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.
Where Poets Go
After my 2 wedding visions, I was no longer sure where I would go when I die. For 25 years I had expected to go to Freya in Folkvangr. I had previously had a brief glimpse of Odin appearing to me at death, as I related in my post Seeing My Own Death in the Runes, but I had not really thought that I would go to him because I thought his humans went to Valhalla, and Valhalla was only for the battle dead. I don't expect to die in battle, and I would not really want to join the army after death anyway, and that's what going to Valhalla means. It's not Heaven or Paradise, it's a training base for the Last War. It did not sound appealing to me.
I didn't want to fight on the other side either. I had always expected to sit out the Last War, as Freya's dead humans are not prophesied to participate in it. I always pictured Folkvangr as a place where both battle dead and some other types of people went. And cats. I pictured cats.
I talked with Odin about this. I told him I still wanted the afterlife full of cats.
He said, "No, you don't. If that was what you wanted, you would be working with cats now. Instead, you write and work in publishing. You are a poet, and you are going where poets go."
"Where is that?" I asked.
"Wherever they wish. Poets are welcome everywhere."
Image: Odin, art by Georg von Rosen [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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I once read that we lay our path through the afterlife in the dreams we have while living. If that's true then I have two or three libraries that I'll be visiting after I've died. There will also be some time back in school.