Impact of Heathenry on Everyday Life

"How has your religion changed your daily, everyday life?"

One of the things most Heathens figure out pretty quickly is that Heathen isn't something you do, it's not something you get, and it's not something you practice on weekends - Heathen is something that you are. This realization has had a continuously profound effect in my life. I've always been the informal type, raised to be loosely Christian (by which I mean I was never forced to go to church as a kid...although I had no concept for existing religions aside from Christianity). I'd say that for most of my life, I was much more spiritual than religious...and for a number of years, I was definitely setting up my tent in the pantheist camp. So when I first realized there was this thing called Asatru, that there was this living, thriving religion based on gods I once lamented as being dead, I experienced what would be the first of many shocks.

Heathens, among other things, are die-hard polytheists. Walk into a room full of Heathens and suggest that our gods and goddesses are part of a universal Goddes and / or God concept, and are thus the same as Egyptian gods or Babylonian gods, and you'll be lucky if you're just politely ignored. We believe that our gods and goddesses are unique and individual, separate from the deities of other pantheons...suggesting that they aren't is in many cases taken as an affront. I had the luck of joining what would become a Heathen forum populated by some of the most notorious über-Heathens on the Internet, suggesting something I'd once heard about all the gods and goddesses of the world being a multi-faceted gem. This, I assure you, did not go over very well. My change from pantheism did not occur over night - in fact it took a few years - but learning to understand the gods as individuals, as relatives and friends, separate and unique was probably my first real step towards being Heathen. At the same time, there was the slight tendency I had toward seeing the gods as something along the lines of archetypes. This, too, has changed as I've gotten to know the Heathen gods as individuals...they aren't an inherited memory of the Germanic race, they aren't a mental construct, they're real, and they are with us. So in this regard, I went from being a Christian-based pantheist spiritualist, to walking and talking with my gods...it's not just an impact in my daily life, it's a nearly complete rewrite of the part of my mind that deals with things on religious and spiritual levels, as well as an added awareness in my daily life.

One of the fundamental virtues that Heathens strive toward is hospitality. This has quite a lot to do with the concept of community, which of course is essential in Heathenry. Hospitality is of such high importance, that many modern-day Heathens, as well as did Heathens a thousand years ago, believe that the gods sometimes walk this world in disguise, testing the hospitality of our homes. Some form of this belief can be traced back as far as the 5th Century, CE, when 'Old Man Winter' would visit the homes in a village looking for food and drink, as a form of placation for a bit of leniency from the harshness of Winter. I take the virtue of hospitality a bit further with part of one of my own maxims: True hospitality does not lock itself indoors, nor does it suffer the hindrance of inconvenience. In other words, wherever I happen to be standing, it's within my power to offer hospitality, and unless I've been insulted or offended somehow, I can generally be counted upon to do just that. Although I've always been interested in things like community service, charity and even offering a clean, warm environment for guests in my home, Heathenry has added a sacred aspect to hospitality for me that I see not just as an effect, but a benefit in my life.

One of the other great impacts for me has been in the way Heathenry approaches Nature and technology. We embrace both with great enthusiasm - Nature isn't absent in technology, quite the contrary, it's as present in technology as it is in anything else. This isn't a stated belief in Heathenry, but it's one that can be inferred from our history and general approach to things. For a person who loves the outdoors, but lives in the city, learning to see the natural in even the synthetic on a daily basis has been a great benefit to my sanity, as well as being a balm to my spirits, because it helps me to feel as though I'm always connected - not in the digital media sense of the word, but in the sense that I'm always connected to my gods and ancestors, as well as the community around me.