Gnosis Diary: Life as a Heathen

My personal experiences, including religious and spiritual experiences, community interaction, general heathenry, and modern life on my heathen path, which is Asatru.

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Reconnecting with Sigyn, Part 1: Learning From My Mistake

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A godphone is like a computer that automatically signs you into your email; if you're using someone else's and you don't know how to sign out and sign back in as yourself, you'll accidentally get their messages instead of yours. If you don't realize what happened it can be really confusing.

Continuing the story of my personal journey on my path from the part where I broke my connection with "Other-Sigyn" as related in my post My Two Weddings Part 4: Odin and Honir: 

I didn't know "Other-Sigyn" was not "My Sigyn" but I could tell that she wasn't the same being I had been connecting with while writing the Sigyn parts in Some Say Fire. I came to the completely wrong conclusion. I concluded that I had never really connected with her at all until then. I realized that the being I had connected with while writing was my own subconscious. There was a truth there: the Sigyn character in my book does represent my adult subconscious. But now I know that I had connected with Sigyn while writing, and I see evidence that she had been in my life since early childhood (her white butterflies had come to me early and kept appearing throughout my life.) While writing Some Say Fire, I connected with both my own subconscious AND "my Sigyn" through the Sigyn character, who was also sometimes just a character. I was able to figure out which was which only after realizing that. 

At the time, I thought the being I connected with that night was the "real" Sigyn, and that "my" Sigyn was just me all along. I now know that I was wrong about that. "Other-Sigyn" may or may not have been an aspect of Sigyn, but it was neither the one who had been in my life all along, nor the one who came to me in the days that followed trying to reconnect with me. It was not the Sigyn I connected with while writing, not my subconscious, not a character thought-form, and not the goddess. If the being of that night was a Sigyn, it wasn't my Sigyn, and was most certainly not the right Sigyn. 

I've learned that people developing godphones need to rely on their own connections to the gods, and not connect through someone else's filter. People with godphones have a part of their god or gods reserved for them, and if they connect to someone else's they won't connect with that aspect. Continuing the email metaphor, that part reserved for them is kind of like a person's email address on a big email service. If you get the wrong one, it's still gmail, but it's not YOUR gmail. 

Looking back, I realize that I drew the wrong conclusion because I didn't know that different people connect with different parts of the gods. I didn't realize that until I read Beth Wodanis's blog post My Odin And Other Peoples' Odins; then it all made sense.

This is why, in the fairy tales where the hero gets help and directions from a little bird or whatever in the forest, the helper never takes him all the way to the destination. If it did, the hero wouldn't end up where he was meant to go. He wouldn't reach the castle he's trying to find. He'd end up in the bird's castle, which is a nest in a tree, instead of his own. 

"My Sigyn" kept coming to me trying to reconnect, while I was falling asleep and entering a state of hypnogogia before true sleep arrived, and in that state I could see her but I couldn't hear her. I had turned off my connection to "Other-Sigyn" but I could not figure out how to turn my connection to "My Sigyn" back on because I didn't realize they were not the same Sigyn. The goddess herself had to break back through to me, in events I'll relate in part 2, coming next. 

 Image: Sigyn Loki's Wife by Harry George Theaker

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Erin Lale is the author of Asatru For Beginners, and the updated, longer version of her book, Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path. Erin has been a gythia since 1989. She was the editor and publisher of Berserkrgangr Magazine, and is admin/ owner of the Asatru Facebook Forum. She also writes science fiction and poetry, ran for public office, is a dyer and fiber artist, was acquisitions editor at a small press, and founded the Heathen Visibility Project.

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