Three tree trunks and the wonderful patterns in their bark photographed on a walk this afternoon. The language of the Old Ways is written in a script beyond words, speaking eloquently of flourishing and dearth, and of all states as the measure of all else. #pagan#paganism#nature#photography#germanicpaganism
Grogu/baby Yoda standing, holding his cup. At his feet he has incense, and a variety of crystals. Text above him reads:
"You're not into that witchy stuff are you?"
Me:
I’ve been wondering what I wanna do with this account. There’s so many things I love to talk about- politics, poetry, art, myself. I’ve settled on my paganism, since I’d quite like to have a little corner on my phone dedicated for it. This isn’t a particularly pagan sketch, just a magical little tree I drew a few weeks back, but I thought it was a good starting point. I really like it, and I hope anyone who sees this does too. I’ll probably be posting more art in the future, since I am an artist!
Discussion of Arabian paganism. Unfortunately, this only talks about the gods and not the mythical beings that are so fascinating - djinn, efreets, maskim, rabisu, the various cryptozoological animals, etc.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on Francis Young's "Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples ".
This book sounds like essential reading for anyone interested in paganism, neopaganism, and the beliefs and practices of those living between the Baltic and the Urals as they encountered Christians.
This Balkan Willow is on my daily walking route. The houses around it were built in the 60s and the green space between them was put there by the developer. So this tree is around 50 years old. It is definitely a he/him and my dog has no hesitation in approaching him and sniffing the snake-like roots that are coiled at the base. She is not so keen on every tree.
Why?
What is being communicated to her by means that my limited human senses can't detect that tells her that Mr Balkan wants her to approach?
There is more to language than writing or speaking
Looking up at a tree with deeply fissured bark. The trunk splits into thick boughs that seem to invite climbing. The canopy is green with medium sized leaves. Moss covers the bark from top to bottom
I watch a lot of people first-time reacting to my favorite types of music that they've never been exposed to before. Metalheads reacting to punk. Boomers reacting to grunge. GenZ reacting to 90s pop. Rappers reacting to hippie anthems.
But nothing beats white people experiencing Heilung for the first time.
They mirror my own first reaction: stunned shock and spiritual revelation.
It's a moment of instant decolonization by tapping into to some long-locked tribal memory that is OURS, not someone else's. It's decolonizing not by telling us what we can't have, but by showing us what we lost — and how we can bring it back.
Heilung is recreating, as best they can, what our Norse, Germanic, and Celtic ancestors might have practiced, the music they might have sung, the rites they might have honored, the worldview they most likely espoused. All of that died when the Christian invasion erased our cultures over the centuries, and they forced us into a life that is still alien to our natures. Yet with each violent wave they proudly declared we'd been "civilized."
No. We'd only been domesticated and robbed of our birthright of knowing Mother Nature, hearing our own instincts, and sensing the spirits who live everywhere.
Heilung digs deep into a vein, not where there is hidden a satanic Balrog (though our programming might make us worry this music has summoned a demon). Instead we find a resurrection of our own ancestral soul lying dormant within us.
And these YouTubers have this spiritual awakening right on screen.
🧵
[added thread emoj]
[Blanket Caveat: This turned into a long thread, so I'll just say, I don't caveat a whole lot, I don't explain many of my terms or how I've arrived at the assumptions and claims that I make, and I probably don't properly connect all the dots. This topic could be a paper, and would be, if I did all that. I just wanted to get the broad strokes down.]
And I know neopaganism is a thing, and I've practiced it both solo and with others, but Heilung really puts in the work, the research, the energy, the spectacle, to make it feel real what it might have been like to sit around a fire where the elders were preparing for a raid, acting out a divine scene, or appealing to the harvest spirits, knowing you're at the mercy of inhuman powers far beyond your control and understanding.
There are many paths out of authoritarian Christianity. And those paths have shifted over the centuries. Time was, your only other option wasn't atheism, it was deism, an enlightenment version of god as a scientist-creator who abandoned the universe after creating it. Now it's atheism, and from there you may end up at suburban paganism-lite, or a secular philosophy. Or you can look to various world religions.
Every one of these routes is some form of colonized or colonizing.
But Heilung is decolonized.
There is nothing about the culture Heilung displays on screen that is stolen from some entirely different People. (Obviously they had trade with and raided one another and nearby regions, but they didn't systemically colonize the way The Roman Empire and later Roman Christianity did.) Heilung gives us something that is 100% ours.
Their name means "Healing," and I could write a thesis on why that is true for me.
It takes me beyond deconstructing, into reconstructing, a space I'm less comfortable with.
There's this problem with how we think, talk, and argue about European #Paganism which I think just demonstrates how Christianity-brained we've all become.
Travail de sculpture sur un athamé, le manche est en ébène de macassar, bois marron chocolat, dessus je grave un visage féminin aux cheveux longs ornés d'une couronne de fleurs