#elegantwitchcupcake

[skaldish]

elegantwitchcupcake replied to your post “Just a late night thought, but I wonder if archaeologists and...”

There are odd things in anthropology, being a sensible crazy loki loving archaeologist, fire God has turned up a lot since 1700s, but there is a whole team of post 1400 written down loki fire stuff, not to mention Iceland and volcanos, so, fire God not really, fire association yes. Personally loki has been involved in blessing sacred fires before, but that's me. The word 'of' is the problem.

I totally agree, and I think you’re onto something with the blessing of sacred fires. My Danish-American friend who grew up Heathen once mentioned Loki is considered a facilitator of offering because of his eating contest with the fire-Jotun, Logi. In my friend’s tradition, fire plays an important role in just about everything, including burning offerings.

But fire association doesn’t beget Fire God. It would be like saying Thor the God of Goats because he has two magic goats, despite the fact animal husbandry isn’t a defining function of his.

I’m currently working through Arith Härger’s newest video on Loki where he supports the idea of Loki being a full-fledged god of fire. I respect Arith; he’s one of the few Heathen scholars I know who has a goddamn brain in his head, so it’s possible he’ll take this in a direction I haven’t seen yet. But I’m not holding my breath about it.

[skaldish]

elegantwitchcupcake replied to your post “concubae replied to your post “Okay color me impressed. I should...”

As a trained academic I give two opinions, first a sensible academic reply to a historic question, then personal if relevant, I try to keep the two separate where things are loosely evidenced or not evidenced in academic study. I don't justify upg with degrees, I may discuss it, but not state it. An example of the difference.

Thank fuck. I wish this was common practice as opposed to half-truths, or worse, bold-faced deception.

[skaldish]

elegantwitchcupcake replied to your post “I know I’ve griped about Loki being a fire god before, but I think I...”

Benjamin, Thorpe, 1851, northern mythology has comparatives of Loki as a fire god, predating Wagner, a bit of history on that association.

I don’t think I’ve actually read this text so I’m gonna squirrel it away into my library like a good goblin. Thanks!

Just to clarify though, my argument wasn’t about whether or not Loki’s associated with fire (he is). It was about how treating someone’s compelling-sounding UPG as Unshakeable Truth can be very detrimental to your practice.

“Loki, God of Fire” is UPG that came from a popular Loki devotional.* While plenty of scholarly articles talk about Loki's association with fire, none of them claim he’s a God of Fire except for this one devotional.

And yet the belief that Loki is the God of Fire is pervasive, which tells me that people aren’t being told to trust their own intuition and experiences over the words of authority figures. This can absolutely leave you open to being preyed on by authority figures who care more about their ego than about authentically teaching you how to make your own path. This is a problem in Heathenry and in Paganism in general, and I really want people to be aware of this phenomenon in order to protect yourselves and grow your own path in a healthy way.

(Side-note: If you do genuinely experience Loki as a fiery god in your practice, that’s awesome and no one can take that away from you).

I hope this clears up my intentions a little better.

*He’s had this conflated elsewhere before but it was mostly out of confusion with Logi and in non-pagan contexts, like in the opera Das Rheingold

[skaldish]

elegantwitchcupcake replied to your post “After two years of working with Loki and finally settling down in my...”

You can be both, its a choice, you don't have to pick one label.

But I want to.

[skaldish]

elegantwitchcupcake replied to your post “Hey yo I’m building a website where I’m gonna dump a bunch of...”

Looks good, would you like random selections of material and references?

Oh absolutely! Feel free to throw whatever you want my way, especially if it’s material / references you’ve personally found useful. Can’t promise I’ll use it, but info is info.

While I won’t say “no” to more academic texts, I actually could really use some solid recommendable resources on magical theory, clairsenses, and hard polytheism. Since I'm learning directly from my teachers I don’t really have written references on these things. All I ask is to make sure you’ve actually read something before recommending it to me.

And since I’m here, might as well say this: Really don’t be shy about throwing me more stuff about Loki. While there’s a chance I’ve head about it or read it, it’s valuable for me to know what people are looking at. And you never know--new stuff comes out every day that I’m not aware of.

[glegrumbles]

Having seen an article on Thor news about the sandvika burials, I thought I would look in to the archaeology of hof and religious sites in Scandinavia, not much about, being a not often excavated site type, do you know of published reports of excavations etc? Hoping to review lit, but can't find much, hope all fares well, j

Hi,I unfortunately don’t have the time to go digging right now and I don’t have links ready to hand, but I do have some suggestions on where to look:

Academia.edu has a lot of academic documents available for free. It’s kind of hard to search, you have to search by very generalized topic tags and then scroll through until you find papers that fit with what you are looking for. I might suggest Old Norse Religion and Medieval Scandinavia to start with. Then try other narrowed tags, like Icelandic Archaeology for example.Another trick is to go to Google Scholar and do a search in the following way:“keyword1″ “keyword2″ “keyword3″ filetype:pdfThis will make Google search for scholarly articles that contain those keywords that are links to PDFs. This is important, as academic articles are usually published as PDFs, and if a hit returns, that means it’s more likely to be a freely available article (instead of just linking you to a paywall site that hides the article until you cough up a large fee for viewing privileges). I’d suggest trying all sorts of keywords like “norse excavation”, “norse archaeology”, “horg”, “hof”, etc etc.

This article might also be of interest, and this book.Hope this is at least a little bit helpful!