langevandreren - Tumblr blog

[langevandreren]

DNI Lookup?

Funny thing about having ASD: It is hard to tell what I do that angers people, even IRL.

But I notice that over time, I accumulate bans from other accounts. It is not a big deal (Tumblr is....not a significant part of my life) but as a curiosity, does anyone know if there is a way to see what DNI lists one has been featured on?

[langevandreren]

Short version: I think you are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Long version:

The cuckoo analogy (and most others, including those that rely on tangible ownership or the term 'appropriation') assume that the offender is causing a harm to 'legitimate' members of the culture. This can be true, but it is not automatically true. Adaptation and syncretism are not synonymous with theft and appropriation.

I think part of that is trying to learn about and respect context, and part of it is not misrepresenting one's own relationship to the source material. There are many ways to do that, but for our situation as Lokeans, perhaps that respect includes studying the culture in which the old stories were told. It perhaps also means not claiming any special status related to that culture or stereotyping it (I tend to avoid Viking kitsch for this reason, among others).

But (and this is a large 'but'), it is also true that many Volkischers have this nonsense idea in their head that they represent an idealized 'true' version of a monolithic culture and that no one who is less pure blooded (or whatever) can have anything to do with that culture. Even someone who can trace their ancestry to 10th century Scandinavia, so what? That ancestor is....(checks notes) maybe 1x10^-15th of their makeup? Does that make such a person more Scandinavian that, say, Marcus Samuelsson?

Americans (and especially West Coast Americans) are perhaps more heterogenous than most, but we are all blended. Scandinavia alone has seen waves of migration that mixed Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens Sapiens. There's a good chance that what we think of as prehistoric Scandinavian culture is itself a blend of SHG and ANE (and probably other) cultural groups and that the myths grow from that blending (one can only speculate about the extent to which the Aesir/Vanir/Jotuns thing is related to this?).

All of which is to say: Purity is a fiction, and a harmful one. An American Lokean may not be Scandinavian, but that does not mean we cannot have a relationship with the Skytreader, and it does not mean we shouldn't study the cultural context of the stories we have about them. I find your work to be useful and enlightening, and would recommend it to anyone as an example of how to study a culture without insulting it.

Oh my god I just had a horrible realization. It's a really personal one so please bear with me but I need to share it because…Idk, maybe it's not just me.

But I realized. I didn't actually grow up being a part of any culture. I grew up with seeing culture around me, and sometimes participating in culture temporarily, but I was not raised with a cultural identity of any sort whatsoever.

I identify as an American only because I live in the US, not because I'm acculturated American. I only have the cultural senses I have because it just so happened to be what I was surrounded by.

None of the stories told to me, none of the food I ate, and nothing I wore, were used to convey "This is who we are as people" by my family or community. Stories were just for entertainment, food was just for eating, and clothes were just whatever I liked wearing from the department store. These things weren't, in any way, identity, outside of things I could use to express my own personal identity if I wanted to.

Fuck, I wasn't even given the cultural knowledge associated with the class I was raised in. No leadership skills, no business sense, nothing.

"But what about religion?" No religion either. My family has culturally Catholic leanings, but it's residual and unrecognized.

"What about being white?" The fact that I can't describe what "being white" even means—beyond how I've heard it described—goes to show you my expertise in the matter.

"What about subcultures?" I only know how to participate in subcultures as either a spectator or as a guest. No culture has ever identified me as belonging to it, despite welcoming my participation, and I can't consider myself part of cultures if they don't claim me.

In terms of my cultural identity, I'm completely blank. It's like I have no name.

I write all this because I was thinking about why some Scandinavians would be upset at me using "Heathen" (as well as bigger questions of cultural appropriation in general) and came to this realization.

For the record…I don't consider myself Heathen because I identify as part of Scandinavian culture. That would be absurd. I use "Heathen" because I accidentally befriended a Heathen god. Loki hid his identity from me for years, and I was very upset when when he finally told me who he was—I felt like he betrayed me, and also like I was going insane, because my worldview prior to that did not support the existence of gods.

I dug deep into learning about Norse paganism because I knew understanding Loki within his cultural context was vital to understanding who he is. The reason I started digging around in Scandinavian culture directly, though, was because—surprise!—nothing we have published in the US actually has this context.

…I'm embarrassed to admit I wasn't aware "cultural appropriation" describes a situation where one person walks into another person's culture and says, "Yes, this is my home now," like a cuckoo taking over another bird's nest. I always thought it was a function of mishandling a culture—using it in ways that was careless and ill-informed—but no, it's taking away other peoples' identities in the name of playing dress-up for yourself.

"You're robbing me of myself for your own stupid aesthetic desires!" That's how I imagine it must feel.

It disgusts me to think that's how my actions may have looked.

[langevandreren]

All good points and things I will think on.

In the meantime, I would add a personal note:

One of the (many) reasons that I reject Volkischer assertions that the old Northern gods are only for people of pure Northern heritage is that I am not.

I am the human equivalent of a dog whose ancestry is such a tangled patchwork that the net result is 'coyote looking mutt.'

And if a coyote-mutt person cannot turn to Loki, who can I turn to?

Okay. I have slept, I've thought about things and got some more persepctives, and I think I have better idea on the whole issue of "what is appropriation" versus "what is a product of diasporic continuation of culture" when it comes to Heathenry. I'm busy today so I won't be able to write about it now, but I'll get around to posting this at some point.

[langevandreren]

This is brilliant and I am adopting this turn of phrase.

I just had a dream that gave me one of the best phrases. You know how when queer people spot another queer person it's called "gaydar"? Well in my dream, when a neurodivergent person clocks another neurodivergent person it's called "spectrometer".

[langevandreren]

You are a literal god who pretends to be a d-list superhero. You’ve grown extremely attached to the people of the village you protect. You get news that an epic battle is taking place near your village and would most likely destroy it…

[langevandreren]

I think @thorraborrin nailed it.

Asking if anyone thought the Eddas (which one?) were a literal and factual account of a real event is...irrelevant? Mythic truth is largely unrelated to literal truth.

To say nothing of the extent to which what we think of as historical facts that are 'literally true' is heavily influenced by cultural narrative. Tell me again, who discovered America and when?

Also, I would argue that a lot of what USAmericans think of as normal in religion, like believing that stories are a verbatim account of a real historical event that happened exactly as told, with no room for interpretation, is influenced by decades of fundamentalists trying to copycat what a movement of profoundly stupid people think scientific 'truth' looks like.

And if there were some people that did believe the stories were literally true, so what?

People are f*cking weird and that isn't a new development. Look at all the implausible stuff people claim to literally believe in our time, even in the face of significant factual counter-evidence.

hello there! today i came across a claim that sort of baffled me. someone said that they believed the historical norse heathens viewed their own myths literally. i was under the impression that the vast majority of sources we have are christian sources, so it seems pretty hard to back that up. is there any actual basis for this claim? thanks in advance for your time!

Sorry for the delay, I've been real busy lately and haven't been home much. Even after making you wait I'm still going to give a copout answer.

I think the most basic actual answer is that it's doubtful that someone has a strong basis to make that claim, and the same would probably go for someone claiming they didn't take things literally. I think we just don't know, and most likely, it was mixed-up bits of both literal and non-literal belief, and which parts were literal and which parts weren't varied from person to person. We have no reason so suppose that there was any compulsion to believe things in any particular way.

About Christians being the interlocutors of a lot of mythology, this is really a whole separate question. On one hand there's the question of whether they took their myths literally, and on the other is entirely different question about whether or not we can know what those myths were. Source criticism in Norse mythology is a pretty complicated topic but the academic consensus is definitely that there are things we can know for sure about Norse myth, and a lot more that we can make arguments for. For instance the myth of Thor fishing for Miðgarðsormr is attested many times, not only by Snorri but by pagan skálds and in art. Myths of the Pagan North by Christopher Abram is a good work about source criticism in Norse mythology.

Though this raises another point, because the myth of Thor fishing is not always the same. Just like how we have a myth of Thor's hammer being made by dwarves, and a reference to a different myth where it came out of the sea. Most likely, medieval Norse people were encountering contradictory information in different performances of myth all the time. So while that leaves room for at least some literal belief, it couldn't be a rigid, all-encompassing systematic treatment of all myth as literal. We have good reason to believe they changed myths on purpose and that it wasn't just memory errors.

I know you're really asking whether this one person has any grounds for their statement, and I've already answered that I don't think they do. But this is an interesting thought so I'm going to keep poking at it. I'm not sure that I'm really prepared to discuss this properly, but my feeling is that this is somehow the wrong question. I don't know how to explain this with reference to myth, so I'm going to make a digression, and hope that you get the vibe of what I'm getting at by analogy. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) described animism in terms of beliefs, "belief in spiritual beings," i.e. a belief that everything (or at least many things) has a soul or spirit. But this is entirely contradicted by later anthropology. Here's an except from Pantheologies by Mary Jane Rubenstein, p. 93:

their animacy is not a matter of belief but rather of relation; to affirm that this tree, that river, or the-bear-looking-at-me is a person is to affirm its capacity to interact with me—and mine with it. As Tim Ingold phrases the matter, “we are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world, but with a condition of living in it.”

In other words, "belief" doesn't even really play into it, whether or not you "believe" in the bear staring you down is nonsensical, and if you can be in relation with a tree then the same goes for that relationality; "believing" in it is totally irrelevant or at least secondary. Myths are of course very different and we can't do a direct comparison here, but I have a feeling that the discussion of literal versus nonliteral would be just as secondary to whatever kind of value the myths had.

One last thing I want to point out is that they obviously had the capacity to interpret things through allegory and metaphor because they did that frequently. This is most obvious in dream interpretations in the sagas. Those dreams usually convey true, prophetic information, but it has to be interpreted by wise people who are skilled at symbolic interpretation. I they ever did this with myths, I'm not aware of any trace they left of that, but we can at least be sure that there was nothing about the medieval Norse mind that confined it to literalism.

For multiple reasons this is not an actual answer but it's basically obligatory to mention that some sagas, especially legendary or chivalric sagas, were referred to in Old Norse as lygisögur, literally 'lie-sagas' (though not pejoratively and probably best translated just as 'fictional sagas'). We know this mostly because Sverrir Sigurðsson was a big fan of lygisögur. But this comes from way too late a date to be useful for your question.

[langevandreren]

IDK much about either Taylor Swift or the Hamburglar, but for sure Bugs Bunny is gender fluid.

when people say taylor swift is a lesbian it strikes me in the same way that someone might claim that the hamburglar is transgender I wouldnt argue for or against it because this information is being shouted at me from the bottom of a well and I'm more inclined to just be wondering what you're doing down there in the first place

[langevandreren]

Yes.

And also, on both the broom closet and *the closet,* I always thought of that as meaning that you were hiding who you are from yourself.

In both cases, there are legitimate reasons why a person may know exactly who they are, but but choose to keep some of those details as part of their private life rather than their public life.

Don’t think of it as, “I’m stuck in the broom closet.”

Think of it as, “I’m a secret agent for the Goddess.”

[langevandreren]

Have you read Prof. Gunnell's 'Pantheon? What Pantheon?' (1) article in Scripta Islandica? I think you might enjoy it, and he has a take on both Valhalla and the regionality thing we were talking about earlier.

tl;dr version:

He makes a case against Snorri's presentation of the Aesir and Vanir as a sort of Olympus style family of gods with Odin as the chief and each god having a specific sphere of influence. Instead, he proposes that while most folks were probably familiar with all the different figures, it is likely that individuals (and familial or regional groups) probably venerated only a couple or even only a single figure (like Thorr). His take on Valhalla is that is was perhaps just an Odinic thing that the ruling class found useful as a general story when the whole pantheon was being fused together in a way that mirrored the order that rulers were trying to create in this world (an extended and powerful family, with a single clear ruler over all others).

But probably getter to read it oneself than trust my interpretation. Also (and unrelated), he references Triin Laidoner's work on Loki (2) which I quite enjoyed and also think is a good read.

(1) Gunnell, Terry (2015). Pantheon? What Pantheon? Concepts of a Family of Gods in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions. Scripta Islandica, vol 66, p 55.

(2) Laidoner, Triin (2012). The Flying Noaidi of the North: Sámi Tradition Reflected in the Figure Loki Laufeyjarson in Old Norse Mythology. Scripta Islandica, vol 63, p 59.

Forget if I mentioned this before, but I'm really starting to think the "die on the battlefield for Valhalla" thing was a mythology specific to the Varangian Guard.

Like, it really just does seem like a classic blend of pagan tropes with Imperial Roman/Byzantine mentalities.

[langevandreren]

Many thanks!

I hear you about the moving. For a long period of my life, I wasn't really able to have anything more than would fit in my rust bucket car, and that tended to limit a lot of things. But also, even now it can sometimes be useful to shed things that just sort of accumulate, and to start over with just the most important things. Either way, I hope the new place works out!

Unrelated: I particularly like both that you have so many things that are from your family, and the piece with the hands reaching for the sky. There is art, and then there is art that makes me feel something. That painting is very much the latter.

Here's what's on my ancestor altar and why

A bowl of potpourri made from local plants and blue lotus and rosemary and lemon essential oil and olive oil. Smells good

Framed butterfly wing I found on the ground. Represents transience and beauty.

Messy minimalist black and white painting that looks like a bunch of black hands reaching up out of the ground, smeared handprints. Represents the forgotten and restless Dead, all those ones whose names we do not remember but whose suffering we carry on in our bones

Black tablecloth. Think that one's kind of obvious

Painting of a skull with little colorful psychedelic mushrooms growing out of it

Skull mask with goose feathers and small purple obsidian chunk. This one will get its own post

Coasters that say bloom and grow to represent life

Decorative plate with candle. Remembrance and warmth

Various personal trinkets that would take a really long time to explain individually but includes personal family symbolism

Book of Russian folk tales from my great grandfather. Also the art is beautiful and reminds me of my great-grandmother who was a very talented artist

Live plants for life. Bamboo plants specifically a house for yokai I met at my last apartment that were Disturbed by construction

Book of insects specifically related to a bug / deaf / decay spirit I work with

Not show or not shown in great detail

Mug for water, shot glass with skull but that is not used for offering alcohol because alcoholism runs in the family, elephant symbolism for personal African guardian spirit, Jade to represent me because similar to birth name, dried flowers from great grandma's funeral, book I wrote in past life about communicating with the Dead.

And yet more

Please reblog if you enjoy because I would like to propose a new tag / movement- described witchcraft

I feel there is an important element to my blindness and my spirituality and want blind people to be able to participate in things related to it .

please consider sharing a similar post of something that you do in your practice with a described image! That's all.

J

[langevandreren]

I haven't included pictures, and there is a shifting collection of candles and incense and sage, but the main features are:

A handmade table, dark wood stain, the top is a sand-colored tile from a salvage store that I fractured into 3 pieces and set a blue and green glass mosiac in the fractures. It symbolizes where I live (the desert), and 'water as life', and Jorumungandr's world-spanning nature.

The skull from a small canid in a bowl of haworthia (spiky succulents). This to me is a reminder of Fenrir, and that the natural world (and life in general) is full of beauty but can also be dangerous to the unwary.

A bonsai tree, about half of which is dead and the other half leaves out and blooms every spring. I also have a pothos vine growing up the dead part of the bonsai. This reminds me of Hel, and that we are all living and we all die. It also reminds me that within the larger seasons of my life are shorter cycles that I should feel and be present in.

A drinking bowl and a coyote carved from hematite. The bowl is for Loki when I make drinks to share with them (I take mine in a rocks glass). The coyote was made by a man from the Zuni Nation, whose work I like, but who is a deeply troubled human being. To me, it is a symbol for Loki's presence in this place. It is a reminder of the challenges in my life and within my self. But it is also a reminder of victories that I have won, and traps that I have escaped from. It is a symbol of change, and being able to adapt and overcome without giving up who I am. It is a symbol of survival.

Here's what's on my ancestor altar and why

A bowl of potpourri made from local plants and blue lotus and rosemary and lemon essential oil and olive oil. Smells good

Framed butterfly wing I found on the ground. Represents transience and beauty.

Messy minimalist black and white painting that looks like a bunch of black hands reaching up out of the ground, smeared handprints. Represents the forgotten and restless Dead, all those ones whose names we do not remember but whose suffering we carry on in our bones

Black tablecloth. Think that one's kind of obvious

Painting of a skull with little colorful psychedelic mushrooms growing out of it

Skull mask with goose feathers and small purple obsidian chunk. This one will get its own post

Coasters that say bloom and grow to represent life

Decorative plate with candle. Remembrance and warmth

Various personal trinkets that would take a really long time to explain individually but includes personal family symbolism

Book of Russian folk tales from my great grandfather. Also the art is beautiful and reminds me of my great-grandmother who was a very talented artist

Live plants for life. Bamboo plants specifically a house for yokai I met at my last apartment that were Disturbed by construction

Book of insects specifically related to a bug / deaf / decay spirit I work with

Not show or not shown in great detail

Mug for water, shot glass with skull but that is not used for offering alcohol because alcoholism runs in the family, elephant symbolism for personal African guardian spirit, Jade to represent me because similar to birth name, dried flowers from great grandma's funeral, book I wrote in past life about communicating with the Dead.

And yet more

Please reblog if you enjoy because I would like to propose a new tag / movement- described witchcraft

I feel there is an important element to my blindness and my spirituality and want blind people to be able to participate in things related to it .

please consider sharing a similar post of something that you do in your practice with a described image! That's all.

J

[langevandreren]

All good points. A thing I might add:

I would say that religions are reflections of their cultures, and those cultures are in turn heavily influenced by the incentives/environment in which the participants live.

The OP description of Danish work culture strikes me as very similar to what I see in the US in locations/industries/workplaces with good job security (and often strong union protection). Mostly, I am thinking of places on the West Coast, but probably it exists elsewhere.

The stereotypical 'protestant work culture' in which not running yourself down to the point of exhaustion is seen as a personal and moral failing...I see that more in locations/industries/workplaces with low job security and few or no protections against the whims of management. The places that comes to mind first for me are places I have known on the East Coast, and wealthier parts of the old slaver states. But tech culture on the West Coast seems to have developed many of the same habits.

The part that I find amusing is that if anything, I've found the more egalitarian, 'lazy-er' environments produce better quality work on average. So much of the hard work that neo-calvinists do ends up being ass-kissing and make-work to look busy and impress management. And that is before factoring in the disasters that come from the kind of managerial hubris that an absolute and divinely ordained hierarchy induces.

Not statistically rigorous, but observations. Make of them what you will.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about the differences between American Protestantism and Nordic Protestantism to say anything deep or groundbreaking about it but hearing the way Americans talk about Protestantism makes it sound like an entirely different religion.

To be clear I’m not religious. The only thing that passed for a religious upbringing was my Religions class in high school. Like most Danes I don’t have any strong feelings about Christianity. It’s just there, Christmas is nice and we get days off from work around Easter.

But just the sentence “Protestant work ethic” as a way to explain why Americans are so overworked sounds kinda humorous to a simple Dane like me. Protestantism is the state religion in Denmark (Evangelical Lutheran to be precise) and we have the highest number of Protestants per capita in the world and yet Americans who move over here often comment on how lazy we are. We leave work early, we have an ungodly number of paid days off (most of them religious), all parents get paid maternity leave and we will break our bosses’ arms if they try to make us work paid overtime too many days in a row. I’m not saying that to brag, it’s just to illustrate what the “Protestant work ethic” looks like in the most Protestant country in the world.

This is super interesting and I need to dig deeper into why Protestantism turned out so differently in our countries.

[langevandreren]

Reblogged, not because I have anything to add, at least until after another trip through the literature. Reblogged so that I can find this again later, and in case anyone who follows me doesn't already read Skaldish.

The more I examine the Norse Myths, the clearer it becomes which tales likely don't actually reflect the worldviews of the Norse people.

Like...there are a few tells. The first and most obvious is the fact a few stories were added/changed in order to make it seem like they are proto-versions of the stories found in Christian mythology (Ragnarok being analogous to Armageddon, Loki being portrayed as the Norse devil, etc).

But there are subtler things as well.

I'm beginning to notice there's a difference between the way stories present information. The function of some stories is to describe how something happened, whereas the function of others is describe what something is.

For example, it is said that Thor throwing down his hammer mjolnir on the heads of giants is what created the mountains and the valleys.

This is an example of a story that describes how something happened.

This stands in comparison to the story of Loki being bound beneath the earth. It's said earthquakes happen is because Loki is writhing from getting snake venom in his eyes.

This is an example of a story that describes what something is (in this case, what an earthquake is).

Now, it's really easy to think of these two stories as being identical, but the "tell" is that first story actually describes an event that can be witnessed: You can watch storms pass through the mountains and strike them with lightning. You cannot, however, see Loki punching and kicking beneath the ground.

Between the two belief systems, Christianity is the one that focuses heavily on describing worldly phenomenon through abstract concepts. We don't actually see this in most of the Norse stories, which are either for entertainment, or are an allegory for a felt experience.

I don't know, I'm just going to keep chipping away at this and see if it gets me anywhere, but I'm fascinated by this perspective so far.

[langevandreren]

Is this from a scene? If no, brilliant, love it. If yes, still brilliant, but this might be the thing that makes me watch that Loki show.

🐍 sketch • Loki does what he does best, pissing off the big guy.

[langevandreren]

There's a lot in there to mull over. I confess to enjoying a good 'let's have a glass of aquavit and a long think about something Skaldish wrote' kind of evening.

I had not considered that the difference could be a melding of regional stories. It makes sense as an alternative to the Christianization possibility (which is my reflexive suspicion when something is off in a story). Also, I love that there is a translation that calls that out. I will have to look up her version.

Side thought (something I need to look into): based on local stories and place names and such, what are the odds that Loki was seen very differently in different regions (and, might this help explain the Loki/Utgard Loki problem)?

Your points about the social role of flyting are well made, and something I need to read up on. I'd always read Lokasenna as deadly serious. Like, 'I'm going to throw down with my commanding officer in front of his family and then go AWOL over the outcome' amount of serious.

Many thanks for the reply! You have given me much to think on.

The more I examine the Norse Myths, the clearer it becomes which tales likely don't actually reflect the worldviews of the Norse people.

Like...there are a few tells. The first and most obvious is the fact a few stories were added/changed in order to make it seem like they are proto-versions of the stories found in Christian mythology (Ragnarok being analogous to Armageddon, Loki being portrayed as the Norse devil, etc).

But there are subtler things as well.

I'm beginning to notice there's a difference between the way stories present information. The function of some stories is to describe how something happened, whereas the function of others is describe what something is.

For example, it is said that Thor throwing down his hammer mjolnir on the heads of giants is what created the mountains and the valleys.

This is an example of a story that describes how something happened.

This stands in comparison to the story of Loki being bound beneath the earth. It's said earthquakes happen is because Loki is writhing from getting snake venom in his eyes.

This is an example of a story that describes what something is (in this case, what an earthquake is).

Now, it's really easy to think of these two stories as being identical, but the "tell" is that first story actually describes an event that can be witnessed: You can watch storms pass through the mountains and strike them with lightning. You cannot, however, see Loki punching and kicking beneath the ground.

Between the two belief systems, Christianity is the one that focuses heavily on describing worldly phenomenon through abstract concepts. We don't actually see this in most of the Norse stories, which are either for entertainment, or are an allegory for a felt experience.

I don't know, I'm just going to keep chipping away at this and see if it gets me anywhere, but I'm fascinated by this perspective so far.

[langevandreren]

Oh yeah. Being raised Christian brings a lot of interesting baggage. Or at least, it did for me.

For what it is worth, I like to think of UPG as guerilla theology. Like, this is me, cobbling together an understanding of what I practice based on some dubiously recorded texts and a collection of scholarly articles written by people who are probably even weirder about this than I am.

And also, of all the figures in the old Scandinavian stories, Loki is the most likely to have a fursona. I mean, there *was* that time they transformed into a mare just so they could mate with a stallion.

This is going to maybe sound silly, but genuinely, I think Loki would have such a blast with cosplayers. Especially the folks who are really dedicated to the art and go all out with hair and makeup and all those things. Dedicated cosplay is about the closest human can come to shape-shifting and I think that delights him to no end.

[langevandreren]

It sounds not at all silly. Or maybe, just the right amount of silly.

Either way, it makes perfect sense to me.

(Scholarly note: One might also argue that the putative tradition of cross-gender dressing among some northern practitioners over the centuries is related to this)

This is going to maybe sound silly, but genuinely, I think Loki would have such a blast with cosplayers. Especially the folks who are really dedicated to the art and go all out with hair and makeup and all those things. Dedicated cosplay is about the closest human can come to shape-shifting and I think that delights him to no end.