In the land of the Gods

It's been (as usual) longer than I intended.

In June, my family and I - my wife, my mother, and my two dearest friends and I, flew to Iceland for a week. Four of the five of us are pagan, and three are heathen or heathen-ish. 

We spent the Summer Solstice in the land of the midnight sun, and saw a legitimate 24 hours of daylight on the Solstice day. 

Being in a land which doesn't see real darkness is a really bizarre head game on your sense of time. At 11:30PM, it is easy to be outside casually walking around, not realizing it is 11:30PM. 

We spent the first two nights in a house literally beside the sea, at the beginnings of the Westfjords. We saw more sheep than people, and saw some of the most wondrous, bizarre, barren but beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. We spent a night nearer to the south of Iceland, with a beautiful endless field for a backyard. We spent our last three nights in the capital, driving around to various places of interest, and parking the car and exploring the downtown areas on foot. From a purely tourist perspective, Iceland is beautiful, the people are wonderful, and the horses are wonderful creatures (coming from someone not overly used to horses.) The air is clean and fresh, our accommodations were all absolutely lovely. 

On the spiritual side...that is a whole other level. 

The spirit of this country is alive like I've never felt before.

For the Solstice, we went to Þhingvellir--it's a national park, the historic seat of the Alþing, and a very powerful place, having been there now. It was wildly windy and rainy for most of our time there, but we - inclusive of my mother - found a flat rock to use as an altar, and placed on it what things we'd thought to bring with us, and did several rounds of a blöt with a bottle of Brennevin. 

A waterfall at Þhingvellir

A very dear and very sacred-seeming encounter with Goose

I of course loved birding in Iceland, and was especially excited by the possibility of seeing Greylag geese "in real life". Goose is my totem, the greylag specifically - while we sometimes get the odd stowaway here in winter with the flocks of Canada geese, the odds of seeing them are rare. We saw them in Iceland almost right away, but never up close and never within photography range.

After our ritual, we continued down the path for a ways, and there they were. A few geese settling in for the night ("night" being relative - it was after 10pm but the only dark was cloud cover.) We watched for a bit and I crept a little closer for photos - and the geese were kind enough to let me in on their little secret - goslings! 

I'd see them again later at a pond in Reykjavik, and closer up, but that night at Þhingvellir there was magic at play. 

It's a pretty surreal feeling now to wear my Mjolnir pendant, knowing it's been in the sea of the Westfjords, and has laid upon a rock as an altar at Þhingvellir. I've been wearing it practically nonstop since I got it as an iniation gift from my wife so many years ago - the silver is starting to show the sort of deep worn tarnish that can't be polished away. And now it's been on this amazing trip with me.

In other news, I lost my grandmother last week to a long battle with Alzheimer's. It was thankfully very quick when the time came - she did not have to linger or suffer too long. As I've been puttering in the garden this past week, I've been thinking of her a lot. 

It's good to be back - maybe sometime soon I'll get back into posting more than every 6 months, perhaps? 

Of wolves among men

Some very exciting spiritual things have been afoot. I've been working steadily at getting through Taking Up The Runes. I had tried once and found myself overwhelmed, but I think I was ready to learn them this time, since I feel more comfortable with my learning. Paxson has earned herself though the dubious distinction of writing the only book I've ever willfully defaced with both pen and highlighter. Long after the book was bought I found out she has some yucky "subtle racism" stuff going on - nothing neo-nazi but just... naive and facepalm worthy, so I've had to make some, um, corrections. I'd have turned to a better book, except there don't appear to be any - every rune book I've uncovered has some nasty "folkish" heathen baggage attached, so it's come to "learn what I can, take the rest with a grain of salt". Sigh.

But the past week or so, I've been thinking a lot about certain animals, their place in myth, spirituality, and science.

A new-ish totem creature has been emerging for me, one whose symbolically ascribed meanings tend towards gluttony, savagery, attitude for days, wild animal abandon, and general orneriness. It's a little known critter, and upon good old fashioned learning about the animal and it's behavior, is not nearly so ornery as is thought. I've decided to learn what this little creature has to teach me, not just in what others think of her, but in what she feels like to me. And this got me thinking.

I read a piece I stumbled upon from March, (Link) about wolves in heathenry, how many people call themselves "wolves among men" or "wolves of Odin" as a sort of fancy title for themselves. The article pondered that wolves are enemies, preying on the weak, gluttonous and greedy and dangerous - that they are not things to emulate, they are things to defend our communities against. The wolves who accompany the Alfather do so because one of his aspects is death, so the wolves are not the most positive side of him. Wolves are the dangerous outsiders stealing our sheep, and threatening our very lives when we enter the woods.

 If those qualities truly belonged to the wolf, I'd be inclined to agree that "wolf people" are perhaps to be avoided. But I happen to know a wolf person, and I also know a decent amount about wolves. So the question I asked myself was - when we work with animal spirits, symbols, archetypes, totems - should we rely only on the mythology of these creatures - or, should we look too, to what we know about them in the modern day?

Wolves are not dangerous antisocial predators among their own - far from it. Wolves are born and bred to be social, it is part of their DNA. The pack hunts together, lives together, shares in caring for the young, and protects each other from their rivals. Wolves are loyal in that way,  and their familial bonds are crucial to their survival. While wolves are territorial, packs do interact, and "lone wolves" may find packs to join and become a part of a community in this way.
As for gluttony, it is true that wolves gorge massive amounts of meat at a kill - sometimes more than 20 pounds in a sitting. But wolves also succeed in the hunt less than 10% of the time - this is not gluttony, but opportunity. An animal who may spend a week or more between meals must make the most of what he can. If moments of joy are few and far between in a world rather at odds with how a lot of us would like to be living, drinking every drop that comes your way is making the most and best of life while you can. (To be fair though, calling yourself a "wolf among sheep" is perhaps something of a predatory statement - or perhaps you're such a rather inept wolf that penned sheep are all you can catch. )

The wolves that appear in Norse myth are certainly not benevolent by and large, but they have their place, too. Fenrir will slay Odin at Ragnarok, and play his part in the end of the world, but when the dust settles, a new world has begun. Death is part of life - you can't have one without the other. In our modern world, the fear of the wolf can subside - though their place in mythology is important, they are an intrinsic part of the world we live in, the cycle of life and death that is woven in all of nature. If you would see the wolf as only a force of destruction and chaos, remember that our planet was born a ball of fire and gas, and that everything eventually breaks to become something new.

So many of these animals were once our ancient foes, and we were right to fear them, for they are mighty and formidable - but now, as the natural world vanishes before we are even done understanding it, remember that between wolves and men, only one kills for sport, consumes more than he ever needs, and doesn't look after his brothers. I've learned the hard way this past year, that sometimes the enemy is already living inside the gates.

I think I'll stick with the wolves.