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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in marvel

Posted by on in Paths Blogs

In the recent Loki series on TV, Marvel-Loki says "I can rewrite the story." He's talking about controlling time, alternate timelines and universes, and time travel. Comics fans are now calling him God of Stories, a title he had in the comics. 

Asa-Loki never held that title, but was certainly a driver of stories, being central to the plot of many myths. He makes change happen.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
On Lodhur and Loki

Lodhur is the original third brother in the trinity Odhinn / Honir / Lodhur. This triple god form appears in the Lore in two major places: when the brothers sculpt the world out of the slain giant Ymir, and when the brothers sculpt humans out of driftwood trees. Both of these are major acts of creation described as sculpting life from a dead form. 

When the Lore relates stories about Odin and his brothers going on adventures together, the name of the third brother becomes Loki. It is clear that Lodhur and Loki are the same god. But they are very different aspects of the same god. 

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

The voice to text fail inviting me to the new Thor movie called it Girls Sore. Before seeing the movie today, as I was having my morning coffee, which is my usual time to raise coffee toasts and listen internally for anything the gods might want to say, I was thinking about this movie. I was hoping it would be good of course, but also thinking about what I knew of the plot which from trailers and social media sounded is a little silly. I was also thinking about how much it has rained this summer, much needed and welcome rain just like when the other Thor movies came out in the theaters. When I raised a coffee toast to Thor I could hear him in my mind. (This is Gnosis Diary so yes, there is personal gnosis! )  It doesn't matter if it's silly. What matters is people are thinking about him. Some people might decide to learn more and find the real Thor. It's better if people come to Thor having to unlearn a few things than never come to him at all. 

SPOILER WARNING

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    You're welcome! It's fun, definitely watch it when it comes on TV.
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Thank you for your review. I still don't think I'll go to the theater for this one, but it sounds like one I can record later in

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Thor Love in a Raindrop

One might think a grocery store parking lot an unlikely place for religious gnosis. Truly, one does not need to adventure into the mists of a primeval forest or climb to the peak of a mountain to experience the gods, for they are all around us all the time. Though I enjoy a nice hike, of course, the gods are there wherever I go. 

It was the day after the summer solstice. I had not done any big ritual on the solstice with my kindred. I had gotten up to try to view the Parade of Planets before dawn, which proved to be less than perfect viewing despite the clear night, since I live not quite 6 miles from the brightest place on Earth (the Las Vegas Strip.) That afternoon at tea my housemate and I clinked teacups as if they were drink glasses and toasted the beginning of summer, so we did have a ritual, even if it was brief and simple. 

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    Yesterday morning before my pool party there was a tremendous thunderstrike (the cat was not a fan, but it rained and I love it) a
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    Nods. Yeah. I've been following the internet discourse on the difference between having female heroes and having a male hero rebra
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Yes, I remember seeing the Jane foster Thor back when we still had a comic book shop in town. I had pretty much dropped comic boo
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    Hi Anthony! Yeah I thought the trailers were cringy. The entire idea of the movie is cringy. Disney says "Let's have female Thor!"
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I've seen a trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder at the theater and I have mixed feelings about it. I haven't looked at the complet

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Humor, Rain, and Lokigator

A quote from Dane Willerslev on humor in Yukaghir hunting rituals has been circulating on the net. It got me thinking about how our Asatru gods might view silly human fan activity related to the Marvel versions of themselves as similar humor.

When the first few Marvel movies featuring Thor, Loki, etc. came out there was a big debate about them within Asatru communities. One of the subjects of that debate was whether the Marvel versions were full fledged new versions of the gods, created by and for our modern culture, in the same way that Odhinn differs from Woden while still being essentially the same god. People were examining the depiction of the gods in the movies but largely ignoring the massive presence and activity of the fans, which I thought was a mistake. It's the humans watching that make a play either a form of sacred theater or just a play, even if it's the same play.

The essential action related to the first Thor movie was not the movie itself, it was millions of children raising toy Thor's hammers and yelling "Hail Thor!" When that first movie came out in theaters, Thor blessed my local area with a lot of rain. There was similarly an unusually large amount of rain every time a new movie with Thor in it came out. Clearly he approves of more people hailing him, even if they don't really know much about the real him.

So, when a new Marvel show was about to come out, although not in theaters and not with Thor in it, I wondered what would happen. Would there be more rain?

Rain is precious where I live, in the Mojave Desert south of Las Vegas, Nevada. 2020 was an exceptionally dry year even for the Vegas valley. For the past several years I've been growing wheat which I turn into Northern Lights Goddesses Brew. I plant in December and harvest in June, usually. It's usually a really reliable crop, easy to grow, but this year I had a total crop failure. It was just too dry. I was hoping for a good wet monsoon season this summer, and not just for my garden. The water that comes out of the tap in my house comes from Lake Mead, which depends on the Colorado River, but city storm runoff refills it too. Lake Mead was way down. Lake Mead also provides a lot of the power in this area, via hydroelectric generation from Hoover Dam. Water in the lake literally keeps the lights on in Las Vegas.

So, there has been a lot of precious rain every time America honored Thor with a movie. How would he respond this time? Fan activity online has strongly associated Lokigator with Throg, the frog version of Thor. Frogs are associated with water and rain. At this point the main character of the Loki series is very connected to the Thor character in the minds of fans, as anyone watching online fan activity could tell. (Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.) When the episode featuring many variants of Loki from different timelines appeared, fans responded with art and stories depicting the childhood and early history of each of the variants, mostly featuring Thor, although some featured Odin and Frigga.

A big fan favorite with the art and stories and jokes was Lokigator. I too found Lokigator delightful. I like Lokigator because he is just so random. Loki meets all the Lokis, some are younger, some older, one is a woman, one is an alligator. It's like a little piece of actual chaos. Very Loki.

I participated in the Lokigator fan activity by inventing a dance motion I call the Lokigator Chomp. I posted a short video of it on my social media (Facebook, Twitter, and MeWe.) Immediately after I recorded the video, within seconds of turning off the camera, it started to rain.

So of course I raised a toast. "Hail Thor! Thank you for the beautiful rain."

Image: Lokigator fan art I made to illustrate this blog post

Last modified on
No, Disney Isn't Trying to Own the Norse God Loki

verybody calm down about the Redbubble incident. This is all over the net at the speed of clickbait but it is a false alarm. An artist on Redbubble made a comics based cosplay item, tagged it with the name Loki, and Redbubble removed it. Disney did not do or say anything, and as of this writing, has not made any official statements about this incident. The artist YourBoswell took to social media telling people that because the issue was the name Loki that Disney could have gotten heathen sacred art removed, but that is not what happened. The art was based on Marvel comics and it was not even Disney that took it down.

Disney has never gone after other entertainment providers with different versions of Loki such as Neil Gaiman, and if they did they would lose, since Loki and the other beings in heathen mythology are in the public domain. They certainly are not going to go after the state religion of Iceland for having the name Loki on their website, because they know if they did they would lose. They would lose just as hard if they went after an individual Asatruar or other Heathen in the USA for making devotional art or books about the god Loki, and they surely know that. Somewhere out there, I'm sure there is a lawyer salivating at the idea of arguing a 1st Amendment freedom of religion case before the Supreme Court against Disney, but this is not that case.

I know the whole "Disney steals the god Loki" story sounds plausible, because Disney did actually try to claim the phrase Dia de los Muertos before public outcry shut them down, so they have shown they are ready to be cultural appropriators if they think there is profit in it. And if they ever do try to claim ownership of medieval books and their contents and the names of the gods within them, or any other thing that properly belongs to the entire world and should always be freely available to everyone, then we should indeed fight them on that. But that's not what is happening right now.

Image: Idunna giving Loki an apple, public domain art

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    You're welcome! Redbubble has apparently gone after more than one artist that Disney has no problem with themselves, according to
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Thank you for the update. Disney doing something stupid is something people have grown to expect. It's nice to know that trying

A fire needs both fuel and a spark. I've written and spoken about the spark that sparked the Heathen Visibility Project many times. That spark was observing a lack of good usable heathen images on the net. But the spark might not have caught fire if there was not already fuel laid ready to burn. In this post I'm writing about the origin of two of the the Project's key ideas, "symbol subversion," something the Nazis were doing to heathen symbols, and the goal of the Project to counteract that, "yield no cultural space to Nazis." I came up with both of those phrases in reaction to the HydraCap scandal, before I started the Heathen Visibility Project.

In 2016 a PR hack for Marvel Comics set the internet on fire by telling Time Magazine that Captain America was really a Nazi. In short order, the hashtags NickSpencerIsHydra SayNoToHydraCap NotMyCap and LeaveCaptainAmericaAlone took over Twitter. Brevoort was the PR hack, Spencer the guy responsible for the HydraCap storyline. I shared a silly meme on Facebook of the character Nick Fury saying "We recognize Marvel has made a decision, but seeing as it's a dumbass decision, we've decided to ignore it." The 68 comment and uncounted subthread fest that followed led to my first use of the phrase "yield no cultural space to Nazis," which would become the tag line of the Heathen Visibility Project.

The most basic problem with the HydraCap storyline is that was a betrayal of the intent of the original creators. Captain America was created as anti-Nazi pro-war propaganda at a time when the USA was not yet at war against Nazi Germany. Captain America #1 featured Cap punching Hitler in the face-- a foreign leader the US did not at that time consider an enemy. America could easily have gone the other way and sided with Germany. Captain America was created by two Jewish men who wanted to influence American public opinion toward war against Germany. Further, Cap was clearly a creator insert character for Jack Kirby, who made Capt. America an artist as well as a soldier. Kirby went on to serve in WWII as a scout, going in alone and unarmed in advance of Allied forces to sketch Nazi fortifications. In one incident, he was surprised by 3 German soldiers armed with guns, and he killed them all with a knife he took from one of them. Kirby WAS Capt. America-- first he dreamed it, then he did it. To take his creation and say Cap had been a Nazi all along was a slap in the face to his creators.

By the time I'd done explaining the issue and linking to news, two disparate groups of my Facebook friends were working together in a way I'd never imagined. I have a lot of righty friends from the publishing industry and the Libertarian Party, and also a lot of lefty friends from the pagan community. My righty friends were calling Nick Spencer a Holocaust denier, my lefty witchy friends were casting formal curses, and then my righty friends started suggesting curses for my witchy friends to cast. America was united by a common enemy.

At the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was running trailers for a new Captain America movie, which is probably why Time Magazine wanted an article about Capt. America. Brevoort may have been of the PR school that says any publicity is good publicity. A speculation on the net was that perhaps he was jealous of the movie division because it made more money than the comics division, and he was trying to tank the movie out of spite. A theory I read at the time was that it was the opposite, they were trying to torpedo the comics and make bank off the movies because of a pay dispute with the dead creator's family, which made no sense even from a math perspective. Either way, he didn't succeed.

In the Facebook post I mentioned above, I encouraged my friends to only boycott the comics division and not the movies, since only the comics division was running the Nazi storyline and movie-Cap was still the beloved character we wanted to support. I compared Hydra-Cap to New Coke, and reminded people of the power of the market to demand the product we wanted and to not demand the one we didn't, and how consumers had successfully used that power to get back Classic Coke.

Of course comics fans knew that there would eventually be some other storyline, but Brevoort had not been talking to comics fans. He had been talking to readers of Time Magazine, a general audience that would mostly include fans of movie Cap, rather than comics Cap. Brevoort had said in the Time interview that the HydraCap storyline was not going to resolve quickly and would go on for years, and that Cap had been a Nazi all along, but the public outcry was eventually successful and Marvel Comics ditched HydraCap. However, in the meantime, before Marvel decided to respond to the public and call the whole thing off, they doubled down by trying to make comics store employees wear Hail Hydra shirts. The word problematic is overused, but it applies; Hydra meant Nazis from the beginning and Hail Hydra had always been a stand-in phrase for Hail Hitler. Making retail employees wear Nazi slogans for their jobs was somehow supposed to generate good publicity? Well, that backfired, as it deserved.

That part hadn't happened yet when my Facebook page became the public forum provided a lot of the raw materials from which I created the Heathen Visibility Project. As people discussed on my post, it was  apparent that if Marvel could make Capt. America a Nazi they could also do it to Thor. That prompted me to talk about symbol subversion, another phrase I use a lot when talking about the Heathen Visibility Project. Symbol subversion is taking a good symbol like Capt. America, or Thor's Hammer, and making it bad. I had already been fighting symbol subversion and other Nazi-related ills as the manager of an online Asatru forum. The literal Nazis of the 1940s had appropriated a lot of symbols from historical heathenry. Asatruars held many debates among ourselves about which symbols could be reclaimed and which could not, and we had decided to fight for the Hammer. It was literally the symbol of our faith, as it had been in historical times. It was not acceptable to allow Thor's Hammer to be lost to Nazis. The Capt. America character had already been portrayed lifting Marvel-Thor's Hammer, which in the Marvel universe meant he was "worthy," a Galahad-level grail knight of pure heart and faultless deeds. To say this pure-hearted warrior was a Nazi, implying Nazis could be "worthy," could not be borne.

May 28, 2016, I posted, "We must yield no space in popular culture to Nazism. The Hammer must not be associated with that in any way. There are real life Nazis already trying to appropriate it as a symbol. They are not pretend, and they are not harmless, and the fight against them must never falter."

And Marvel's Thor himself, a character clearly based on one of our actual gods in Asatru and other heathen religions, could have been the subject of similar subversion by Marvel Comics just as easily as Cap. There are deep historical and religious reasons not to allow Thor's Hammer to be claimed by Nazis, and not by neo-Nazis either.

As I pointed out in my fateful Facebook post, Nazis aren't imaginary and they aren't confined to the dusty pages of history. They are real and they are dangerous, and neo-Nazis still exist and should not be encouraged.

One of my friends pointed out the comics stories were all fake. I replied, "That's the definition of fiction. But ideas matter. Symbols matter. Mythologies, national narratives, and personalized heroes matter. The ideals to which we strive to live up matter."

The fact that public outcry actually worked in the case of HydraCap and that fans, the general public, and the great storehouse of pop culture symbols eventually got back our Cap unscathed and un-Nazified should encourage us. It means that it is actually possible to fight symbol subversion and win.

I thought of the Heathen Visibility Project due to matters which were completely unrelated to the comics scandal. As I mentioned, I'd already been fighting symbol subversion, but I had been doing it largely in private, among my fellow heathens. For years, I had noticed that when news outlets illustrated an article about Asatru, they often illustrated it with either a Marvel Comics Thor image or a photo of a white supremacist march. It had always irritated me, but I hadn't thought about trying to do something about it. When I launched the Heathen Visibility Project, I had just been searching for Asatru related images to use for my first Heathen Calendar, the 2017 Calendar. I was working on that in 2016, just after participating in the public reaction against HydraCap. As I did searches for heathen images, I had realized why so few news outlets used real heathen related photos: because there weren't very many available. Those were the things that I had in mind when I began the Project. But I quickly fell back on the two phrases I had used when I first started talking about HydraCap: "symbol subversion" and "yield no cultural space to Nazis." And when I was invited to speak about the Heathen Visibility Project at Pagan Pride, I thought again of the original Captain America and made the main motif of my speech "punch a Nazi in the face." So the spark for the Heathen Visibility Project was performing online searches for heathen related art and photos and not finding much that wasn't either Marvel or Nazis, but the ideas and experience of the HydraCap scandal provided ready-made fuel. With that fuel and that spark, we lit a fire that has never gone out.

I already cared about American symbols and culture before the comics scandal, of course, which is why I published my now out of print book American Celebration. But the HydraCap scandal and our conversation about the Hammer, symbol subversion, and denying Nazis the cultural space of search engine results by occupying it ourselves united my interest in American symbols with my heathenry in a way it had never connected before. I'm pleased to see all the other people joining in on the Heathen Visibility Project. I'm also enthused that a louder voice than mine is taking up the topic of symbol subversion of American symbols and will be publishing a new book on that soon, which I plan to review. Both that book and the Heathen Visibility Project are part of the push to fight back against symbol subversion. The HydraCap scandal was like the proverbial stone that started the avalanche.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    Thanks and you're welcome! Lots of people have been participating in the Heathen Visibility Project. There are also other groups o
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    First off Thank You for fighting that HydraCap storyline. That was so very contrary to everything I knew about Captain America th

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