Advice for crafting wishes: When you wish for a suitcase full of money, you must specify that you don't mean a gentlemen's toiletry case that your then-teenage older brother put pretty looking pocket change into in 1978.
Here follows some further advice on how to make a wish, which I have learned the same way I learned the above: by experience. This is general wish advice, so it doesn't matter whether you are making your wishes via folk magic, such as birthday candles or a wishing well or a dandelion or a star, or a formal spell of some kind, or by appealing to a wish granting entity.
In the days of yore, people often made their own inks, thus imbuing them with a deeply personal energy. They simply went to the side of the road and gathered blackberries or pokeberries from the vines that grew there. Often a bird flying overhead will supply a gift of volunteer vines best cultivated by a fence where they can climb, making berry-picking easier. When it comes to matters of the heart, contracts, legacy letters and any document of real importance that you feel the need to make your mark upon, an artfully made ink can help you write unforgettable love letters and very memorable memorandums. This spell is best performed during the waning moon.
Gather the following for your ink recipe: a vial or small sealable bottle, dark red ink, 1/8th cup crushed berry juice, nine drops of burgundy wine, apple essential oil, and paper.
Here are some more questions and answers about my new book Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path, and about me and my other books and projects. This book is the ONLY official, authorized new version of my out-of-print book Asatru For Beginners.
With that out of the way, here are some more of the questions and answers. Part 1 of this 2 part series ran last weekend.
On August 1, book launch day for Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path, I hosted an online book launch party on my social media instead of having an in-person book launch event. People posted some questions to my social media. Here's an unroll of questions and answers from the event.
Question: What changed for you, from the beginning to the end of writing this book? How did writing this book change you?
One of the reasons we call Modern Minoan Paganism a revivalist tradition instead of a reconstructionist one is that, unlike many reconstructionist Pagan traditions, we don't have any ancient texts to work from. Yes, the ancient Minoans were a literate society, but so far all of their scripts and writing systems are untranslated.
Take, for instance, the cup pictured at the top of this post. This is a photo from Sir Arthur Evans' monumental multi-volume work Palace of Minos, a record of his excavations at Knossos (now in the public domain). The artifact in the photo is a terracotta cup with writing on the interior in what may very well be squid ink. That writing is in the script rather unimaginatively known as Linear A, and it's still undeciphered.
Nanna is Baldur's wife. As I mentioned in my prior post on Hodur, in the Fireverse Nanna was the old moon goddess before the moon power passed to the moon god Mani. I believe this insight works in the actual mythology too. That's the reason I'm posting my novel gnosis: I think that some of what flowed out of my fingers when I was writing Some Say Fire was actual religious truth. I believe that much of my novel was directly inspired by Loki and Odin and other gods. So, here is the gnosis I've gleaned from the chapter focusing on Nanna.
In the Fireverse, when Baldur and Hodur were both wooing Nanna, Baldur invited Nanna to a ball he held in his mother’s underwater ballroom in Fensalir. Usually Fensalir only admits women and children, but there was an exception for the ballroom. The ballroom is round and one can look out of the curving walls at the underwater portions of a lake. The ballroom chapter being told from the perspective of Loki, like the rest of the novel, the story focused on Loki’s attempt to help out Hodur, which did not go well from Loki’s perspective. There were shenanigans involving a snow making machine. In the end, Nanna chose Baldur, just as she was always meant to, even though that’s not what Loki was trying to achieve.
In this series of posts, I will be presenting some of my novel gnosis, that is, my religious insights gained via writing fiction. Most of these come from my unpublished behemoth Some Say Fire, in which I retold the entire corpus of heathen mythology, with original work inserted interstitially, like in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Some of my novel gnosis comes from my Time Yarns Universe, which has both published and unpublished works in it.
Anthony Gresham
I once had a store bought pumpkin pie that had no flavor at all. It looked pretty, but I couldn't taste it, all I got was texture. I haven't bought ...
Erin Lale
Nods. Mythology Thor is 3/4 giant, physically big and strong, and married to the grain goddess Sif aka goddess of bread (and beer, probably.) He would...
Jamie
Cunning Wife,I believe you are 100% correct. Just look at the 'Chessboard' of Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio, one of the 13 Treasures of The Island of Britain. ...
Anthony Gresham
There is a Methodist church north of the James river that sells homemade Brunswick Stew for a few days each year. My parents loved it. They would bu...
