Howdy everyone, long time no see. It’s been a minute since my last post, and a lot has changed. Last time I was writing consistently, I had just ventured down the pagan path, and my way began as a Wiccan, or at least loosely practicing as one.

Since then, almost a year ago now, I’ve transitioned from Wicca to generally calling myself “pagan” and adhering to an eclectic practice tailored after Norse and Celtic polytheism. The shift sprang about as I did what I do: researched until I was drowning in conflicting information and then nervously bit my nails for a month deciding what was what.

From my perspective at that time, I decided Wicca wasn’t my path, not entirely. I believed it had fallen into, or perhaps was born of and had not yet emerged from, romanticized pseudo-mythology. Taking the foundations of a very influential but largely fantasized 1948 book on comparative mythology and poetry by Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Wicca in my mind had become a romantic’s paganism.

It was an ideal, something nice to think about, nice to see all the mythologies of the world come together as though formed of the same substance and simply divided facets of the same whole.

But that isn’t exactly how things panned out, mythology didn’t work so perfectly. Yet in Wicca, often it’s packaged as though it did. Practices are called “ancient” when in reality they are entirely new, and often fabricated. Inspired, perhaps, but not at all ancient. Beliefs of many modern Wiccans are from 17th and 18th century occultism at best. Again, not ancient; not really, truly ancient.

Granted, this is a pervasive issue in modern paganism, even in Norse paganism, half of my new home (kinda, but another post on that later).

The runes, for example, are viewed as though they reach back into the annals of prehistory itself, but they don’t. The oldest known runic inscriptions in Elder Futhark (the alphabet used by the predecessors of the Vikings, who used the Younger Futhark) date to the 2nd century C.E. So the Latin alphabet we use today is far and away older.

We do this too with the gods. We define them, constrain them, identify them strictly by name and association, and often I fear fail to realize the gods of the Vikings and the Eddas were newly named (in the grand scheme of things), in a mythology likely only recently defined at the time of the Scandinavian migration into northern Europe and the New World, perhaps dating no further back than the 5th century based on discoveries.

That’s not to say they are not older, for certainly they are. Continental Germans knew them by similar names, and before them they may not have had names at all, but were spirits of the wilds, acknowledged and venerated by the people of that land.

Today my practice acknowledges the missing pieces in our mythologies, but also emphasizes the need for modern pagans to understand they now hold the flame of a living tradition.

I do not feel we can simply look to the past to justify our practice and beliefs, for doing so means we live in the shadow of a greater past, existing on the edge of a page torn from an ancient tome.

Look to the past and learn how to move into the future, but don’t be confined by it. We must recognize what comes from history and what comes from modern gnosis, but both are equally valid and important, and will guide the pagans of today into the future, where once again perhaps we will tell new tales of the gods and the ancestors by the fireside, as numerous and bright as our ancestors once did.