Oath to Truth

When I first began my journey into paganism, I was thrilled to unveil something that finally felt real, but unbearably frustrated by how difficult it was to find the answers for what exactly I was feeling. As we know, written knowledge for any pagan sect is extremely limited, and the surviving texts that we do have aren’t 100% reliable, either. Coming from a religion where everything was written down and spelled out word for word, telling you exactly what the story is, what lessons to learn, and where to go to find the answers, I quickly came to the realization that if I wanted a “manual” of sorts, I’d have to create my own. A task I found daunting and next to impossible considering every text I had to go off of had a disclaimer stating it shouldn’t be fully trusted. And with good reason.

There’s a plethora of books available delving into the study of various pagan beliefs and histories, and it’s often encouraged to read as many as possible to understand the whole “truth”. While I believe being open to other perspectives is important and can help anyone be a more well-rounded individual, I take issue with many of the current interpretations. Unfortunately, a lot of modern interpretations that I’ve seen are backed by texts that were written by extremist and supremacist groups in the mid-1900s, whose ideals and values were intertwined with their interpretations of the original myths and, to be frank, send the wrong message. Comparatively, the Neo-pagan belief set, especially in the Nordic community, looks like a completely different religion than what was originally intended by our ancestors.

I’ve read from academics and proponents of Asatru who agree full-heartedly and accept this path, stating that because we can never truly recover what our ancestors originally practiced, putting the pieces together and creating a “new” religion is the best possible avenue. This is where my brain started to ooze out of my ears because I refuse to believe that the religion of my ancestors could be so easily lost and diluted with white supremacy and eugenics and that we should just roll over and accept it. There had to be another way.

After years of researching, finding dead ends, and struggling to practice “authentically” since I was relying on warped rituals, Christianized myths, and pseudoscience, I finally reached the end of my rope. I decided to stop relying on men who are acting in their own best interests and lay my trust entirely in my own ability to connect with the gods.

Connection to the spiritual realm is something that I’ve noticed has unnecessarily fallen victim to gatekeeping, For some reason, in every spiritual community you will find at least one person claiming that only “certain people” with “special abilities” can access the spiritual realms and you must allow them to be your middleman to speak with the gods, your ancestors, or any other type of spiritual entity for you. Obviously, this is false.

Everyone has the ability to connect with the spiritual realms and reach out to any entity they wish. Spiritual blocks can make it more difficult to do so, but that’s why working on personal healing is so important. Once your blocks are cleared, you have full access to whoever you wish to contact, and your abilities only become easier to work with and more fine-tuned the more you practice. What I have come to understand is that to find the truth, it is vital to develop your psychic gifts at least at this most basic level.

Seeing myself walking in Odin’s footsteps on a quest for truth and wisdom, I swore an oath to devote myself to discovering the truth of the faith of my ancestors and get back to the root of their beliefs. To learn it as they learned it—through interacting with the spiritual world and opening their minds to interpret the messages they received based on their culture and understanding. In this pursuit, I asked Odin to guide me and place opportunities in my path to lead me to this truth. And he did not disappoint.

First, he sent me into a deep dive to understand the core of where these beliefs came from: back to the beginning of European spiritual practice. I began with following the first homosapien migrations from Africa into Europe and from there, studied the oldest cave art we have records of that depict shamanic symbolism and rituals. By reading about the analyses of the paintings and our current interpretations of their symbols, I realized that all early religious traditions in the area came from describing spiritual phenomena using physical metaphors so that it was easier to comprehend and pass on the information. Much like how our earliest great thinkers and religious leaders would put their most important stories to poetry and music to ensure it would survive the test of time, even if the meaning behind the symbolism was long forgotten. Stories like Beowulf and the Poetic Edda, itself, are fine examples of this, but this is certainly not a practice that was exclusive to Europe, as there are similar findings, stories, and poems threaded in every early civilization on the planet, and many older than neolithic Europe. Humans have always been at their core, poets.

In any case, this was my first inkling that lead me to discovering animism—the belief that all religions originally began from describing spiritual phenomena with metaphors so that they were easier to pass on and understand, yet over time, people forgot the original meaning of the symbolism and began to take the poetry literally, creating human-like gods and goddesses, monsters and beasts, and magical items that could only be held by powerful spiritual entities. Where we are pushed to believe that impossible stories of regenerating goats actually happened, or that dragons and ice-monsters will destroy the earth on doomsday. Yes, I am focusing on Nordic myth for this discussion, but the same could be said for any religion. It doesn’t make the beliefs behind those stories any less valid, it simply delves further into the myths, reading in between the lines, to discover the true lesson there is to learn that our ancestors left behind for us to find once we remembered how to.

One of these days I’ll write a blog of my interpretation of the first handful of stanzas of the Voluspa, one of my favorite interpretations I have done so far, showing that the seeress was actually describing the creation of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth making life possible on our pretty blue planet. But I digress, for that is slightly off topic and I’m not writing today to heavily decode all of Nordic animism, which would be far too much for any one blog post, regardless.

To end this as simply as possible without rambling more than I already have, my goal was to get back to the root of my ancestor’s beliefs, and I feel that I have accomplished the bare minimum. The journey is still not over, as I feel this is going to be a life-long endeavor for me, but as I continue my study of the Poetic Edda and interpreting the symbols therein, I will share them here to offer some of the truth I’ve been able to uncover. But at least I can say for now, in the two years since I made my oath, I have discovered the means to find the truth.

The only way we can truly restore the original practices of our ancestors is to learn them the same way they learned them: by allowing spirit to guide us to the answers.