#why do you suddenly not care about dying kids women and men why doesn't this bring out the same this is fucking wrong reaction

[chappellrroan]

love discussing politics with sis we're so sync it gives me faith in this family

#we were discussing about recent elections conditions since both of us can vote #how there is so much corruption & how none of our media fucking covers it #the riots in ladakh and the condition of north east and kashmir bjp will never speak on it and still it's almost confirmed they're going to #be the next ruling party how some congress members when accused with corruption joined bjp and suddenly their whole record is clear #how there is so much rise in prejudice and minorities are facing hell #how these people who wouldn't shut up about the kashmiri pandit genocide DO NOT have the same reaction to palestinian genocide #why do you suddenly not care about dying kids women and men why doesn't this bring out the same this is fucking wrong reaction #discussed everything and now i feel so good #mine

[a-method-in-it]

I posted 10,888 times in 2022

That's 3,099 more posts than 2021!

21 posts created (0%)

10,867 posts reblogged (100%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@bdigfreakingwooper

@holyfucker

@dingdongyouarewrong

@massivetittiesandwarcrimes

@citizen-zero

I tagged 630 of my posts in 2022

#method speaks - 164 posts

#but also - 15 posts

#union stuff - 13 posts

#like - 11 posts

#also - 7 posts

#honestly - 6 posts

#union 101 - 6 posts

#listen - 6 posts

#and also - 5 posts

#but yeah - 5 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#i genuinely did not realize that jordan peterson had recovered from that medically induced coma that he was put in while in russia because o

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

[Transcription in the alt text]

The song:

I. Am. DYING.

33 notes - Posted September 1, 2022

#4

a thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately, partly in the wake of the Roe v. Wade repeal: We need to do more to ensure that gender inclusive medical language doesn't wind up filtering out people, especially AFAB people, who straight up do not know the terms for certain body parts.

I am a big fan of inclusive language around medical stuff (ex: "mammograms and cervical cancer screenings" instead of "cancer screenings for women"). It's more precise, and, for people who are reasonably well-educated about their own bodies, more informative. And also, obviously, more accurate.

But the trouble comes in when people aren't reasonably well-educated about their bodies.

I think a lot of college-educated, middle-class people would be frankly astounded by the number of AFAB people who were not taught anything --- literally anything --- about their bodies and what parts they have and how things work.

There are definitely extreme cases of this in hyper-religious environments; for example, I remember reading a memoir of a girl who grew up in the FLDS cult and was never told what sex entails and found out on her wedding night when her husband, a man fifty years older than her, wanted to have sex. But even beyond the outlier cases, there are also just a lot of kids who never get a decent sex talk or anything approaching comprehensive sex ed in school.

And it's especially a problem for AFAB people, whose bodies are often treated as inherently inappropriate to talk about, even in a lot of secular environments.

So yes, "Annual pap smears are recommended for anyone with a cervix" is the most accurate and precise way to describe cervical cancer screenings. But also, there are probably millions of cis women out there (and probably even some AFAB trans men and enbys) who would see that and think "Oh, good thing I don't have whatever a cervix is so I don't have to worry about that." Even though they do!

The thing that has me thinking about this is the fact that this is only going to get worse post-Dobbs decision. A lot of local clinics that are known to provide healthcare for AFAB people are going to wind up closing in red states as they are targeted by lawmakers. And so cis women who might have previously gone there because they knew it was a women's healthcare clinic and who therefore would have been directed to the care they needed, whether they knew the terms or not...in a post-Dobbs world, honestly, I don't know what's going to happen.

I don't really have a solution for this beyond the fact that we obviously need to do a better job of educating people about human anatomy. But it's not like the GOP is going to suddenly become cool with doing that.

It's just something I think about.

34 notes - Posted October 16, 2022

#3

someday, someone who has not yet migrated off this cursed webbed site is going to write a hit netflix fantasy series where a prominent side character is B'lorbo of Mai Sho and absolutely none of us is going to be able to explain to anyone in our lives why we are on the floor scream laughing

36 notes - Posted February 15, 2022

#2

In light of Roe v. Wade being struck down, I would like to give you one concrete thing you can do to help protect some of the people in your life that you might not ever think of:

Unionize your workplace.

After the opinion leaked, a bunch of unions started negotiating language in their contracts that mandates employee health insurance must cover all types of reproductive care, including abortion, and even language about covering travel expenses if someone needs to go out of state to access reproductive care.

This will not fix things, obviously. But it is a form of harm reduction that can be incredibly powerful.

It also puts the burden of dealing with the fallout from this decision where it belongs: On the corporate fuckers who have spent years donating to right-wing politicians for the tax breaks and didn't much care what else came of it.

Let them foot the bill for it, at the very least.

Solidarity.

254 notes - Posted June 24, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I can't remember if I've plugged this here or not, but: The Federal Aviation Administration is currently taking comments about what the minimum size should be for airplane seats.

Link

Over time, airline seats have declined from an average of 18 or 19 inches to about 17 inches. Average waiting room seats are 22 inches. This presents obvious problems for...well, for a lot of people.

The FAA is specifically concerned with safety for this regulation (that's what Congress directed them to do), and not with comfort, so if you do comment, try to gear it towards safety concerns. They are particularly interested in hearing from disabled people and people over 60, apparently.

And even though this isn't about comfort, it's still the first time the agency has regulated seat size for airlines, so it's exciting and you should comment if you can.

Comments can be submitted here until November 3, 2022.

578 notes - Posted September 4, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #ten thousand fucking reblogs #and 21 original posts #i truly do not know why any of you follow me lololol #but i'm glad you like the same trash i do #also #this is a genuinely good feature #tumblr is like four for four on genuinely good features this year #what is happening? #Youtube

[radkindoffeminist]

The whole misogynistic trope of shows making their female characters who don't want kids get pregnant is so true tho!

While not a medical show, jane the virgin has the same premise.

Jane (who's grandmother is a Catholic and scared jane into waiting until marriage bc jane's mother had her at 15) gets pregnant (from a medical mistake of her doctor) but decided to get an abortion but backs out bc the father (who is the doctors brother) had cancer and cannot have kids. So not only did they force Jane to carry this pregnancy but the kid isnt even her boyfriend's!

Like...im just tired of these shows lmao. She clearly didn't want kids rn bc she was still in college but ofc the show runners decided that god forbid the guy who gets drunk and angry doesn't have kids.

Ik that the storyline is bat shit insane and never would happen (being accidental inseminated) but still.

It takes over absolutely everything! I obviously see it a lot on medical shows, but it’s everywhere. Women risk their lives to have children that they don’t want and have been pressured into while men are like ‘let’s try and save you first and the baby later’. Why is it that the men, the ones who wanted these children and pressured these women into having children in many cases, are the ones putting the women first right now? Does it suddenly matter that their baby incubator is dying but they don’t care when they didn’t want children?

And then abortion. Let’s talk about that. Addison Montgomery in Grey’s and Private Practice pisses me off to no end in the way she talks about abortions and her own abortion. At one point she talks about how she would’ve had a six year old daughter if she didn’t get an abortion and I’m sure that women do question this stuff later down the line but can we not completely obsess over this fucking shit? Can we have women who have one is glad that they didn’t have that child or even just managed to move on with their lives because that’s actually what happens to most women who get abortions? Another point she talks about how having an abortion is the hardest choice a women has to make and I’m sure that’s a truly difficult choice for many women, but acting like it’s the hardest thing ever? Making it out like every woman who has an abortion spent days or weeks questioning it? It’s completely led into the idea that women put themselves through hell and get abortions because there’s basically no other choice for them. Why do you think that men are now getting pissy that women on TikTok are getting abortions that they don’t regret and that they haven’t killed themselves over getting when this is the media and representation around abortion which we’ve grown up with?

I could fill up a book with the examples of these misogynistic tropes surrounding women and pregnancies and why they’re fucking awful. Abortion is the hardest thing ever, making abortion to be the last resort/only giving it to the most vulnerable women, making women regret having had their abortions, women being pressured into having children, women putting themselves through hell in order to have children, men suddenly being more worried about their partner’s health than keeping a foetus alive. It kills me inside to see it so often.

[cult-of-artemis-and-athena]

What the fuck is "femininity", anyway? Pt. 2

I was watching a video a few months ago about Evangelical Christians complaining about what they perceived as androgyny - women wearing pants and not having long hair, men not going fishing or wearing beards - and then said something to the effect of "These people are straying from God's design!"

I suppose the Bible does have some parts that can be construed as saying that women should have long hair, men should have short hair, and they should both look different and do different things. However, wearing certain clothes or hairstyles, or doing the majority of tasks don't have a biological component. If men were naturally, biologically, by-God supposed to have short hair, it should grow to be an inch long and stop, right? I've seen some Christians rebut the "only men can wear pants" argument on the basis that the stereotypical Christian man wouldn't like, nor properly fit into a pair of women's pants. I would take that a step further, because I think it's hilarious, and say that if women wearing pants were a 100%, by-God biological impossibility, they would have one leg, or be like nagas or mermaids and it would be physically impossible to make pants for them.

Another example: musical instruments are assigned gender stereotypes for some fucking reason. A friend from middle school said she wanted to play the trumpet, but was given a clarinet because it was a "feminine" instrument. Conversely, I've seen boys who started school band on a flute or clarinet either switch instruments, or quit band altogether. Perhaps small hands make it easier to play the piccolo, and it's less annoying for a strong person to carry around a tuba, upright bass, or bari sax, but there's no reason for the player's genitals to enter the equation. During the 18th century, the acceptability of an instrument for women was based on whether the player had to spread their legs to play it. Pianos, violins/violas, and flutes were allowed, but a cello was indecent. I'm not sure, then, how harps became stereotyped as "feminine instruments" when they're both gigantic and require the player to straddle them...but here I am trying to make sense of nonsense again...

Finally - and this is the big one - there is the downright schizophrenic relationship some male communities have with female attractiveness and things women do, or have done to them, to change how they look in pictures and videos.

I feel I must preface the rest of this point with something: "men" and "women" are not hive minds, and it's important to not strawman half the population based on a conglomeration of the worst representatives you have experienced. If you go outside, in real life, and think about the couples you see, it becomes very obvious that the majority of men you will see are attracted to women who aren't skinny blondes with big boobs/asses and the majority of women you see are attracted to men who aren't 6-/7-figure earners. People who seem to express that they are totally alone and perpetually shit-on by a world of "Chads" and "Staceys" feels like the same type of mindset school kids have, where they obsess over not being included by the popular kids while they're befriended and included just fine by kids they actually have more in common with. It's not a healthy mindset to have, but excusable in school kids because kids are immature by nature and they mostly grow out of it; however, to be an adult and still think like this is a good sign to get help.

I'm talking primarily about the incel community and perhaps some of the groups that this mentality spills into.

A post was going around several years ago and I think the photos were taken from a clickbait which was taken from a makeup artist's portfolio. The MUA might actually have been Goar Avetisyan (https://www.goaronline.com/courses) but the before and after pictures resembled the ones on the link above -- one with absolutely no makeup or hair styling, and then the other with full glam, special occasion makeup and styled hair, a wig, extensions, etc. The way it was presented was "LOOK! HERE'S PROOF W*MEN AREN'T ACTUALLY HOT! WAKE UP SHEEPLE! THEY'RE LYING TO YOU! ILLUMINATI EXPOSED!!!!"

I can see why they're mad, because the dishonesty surrounding makeup, but especially photoshop, plastic surgery, posing, and airbrushing can get toxic. I'm old enough to remember the old-fashioned mindset where women were supposed to hide their "beauty secrets". Don't apply makeup in public, keep your roots touched up so nobody knows they're dyed, and if you have any treatments or surgery always deny having them. Wear your makeup to bed, then wake up early and fix it before your guy sees you.

I couldn't imagine how awful I would feel if I had Instagram or TikTok when I was growing up. I had enough moments of feeling frustrated because I didn't naturally look how other people looked, and I didn't realize that people in TV and movies were wearing makeup, that magazine ads were photoshopped, etc. Just being an extremely average-looking human being with no concept of basic grooming, comparing myself to other kids at school was hard enough without the rapist-run media adding another layer of bullshit.

When I realized the layers of lies, it was like...how long have I been wasting my time and money on this totally made-up problem? How much did I actually improve my life and happiness chasing it? Or, did it actually make me more miserable? How much could I have accomplished if I put the same amount of angst into a different pursuit -- instead of fixing my face, I could have been fixing my art...When it comes to pursuing an unattainable ideal, there is no end to the horror.

So, I suppose, when a group of men (...boys, whatever) realize that "hot women" are a spook, and the the ethereal creature they've been told by society to put on a pedestal is actually not far removed from them, and it shits and farts, it seems very reasonable to feel angry and like you've been taken for a ride by "the system". It can be easy to blame women for this, and hate them. And it's probably easy to get stuck here.

Instead of being perpetually angry, they have to mourn the death of this ethereal spook-woman, and move on with an acceptance of reality as it is. Women, too, have to kill and mourn the spook-woman as part of self-acceptance.

One positive evolution of the makeup fandom is that while the makeup has gotten more intense and elaborate, makeup tutorials have demystified makeup. When tutorials started to become popular, there was a lot of "Excuse my eye-circles, excuse my pimple, excuse my skin, excuse my hair, excuse my lighting, excuse my room, excuse my, excuse my, excuse, excuse, excexcexcexCEXEXEXEXEXEX- *boom*" and thankfully someone eventually came along ($10 says it was a drag queen) and said, "SHUT THE FUCK UP, NOBODY CARES," and eventually the makeup fandom became okay with letting a bare face be a bare face. You wear the makeup, you don't wear the makeup. It doesn't matter. It's just a hobby.

To refer back to my original point, the confusion of makeup (something culturally feminine) with biological femininity has really fucked up both men and women. Everyone is better off extracting the two from one another, and it seems like many people are in the process of doing that. It helps women hate themselves less, and it helps men humanize women and have better relationships.

However, the image of the spook-woman, "10/10 model" is so ingrained in some parts of the culture, as the apex of the vertex of femininity, that despite complaints about how makeup is a lie, discarding that in favor of just a healthy, bare-faced woman feels like embracing post-modernity and a slippery slope to embracing ugliness as beauty. I think the lack of exaggerated femininity that spook-woman makeup provides feels threatening because the woman's face looks more masculine in a purely relative sense. The exaggerated femininity of the spook-woman, as it is for the Evangelical Christians who follow strict gender roles, provides additional separation between the sexes which serves to reassure men who are A) preoccupied with their level of masculinity and B) hyper-aware of their standing toward the bottom of this hierarchy of masculinity. I think the entire hierarchy benefits from them being placated by more separation from women, because if the bottom whatever percent of men are too dissatisfied with their standing, they may start punching upwards or wanting to attack the hierarchy itself. The men at the top don't want that because of the benefits they receive for being at the top.

MGTOW and the incel movement really kicked off after Gamergate, and intensified with subsequent "waves" of feminism. The discontent men direct their frustration at women, but they also direct their frustration at the men not troubled by what women do. There's suddenly a lot of interest in whether you're an alpha, a beta, a gamma, omega, a sigma, a ligma male, etc. and which one is the better type of male to be. There's a lot of hatred for "Chads" and I see a lot of jealousy directed toward men who are married and have families, usually in the form of "She's just gonna divorce you, take half your shit, and then manipulate your kids to hate you. You'll see...you'll realize you should have spent your whole life banging whores."

This all seems like the result of the ol' spending money we don't have to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like. This is undoubtedly the idealist in me, men and women would be better off to cut each other some slack. We could see one another as fellow tragic, flawed individuals instead of fleshlights and ATMs, escape the Matrix and spit in the faces of our rapist, media elite overlords.

#femininity #performative femininity #mgtow #mass media #makeup #spooks #traditional gender roles #women don't exist #gender roles are a spook #hollywood rapists #jordan peterson #stop putting women on pedestals

[rudolf-rokkr]

Heyo. I've been trying to get into more heathenry/norse paganism kinda stuff (what can I say, I love folk metal), but the one thing that's kind of been a damper on the concept for me is the concept of Hel - specifically, how (as I understand it) dying of sickness or old age is a form of cowardice and punishable by eternal torment. Being chronically ill myself, that doesn't really sit right with me. Do you have any thoughts/corrections/resources on this topic in particular?

Thanks for the question. Basically the image of Viking afterlife concepts that has entered popular culture is extremely shallow and not a good representation of what we know believe actually existed. This is a big topic so it’s easy to get lost but I’m gonna try to keep it simple without leaving too much out but feel free to follow up if it seems like I’ve missed something. It’s long so the rest is behind the break.

I’ll start with the major point I want to make and then we’ll fill in the “so what then?” after. The reason you’re disturbed by this is because it’s, at least partially, a recruitment tactic. It’s designed to tempt you to suspend your reason and even if it did apply to your personal situation you’re better off not falling for it.

I know some people find strength in the Valhöll idea and I don’t want to take that away from anyone but my uncensored opinion is that it’s for dupes. It’s full of people who wasted their lives in service to kings who didn’t give a shit about them, who used them to gain rule over them. Óðinn isn’t vetting them for bravery, he’s vetting them for certain personality traits that are bad for self-preservation but good for early proto-state-formation. That’s why it’s the afterlife we find out about from Snorri. He was a court poet, trying to piece back together a cosmology from shreds of court poetry that extolled the virtues of fearlessly taking an axe to the face in defense of your favored tyrant. Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go to an afterlife where you have to die every day. I think this was more of a prestige factor among the living than an actual hope for the afterlife. I could be wrong though since the primary audience of such a myth would have been, like, 18-year-old kids hopped up on adrenaline, having just left the family farm for the first time in their lives, suddenly being adorned in gold and addressed by kings and making their first kills and drinking unending ale. Frat boys to whom the world is suddenly open (note that we’re mostly talking about higher class people anyway because they’re the ones who could afford weapons, so the world was already more open to them than others). Like the primary source for details about Valhöll is Vafþrúðnismál which rather likely was performed before an audience of these young, drunk warriors far from home (see Terry Gunnell for theories about performance of Eddic poetry).

So yeah, I could see them falling for this, or thinking it sounds appealing, or whatever. But at the same time I doubt anyone would have admitted out loud that killing each other all day every day for eternity would be awful (in fact it sounds a bit like the Buddhist hell Sañjīva but with good food). If it’s a real thing its full of people who can’t admit they’ve longed for Niflhel for centuries. 

That isn’t to say it can’t be a legitimate belief as well, just that this is its primary social function from the perspective of our sources. I’m sure that another motivating factor for the preservation and distribution of this belief is that those promising 18-year-olds also had families back home and maybe wives and kids and they were supposed to come home from exploiting the Karelians for the King’s tribute to take care of all this, and the pain of such a loss is made somewhat more mild by believing that these individuals have been called to the higher purpose of preserving the cosmic order. Not saying I agree, just that I get it.

(Note that in reality we have substantial evidence that the actual motivating factor for at least some “Viking” warriors wasn’t a glorious afterlife but rather they were mercenaries and maybe not even locals).

Now onto the next point. In Gylfaginning Snorri says that Óðinn decides where people go when they die and that good (siðaðir, literally more like ‘ethical’ I guess) people go to Vingólf or Gimlé (note: not the same as Valhöll; this might be where Snorri thinks good people who aren’t killed in battle go) and that bad people go first to Hel and then to Nifhel. The problem is that he’s full of shit. This isn’t corroborated anywhere. We can put the “full of shit” onus on Snorri the Christian who believed literally in an all-powerful God and Heaven and Hell, or we can put it Snorri’s depiction of Óðinn as Hárr/Jafnhárr/Þriði lying to Gylfi, but either way it’s obviously wrong and easily refuted.

For one thing there’s nothing moral about it. It’s just down to the manner of death. The greatest hero of Germanic mythology, Sigurðr Fáfnisbani, went to hel because he was killed in his sleep or stabbed in the back. And we know he went to hel because Brynhildr committed suicide in order to follow him. And according to skaldic poetry, King Hákon góði went to Valhöll despite not even being heathen because he died in glorious battle.

Grímnismál says that Freyja gets half the slain warriors; Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir (who is not a warrior) in Egils saga expresses expectation that she’ll spend the afterlife with Freyja. In Hárbarðsljóð Hárbarðr (Óðinn) makes fun of Þórr because he receives slaves into his halls rather than rulers like Óðinn does. Snorri himself tells us that Gefjun receives those who die as unmarried women which doesn’t apply to your situation but is another hole in the Valhöll/Hel paradigm. He also says that Rán (the sea-gýgr) takes those who die by drowning, which is corroborated by Eyrbyggja saga (chapter 54, when the drowned men show up to their own funeral, perpetually dripping wet).

Meanwhile, other than very specific parts of it that might be designated for people marked for obliteration from existence (this is based on lines in Vafþrúðnismál describing Niflhel as the place “whence men die out of hel,” what precisely that means is not obvious), we don’t have much reason to believe Helheimr is really so bad. Hel herself seems to thrive on death and decay and all that but I mean, it’s the world of the dead, that kind of seems to make sense and we can’t frame it according to our perspective as the living. On the other hand though, most of our evidence actually points to the world of the dead having a relatively strong sense of continuity with the world of the living. That seems to be why people were buried with their stuff – they weren’t done using it. 

Whether or not we should place Glæsisvellir or Ódáinsakr in the “world of the dead” (they get an association with Jötunheimar in some sources – it’s not clear if this is part of the Euhemerizing process where mythological places are mapped to geographical locations, or if Jötunheimar was part of the “world of the dead”) is unclear. Glæsisvellir ‘shining fields’ are a sort of “otherworld” more like what you normally see in Gaelic myth and legend that tend to show up a bit later in Norse mythology but seems to possibly play on things that show up as early as Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s description of the Rus’. It’s pretty much Valhöll for peaceful people. Ódáinsakr is a place within Glæsisvellir where there is no death and everything comes back to life. They’re usually ruled over by a very benevolent and hospitable jötunn named Guðmundr or Goðmundr (though split from the same origin, guð is used more for the Christian god and goð more for heathen ones, so calling him Goðmundr is marking him as heathen). Basically it seems to be Norse Elysium.

Finally, the afterlife that has the most support from the Íslendinga sögur, which means it’s probably the best reflection of the day-to-day beliefs of average people during the Viking age is some kind of continued existence in the landscape. The most clear description is in Eyrbyggja saga wherein it’s seen that the mountain Helgafell opens up to receive Þorsteinn þorskabítr and his companions; the mountain contained a whole hall full of people with fires burning and horns blowing and everything to welcome Þorsteinn. It was later discovered that Þorsteinn had drowned (note that this is the same saga I mentioned before where drowned sailors go to Rán).

Some scholars think that this is actually the origin of Hel and Valhöll. That they were just the continued existence of the dead, basically underground or living in rocks or other natural formations (like the elves do in Icelandic folklore). The abstraction of Hel and Valhöll from geographical location might have been part of the universalization/mobilization that some scholars propose for the development of the Óðinn cult (see: Tracing Old Norse Cosmology by Anders Andrén).

We also see a sort of double-afterlife in Helgakviða Hundingsbana II (a.k.a. Völsungakviða in forna) wherein Helgi has some kind of mobility between his burial mound and Valhöll… and then is later reincarnated.

Reincarnation pops up a couple times in Norse lore, this aforementioned poem being one of them. It actually says:

Þat var trúa í forneskju, at menn væri endrbornir, en þat er nú kölluð kerlingavilla.

‘It was a belief in heathen times that men would be reborn, but that is now called an old wives’ tale.’

It’s also implied in Flateyjarbók that Saint Ólafr is the reincarnation of an old heathen king who was worshiped as an elf in death, Ólafr Guðrøðarson (Ólafr Geirstaðaálfr). I did a post about reincarnation on my other blog that covers a lot of the same ground as this post.

Reincarnation is also a more or less fixed part of Urglaawe, a variant of modern heathenism focusing on the experience of the Pennsylvania Dutch (although these other afterlives are as well – just part of a process that ultimately results in reincarnation. To my mind such a view is perfectly compatible with everything else I’ve mentioned above).

The Wild Hunt does not factor much into Norse mythology but we have a pretty good idea that the concept was around based on its appearance in later folklore and its general wide spread across world cultures. It could possibly be related to the Valhöll afterlife concept, perhaps among a different class of people. We are pretty sure, for example, that Óðinn was popular in Denmark before Christianization and we are not able to connect him clearly to a ruling class like we are able to do with Norway (largely because of a general lack of literary sources for heathenism for that time or place). While no evidence compels us to do so, we have room for envisioning an Óðinn-centric afterlife that is not Valhöll, nor restricted to the upper classes. I mean he’s clearly a “god of the upper classes” but he’s no less a wandering hobo.

Anyway, the point so far is that there are lots of alternatives to the “Viking heaven” vs. “Viking hell” bullshit. This is probably not exhaustive and it partially conflicts. That isn’t surprising given that there is no centralized heathen authority and what we’re actually talking about is a huge variety of religious ideas that circulated differently along localities, social classes, time periods, social contexts, etc.

If we can point to something underlying all of this, it’s that there was believed to be some kind of continuity between life, manner of death, and afterlife. People dying in battle and going to Valhöll is, to my mind, an extension of this. “Those who die violently have a violent afterlife.” Whether or not that’s good will depend on the person, I’d imagine. Those who die in illness (and remember that there was a relationship between illness and trolls and elves or other unclean or vengeful spirits) may unfortunately find themselves in an afterlife characterized by fever and coughing and other unpleasant things. However the afterlife also seems negotiable, fluid, and furthermore determined at least partially by the activities of the survivors. When Ahmad ibn Fadlan attended a Rus’ funeral one of the Rus’ made fun of him because to him, the Muslim practice of burying the dead meant that the deceased would have to lie there in the ground while they decomposed, as opposed to the Rus’ who were cremated and thereby went immediately to the gods (by the way both burial and cremation happened under heathenism, so this is clear evidence of discontinuous religious belief among heathens and that we can’t call it “one” “religion.” Snorri associated burial and cremation with the cults of Freyr and Óðinn respectively in Ynglinga saga but of course he didn’t have all the archaeological evidence we do so we shouldn’t take that as necessarily true, but it’s interesting that he knew about both). We also see worship of the dead in the sources as the dead were considered to continue to have contact with the world of the living, for example by influencing crop yields and local weather patterns. Snorri’s Euhemerized history of the kings of Scandinavia exploits this to explain how the human king Freyr became a god – he was a human king who died and was worshiped as an ancestor at first before being reanalyzed as a god in the popular tradition. Though maybe not with Freyr specifically, this probably actually happened, even if more strictly localized, like in Vita Anskarii wherein it’s said that a certain King Erik was accepted by the gods as one of them when he died.

This is why I can’t help but think of Valhöll as “if you spend your life bootlicking you’ll spend death doing the same.” Indeed, even in the old sources, hierarchy in human society is replicated in Valhöll when Helgi Hundingsbani goes there and humiliates Hundingr by ordering him around.

We might also gain some insight by comparing other cultures that share beliefs in common with the pre-Christian Norse.  Though close reading of literature and comparative religion most people believe that the Norse did not believe in a single soul but rather something of a personal complex. We see this in other circumpolar cultures that also recognize things like the World Tree, ancestor worship, nature spirits, etc – that doesn’t mean we can just lift ideas from these other cultures but they do give real-life examples of how these abstract concepts can work in day-to-day life. Personally I have been very inspired by and influenced by Buryat Mongol belief and custom, especially because they themselves are often eager to share (reminder that it not being strictly “closed” does not mean that inappropriate appropriation is not possible). Buryat Mongols recognize three “souls,” each of which go their separate ways at death. One becomes a nature spirit, one which goes to the underworld and is eventually reincarnated, and another which becomes a bird on the world tree which is also eventually reincarnated (but, if I understand correctly, not along with the soul which had gone to the underworld). Among many such cultures going to the gods in the afterlife is a possibility, but a major exception to the norm. The reason I find this so interesting for this conversation is that if the Norse believed something similar, it would explain why our sources are in such conflict, how people can be going to Hel and living in the mound at the same time, how Helgi Hundingsbani can go to Valhöll and be reincarnated, etc. If you’re interested in learning more about Buryat Mongol belief try the site I already linked and also the works of anthropologist Katherine Swancutt (note that the families she stayed with had complete agency in determining what and how she would share what she learned… she talks a lot about this in Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination).

This next part is gonna be even more opinionated than what I’ve already written. I think it’s tempting to believe that people get what they deserve in death. That people who are treated unfairly in life are compensated in death and that those who were unfair themselves get their comeuppance. But to my mind heathenism lacks a mechanism for identifying or producing desert. That means it’s up to us, the living, and maybe those dead who continue to exert an influence on the world of the living, to vindicate those who were oppressed, or robbed of a good death; and to mitigate the legacy of unfairness. I do not believe that “the universe” or “wyrd” or whatever punishes wrongdoing – not because it wouldn’t be nice but because how exactly is that supposed to even happen? Do we really want to rely on gods who often act immorally themselves and use their supernatural abilities to exert their wills, to judge us? We might ask for their help, but we shouldn’t leave it in their hands. It would be great to take the burden off of ourselves but for better or worse, that’s where the burden is. This concept is a major spiritual informant to my belief in social justice, it’s (among many other things) a way to achieve a symbolic (and restorative, rather than retributive) equivalent to the social role of blood vengeance, for people who faced oppression. And what’s more, if we’re prepared to accept the possibility of reincarnation, then it actually is helping ourselves as well as our dearly departed awaiting rebirth in the underworld to make the world a better place for future generations.

Finally the last thing I want to say is that all of this is just theory. Not believing it doesn’t make you not heathen. We don’t have a Bible, there is no centralized authority, nobody living a thousand+ years ago was totally sure what happened in death – the lore we have received is just whatever models they came up with that best explained their experiences (probably especially mystical experiences of religious specialists, but still) and informed their behavior. For that matter, plenty of this shit is probably Christian speculation about what heathens believed anyway. If you have reason to believe otherwise it isn’t “un-heathen” to trust in your own ability to reason. Like, I think I did an alright job of framing my distaste for Valhöll in heathen discourse which just means it’s a productive set of religious beliefs that’s capable of autocritique. A person can’t possibly read the sagas and conclude that everyone agreed with each other all the time; variation, dissent, and creativity are generally speaking all good signs.

Hope this helps.

P.S. I know there are a lot of people who see entrance to Valhöll being granted to anyone engaging in struggle, whether physical or otherwise. I don’t agree, and if you’ve read this far you know I haven’t factored it into my understanding at all. But I don’t necessarily have a problem with it. I think it comes down to the active conception of “violence.” I do not believe that violence is strictly an act of causing physical damage to a person or object in a single event. I think that rearranging Valhöll to conform to a modern conception of violence that also includes systematic oppression is a literally incorrect way to interpret it according to Old Norse religion – but fuck it, my opinion of Valhöll is low as shit, so do whatever you want for all I care.

#ask #heathenry #heathenism #valhöll #hel