Spirit Writer

Image by Enrique Meseguer, Pixabay . I left hellfire and brimstone Christianity at age 13. I should say that I was still in a household run by a believer, but thankfully wasn't forced to go back to church when I said I didn't believe and actually felt sick to my stomach with the thought of going back. My path to Paganism started with reading Edgar Cayce, aka The Sleeping Prophet , in my teens. He was a devout Christian but was a conundrum to those of his faith who eschewed any kind of psychic phenomena or belief in reincarnation. This laid down the road for me to enter the '90s in my full New-Age girl glory. I loved this new path and experienced deep healing of childhood abuse and learned about Wicca and other Pagan paths. I became an energy healer and massage therapist for a decade, but I also saw some of the same hypocrisy in that community that Christians were accused of and often found myself in disagreement with some of the principles. As a childhood physical an

Odin as wanderer. Image credit: Hans Thoma [Public domain]. "People’s approval ain’t nothin’ you need. Half the time it ain’t true. Just be sure you think you’re right; and that you’re comfortable in your own skin; you’re all you can count on." The Poetic Edda , a record of early Norse poems, is one of the sources of our knowledge of the Norse deities and mythology. A more recent translation is by author, scholar and professor of Nordic Studies, Jackson Crawford, P.h.D. He shares his knowledge and his passion for myths on his popular Youtube channel . The Poetic Edda includes the Havamal , which in Crawford's translation is the Counsel of Odin the One-Eyed . This is a poem of stanzas purported to be sayings of Odin. Crawford gives his scholarly translation, but in an appendix, he also shares what he calls the Cowboy Havamal as sampled at the beginning of this post. It's a down-to-earth, Old West meets Norse myths rendition of stanzas 1-79 "give or ta

The author dedicates her work to Odin. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain . "Where eclectic isn't a dirty word" is the subtitle of this blog, and that's true to my original intent of depositing old 101-type (or admittedly 099-type) articles from my days over a decade ago writing at the Pagan site at BellaOnline. The goal at that site was to be a unification point to provide free access to resources for new pagans of every stripe. My path has taken many turns since then, and while I believe I'll always be eclectic in some form, my daily practice is what I consider devotional polytheism. I remember the bad scholarship in books from the '80s and '90s, and understood the need for the backlash that happened in paganism. However, I always found the anti "fluffy-bunny" trend somewhat pretentious and unnecessary. Besides the derision towards new pagans and witches, there was a growing trend of anti-eclecticism and anti UPG* (see below) to th