at the second largest heathen gathering in the country isn’t still exerting tremendous amounts of power. I mean the bewilderingly specific declarations about the precise metaphysics of giving offerings to the fire and how they relate to communal wyrd—a mass of doctrine that gives transubstantiation a run for its money in baroque complexity without having a shred of historical attestation. 

And that’s when I realized that I’d made a fundamental category error about, if not the entire community, at least the structural realities of the event. See, I came to heathenry from a background in chaos magic. For me the appeal of paganism is that it’s a religious tradition that allows for magic, direct experience of the gods, and the freedom to chart your own path. I don’t quite want to suggest that it’s an individualistic religion because a lot of it ends up pushing against Enlightenment notions of individualism in favor of radical reconception of the notions of self, society, and history. But it is a really good family of religions for weirdo iconoclasts. At the end of the day, though, that’s not what David Carron or the Tyrswoman or the Maudlin Minister were doing.

There’s an observation I think I first heard from Penn Jillette, of all people, where he snarks that Satanism is just Christianity where you pick the losing side. And that’s basically what these tin pot prelates are. They’re not pagans in the sense of returning to a visionary, animist tradition with all the radical rejection of liberal capitalism and the anthropocene that implies. They’re just naughty Christians.

ᛗ. Representation: It’s Not Just for Metaphors

One of the most frustrating viewpoints projected onto me throughout all of this has been the belief that I was accusing David Carron, Rancid Vibes, or really anyone else of bigotry. And since structural considerations oblige me to have five more sections I figure what the heck, let’s go into minute detail on the exact shape of transphobia involved in this bullshit. 

Now, first of all, and I swear I’ve fucking said this half a dozen times already, I do not think conscious transphobia was a motivation in anyone’s actions here. My point has always been that the impact of this has disproportionately been felt by queer and especially trans attendees, and that impact trumps intent; like I just said, this isn’t chaos magic. And quite frankly, the reflexive “how dare you accuse me of bigotry” response feels like little more than an attempt to shift the focus away from that reality in favor of centering the discussion on cis moral rectitude. 

But if I’m being honest, I don’t buy for a hot second that my being a trans woman had nothing to do with how I’ve been treated here. One of the points I made when asking to join the planning committee was that, despite trans people making up something like 15% of the event’s attendance, there were no trans women on the committee. This was the only point that the committee made any public response to, noting that there were in fact three nonbinary people on the committee. Now, first of all, that wasn’t what I said. But second of all…

Fuck it. It’s not like this essay is going to leave me with any good will to squander, and frankly it’s not like I had much in the first place. Let’s get into some in-community trans discourse. Yes, there were three nonbinary people on the planning committee. Yes, there were three nonbinary people on the committee. All three, however, are cis passing. And that’s not a criticism of any of them. I absolutely felt much better about the event with all three of them on the planning committee than I would without them.

However, to state what really should be a lot more obvious than it apparently is, the discrimination experienced by someone who has to explicitly assert (and often reassert) their pronouns in order to have their identity recognized is very different from that experienced by someone who is visibly trans. Yes, invisibility sucks. But being mistaken for cis is a different problem than being instantly, universally recognized as not being. And the invisibility that so grates the tenth time you have to remind someone that your pronouns are actually they/them is, quite frankly, really fucking useful when it comes time to use a bathroom at a rest area. I’m not trying to play oppression olympics here. My point is just that the discrimination I face is not something anyone on the planning committee had any experience with.

Now, in the months since the Thing the planning committee has added two further trans people, both of whom are visibly trans. One is the friend who engaged in the mediation with David Carron, and I have zero doubt that they’ll be a tremendously useful and positive voice on the committee; indeed, if I’m not going to be on it I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have in my stead. The other… well, I have four more sections to fill so we can get back to him. But both of them are AFAB trans people. There remains exactly one AMAB trans person on the committee—one of the aforementioned three cis-passing enbies. And they’re also the only Black person on the committee, which just feels like an awful lot of work representing to dump on one person’s shoulders.

But the key point here is that there is still nobody on the planning committee who is affected by transmisogyny. And when I find myself routinely accused of being confrontational, treated with suspicion, taken in bad faith, denied apologies, and actively, consciously excluded from leadership it’s pretty hard not to think there might be some pretty massive amounts of unexamined transmisogyny in play. But what would I know, I guess. Better go ask the cis.

ᛚ. Meanwhile in the Troth 

The obvious rejoinder to all this grousing about heathenry is that I’ve only actually talked about one regional heathen event. Sure, it’s a big one, but it’s still just one event and the failures of its leadership do not constitute failures of the heathen community at large. And this would be a very good point if, out of sheer but revealing coincidence, the Troth hadn’t managed to have a complete meltdown at the exact same time all of this was going on. 

Really the Troth seems to have them on a semi-regular schedule. Earlier this year it flipped out and expelled Diana Paxson, a longstanding and senior member who headed the Troth’s clergy program, for her association with Marion Zimmer Bradley. Now, you may wonder why this happened in 2024 given that she’d been cowriting Mists of Avalon books thirty years ago and the revelations about Bradley and her husband Walter Breen emerged a decade ago. You may also wonder why Paxson is implicated at all given that there is no actual accusation that she abused anyone and was very likely a victim of Breen’s larger emotional abuse and manipulation. For that matter, you may wonder why Moira Greyland—who, while there is no dispute that she was the victim of horrific abuse, has let that abuse turn her into a vehement homophobe that published her memoir with an outright neo-nazi press—is being allowed to bring down elder after elder within the pagan community. There may well be good answers to all of those questions, and I’m sure there are to at least some of them, but it’s impossible to know because the actual decision-making was opaque and clearly determined more by sensitivities to public perception than by any actual new developments or evidence that hadn’t been known about for ages. In the end, regardless of what the appropriate decision about Paxson was—I’m certainly not in a position to know—the clearest takeaway was simply that the Troth is a massive pile of clown shoes.

But that was last shitshow. This time around the shitshow was a quadruple resignation of board members, followed by the President of the organization, which, fair enough really—were it that every heathen organization had a President who resigned after a massive fuckup. The reasons given for the resignations were numerous: failures at disability access, sheltering abusers, irritation that the Troth was expending much of its energy in a feud with a pair of YouTubers, failure to issue statements on hot button political issues, mismanaged elections, and lack of diversity in leadership, to name a few. Which is quite the laundry list, and who knows about the particulars, but honestly, forest for the trees. This is patently a spectacularly dysfunctional organization. 

Which, frankly, you can tell just by looking at it. Whether it’s their use of the jankiest-ass online platform imaginable, the educational programs full of poorly edited materials purporting to be “equivalent to a mid-level college specialty course” that are in reality reading lists followed by brief exams requiring little more than knowing how to search a PDF, or basically everything about Heathens Against Hate, absolutely nothing about the Troth looks like it has its shit together. 

And that’s not even a dealbreaker. It’s a pagan organization; competence just isn’t their thing. It’s certainly not a case for staying in the community, but it’s not prima facie a case for fucking off either. The problem, for me, is altogether more personal. See, all those resignations mean that the Troth needs to hold a bunch of special elections. The ballots for the main chunk of those will be going out on Wednesday, and my understanding is that David Carron is running for something, which is a hell of a cherry on top of a month’s worth of election news. But there’s already been a set of emergency board elections that resulted in the Associate President moving up the org chart to Interim President, and a new Associate President being elected. In fact, it was the same guy who got added to the Northeast Thing planning committee a few days earlier.

Now, I’ll freely cop to being a slightly paranoid anarchist who’s a touch suspicious of anyone who goes on such a sudden tear of consolidating power. But I won’t pretend my concerns here are so philosophical or high-minded. It’s really just that, at the same time that this guy was racking up new leadership positions I ate a Facebook block from him for no discernible reason. He’d, a couple days earlier, “implored” me to reevaluate my opinion of Tyr when I noted that I was uncomfortable with hailing him but you didn’t see me pitching a fit about it, so I didn’t really see why people uncomfortable with Fenrir should be mollycoddled, but that was our only recent interaction and seems a strange thing to block someone over, and a particularly striking move from another trans person.

For once it’s Penn that’s got the first impression and not me, which is just when the Quisling weirdly blanked him when he tried to introduce himself to the fellow trans. Which, obviously one doesn’t want to inflate minor social slights that could just be misreadings of affect. But the particular flavor of the brush-off was notable to Penn in the way it resembled the way cis gay men tend to snub trans men. And you wouldn’t want to make too much out of it, except when you’re looking at someone who’s so plainly hungry for climbing the social ladder, and who is so plainly uninvested in solidarity, well…

Next time I really became aware of the Quisling was as the whole clusterfuck around my workshop was popping off, when he scheduled a Zoom class on transphobia in the heathen community. I ended up missing this after an “actually the class is today instead” scheduling change that, if nothing else, shows why he fits right in with Troth leadership, but what stood out to me was the fact that at no point during any of this did he get in touch with me, offer a word of support, or anything like that. He just blatantly used my situation as a pretext to position himself as the go-to authority on transphobia. My understanding, incidentally, is that the class started with a nine minute video the Quisling had compiled of trans people talking about their experiences, literally zero of whom were transfeminine. Go figure.

And so when I see a massive pile of resignations from the Troth that are focused on its failures around diversity, where the overwhelming cisness of the organization is being stressed, and then I see the Quisling suddenly riding to the organization’s rescue, I do have to wonder. Like, I’m glad there’s trans representation at the highest levels of the organization. I get the case for sticking with an organization to try to change it, and I’m sure that his desire to make the Troth a better place for marginalized populations is sincere, for whatever that’s worth. And maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about him and he’s not a respectability politicking opportunist with more fondness for mean girl shit than you’d really expect from a trans guy. (Seriously dude. Stay in your lane.)

Doesn’t really matter, though. The national heathen organization’s a shitshow. Its second in command blocked me for not vibing with the god of liars. And David Carron is running for office on top of that. This just ain’t a community I’m sticking around in.

ᛜ. An Old Man Sitting on the Throne There Saying that I Probably Shouldn’t be so Mean

Some seventeen thousand words into this, it’s probably worth addressing the elephant in the room. I could have told this story a lot of ways. And I’ve plainly picked the most inflammatory possible way to do it—belittling nicknames, nasty gossip, and a determination to leave no axe unground. I’m not an idiot. I know full well when I’m being a complete bitch. So why am I taking this one so far?

In some ways I find that a strange question, as reasonable as it plainly is. Because once that final line got crossed I never really considered anything else. There was a workshop at the Thing this year—by the Maudlin Minister, actually—about the heathen notion of time. I alluded to it up in “flyting,” with that line about Urðr and Skuld. The idea is that Urðr represents the past—not just in the sense of things that have already happened, but in the sense of things that have been set into motion. And Skuld represents not so much the future as the way in which those things in motion are inclined to complete themselves. It translates most literally to “should,” but can be thought of in terms of debt as well. As Urðr accumulates, the possibilities for Skuld narrow until they finally settle into something very much like fate. For a totally arbitrary example, imagine that there’s a big scary wolf, and some people say it seems dangerous. There’s a lot of stories that can turn out to be. But if you, say, have the wolf’s only friend lie to him and trick him into being bound forever, then laugh at him as you run a sword through his mouth, pinning it open til the end of time, suddenly there are a lot fewer possible stories about what happens when he gets out. 

It’s ironic, given the limp-dicked conflict aversion of the Thing’s leadership, that the heathen pantheon is made of warrior gods. And that’s true of its goddess of language as well. David Carron decided to go to war with me. He didn’t just wrong me at the event. He pursued the grudge, repeatedly, while lying over and over again about what I said. He all but gloated about having upset my husband. He refused to apologize to me. And he had the unmitigated fucking gall to demand to be rewarded for his behavior. Meanwhile I spent months creating off-ramp after off-ramp only to watch him and his cronies sail past them, more often than not flipping the bird as they did.

Like I said at the start: I drew my red line, and they crossed it. There’s really only one way that story ends. And if I’m going to ride to war, I’m not going to fuck around. I paid attention in the Drake/Kendrick beef, y’know? If I’m doing this, I’m doing it hard enough to end it; if that means bringing a nuke to a slap fight, so be it. We’re past affecting positive change. We’re past maintaining frith and the bonds of community. We’re sure as fuck past finding a space for myself. I don’t have one. David Carron took it from me, and the leadership sat by and let him. And without that, there’s nothing you motherfuckers have that I want except your blood. And so I’ve come for it, in Sága’s name.

But as I said, I recognize it’s not that simple. I am not some mindless zealot, and I am not one to blame my goddess for my own decisions. Yes, when I turned to her on this she counseled war. But I’m the one that marched, and so the question of why stands.

And though it’s a prosaic answer, I’d be a liar to pretend it isn’t simply anger. There’s a sort of bitter catharsis to giving in and deciding to just be the monster everyone is determined to see you as, and doubly so to playing that role more fearsomely than even their most fevered histrionics imagined possible. By the time this goes live on the site it’ll have been three months since the Thing. And I’ve spent absolutely grotesque amounts of time over those months trying to get this situation to come to an amicable resolution. It has been by miles the most stressful thing going on in my life over that period, which is pretty fucking impressive for a period that had the election of Donald Trump in it. I spent much of my birthday sobbing in despair over how I was being treated. And so when the breaking point finally got reached it proved to be a rather explosive break. 

So to my mind the question is really less “why am I being so mean” than “why do I care so damn much?” And I hope I’ve made that answer relatively clear by now, but let’s spell it out. This is a community that was the source of profound, life-altering religious revelations for me. And there’s a real vulnerability that comes with that. There’s a reason that religious trauma is such a damaging thing. So to be so repeatedly reassured by event leadership of my safety and then be so spectacularly betrayed when it came time to turn those words into actions hurts. Not only am I plainly not fucking safe in this community, it turns out the people in not safe from are the ones who promised me I was. 

But my gods are still my gods. Sága remains vividly present. I’ve still got her bindrune on my wrist, and her pendant around my neck. I’m still in the midst of getting a massive back tattoo depicting her mysteries as she revealed them to me. The underlying needs and desires that religious community served are all still there. I just no longer have any viable path to fulfilling them. I’d explain how much that hurts, but I think I’ve just spent eighteen thousand words demonstrating it.

Truth be told, though, that’s not even the thing that hurts the most. The thing that hurts the most is that I know much of leadership thought David Carron was in the wrong. I know they were telling him in private that he was being a dick; several told me in private as well. (Only in private, of course; none of them said a word in my defense publicly.) But they still closed ranks around their friend and protected him. Meanwhile, when I expressed anger about someone being a dick to me I was condemned for being—and to be clear this is the actual reason given by many of the planning committee members who voted against admitting me—divisive. Which, sure, if you want to say that about me now I can’t really argue, but this was when all I was doing was pointing out the fact that I was being bullied and trying to contribute to making the event a safer, better place. And they didn’t even disagree that I was being bullied; they just blamed me for being mad about it more than they blamed David Carron for bullying me.

And that’s par for the course. At seemingly every turn I have been taken in maximally bad faith, starting, frankly, from David Carron walking into my workshop. When, in that hell thread, as person after person rushed to defend David Carron’s lack of bigotry, I sarcastically posted that comic where two eagles discuss whether the owl is a predator. “Of course not,” says one. “He’s never bothered me.” “Exactly,” replies the other. “No idea what Mr. Mouse was going on about.” And there were people who, in all sincerity, viewed that as me calling David Carron a predator. Like, what the fuck do you even do with that? 

There are even those, I’m told, who still, despite my repeated statements to the contrary, believe I’m covertly worshipping Fenrir and Surtr. And I’m really not! I swear on Ahania’s name, and may she forsake me and never bless me with her joy again if I’m lying, I have never once in my life invoked either of them.

ᛞ. First Time For Everything Though

Hail Fenrir
Hail Surtr
Hail the worldbreakers
Who look upon a frith whose law lies
And know it cannot stand.

Fenrir!
You are your father’s son
You bare his fury in your fangs
And know well the skuld of stillness
You are not cruel
(In truth his children never are)
But do not shy from needful things

Surtr!
You are neither kind nor cruel
You simply are
And without you we would not be
You bring destruction, yes
But all things end
And fields regrow from fire

I call upon you now:

May Urizen’s petty tyrants be devoured
May their works be burnt away
May their false gods be cast aside
And better stories grow within their empty names

I call upon you,
Bring wrath and righteousness
Bring justice, poetic and true
Bring fetters of iron and irony
With which they may be bound

May the Quisling meet the day
Where what he needs are friends
And find naught but other politicians

May Rancid Vibes look his favorite student in the eye
And have to tell her how Edred Thorsson
Is just a Texas good old boy

May it simply rain upon the Maudlin Minister
Just rain
As endless as his tears

May the Tyrswoman have her hand torn off by a bear
Yeah
A fucking bear (metaphoric)

May Paul Blart have his foot run over by his Segway
May Youth Pastor get a splinter from one of his dopey god poles
May the World’s Dullest Acid Casualty lose her plug

May all the other cowards
Who sat and let this happen
Just feel really shitty about themselves
Or have some entertaining mishap
At your discretion

As for David Carron
May he pass and learn that he was wrong
That it was Yahweh all along
May he stand before Christ Almighty
Who looks upon him and says
The heathen thing is fine
It’s only metaphysics after all
But you were just such
A massive
Cunt
And then
Because eternal torture would be cruel
Simply destroy him
Like space unwasted

And may something worthy of the community
At last grow in their place

ᛟ. Epilogue: Gimlé

I mean that last bit, to be clear. I told that story of the Odin ritual. And it really is one of my fondest memories of the event. I watched you all walk past, and you were beautiful. And I’m sorry. You deserve so much better than this. And I don’t mean your leaders when I say that. For one thing, you have leaders who tried to stop this, and to them I am especially sorry. I’m sorry that I have spent nearly twenty thousand words trying to hurt your friends. I’m sorry that I’ve been so loudly unkind here. I’m sorry that I rode to war, and that as with any war innocent people got hurt. I did intend it, in that I knew it would be a consequence and I did it anyway. But it was not what I wanted, and the knowledge of it hurt me with every word I wrote.

There are many of you I still consider friends, whether deep or casual. I understand if this essay marks the end of that. I hope that you see why it had to happen, at least, and forgive. But if not, well, I get what burning bridges means. And I’m still sorry.

But for those who would still call me a friend, let’s end on some good news. Contrary to the apparent belief of several people, Penn is actually a whole ass separate person from me, and I don’t speak for him. But he’s committed to becoming a Priest of Sága, and as it stands he has every intention of coming back to Northeast Thing in 2025.

I am, to be clear, still done with heathenry. I’m a Ságaswoman, but more fundamentally I’m a dedicant of Ahania. Really, that’s something I’ve become even more committed to as I’ve watched those fucking fascists the Troth kept not standing up to gear up to take over the country and threaten all manner of pogroms against people like me. In the face of that, as a visible trans woman with a platform that doesn’t rely on the cold-footed whims of a publisher and the ability to do what I do outside of the country if it comes to it, my sacred duty feels pretty fucking clear, and I’m going to get back to it and stop wasting my time with this sort of dipshittery. 

But Penn and I are a “where he drinks I drink” kinda deal; if nothing else, he doesn’t drive. So in all likelihood, in what I think is actually a pretty hilarious punchline to an essay that contains a strong contender for the single most extra line I have ever written in “there’s nothing you motherfuckers have that I want except your blood,” I’m probably going to be present at NET next year.

In my view, I’m not attending the event, I’m supporting my husband. I’ll keep the frith, but I will not be attending the main ritual, nor do I mean to go to any other rituals or workshops unless I’m specifically invited by the person running them. I’m certainly not fucking doing another workshop; y’all can back my Patreon if you want my writing. But I’ll be sat at the Sága vé, and Sokkvabekkr’s doors remain open. And if anyone in leadership has a problem with that… well, look, I didn’t say any of this shit at the event, so what are you gonna do about it?