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What aches within you to know the Divine
What fills your table of spiritual sustenance
To what ends will you go to sit at the table
Of your Divine Nature?

Does this hunger awaken you from the comfort of your slumber
Calling you to sit naked and vulnerable in the solitude of Sacred Space
And surrender in opening to the pervasive silence of Spirit?

Do you feel sorrow at the grains of wisdom spilled out
From bowls upturned in seeker's frantic search?

I had a mystical experience that gave me insight into the god Lodhur. In heathen mythology, the brothers Odin, Honir, and Lodhur sculpted both the world and humankind. They each gave different gifts to humanity. One of Odin's gifts was breath.

One day, a friend took me to a restaurant inside one of the local casinos, which was very smoky. I had an asthma attack and had to go outside to get some air.

Continuing my story of receiving gnosis through fiction writing, it was always obvious to me which parts were inspired, because they felt different from everything else. That feeling would not be obvious to the reader, though. In thousands of hours of writing and being open to receive gnosis, over the course of a year and a half, I had perhaps a few minutes of messages for humanity. They occurred at unpredictable times. There are mediums who contact a god, dead person, or other being and relay questions and answers for someone else, but I’m not one of them. I'm a writer. I receive poetic inspiration.

This is the gnosis I received about what happens to burned books. I sat down to write in my novel, and this came out of my fingers. 

What flowed out:

Loki was sitting on a marble bench reading a book. Odin sat down beside him. “Hello, Loki.”

Loki didn’t look up. “Hi.”

“What book is that?”

“Leaves of Grass. In German translation.”

“Is it any good?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Is it from my library?” Odin received many book sacrifices. Anytime a book was burned in the world, if it was not dedicated aloud to some other god, it always went to him. Sometimes there were whole piles of the same book all burned together. He had not gotten around to reading every title in his library yet. He was still working on all the ones burned together at Alexandria.

“Mmhmm.”

There was a long pause. “I’m going herb shopping in Midgard after lunch. Would you like to come with me?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Are you the father of Zisa’s new puppy?”

“Mmhmm.”

[redacted – unsuitable to print in a family newspaper]

“What?” Loki looked up, blinking in startlement. “Um, peeled, thank you.”

“Just checking to see if you were listening.”
 

What I think it means:

Unless specifically dedicated to someone else, burned books go to Odin. Books have an afterlife.

Further thoughts on this gnosis:

That was the original gnosis, the actual words which flowed from my fingers when Odin inspired me with this message. Later, I put in a scene in which burned books actually show up in his library. The talking scene was gnosis, and the scene in which a bonfire spontaneously shows up in the library, depositing a pile of books, came from my head based on that gnosis.

I haven’t heard of anyone else receiving the same gnosis, but it makes sense to me that books would have an afterlife. Heathenry is strongly infused with animism, and the wider culture in which we live treats books as objects of reverence. We are taught as children to respect books, and not to damage them. Authors sign books like artists sign artworks. The physical book has inherent worth in our culture, beyond the knowledge that is in it. In the US, the three guaranteed freedoms listed first in our Bill of Rights are speech, the press, and religion, of all which are related to books and knowledge. We have book temples; we love books and the knowledge within them so much we've had public libraries for centuries longer than we've had public health care. Our culture has elevated the importance of books above our own lives. Of course, with that much human energy directed at them, books aren't just inanimate objects.

When you read a book, you are a telepath who owns a time machine. You see into the mind of the author, even if the author is long dead. When you write a book, you speak to the whole world, and to the end of time. What an awesome creation writing is! Books are magic.

My path has taken a few sharp turns over the years, but I like to think of it as switchbacks on the same path up the same mountain. If I couldn't handle the turn, I'd be off my path.

In the Fireverse series of posts, I’ll be telling the story of how my relationships with the gods changed because of writing the unpublished, overgrown novel Some Say Fire. The book is a healing journey, and writing it opened me to receiving inspiration from the gods and to connecting with my own subconscious. The book is about the length of Lord of the Rings and took me about a year and a half to write. In writing it, I spent many hours thinking about the gods, retelling their stories, and being mentally open to receive their messages. There is more than I can put in a series of blog posts, even a rather long series. I’ll tell the most significant gnosis, and the most important events.

Here on the Gnosis Diary blog, I’ve been telling the story of my personal journey on my heathen path more or less in chronological order, and now we’ve caught up to where I was when I started writing it. I wanted to write Gnosis Diary because I have gnosis to share, messages given to me for humankind in the form of a novel that is at times horrifying, which some other heathens to whom I’ve shown it have found offensive, and which may be unpublishable. How can I share what I’ve learned if the book is never published, or if it’s published and never reaches a mass audience? How can I be sure people will realize which parts are actual gnosis and which are just part of the story?

Here on Gnosis Diary, I can pick out the parts of Some Say Fire that are genuine gnosis, and not only relate what flowed out when I was writing, but also interpret it outside the context of the story and tell what I think the message means. I already did that with the early post on this blog where I quoted part of a scene inspired by Sif and interpreted it as a message to humanity to stop using GMO Roundup Ready grains that poison the land. Hardly anyone liked that post, so I felt I had not gotten my message out enough, and that I needed to do something else to help the earth, and that was what led me to participate in the editing of A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.

I also already relayed a message to humanity to please stop misusing the Rainbow Bridge, and that it is not a destination but the way to Asgard, and if one intends to go somewhere else, to please direct one's companions to where one expects to go, and if one wishes to direct one's animal companions to the Northern gods, to send them to the gods associated with them, such as cats to Freya and dogs to Nehellenia or Zisa. I concluded with a list of animal associations with the Norse gods. No one much liked that message, either, but people did like the list, so I expanded it and worked it into the new, expanded version of Asatru For Beginners that I'm working on.

When I write fiction or poetry, I often hear lines of dialogue or lines of poetry in my head. That’s quite common among writers. Over the decades that I’ve been writing, I have sometimes felt that what I wrote was inspired by Odin. For example, I wrote the poem Skadhi: Water Cycle by hearing it in a dream, waking up, and copying it down verbatim. Like a lot of other writers do, I’ve often heard fictional characters talking to each other in my head. So when I set out to write Some Say Fire, at first I didn’t realize that sometimes I wasn’t just hearing characters with the names of the gods talking, sometimes I was hearing the actual gods. I had never heard them speak before. Some people possess a “godphone,” but I’ve never been one of them. I didn’t even realize it when they started talking directly to me rather than each other. I just thought that meant there was a character that represents me in my book, so I put in a human protagonist. I didn’t realize it was really them until they started doing real things, and then it terrified me, because of some of the things I had written about them by then. In the 25 years between when I became Priestess of Freya and when I started writing Some Say Fire, I had never heard the gods speak to me. Writing this book cracked open my mind to them so that I could hear them. I usually don’t experience automatic writing, either, but I did sometimes while writing this book. I put my fingers on the keyboard and things flowed out.

I call the universe of Some Say Fire the Fireverse. It differs from our own world in some ways. Many of the things in the book are meant to show how messed up that universe is, so as to show why the Fireverse needs to end and be restarted so a better world can come about, which is the goal of the heroes of the novel. Some of the gods are different in the Fireverse, too. For example, Fireverse-Odin is as different from Asa-Odin as Marvelverse-Odin is. Nonetheless, writing the book became both a healing journey and a vehicle for receiving gnosis. I’ll be writing about those things in this series of posts.

Image credit: Francisco Farias Jr. via Public Domain Pictures

Today is the 28th. This date has personal significance for me, which will be explained in a later post. This is the date on which I honor the northern trinity each month, so it's an excellent day on which to begin the Fireverse blog series. Odin and his brothers are separate gods with distinctly different personalities, and yet they also appear in fused forms and borrow each other's powers and appear as each other. In honoring them, I have learned to embrace mystery over taxonomy. I'm learning to be comfortable with paradox. Today, I hail the tripartite god by all of his names: High, Just-as-High, and Third, Odhinn, Vili, and Ve, Wotan, Wili, and We, Odhinn, Honir, and Lodhur, Odin, Honir, and Loki, and by all his other names aspects and all possible combinations thereof. On this day I say: Hail the ninefold Odin!

Different kinds of knowing, each having their own veracity and value, are to be cultivated and used appropriately. However, there is one kind of knowing we should avoid as much as possible: belief.

Book of the Dead, Book of the Amduat, Book of Caverns, Coffin Texts, Book of the Night, Book of the Earth, Book of Gates - these and more comprise a group of ancient Egyptian texts which describe the journey of Ra through the night world and, by extension, that of the dead soul following his pattern. First discovered by Champollion in the Valley of the Kings in 1829, they were pretty much dismissed as priestly fantasies by subsequent Egyptologists, though Maspero and Lefébure worked on deciphering some of the books in the 19th century. Only in the 20th century did scholars like Piankoff and Hornung begin to really study this rich material.

But I can understand why some were initially put off. I even found myself commenting last week to a friend, “The ancient Egyptians were in their own way just as nutty as the early Christians!” (If you’ve read all the lately-translated apocryphal texts you’ll know what I mean.) Hornung’s The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife is a blow-by-blow description of what you see in the accompanying drawings. Page after page of embellishments, fantastical netherworld characters, and attempts to graphically illustrate esoteric concepts begin to make me a bit dizzy. I start to wonder just how much artistic license the different priest-artist-scribes employed while creating their masterpieces.

But I’ve reconsidered. Some say that pre-industrial people did not distinguish between the physical and the realm of the soul, as we do now. Certainly, the written record indicates that Egyptians viewed every part of existence as infused with meaning and spirit. The books of the afterlife predominantly depict and describe these ideas, illustrated with a seemingly-endless pantheon of otherworldly deities and characters. Hence, a human figure with the head of an cobra can stand for the motherly protection for which the cobra was noted.  A floating pair of arms may denote protection, or the reverential passing of the sun disk from one place to another. Mummies are shown which have waked from the dead and turned over in their coffin, the implication being that they are about to rise and walk into a new life. And snakes - there are a lot of snakes, some of them a protective coil or ourobouros, and others represent the sinister Apep (or Apophis).

Egyptian culture was one that valued dreams and the numinous. The Duat was nothing if not liminal, poised as it was on the edges between life and death and new life, between conscious and subconscious, between this world and the next. I can imagine that priests who were truly devoted to their practice and craft would birth fresh ideas in the course of temple life. No doubt, some also wanted to impress the client with elaborate products that might be perceived as better than the last client’s - though most of these works were found in tombs of pharaohs. The texts also span many centuries and several locales; given how different English communications now are radically different from only 400 years ago, I would likewise expect Egyptian texts to show some evolution.

The afterlife books also remind me of the value of personal gnosis. Our scientific era has made this a dicey subject - how can gnosis replace so-called verifiable fact? But ancient Egyptians understood the importance of those insights which can only emerge from within, from the dark waters of the Duat, or from the watery interior of Nut’s body (through which the sun also passed during the night). Pondering the mysteries of the afterlife texts is like stepping into those waters and exploring, one foot in the conscious world and one in that of the soul.

Or, why UPG is personal, and why no one else's gnosis should get in the way of your relationship with Himself.

Loki is many things - charismatic, cunning, ruthless, loyal, loving. When I was a newer Lokean (yanno, still had the new car smell!), I used to worry that the sweet Husband that I had was somehow a false Loki or a sockpuppet or whatever godphone error. Over time, I've come to realize that it's not that someone else is wrong about Loki being harsh to them, or that I'm wrong in understanding His relationship with me, it's just that I'm not living with their Loki, and they're not living with mine. I suppose some of my feelings on Him are colored by perspective - it's not as if I've never been asked to do something hard - I left my mortal spouse, uprooted my child, lost a fair amount of zie's childhood pictures and keepsakes, many of which I'll never be able to replace, but the reason why He asked it of me was of Nyd, and still done out of love, so I can't truly be angry with Him or feel it unjust.