Heretical Heathenry

This is the text of a talk I gave on August 24th at Northeast Thing, one of the largest heathen (Norse pagan) gatherings in the United States, archived here for general interest.

I got the idea for this workshop on what I think was the first night of Northeast Thing last year. I was talking to someone about his first time at the Loki blot, when he really came around on the idea that it should be there, counterintuitive to him as it had initially seemed. And this was a thing that meant a lot to me—I’d spoken fairly loudly about his exclusion from the main ritual at the last Thing before the pandemic, pointing out the fact that Loki’s modern veneration is especially common among queer heathens. I had been very hurt by his exclusion there, and what he was saying was healing.

And then a bit later in the conversation he said something about still not understanding people who try to cultivate a personal relationship with Surtr. And I was struck by that, because it felt like exactly the sort of dumbass shit I’d have done at any number of points during my life. I haven’t ever, but it didn’t strike me as particularly weird. Certainly not weirder than working with an angry, wronged trickster burning beneath the world.

And I spent the rest of the weekend thinking about that. I thought about Odin and the way he gathered outsiders around himself, allying with the Vanir after initially warring, or becoming brothers with a giant. I thought about Hél and her brothers, and the fine line between gods and monsters. And what I realized was that there was a really important conversation to have here. Because what the question was really about was heresy. 

That’s not a word we really talk about much in Heathenry. But we should. For one thing, that distinction between who is like and not like us is one of the great questions in the lore, on par with “what do I do when my duties conflict.” For another, it’s uniquely important for us to have a notion of heresy within Heathenry. In a world where this happens, (note: this was accompanied by a slide of the so-called “QAnon Shaman” during the January 6th riots) I would go so far as to say it’s a duty.

Now, that’s obviously not a heresy worth discussing, so let’s back up and think about the word itself, if only because I promised some scholarly reputability here. It entered the English language during the thirteenth century, from the Latin hæresis, meaning school of thought, itself from the Greek hairesis, meaning choice. And that highlights a key thing about heresy, which is that it’s deliberate. It’s not simply a religious error, but the conscious adoption of an unacceptable belief. But there’s another key thing about heresy in all of that. If we’re talking about unacceptable belief in the thirteenth century and we’re using English to do it then unacceptable means a very specific thing, which is that the belief is unacceptable to the Roman Catholic Church. More to the point, heresy is an unacceptable belief within the Roman Catholic Church. Paganism wasn’t heresy, because to be a heretic you have to still purport to be Christian. So I apologize, but I’m gonna set heathenry aside for a bit and talk Christianity, because that’s where the examples are.

So what were the big heretical beliefs of the thirteenth century? Well, there’s a bunch. You’ve got Catharism, which was an aggressively dualist belief that said that Satan was a second, evil god of the material world who trapped the souls of angels in human bodies. That one upset the Church so much they had an entire crusade just to kill these guys specifically. Then there were the Henricians, who were just uppity anti-authority types who rejected the validity of the Church and insisted everyone was free to interpret the Gospels for themselves. And there were a couple different groups like the Waldensians and the Fraticelli, both of whom took positions of extreme asceticism and attacked the Church for its scandalously excessive wealth.

What I want to point out here is that these were big, serious issues. The Henricians were basically a dry run for Puritanism. Likewise, the Waldensians and Fraticelli were raising many of the same issues that would underpin the Protestant Reformation. You don’t have to care about the Catholic Church to recognize that these were real debates with real consequences, where the losing side, for all that they got burnt at the stake, still had a tremendous impact. 

As for Catharism, its notion of a fallen material world—which was basically a variant of gnosticism—crops up again in the work of the poet, painter, and visionary William Blake, who used similar ideas to underpin the sprawling personal mythology that he laid out in a series of manuscripts produced via a process he called illuminated printing. And it was in one of his early illuminated manuscripts, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he laid out what I think is probably the best framework for thinking about heresy. 

As the title suggests, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is pretty heretical itself. There’s a lot going on in it, but the gist is that Blake associates Heaven with order and regulation, while Hell is a more wild and untamed energy, specifically associated with creativity. (There’s a whole passage where Blake claims to have learned his illuminated printing process in the course of a spiritual journey to Hell.) And Blake’s big point is that you need both of these forces. As he puts it, “without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” 

Which I think captures why heresy matters. The Waldensians and Henricians and the like were driving a real debate within the Church. And even though they were condemned, persecuted, and executed, they changed things. And subsequent heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin changed things even more. I’m not just talking about the establishment of Protestant churches here either. The Catholic Church changed too, abandoning the practice of selling indulgences in the wake of Luther’s attacks on it. Heresy gets things done.

We talk a lot about heathenry being a living religion. But living things change, and heresy is how religions do that. So how can we think about heresy as heathens? Because there’s one problem that immediately springs up. When heresy is defined in terms of the Catholic Church it’s pretty simple, because there’s a centralized authority that can declare something heretical. We, obviously, don’t have that. Sure there’s the Troth and their account of the lore, and there’s scholars who can piece together what historical pagans believed for us, but there’s no central, primary authority that can decide what is and isn’t heretical. 

But that just means that we can have a healthier relationship with heresy that doesn’t involve quite so much setting people on fire. Because the other thing to point out about heathenry and heresy is that we’re really, really good at generating it. One of the ways the Catholic Church tamps down on heresy is by restricting the number of people who are in a position to have any. The Catholic God is remote, and there’s an entire class of priests who stand between him and the congregation. That makes for a lot fewer opportunities for heresy to spring up.

Not us though. We go drinking with our gods. We have unverified personal gnosis, visionary practices like seidr, and a horribly fragmentary lore that’s often more gap than doctrine. We generate new ideas like a parliament of cats, all of them with heretical potential. On top of that, we’re part of the larger modern pagan community, in which cross-pantheon worship is commonplace, which means a lot of us are, at least on our own time, mixing and matching gods in ways that are definitionally heterodox. So a less combustible relationship with the concept of heresy is a good idea all around. But that can’t just mean that anything goes either; we’ve still got nazis to kick out, after all. So how can we thread that needle? Well, if heresy is supposed to drive progress then I think one of the biggest things we can demand of it is that it be interesting. Do the challenges it poses to mainstream belief seem substantive and worth talking about? Notably, this is a test that the nazis fail spectacularly. 

So let’s go back to where we started. What might be interesting about working with Surtr? Well, Blake already gives us a good clue when he allied heresy with hell and the Christian Devil. Indeed, if you look at our creation story you’ll see a setup very much like Blake’s notion of the dual energies of heaven and hell, with the world emerging out of the comingled energies of Surtr’s fire and the ice from Niflheim. But more broadly, if we’re going to talk about heresy, we may as well talk about the big one: satanism. Now, perhaps you’re not wild about satanism as a role model. But I’m not looking to argue in favor of it any more than I am in Surtr. Besides, I know perfectly well how many of you listen to Wardruna, and given that Einar Selvik’s previous band was Gorgoroth, a satanic black metal band, I don’t think we’re in a position to dismiss it out of hand. 

In fact, black metal is a pretty solid demonstration of how this sort of heresy can become interesting. The genre’s unrelenting misanthropy serves a number of purposes, from declaring an antagonistic relationship with established power to expressing complex thoughts about philosophical pessimism. And all of these apply not just to Surtr but to what we might think of as the whole gamut of monster worship, including the good Mr. Laufeyson. He obviously sits more at the “claiming an antagonistic relationship with power” end of things, which is why he’s so specifically beloved by queer people for whom his exclusion and ostracization is all too familiar. Whereas Surtr is much more in line with philosophical pessimism, in that he’s more an abstract destructive force than a figure who can be empathized with.

 I’m not going to go too deep into the weeds on philosophical pessimism, but broadly speaking it’s a school of philosophy dating to the work of Schopenhauer in the early 19th century that argues that the world is a fundamentally broken place, and that being born into it should be considered an unfortunate development. One thing I do want to highlight, because it’s an extremely common misconception, especially among people who are hearing about it for the first time: pessimism does not generally advocate suicide. Its usual argument is that not wanting to die is part of being alive, and in fact one more reason why the whole thing sucks. Anyway, there are scads of important works along these lines—it’s a legitimately important and serious line of philosophical thought, perhaps best known for inspiring Matthew McConaughey’s character in the first season of True Detective. And it’s one that’s got a particular vogue in 2024 because it’s grappling pretty directly with a lot of the emotions that come from confronting climate change and the rise of fascism, especially among young people who are afraid that they’ve been born into a world that’s going to end in their lifetimes.

Which I think gets pretty directly at the question of “why Surtr?” Because in a world that’s going to burn, why wouldn’t you want to get to know the flames? And more broadly, heathenry doesn’t really have a pessimist tradition yet. Virtually everything that’s been written about it has been from, if not a Christian perspective, at least a Christian frame of reference. Whether or not you’re particularly drawn to pessimism, heathenry as a whole is impoverished by its absence. And any path to a heathen pessimism is going to run straight through trying to find new interpretations and perspectives on Surtr. Now, I obviously can’t guarantee that any given person who’s working with Surtr is thinking along these lines. They could just be a destructive asshole. But if they were willing to keep frith with me then I’d be hard-pressed not to want to listen to what they had to say.

But our notion of heresy needn’t be quite so extreme as all that. Like I said, one of the things about heathenry is that we have a lot of avenues for developing new and potentially heretical ideas. So let’s lower the stakes a little. Because as a quick glance across the véstead will readily show, there’s a lot of idiosyncratic views on the gods out there. So I figured I’d talk about a heresy where I can actually vouch for the details and talk about Sága. 

Let me start with some of my own background. I’ve been vaguely pagany my entire life, but I started taking magic more seriously around 2010. And at that point I was heavily influenced by Alan Moore, best known as a comics writer responsible for stuff like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but also a practicing magician. He took up this practice at the age of forty, after writing a line in one of his comics about how “the only place that gods and demons inarguably exist is inside the human mind, where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity” and realizing that he actually believed this. He started working with an obscure Roman snake god named Glycon, who is notable for having been pretty conclusively proven to have actually been a con man with a glove puppet fleecing the gullible. 

And the thing is, that was the point for Moore. He believes that the gods are phenomena of consciousness, a view he pointedly doesn’t think diminishes them in any way. So he wanted an invented god because, as he put it, “I’m not likely to start believing that glove puppet created the universe or anything dangerous like that.” And I was really inspired by that, but it seemed to me that also worshiping Glycon was kind of missing the point. So I went looking for my own. I’m a writer, and I was also drawn to lines like William S. Burroughs’s famed description of language as a virus, or Aleister Crowley’s description of magic as “a disease of language,” so I wanted someone who would focus on the idea that language and magic were fundamentally connected. I also knew I wanted a goddess because I had what we might euphemistically call some unresolved issues around gender. So I started working with this idea, not really having a clear direction.

Fast forward to 2019. I’m freshly married to Penn over there, and he takes me to what was still East Coast Thing at the time, where I get into fights with people over Loki, who’s the figure in the pantheon I’d spent the most time working with. And it’s a nice, big consciousness-expanding experience for me, so I get home and start poking around the lore, and I come upon Sága. 

Now, here’s the existing lore around Sága. First off, in the Grimnismál there’s a bit where they go through various places gods live, and there’s a couple lines: 

“Sökkvabekk is the fourth, where cool waves flow,
And amid their murmur it stands;
There daily do Odin and Sága drink
In gladness from cups of gold.”

And then in the Prose Edda there’s the list of Frigg and her “handmaidens” where it says, “Second is Sága. She dwells in Sökkvabekk, and that is a big place.” And that’s it. That’s what we know about her. Notably absent from that, of course, is any sense of what she does as a goddess. For that people generally go off of her name, where there’s two possible etymologies that scholars consider credible. The first, which was the dominant view in the early twentieth century, is that it comes from the Old Norse sjá, meaning “to see,” and that Sága is a seeress of some sort. The second, which picked up steam in the latter part of the century, is that it comes from segja, meaning to speak or tell. Most of her contemporary worshippers, meanwhile, do what Jacob Grimm did and just go off the apparent similarity with the word “saga” as in story instead of making their academic friends pull 1950s journal articles about etymology for them. But the thing that immediately struck me was that this ambiguity between seeing and speaking is the exact thing I was looking for a goddess of. 

Now here’s the thing. Do I think the historical Germanic pagans were working with a goddess whose name was basically a pun about how magic and language were the same thing? I’m gonna go ahead and admit that sounds like a stretch. But I mean, I got here from “hey that guy who worships a glove puppet seems to know the score,” so that’s kind of the point. 

Because the thing is, like any good heresy, what the idea lacks in plausibility it more than makes up for in how interesting it is. Indeed, it’s downright productive. For one thing, it resolves the etymological debate in a nice “everybody wins” way. For another, it does a nice job distinguishing Sága both from Frigga, who a lot of the “Sága as seeress” people then go on to conclude Sága is just a byname of because why would there be multiple icky girls in the pantheon, and from Bragi, with whom she overlaps heavily if you treat her as a goddess of storytelling. Under this interpretation she has her own clear niche. It also, much like Surtr, provides a vehicle for importing a bunch of interesting lines of thought into heathenry. Perhaps you’re not the sort of person who really wants to be able to talk about William S. Burroughs and heathenry, but I absolutely am.

But I promised you heresy, and this isn’t nearly spicy enough yet. So let’s go one further. Sága is, after all, second only to Frigga herself among the asynjur. She does not merely drink with Odin, she drinks with him daily. Yeah, the old man loves him some seers, but that’s a heck of a lot of drinking for what would be the third goddess associated with seeing in the pantheon. And he’s certainly not about to clear that much time out of his busy “disguising himself so he can enter trivia competitions and yell at his son” schedule for a mere storyteller.

But if Sága is the goddess of language as magic it all starts to make sense. After all, Odin hung nine nights on a tree to gain that magic. A vast and mighty hall, the privilege of being named second only to his wife, and the respect of being such valued counsel as to be sought out daily seems an entirely fair gift for the person that gave them to him. Frankly, he should probably be washing those golden cups for her too. 

Now, maybe this is all a bridge too far for you. That’s fine. My goal here isn’t to convert you all to my Sága cult any more than it was to get a Surtr vé established or to spark the Waldensian Revival. Rather, my goal is to suggest that there are more productive questions to ask about religion than “is this correct” or “is this true,” and that one of the joys of heathenry is that we are free to pursue those questions. 

So let me close with one final point. I want you to think about how you got into this. Not necessarily heathenry in specific, but paganism in general. Now, I know for some of us it’s a family religion, but for most of us it’s something we turned to later in life. Maybe you were a teenager hiding your Book of Shadows from your parents. Maybe you were a returning veteran who realized you needed a new framework to understand the world you’d experienced. Maybe you just found a group of pagans and discovered you vibed with them. But one way or another there was a moment where you decided that in a country where 90% of the population is either Christian or non-religious, you wanted to be one of the weirdos at the margins. And even for those who were raised heathen, I’ll bet dollars to donuts you were raised by people who wanted to be weirdos. At the end of the day, more than having a favorite metal band or enjoying the taste of mead, that’s the thing that we most have in common: at some point in our lives, we made the choice to be transgressive. And I’m using the word “choice” very deliberately there.

So what I’d ask you is simply to be kind to that version of yourself. Because they were on to something. Heathenry should be defiant, dangerous, and frankly, a bit naughty. And one of the ways we can do that is to listen to our own margins and see what we can learn from them. To borrow a feminist slogan, my heathenry will be heretical or it will be bullshit.

And to that end, I’m gonna shut up and use the back half of this timeslot to do some listening of my own. So let’s throw this open to discussion. I’ll absolutely take questions if anyone has them, but first I’d like to ask some of my own, with the hope that they’ll spark conversations both here and over the remainder of our weekend together. 

1.  What potentially heretical ideas about heathenry do you hold? 
2.  Are there any views about heathenry you’ve heard that you don’t understand, or even find alarming?
3.  What’s your most out there piece of unverified personal gnosis?
4.  What commonly held belief or practice within heathenry do you think is wrong or misguided?
   
5. What was the last time you changed your mind about something in heathenry, and what made you do it?