| In Remembrance |
[08 Nov 2009|12:32am] |
of those that have given their lives for us in WW1, WW2 and every war that our brave men and women of the armed forces have fought in and are still fighting since then.
They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them...
We will remember them.
In Britain, on the Sunday closest to the 11/11, and on the 11/11 itself, we hold a 2 minute silence at 11am in memory of the fallen. This is our Remembrance day, kind of like the American Memorial day but on the anniversary of the time and date of the end of WW1. The armistice was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 and it is for that that we remember on this day.
For more information: http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/CUSTOMS/remembrance/poppy.htm
Hail our heroes!
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| Introducing blog_of_void |
[30 Jun 2009|01:47pm] |
The blurb:
It started with a person and an idea. The idea to blog about Heathen mysticism during the month of July. Others thought this idea to be good and asked to join in.
A way for us 'middle path' mystics to voice our opinions and be heard. We wanted to show that Heathen mysticism doesn't have to be about ordeal work or godslavery. It doesn't have to be as extreme as that. We also wanted to make the wider community aware of us, what we do, our motivations and how we perceive our roles in the wider community.
Most of us will be posting on our own blogs elsewhere too, but this will be a place to collect what we have and to make it easier to follow.
Only a few folks have posting access on this blog but this blog is open for everyone to follow.
The place:
community.livejournal.com/blog_of_void
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| Ginnungagap Website And List |
[12 Jun 2009|11:51pm] |
I've been a very busy Cat tonight...
From the Ginnungagap website:
There was a time...
There was a time when experience with the unexplainable was more commonplace than it seems to be now. When the world of magic interwove with the lives of ordinary people in their crafts, their homes and their very survival. When keeping Frith with the hidden folk was important to all and not just those with the sight and when certain people in the community were known to be a 'friend of' deity, without mockery.
There was a time when the fates of a nation would rest upon the result of one man going under a cloak for a while in order to get some kind of answer. There was a time when folks just accepted that.
There was a time when vision was a part of history.
In modern Asatru and Heathenry, we look to the lore, the historical accounts, the archeaological evidence and we suck at it to try and extract everything we can from it. If it isn't in there, it shouldn't be done, right? And if it's a magical practice or intense religious experience of the kind also recorded in the lore then you can't possibly have done it/it can't possibly have happened to you! Because well...you're you. Right? Engage mockery function.
Only there are those of us in the community that do do this stuff and that do have those kind of experiences and an increasing number are feeling marginalized.
Where does that leave us then?
On the one side we have the icy Niflheim of the 'recon orthodoxy' - hell, even the more middle of the road groups seem to be heading in this direction nowadays. On the other side we have the extreme Muspell of the more vision based groups that are engaged in practices that we might not want to get involved in because we don't want to be put through painful physical ordeals and nor do we think them necessary. This leaves us in a kind of Ginnungagap.
This isn't right.
To this end, we're setting up a community for those of us in this Ginnungagap. We don't want to separate ourselves from the wider community, in fact we think it's important to still engage. However, over the past few years it's become painfully obvious that there needs to be something out there where we can discuss our experiences, the things we do and our take on things in a non-judgemental environment. That is what we are endevouring to create. Instead of seeing the vast emptiness of our ginnungagap, we're choosing to see the vast potentiality instead.
If you like the sound of what we are about, please feel free to join our mailing list at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ginnungagap_list/
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| Announcing my new website |
[11 Jun 2009|03:04pm] |
Hello to all!!!
I've finally gotten off my arse and created a website. All my poems, essays and crazy experiences can be found there. There is also a section for essays about such things as being a Heathen in the Military Community, Deployment and the Asynjur.
Go check it out!!
http://birkasgrove.weebly.com/index.html
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| Pagans Against Arthur's Protest |
[04 May 2009|09:08pm] |
This is a petition for Pagans who are sick of Arthur Pendragon's Stonehenge campaign and who would like to stand up and say that he does not represent us!
Pagans working in the public eye have a responsibility to the rest of the Pagan community in that they should avoid portraying all Pagans as being the same, having the same beliefs and caring about the same causes. Pagans in the public eye have a responsibilty to be clear when dealing with the press that they do not represent us all.
Stonehenge predates the Druids, they have no claim to it over that of any other individual in the land. The religious practices of modern Druids probably have very little to do with the religious practices of the people that built Stonehenge. The current set of controls and measures now in place at Stonehenge were put in place to protect the site after it was damaged by people claiming to care about Stonehenge. Stonehenge should be protected. Arthur Pendragon should be made to leave and stop embarassing us!!!
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/pagans-against-arthurs-protest
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[05 Sep 2008|06:33pm] |
This song rocks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYwf69AAyXU
Is it wrong I have this fantasy about going fishing for king crabs. I like boats. I like boats a lot and it's been a long time since I was last on one.
I think the last time was actually in Sweden - well that was all I did in Sweden, go on the boats. My favourite times on boats though were always on the cross channel ferries during a storm and with the white cliffs of Dover looming in the sunrise.
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| Deployment Goals |
[27 Aug 2008|08:55am] |
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Here are my top five goals for when my husband is deployed:
1. Improve my German to the point that I am fluent or nearly fluent.
2. Improve my income and if possible save money.
3. Learn tablet weaving and make some pretty trims for the viking age outfits we're cooking up for our actual Heathen wedding. We only had time for the legal wedding at the moment. This will be the wedding we both wanted.
4. Learn a new language (either Old Norse or one of the Finno-Ugric languages)
5. Resume my study of herbalism.
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| The OR's Children's Army |
[12 Aug 2008|07:27pm] |
So I'm going to be honest, the OR creep me out normally but surfing round youtube, I found this video of OR children wrestling and doing jujitsu. The group is called 'Team Fyrd', Fyrd meaning 'army'
Odinic Rite - Team Fyrd
From Hengest Thorsson's blog:
ORV Team Fyrd
ORV is proud to announce the creation of the official ORV Team Fyrd competition team. We have 13 team members ranging in skill from beginners to two prior season champions. We hope to be a major factor in next years events. We will compete in jiu jitsu, submission wrestling and Pankration tournaments.
We will be soliciting sponsorship to help with expenses for travel to other competitions around the West Coast and hopefully the country. One of our goals is to enter fighters into tournaments overseas in England with other OR competitors.
We will be the strikeforce for Odins holy nation in a sporting, hand to hand combat setting. We will announce results of competitions as they become available.
http://www.odinist.co.uk/blog%202007%2006.htm
Does anyone else find this whole thing, especially with kids really disturbing?
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[06 Aug 2008|02:32pm] |
I am now Mrs Catherine Heath.
It's strange being a married woman.
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[01 Aug 2008|05:57pm] |
So I will be Mrs Heath at around about 11 something on Wednesday.
Or at least that's what Herr Strauss the man that will be marrying us said!
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[28 Jul 2008|09:15pm] |
My house is an old guesthouse and as such, it has a gated courtyard.
There is currently a tramp stood in said courtyard with long gray hair, a furry jacket in spite of the 30degree heat. He is standing there with about four carrier bags shouting to himself about everything from bread buns to computer translations....
I shouted 'Get out old bag!' before but he didn't do anything. However when I opened a window above where he was standing he moved position and was quiet for a bit.
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[19 Jul 2008|04:19pm] |
So I am living in a place that used to be a guesthouse.
Guess who stayed here once? It's on a plaque on the wall outside that I only really noticed the other day.....Goethe....as in the man that wrote Faust.
When I have charged my camera up again, I'll take pics of it.
Very cool.
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| Bye bye |
[02 Jun 2008|08:59am] |
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I'm off to Germany now, don't know when I'll be back online but take care and I'll see you when I see you :D
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[15 May 2008|06:27pm] |
I is back in England!
It niiiiiice!! :D
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| Britt-Mari Nasstrom |
[10 Mar 2008|09:11am] |
Has anyone read Britt-Mari Nasstrom's Freyja the Great Goddess of the North?
What did you think of it?
What was positive/negative/particularly interesting?
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[24 Feb 2008|09:37pm] |
So I'm tired....
That's all I have to say. Yup that's all.
Oh yeah and I'm being dragged off on a mad skiing trip with a bunch of non-english speaking koreans on thursday. yep - me, the girl that can break limbs just from standing still....
Watch this space.
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| The soul and afterlife - Recon Heathen stylee |
[09 Dec 2007|08:03pm] |
Here's something that's been buzzing around in my head a fair bit recently thanks to reading stuff by a certain Bil Linzie. The concept of non-dualism and the probability that the concept of soul (in the sense that contemporary culture be it secular or Heathen understands it) has absolutely bugger all to do with the actual Heathen worldview pre-conversion.
What do I mean by non-dualism in this sense? Well I'll leave it to Simek to explain because he does a much better job than me in his Dictionary of Northern European Mythology
'Detailed investigations since the beginning of the 20th Century have led to the insight that it is extremely unlikely, at least for the late heathen period, that the North-European peoples had a dualistic belief i.e distinct division between the decomposing body of the dead person and the further existence of his soul. The extant sources suggest that the concept was rather that of the 'living corpse' which lived on the gravemound. Although the saga literature(written 200-500 years after Christianization) is otherwise extremely unreliable for Heathen beliefs, these sources do show unanimity, particularly with regard to these concepts, so widely divergent from Christian thought. Admittedly they may be strongly influenced by the folklore of Mediaeval Iceland. Nevertheless, we may assume that the concept does indeed reflect Heathen beliefs.'
Now this sounds pretty horrendous, right?
Especially when you compare it with the other ideas about a Heathen afterlife flying around that are mostly all filled with more hope than the idea of going to rot in the earth with your ancestors(if it's a family mound) and gravegoods.
Then there's the question of just where does the Draugr come in? Well, it's obvious that not every corpse will become a Draugr and then there's always the Hamr to consider...but more about that further down.
According to Eric Christiansen there are 7 possiblities for the dead Heathen
1.Living with the Gods -a concept not seen until the 10th century and thought to have been brought in as a poetic device.
2. Valhalla -believed to have originally referred to as an actual physical place - a mountain where the dead were interred.
3. Hel -no kennings for Hel as a goddess of the land of the dead until the 10th and 11th centuries - definitely conversion era. However as Lindow points out in his Handbook of Northern Mythology "The place Hel (or the noun hel) originally probably just meant 'grave.'". Simek agrees with this saying that the word Hel was used for hundreds of years to refer to the gravemound.
4. Under the sea (with Ran)
5. An earthly land of the dead.
6 With the poor over the stream.
7. Reincarnation - There are some mentions of reincarnation in the Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani however there are no more in an entire corpus of literature. Also one has to consider the possible leakage of early Christian reincarnation belief into Northern European belief. The concept of 'Aftrborinn' would be the nearest thing in North European culture to reincarnation. Aftrborinn is the passing on of traits, qualities and in some cases duties to your offspring.
Out of all of the possibilities listed above, neither Christiansen or Simek are convinced that the Heathen worldview in pre-Christian times in terms of death went beyond the concepts of Hel or the gravemound.
Another thing that's pretty prevelent in modern Heathenry is the concept of the soul complex with its 9 soul parts. I'm yet to find any evidence or any mentions in any of the original sources that back up the idea that this concept is any older than 30 or so years.
Maybe you're wondering how someone with Seidhr leanings could buy into this...after all, I've sat mounds, I've had countless run ins with the dead and dealings with landvaettir and I have a habit of disappearing off through the worlds(or at least projecting my hamr or dreaming my way).
If anything a non-dualist belief clears up some of the confusion - it's also sort of reassuring in that you will always get back to your body because it cannot be separated from you. What is really going about would be your Hamr (skin) that you're projecting. I also don't see why the dead cannot project their Hamr in this way - as long as they're strong enough....maybe that's why ghosts are reported to fade over time? This kind of clears a lot of stuff up.
I'm having one of the most exciting headblags of my life....can you tell???
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[31 Oct 2007|06:01pm] |
I've got gastroenteritis
Or that was the gist of what the doctor said. Nice.
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[10 Oct 2007|06:53pm] |
I feel very blah today.
I hate the way I look and I hate the world.
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[05 Oct 2007|03:48am] |
I've done my exercise routine for 5 days now and last night I joined the gym for 3 months and did 15km on the bikes (couldn't do the walking machine for long because of ankle).
Be careful folks - the world *is* coming to an end.
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[16 Sep 2007|09:53pm] |
And because a scrape and bruising to the chin wasn't enough...
I had to fall over again in a comedy fashion after only ONE drink on Friday night and hurt my lower back sufficiently to put me out of action for most of saturday.I felt nothing at the time and was able to carry on drinking all night. Today it still twinges but it's not too bad.
I also scraped my arm.
Only me....
In other news Mr Josh got really drunk, thanks to Ronon hauling him off and feeding him way too much alcohol then we went to Noraebang. Only one more week until Chuseok and lots of time with mr josh :D YAY!!!
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| Stitchy stitch and runes |
[22 Aug 2007|06:30pm] |
Well this is what I've been working on recently stitchwise. It's a ways off being done and now I'm getting sick of it because I want to make a rune casting cloth and can already 'see' the pattern in my head.( Read more... )
Regarding runes, I'm currently finding a much clearer reading from cutting 9 twigs from various trees (whatever takes your fancy really), thinking about what I want to know until they feel like they buzz and then throwing them slightly up in the air and letting them fall. Then I simply read the patterns.
It's actually easier than staves with runes carved on.
Only thing is that one set of twigs only seems to work for one question.
I've also found birch trees here in Korea and so now feel a lot happier that there's at least one tree I know. Sounds funny but stuff like that matters to me.
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[25 May 2007|01:30am] |
On Wednesday night I came down with a flu bug thing - basically over here we have no immunity to anything and so we are more prone to illness. I felt awful and I'm still not right. Have gotten dosed up so that I can teach the kids ok.
Yesterday was Buddha's birthday and I found a really lovely Buddhist shop tucked away on one of my getting lost sessions in Onyang/Asan. I went in and basically asked for incense using my dictionary and they were really lovely. Lots of bowing involved and because I was hot they gave me some water - really lovely folks.
Met up with Laura and Ronon, went for lunch in this Korean take of off MacDonalds because Laura and Ronon can't deal with Korean food and had all these kids following us up the main street shouting hello at us and asking us questions in English and Korean.
I bought some candles and potted plants for the house.
Came back, watched some mad Korean tv and felt sorry for myself because I still felt like shit and then went to bed.
Today I'm still feeling rough, the trip to Guangju is really in the balance now. Oh well
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| Korea |
[12 May 2007|01:40pm] |
Right I leave on Tuesday the 15th May at 2:05pm.
Just booked my flight and I'm off out in Cheonan next weekend.
Sounds class doesn't it?
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[03 May 2007|10:36am] |
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I've finally got my code for Korea!!!
So it's looking like I'll be flying out on the 15th.WOOOHOOOOO!!!!
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[24 Apr 2007|11:59am] |
I went for the Mantoux test today.
Basically they put a needle just under your skin, inject tuberculin protein there and it forms a sort of fake blister. They come back in 2 to three days, check and the test will tell them if:
a. You have ever come into contact with TB
b. If you have any degree of immunity
c. If you've ever had TB
Pretty nifty from a fake blister(which conveniently fades to nothing)!
Well she did it, I watched and it was so cool how the blister thing formed but now it's gone.
Totally vanished.
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[16 Mar 2007|02:44pm] |
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I was pathetic today. Didn't sleep much last night, nearly had a panic attack on waking up, got to the dentists, had a nose bleed (which I never normally get), actually cried, nearly had a heart attack in the chair - couldn't breath and have been booked in for a filling in two weeks.
Looks like I'm off to the drs for some valium for that.
The 30th is going to be a delightful day - filling at 12 and then various jabs at 2:40pm.
On the bright side - after a decade of staying away from the dentist I only need one filling doing. Mother couldn't believe it.
Also on the bright side, I won't have a rotting tooth in my smile anymore.
I just need to get through the filling without completely spazzing out (really doesn't help telling me 'you'll be fine' here because I'm more than capable of spazzing out - today was just a check up and look at the craziness).
I dropped my phone down the bog yesterday so until I can get a new handset - I'm incommunicado (apart from with the house phone).
Oh yeah and as for my leaving do,
March the 31st - 1pm chez Jarmara and Thunarr :D
All of you are invited.
Off to get some sleep now.
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[01 Mar 2007|05:25pm] |
I've got a Creative Zen and it's very pretty :D
Gadgetry sqee!!!
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[27 Feb 2007|02:43pm] |
I've got an interview for a job teaching in Japan!!!! :D
*bounce*
*bounce*
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| Gut update the 3rd |
[21 Feb 2007|10:11am] |
Well after a worsening of the stomach pains and some really trippy dreams and nausea feeling - I went to the doc.
It's gastroenteristis and I have to go back if it gets worse.
Is it normal to feel so spaced out you may as well be tripping your bollocks off?
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| Gut update |
[20 Feb 2007|03:10pm] |
Well it's not got any worse or any better and I've had this since Sunday night so I reckon it can't be appendicitis or I'd be dead by now.
And besides which, I can't have had it because I'd decided not to have it because today is a great excuse to eat really fattening pancakes and there's no way I would go to hospital without having had any.
But I'll get my nursey friend to check it out for me anyway (better availability than our local doctors which is next to nil if you don't get a call in to the surgery before 9:15am).
Mucho burping now so maybe Ravingfrog was right.
Right off to try and make myself not look like something the rat dragged in - I have a kid's birthday party to go to and 30 mini pizzas and 50 mini rostis to cook!
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[19 Feb 2007|01:55pm] |
I've had pain in the lower right side of my gut. I've had it since last night. When I move or cough it gets worse. Kenny thinks it's my appendix
I on the other hand, refuse to have appendicitis and so I'm just going to ignore it until I start vomiting and then have to call an ambulance or until it goes away. On the bright side if I do end up in hospital - at least I'll be off work for ages ;)
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[12 Feb 2007|03:19pm] |
Saturday was fucked up, ended up being transferred for the day to work with this MONG in Coppull. There really is no other word for him. He's a shit. Takes his dirty pads off and puts them in this backpack and then kicks off when staff try to dispose of them. Had to be locked in the kitchen just so I could prepare tea and the other staff member got slapped repeatedly. Nice of my boss to tell me I'd be going to work with challenging behaviour huh? Typical of my company really.
Sunday was really good. Went to the Shared Earth Drumming, Chanting and Dancing workshop in Preston with Jo. It was great - a good day was had all round. The came back and showed Jo a bit of Staddhagaldr and we did a bit of journeying.
Today, it's back to the grind.
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