I feel like I need to apologize and like I will never stop apologizing because I often fail to take my own advice. Like I fully acknowledge that the Heathen community needs to learn to listen better.
Loki devotees need to learn to listen to Odin devotees and vice versa.
And by Odin devotees I do not mean Folkish Nazis.
More than that, though, we need to learn to listen with kindness and empathy. And I feel like I played this role in popularizing Lokeans being pissed 24/7 and fixating on our own trauma. That's not okay because we are never to going to heal individually or as a community if we are constantly at war with each other.
"Holding onto anger is like swallowing poison: Painful and the only person you're hurting is yourself." -The Dalai Lama
Lokean who staunchly hate all Odin devotees because of Nazi assholes and refuse to hear out the good guys, this is you -- right now, YOU are RAPHAEL HAMATO.
But like....I'm just really sorry for motivating such hatred.
Like Ragnarok is about revolution, but eventually the revolt ends and things change for the better. Loki and Odin are always brothers and friends afterwards.
And I know that there are some Heathens out there that are still hesitant about people worshipping Loki. Look, you don't have to worship Loki. No one is gonna force you, but you definitely have no right telling anyone else who they can or cannot worship. You have no right trying to police someone else's religion.
Heathenry is not an organized religion, okay, and as far as I can tell a lot of the trouble in the community stems from people wanting it to be an organized religion. Like does it not strike you as a red flag that the closest thing our community has to a church happens to be a white supremacist cult?🤨
This whole One True Heathen™️ mindset needs to be abandoned. We do not all need to be recons or pseudo-intellectuals. We do not all need to be viking LARPers that for some deranged reason think that we should be slaughtering goats every holiday instead of just going to a butcher or a farmer and asking for like chicken blood or whatever. In fact, we do not all need to be meat eaters. Like as long as they're not pretentious and annoying about it let the vegan Heathens exist.
The only thing we need to agree on is that Nazis don't belong in our community.
Yes, there is -- Loki has been worshipped for 20 years and from what historians have been turning up lately, he was worshipped way before then too.
More importantly than that, I exist. This blog exists. I have two FB accounts full of six years worth of momentos of my worship and an entire friends list full of people who worship Loki Laufeyjarson.
So you're fighting an uphill battle here. Lokeans are not going away cause even if it's recent or newly discovered evidence, the evidence still exists.
And Loki isn't someone to be afraid of.
Like I've been meditating on the myths a lot lately. Particularly the myth of Loki's battle with Logi, the God of fire. Which Loki lost. So why is Loki a fire God?
Because Loki embodies the spirit of the hearthfire or the fireplace or the kitchen or dining room table. The place where we all gather together as families to laugh and drink and tell jokes and stories to our children. That is Loki -- Loki is home and in ancient Scandinavia if you didn't have a fire of some sort in your home, you were dead. Plain and simple🤷🏻♀️
That is why Loki was seen as a protector of children and families because he kept them from freezing to death.
So what does Loki losing the battle to Logi symbolize? That's easy -- Logi is wildfire.
The story of Loki vs Logi is a story of what happens when drought arrives and the heat sets fire to a home. The home burns down because we have to be careful with fire -- it can be dangerous. But it's still life-giving. We still have furnaces and fireplaces, don't we?
And we still use fire to cook our food -- in fact if you eat meat you have to use fire to cook our food.
Loki losing that fight to Logi is a tragedy and yeah, fire can be dangerous, but that doesn't mean that Loki is dangerous. All of the Norse myths -- The Eddas anyway -- are a tragedy. Odin literally let his anxiety and OCD and perfectionism drive him insane. It drove him to betray his best friend and brother. How is that not tragic?
Ultimately, The Eddas are a message of how Heathens and humans in general need to be there to love and support each other. To guide each other away from making terrible, irrational decisions like the ones Odin made that had such a horrible impact on his brother and family's life. The Aesir are the original dysfunctional family dramedy.
Loki is the fire and the home that keeps us alive and safe. And he is not a God of chaos. He is a God of family because families are chaotic just like people in general are chaotic.
This is my opinion and my interpretation of the Norse Eddas. If this, for any reason, vibes with you then please stop fighting with people. Like you don't have to forgive your abusers or whoever but....I don't know. Try to find peace so that this community can find peace.
