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Showing posts with the label Expanded Praxis

Borgvættir & Staðvættir: the Heathen cityscape.

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Listening to Gifts of the Wyrd podcast, Heathen urban planner Paul Mercutio of the North River Kindred recontextualizes the city as just as much a landvættir  connective space. To paraphrase Mercutio's thoughts: In the wild there are trees, rivers, lakes, mountains, and all of that is majestic and obvious in terms of connecting with nature. And going outside's all well & good, but in the intervening 1000+ years, man has gone from agricultural to urban and is unlikely to perform any sort of radical reversal on a large scale, so we have to find connective praxis in the modern context of the city's environment. If we look at the materials of the city we find that concrete was once air, water, sand, gravel, and eight other bits of earth cemented to make that concrete. Glass is just a sheet of heated sand. Steel is iron and carbon. These are all natural elements reformed into what makes a city. Also, your utilities are tubed, piped, and wired in what resembles a root syst...

appealing to the children of the Gods.

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In Ibn Fadlan's Risala  (§ 85) , when Viking trading trips to Russia didn't work out after their first four attempts at the market after leaving offerings at the large godpoles , merchants would then employ a roundabout appeal via Gods' wives & children   by instead leaving offerings at their smaller statues surrounding those godpoles  to then intercede for them and get their Gods' attention & favour that way. This one-degree-removed hierarchy networking seems amusing, yet let's NorsePlay this idea from a religious practice standpoint and look at the divinity of the children themselves. Some modern Asatruar point out that the Æsir Gods & Ásynjur Goddesses are usually too busy to attend to individual appeals since on a cosmic level they are big picture beings keeping the Norse Níuverse in order . For instance, Odin's chessmastering things so Ragnarök either never happens or to make it so that the Aesir get the upper hand to  defeat the prophecies ...