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This one is by me but I didn't want to change the format that I used with the other essays so I went ahead and put my name on it. Keep in mind that I wrote this shortly after I had been writing about the topic of novel gnosis here on this blog.
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This started with a prank. It turned into a profound insight. Here is the story.
I usually do a mild prank every year on April 1st, in which I say or post something that is not true and see if anyone believes me. When I worked in a call center, one year on April 1st I told everyone there was a UFO in the parking lot.
...More short, pithy sayings, and short form advice from my responses to questions and social media. I was asked what happened to the dead before the goddess Hel came to rule the realm Hel. My answer:
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...I was one of 3 people, each from different paths, who performed a ritual of their path at a funeral. I wore my religious robes and brought a drinking horn to perform a traditional sumbel toast.
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My primary goddess is Freya. That has been true all along, as the gods have recently affirmed for me, even when Freya gave me to Sigyn for a while. Sigyn was who I needed at the point in my life when I was dealing with caregiving and then death and its aftermath. As long time readers of this blog know, last year I started my Monster Powers journey (see my posts titled Monster Powers.) As my Gila Lizard Powers (GLP-1) medicine got my health under control and I started losing weight, I found myself vaulted into the world of perfumes, and began exploring new aspects of beauty which I had never considered before. That was when the goddess Frigga told me my primary goddess was still Freya and always would be. Later I affirmed that with Freya herself.
Long ago, in my 20s, my natural body was thin and beautiful and strong and capable. It was also dying, bleeding to death. I tried a medicine to attempt to make that stop, Depo-Provera, which didn't work and caused me to gain 60 lbs. in 3 months and become severely depressed before I went off of it and started trying other medicines over the course of the next year, none of which really worked, but I survived. In trying to deal with my new body, I began making art of Stone Age goddesses such as the Goddess of Willendorf and the Goddess and Laussel. I shifted my personal beauty standard to the Stone Age and identified as goddess shaped. I realized the rest of the world took that as a joke, and went with it, as I went with it any time my most serious and personal expressions came across as funny. For 30 years, I embraced Stone Age beauty, even as I tried, and failed, to get my natural body back.
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Heathen Visibility Project artists had to decide whether to continue to make and share art, including Project art, in the face of the cesspool of genAI slop invading art spaces with images "generated" via near-universal data theft by so-called "AI" companies. (Generative AI is neither generative nor AI. It merely digests the creative output of human beings and regurgitates average output.)
Many artists have stopped sharing art online, and have taken down their already existing galleries. I too stopped making certain kinds of art. However, since the purpose of the Heathen Visibility Project is to provide free images for editorial use, I have made some Project photos this year. I hesitated to load any more art to my Deviantart because it's not only awash in AI slop but has added features for making the crap. Nonetheless, I do have an established gallery with followers there, and I decided to go ahead and load one Project image there: a photo from the Swords and Swimming ritual. You can see it on this link:
...There's a genre of writing passed around social media that is things that sound profound but came from really mundane sources. It started, I think, in a thread about writing that sounds like it came from classic fiction or a classic play but came from fanfic or anime or some other non-traditional source.
Once in a while, I run across an old piece of my own social media writing that strikes me as belonging in this genre. They are small pieces of writing, and they also exist only as 1s and 0s on the worldwide computer network, both of which can be called bits. So forgive the pun, and please enjoy this collection of my social media posts.
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