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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.

What does novel gnosis look like?

I'm so very glad we have the internet as a venue for sharing about spirituality - the community grows as the web widens. But there are some pitfalls and obstacles that limit the extent to which we can really communicate about spirituality online, or on any other platform that involves writing. I grapple with these issues almost every time I write a blog post here.

The nature of blogging, or writing articles for Pagan magazines, or posting in spiritual groups on social media, or even writing books is that of words: we write down what we want to share, and other people read it.

May I be inspired.
May I be grateful.
May I walk in ease
and devotion.

As I have noted several times here on this blog, this June I fell and hurt my ankle, which confined me to flat surfaces and my back deck instead of the long walks on the road and through the woods that I so enjoy and find so nourishing of my creativity and spirituality. In my time on the deck, I started to ponder devotion and building devotional practices and from those contemplations the Goddess Devotional prayerbook was born. My family jokes that I fell down and when I got back up, I’d written a book. This was a surprise project for me this year, not something I expected to create, and I’m really pleased with it.

Free pdf version and a collection of additional resources is available here.