Gnosis Diary: Life as a Heathen

My personal experiences, including religious and spiritual experiences, community interaction, general heathenry, and modern life on my heathen path, which is Asatru.

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No, Disney Isn't Trying to Own the Norse God Loki

verybody calm down about the Redbubble incident. This is all over the net at the speed of clickbait but it is a false alarm. An artist on Redbubble made a comics based cosplay item, tagged it with the name Loki, and Redbubble removed it. Disney did not do or say anything, and as of this writing, has not made any official statements about this incident. The artist YourBoswell took to social media telling people that because the issue was the name Loki that Disney could have gotten heathen sacred art removed, but that is not what happened. The art was based on Marvel comics and it was not even Disney that took it down.

Disney has never gone after other entertainment providers with different versions of Loki such as Neil Gaiman, and if they did they would lose, since Loki and the other beings in heathen mythology are in the public domain. They certainly are not going to go after the state religion of Iceland for having the name Loki on their website, because they know if they did they would lose. They would lose just as hard if they went after an individual Asatruar or other Heathen in the USA for making devotional art or books about the god Loki, and they surely know that. Somewhere out there, I'm sure there is a lawyer salivating at the idea of arguing a 1st Amendment freedom of religion case before the Supreme Court against Disney, but this is not that case.

I know the whole "Disney steals the god Loki" story sounds plausible, because Disney did actually try to claim the phrase Dia de los Muertos before public outcry shut them down, so they have shown they are ready to be cultural appropriators if they think there is profit in it. And if they ever do try to claim ownership of medieval books and their contents and the names of the gods within them, or any other thing that properly belongs to the entire world and should always be freely available to everyone, then we should indeed fight them on that. But that's not what is happening right now.

Image: Idunna giving Loki an apple, public domain art

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Erin Lale is the author of Asatru For Beginners, and the updated, longer version of her book, Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path. Erin has been a gythia since 1989. She was the editor and publisher of Berserkrgangr Magazine, and is admin/ owner of the Asatru Facebook Forum. She also writes science fiction and poetry, ran for public office, is a dyer and fiber artist, was acquisitions editor at a small press, and founded the Heathen Visibility Project.

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