Last Call

The silence at the end of the song…yes, it’s that.

mainer74

Story first, and then the bit you won’t like.

The community was in shock.  One of their own was dead by his own hand.  Bear had been loved by all, a laughing figure, forever the roaring heart of the party.  One man who always had time for those who were struggling, for those who were hurting, for those who were lost.  He was in many ways like a bear, too large for life, and his bumbling rambling progress through life and its spaces left a certain amount of chaos and spills in its wake, but laughter coloured those spills and memories for everyone.  The news that this laughing giant would no more loom in every picture, that his booming laugh and off colour remarks would no longer trigger laughter and pained groans in every gathering was just starting to sink in.

Angus was the leader of the community, its most…

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Troubling Ancestors, and ancestor worship

mainer74

Ancestor worship is important to a fully developed Heathen practice.  Not everyone is going to get there.  We live in a Post-Christian western society, and its god-centric legacy will honestly be centuries in undoing.

Our surviving literature does not help as much as it should, because while every scholar will begin with telling you how sad it is we don’t have much about what everyone knew and did every day, because the saga’s only talk about the stuff you saw once a year, or Uncle Olaf saw when he was young and actually guested in the King’s Hall, but you will never see in your whole life; casual readers come away with the mistaken impression that the god centered tales describe daily life.

The truth is most of ancestral practice was as hearth based as any of the pagan tribes well into recorded history.  The spirits of the hearth and…

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