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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

A fire needs both fuel and a spark. I've written and spoken about the spark that sparked the Heathen Visibility Project many times. That spark was observing a lack of good usable heathen images on the net. But the spark might not have caught fire if there was not already fuel laid ready to burn. In this post I'm writing about the origin of two of the the Project's key ideas, "symbol subversion," something the Nazis were doing to heathen symbols, and the goal of the Project to counteract that, "yield no cultural space to Nazis." I came up with both of those phrases in reaction to the HydraCap scandal, before I started the Heathen Visibility Project.

In 2016 a PR hack for Marvel Comics set the internet on fire by telling Time Magazine that Captain America was really a Nazi. In short order, the hashtags NickSpencerIsHydra SayNoToHydraCap NotMyCap and LeaveCaptainAmericaAlone took over Twitter. Brevoort was the PR hack, Spencer the guy responsible for the HydraCap storyline. I shared a silly meme on Facebook of the character Nick Fury saying "We recognize Marvel has made a decision, but seeing as it's a dumbass decision, we've decided to ignore it." The 68 comment and uncounted subthread fest that followed led to my first use of the phrase "yield no cultural space to Nazis," which would become the tag line of the Heathen Visibility Project.

The most basic problem with the HydraCap storyline is that was a betrayal of the intent of the original creators. Captain America was created as anti-Nazi pro-war propaganda at a time when the USA was not yet at war against Nazi Germany. Captain America #1 featured Cap punching Hitler in the face-- a foreign leader the US did not at that time consider an enemy. America could easily have gone the other way and sided with Germany. Captain America was created by two Jewish men who wanted to influence American public opinion toward war against Germany. Further, Cap was clearly a creator insert character for Jack Kirby, who made Capt. America an artist as well as a soldier. Kirby went on to serve in WWII as a scout, going in alone and unarmed in advance of Allied forces to sketch Nazi fortifications. In one incident, he was surprised by 3 German soldiers armed with guns, and he killed them all with a knife he took from one of them. Kirby WAS Capt. America-- first he dreamed it, then he did it. To take his creation and say Cap had been a Nazi all along was a slap in the face to his creators.

By the time I'd done explaining the issue and linking to news, two disparate groups of my Facebook friends were working together in a way I'd never imagined. I have a lot of righty friends from the publishing industry and the Libertarian Party, and also a lot of lefty friends from the pagan community. My righty friends were calling Nick Spencer a Holocaust denier, my lefty witchy friends were casting formal curses, and then my righty friends started suggesting curses for my witchy friends to cast. America was united by a common enemy.

At the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was running trailers for a new Captain America movie, which is probably why Time Magazine wanted an article about Capt. America. Brevoort may have been of the PR school that says any publicity is good publicity. A speculation on the net was that perhaps he was jealous of the movie division because it made more money than the comics division, and he was trying to tank the movie out of spite. A theory I read at the time was that it was the opposite, they were trying to torpedo the comics and make bank off the movies because of a pay dispute with the dead creator's family, which made no sense even from a math perspective. Either way, he didn't succeed.

In the Facebook post I mentioned above, I encouraged my friends to only boycott the comics division and not the movies, since only the comics division was running the Nazi storyline and movie-Cap was still the beloved character we wanted to support. I compared Hydra-Cap to New Coke, and reminded people of the power of the market to demand the product we wanted and to not demand the one we didn't, and how consumers had successfully used that power to get back Classic Coke.

Of course comics fans knew that there would eventually be some other storyline, but Brevoort had not been talking to comics fans. He had been talking to readers of Time Magazine, a general audience that would mostly include fans of movie Cap, rather than comics Cap. Brevoort had said in the Time interview that the HydraCap storyline was not going to resolve quickly and would go on for years, and that Cap had been a Nazi all along, but the public outcry was eventually successful and Marvel Comics ditched HydraCap. However, in the meantime, before Marvel decided to respond to the public and call the whole thing off, they doubled down by trying to make comics store employees wear Hail Hydra shirts. The word problematic is overused, but it applies; Hydra meant Nazis from the beginning and Hail Hydra had always been a stand-in phrase for Hail Hitler. Making retail employees wear Nazi slogans for their jobs was somehow supposed to generate good publicity? Well, that backfired, as it deserved.

That part hadn't happened yet when my Facebook page became the public forum provided a lot of the raw materials from which I created the Heathen Visibility Project. As people discussed on my post, it was  apparent that if Marvel could make Capt. America a Nazi they could also do it to Thor. That prompted me to talk about symbol subversion, another phrase I use a lot when talking about the Heathen Visibility Project. Symbol subversion is taking a good symbol like Capt. America, or Thor's Hammer, and making it bad. I had already been fighting symbol subversion and other Nazi-related ills as the manager of an online Asatru forum. The literal Nazis of the 1940s had appropriated a lot of symbols from historical heathenry. Asatruars held many debates among ourselves about which symbols could be reclaimed and which could not, and we had decided to fight for the Hammer. It was literally the symbol of our faith, as it had been in historical times. It was not acceptable to allow Thor's Hammer to be lost to Nazis. The Capt. America character had already been portrayed lifting Marvel-Thor's Hammer, which in the Marvel universe meant he was "worthy," a Galahad-level grail knight of pure heart and faultless deeds. To say this pure-hearted warrior was a Nazi, implying Nazis could be "worthy," could not be borne.

May 28, 2016, I posted, "We must yield no space in popular culture to Nazism. The Hammer must not be associated with that in any way. There are real life Nazis already trying to appropriate it as a symbol. They are not pretend, and they are not harmless, and the fight against them must never falter."

And Marvel's Thor himself, a character clearly based on one of our actual gods in Asatru and other heathen religions, could have been the subject of similar subversion by Marvel Comics just as easily as Cap. There are deep historical and religious reasons not to allow Thor's Hammer to be claimed by Nazis, and not by neo-Nazis either.

As I pointed out in my fateful Facebook post, Nazis aren't imaginary and they aren't confined to the dusty pages of history. They are real and they are dangerous, and neo-Nazis still exist and should not be encouraged.

One of my friends pointed out the comics stories were all fake. I replied, "That's the definition of fiction. But ideas matter. Symbols matter. Mythologies, national narratives, and personalized heroes matter. The ideals to which we strive to live up matter."

The fact that public outcry actually worked in the case of HydraCap and that fans, the general public, and the great storehouse of pop culture symbols eventually got back our Cap unscathed and un-Nazified should encourage us. It means that it is actually possible to fight symbol subversion and win.

I thought of the Heathen Visibility Project due to matters which were completely unrelated to the comics scandal. As I mentioned, I'd already been fighting symbol subversion, but I had been doing it largely in private, among my fellow heathens. For years, I had noticed that when news outlets illustrated an article about Asatru, they often illustrated it with either a Marvel Comics Thor image or a photo of a white supremacist march. It had always irritated me, but I hadn't thought about trying to do something about it. When I launched the Heathen Visibility Project, I had just been searching for Asatru related images to use for my first Heathen Calendar, the 2017 Calendar. I was working on that in 2016, just after participating in the public reaction against HydraCap. As I did searches for heathen images, I had realized why so few news outlets used real heathen related photos: because there weren't very many available. Those were the things that I had in mind when I began the Project. But I quickly fell back on the two phrases I had used when I first started talking about HydraCap: "symbol subversion" and "yield no cultural space to Nazis." And when I was invited to speak about the Heathen Visibility Project at Pagan Pride, I thought again of the original Captain America and made the main motif of my speech "punch a Nazi in the face." So the spark for the Heathen Visibility Project was performing online searches for heathen related art and photos and not finding much that wasn't either Marvel or Nazis, but the ideas and experience of the HydraCap scandal provided ready-made fuel. With that fuel and that spark, we lit a fire that has never gone out.

I already cared about American symbols and culture before the comics scandal, of course, which is why I published my now out of print book American Celebration. But the HydraCap scandal and our conversation about the Hammer, symbol subversion, and denying Nazis the cultural space of search engine results by occupying it ourselves united my interest in American symbols with my heathenry in a way it had never connected before. I'm pleased to see all the other people joining in on the Heathen Visibility Project. I'm also enthused that a louder voice than mine is taking up the topic of symbol subversion of American symbols and will be publishing a new book on that soon, which I plan to review. Both that book and the Heathen Visibility Project are part of the push to fight back against symbol subversion. The HydraCap scandal was like the proverbial stone that started the avalanche.

Why? Because apparently I possess the common sense the gods gave a honey badger.
 
I had just run for office for the second time. I was exhausted and disillusioned. I had seen how the political sausage was made and felt that the system was rigged. I read an essay on Popehat, “Burn the [expletive deleted] System to the Ground,” and agreed wholeheartedly. That opened me to Loki in his aspect as Breaker of Worlds. I didn’t realize that until much later, though.

In November 2013, I went to see Thor: The Dark World. I enjoyed it, but I left the theater thinking, “I could write a much more authentic story about the heathen gods than that!” That opened me to Loki, too, and to Odin, though I didn’t realize that until later, either.

“Yes, you could,” purred that voice. Loki appeared in my mind as a fictional character, talking and making story. I didn’t think it was really him, though. For one thing, I was used to hearing fictional characters talking in my head; it’s how I’ve been writing fiction for decades. Like many other authors, when I get an idea for a story and the characters start talking to each other, it always feels like the characters are banging on the inside of my head trying to get out. For another thing, he didn’t look like I remembered him. I had met Loki as a child, in a dream, without knowing who he was, but by the time he showed up again, I had identified the Lord of the Monsters as Loki (see my previous post Lord of the Monsters for that story.) Now he was coming around my mind cosplaying as Marvel-Loki. It took me a while to realize, “Duh, shapeshifter.” Of course he can look like anyone or anything he wants.

Scenes played in my head. I saw chemtrails create the Fimbulwinter, and the Well of Worlds on fire because it was full of fracking fluid, and Sif lying dead in her temple, poisoned by her own worshippers who accidentally sacrificed unlabeled GMO grain. I saw myself die in a zombie apocalypse with a Smith & Wesson Shield in my hand – weeks before I actually was given one for Yule – the dead rising because the Rainbow Bridge was out. I heard Heimdall say it broke under the weight of dead cats and dogs.

“Look, there is dialogue, there are scenes, write.” His horns of flame tickled the inside of my skull, giving me a headache.

I told him, “Shut up in there or I’ll write a scene in which you get bitten by the Midgard Serpent.”

His eyes twinkled and he laughed at me, and—well, I wrote the scene. It is now in the book.

He was delighted. “You wrote something!”

Yes, I did, I wrote something. You win. Score one for Loki.

So, when I realized, “Holy *^(&^ it’s really Loki!” what did I do? I challenged him to a formal duel, using traditional Old Norse fighting words. I wrote a horrible little fanfic story in which the very worst thing that could ever happen to anyone happens – what I thought was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, that is. I wasn’t even aware that was what I was doing. It only became glaringly obvious in hindsight. At the time, I thought I was insulting him.

“Ha, ha! Look! You wrote more things about meeeeeee!”

He reacted as if I amused him, but months later, I realized that when I tried to insult him, what I was really doing was revealing my deepest unhealed trauma. Being a god, he saw right through me, and saw what I could not see myself. He resolved to help me heal it through writing, though I didn’t realize that at the time either.

I also realize now that reacting as if he was amused was the “laugh so you won’t cry or scream” phenomenon that I’ve seen so often before, particularly in myself. He deflected me with humor, and I didn’t realize just how very seriously he was taking my unconscious cry for help until much later. I also didn’t realize until much later that often the being who showed up to inspire my writing insisting that I call him Loki was really Odin, although I had a sneaking suspicion of it for months before it became really obvious.

Every night I dreamed of Ragnarok. Dreams in the twelve nights of Yule are supposed to be prophetic. I saw Thor’s head on a pike. Loki boiled tea from the flowers left at the graves of the dead, and held a tea dance. It was absurd and terrifying.

Finally I had my outline done and I started writing. The pressure eased. Dialogue poured out my fingers, into the keyboard, and when I saw it on the screen, I thought, “I just wrote WHAT about WHO?” I was afraid what I had written might offend Thor. When I went outside I expected a lightning bolt between the shoulder blades. I was mortally afraid to walk beneath the sky, until I raised a cup of coffee to the Thunderer and asked for a sign of approval if he wanted me to keep writing this story this way, and an out-of-season rainstorm arrived, a blessing from Thor.

On Yule 2013, I laid two fires, a bonfire for the ceremony and a barbecue fire for cooking the feast for after the ceremony. I lit both fires. The bonfire shed fire all around it and required much work to contain, and when I set the leaf-design iron lid aside to toss burning branches back into the fire, I burned my foot on the lid. I stood in the cold bucket of water. It was time to concede. It was time to admit that I could not win a duel against a god. Like the cup of coffee I had offered to Thor, I had to make some small gesture toward Loki. So I threw my hair-combings into the barbecue.

At once the fire popped and spat and threw off a great light in acceptance of my sacrifice. Not the fire I threw it into, but the great Yule bonfire, which suddenly stopped trying to get out of its metal confines and started burning merrily and throwing off a great white-yellow pyramid of herbal smoke straight up into the air. The rest of the ceremony went off perfectly, and the cooking did too.

That was when my head cracked open and I started hearing the rest of the gods, too. They inspired my writing. Loki’s laughter echoed down trunk of the World-Tree and shook dry rot from its heart. His voice moistened the dark between the stars, shivered through all the worlds and waited for me every night as I closed my eyes. I no longer heard it in dreams, but now, in that half awake, half asleep state as I drifted off to sleep. As I slipped into the state of consciousness called hypnogogia, I saw Loki standing in my room, and a large snake slithered into my bed. Nervously, I told Loki his snake was getting too close, but he laughed and told me it wasn’t his snake.

“That is my blood brother, Bolverkr, the mead of poetry in his mouth, here to help you birth a new world.”

Image credit: "Loke by C. E. Doepler" by Carl Emil Doepler (1824-1905) - Wägner, Wilhelm. 1882. Nordisch-germanische Götter und Helden. Otto Spamer, Leipzig & Berlin. Page 255.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

For today's Faithful Friday we've got stories of real life shamanism and comic-book gods. Have a great weekend!

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