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Loki & Relationships: The Godspouse Conundrum

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As I was browsing through my Facebook feed, one friend’s post caught my eye. In it, I saw a discussion of how the Lokean community has become so inundated with godspousery that it has become difficult to discuss relationships of a different nature. Some of the comments left on the thread told me that there are individuals out there who currently feel ostracized by the sheer number of godspouses in the Lokean community. Some feel left out and alienated because they don’t have that type of relationship with Loki. Others are distinctly uncomfortable because of traumatic sexual histories.

I find this both frustrating and fascinating. I find it frustrating because I feel that everyone’s voice deserves to be heard. No one should feel like they are being drowned out. People should not feel like they cannot start a conversation because they are afraid that someone is going to take what they say the wrong way or criticize them for not being a godspouse.

The fascinating thing is that the majority of Lokeans aren’t godspouses. Some of the preliminary results of the survey done by my sexologist friend (here’s the article where she discusses the survey) demonstrate that. Out of around 85 surveyed (she posted this in the Loki’s Wyrdlings group), only 14 of those surveyed were Lokeans. That’s a little over 15%, but that definitely isn’t a percentage that screams majority.

In some ways, we can say, as a community, that we’ve treated our minority group incredibly well – to the point that the majority literally thinks they are being drowned out by those who are godspouses. That is more a perception than a reality, and it may come down to the simple fact that a lot of people who are Lokean godspouses are louder about the relationship they share with Loki.

There are various opinions as to why godspouses tend to be so vocal about their relationships, though most of them tend to center around the idea that godspouses are attention-seekers. That’s not very easy to measure, since there are certainly going to be people who fit into that category. There are also Lokean godspouses that never mention that they exist because they remember the level of ridicule faced when godspousery was becoming a concept within Paganism. It’s really not that old an idea in the broader Pagan world, so some of the loudness may also come from the novelty of the fact it is more accepted today than it was even five years ago.

That said, there are a thousand different types of relationships. Every person’s relationship with Loki is unique. No one’s experience needs to dictate anyone else’s. I am not a godspouse to Loki, nor would I want to be. That’s not the relationship we have, and it’s not the kind of relationship I would readily pursue with any deity. Godspousery requires a ridiculous amount of dedication and work, when a person is truly dedicated to their astral partner (in all honesty, I question the amount of dedication I see from many self-named godspouses).

The majority of Lokeans have devotee relationships with Loki. That means they honor him through offerings on the schedule they have arranged with him. Generally, that means getting familiar with the lore and developing the understanding that the Marvel universe is not the mythology. When I see Lokean godspouses talking about how much they enjoy Marvel Loki and base everything off Tom Hiddleston, it’s pretty hard to shake the conviction that they simply have a crush on the actor that they, for some reason, have gotten mixed up with a deity in their head. It’s one thing to appreciate Marvel’s version of Loki and understand where the religious lore and the comic verse intersect – it’s another entirely to worship Marvel’s Loki instead of the Norse one (that’s a long-standing view I’ve held that is fairly regularly found contentious).

The other thing that I find absolutely fascinating about this entire situation is that so many Lokeans who are not godspouses are afraid to speak up in a more public way. That actually amuses me to a degree but I also find it a bit offensive. Because Loki is a god that promotes confronting reality, I do not understand standing back and trying not to offend someone by presenting a view you hold. If it’s a view you hold, and you present it without directly insulting anyone, where is the disrespect?

I personally find it far more disrespectful to stay silent, as that creates the impression – and the illusion – of the existence of what simply is not there. It is rude to stay silent when truth needs to be spoken.

So why not be true to yourself and to what you think? Why not speak your truth? Sure, there are fears to be faced. The fear of rejection, of being told “no, you’re wrong, you cannot believe this way,” is always there, lurking under the surface. The fear of being silenced, of being told, “shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” is another. Fortunately, fears are always greater in the abstract than in reality.

A better question might be, “Is there at least one person who will agree with me?” Some of us need to know that someone will have our back when we say something controversial. That’s a pretty universal human need. And honestly, the chances are high you will find someone who shares your viewpoint. If you cannot convince yourself of this, then maybe ask yourself a different question:

“Who can I help give a voice to if I share my story?”

Worry less about how people will perceive you and worry more about people whose stories are similar to yours. Who knows, you may just give someone else the courage to speak up, once you take that risk. Everything is a gamble; in some ways, life is just a series of risks that have either paid off or haven’t.

Speaking to Lokeans, I’d say we should all be willing to take a risk and speak up. Loki is, after all, one of the greatest risk-taskers of the gods. Just look at everything he accomplished…simply because he was willing to speak up and suggest something different. It’s been said that the best form of worship is emulation. Who else would a Lokean emulate, if not Loki himself?

So, since I’m very much a proponent of practicing what I preach, I’ll start my defining my relationship with Loki.

Loki is the god I serve as a priest. What that means can be difficult to explain, though I do try to do so when asked. Being a Pagan priest, to begin with, is different than what is assumed by the word. Generally, a priest in the Pagan context helps facilitate ritual, and I certainly do that for Loki.

However, there’s also a community aspect to the work I do. The Loki’s Wyrdlings group and Loki University came out of the service that I give to Loki. Those are things I was asked to do. Loki asked me to create a community where all Lokeans could come together and feel safe in their veneration of Him. He did not ask me to provide a community free of conflict – just a place Lokeans could come to escape the persecution faced in mainstream Paganism and Heathenry.

The unfortunate reality is that people create conflict all the time. Put two people together long enough, conflict eventually happens. Even best friends fight and disagree with each other. So, that is an impossible task to begin with, and I’d like to think that the gods try not to ask us to do the impossible.

When I created Wyrdlings with Karlesha’s help, there was no space for Lokeans as a whole. There were small pockets of people on forums that sort of stuck together, but the kind of force generated by the Lokean community when the Trump article came out in the Wild Hunt would have been impossible a few years ago.

Sometimes, I see spin-off groups from Wyrdlings, and I admit, I do wonder a bit why they left and if I did something wrong – I’m only human, after all. Sometimes, I even feel a bit jealous of these spin-off groups, and then I remind myself that I’m being ridiculous. Because these smaller branching off groups are a reminder that the Lokean community is vibrant and alive and growing. The larger a community grows, the more splinters it tends to have. History has taught me that, especially the history of professional communities.

Loki has never been a simple god – I don’t think I’ve ever met a god that was simple – so of course it makes since that as the Lokean community gets larger, the number of groups that have their own way of looking at Loki also increases. The gods are expansive. People bond over different aspects of the gods.

Because of that, the aspects we each deal with means all of us have different relationships with the gods we work with. What I do for Loki as one of his priests is different than what another one of his priests does for him. It’s also different from what devotees do, what godspouses do, and those are all different from familial relationships with Loki. Different doesn’t mean better or worse. It just means different.

Every relationship any of us have with another person is different than the relationship someone else has with that person. It’s like getting jealous of a friend’s relationship with another friend. It doesn’t make sense. Because getting jealous of that relationship indicates that you aren’t content with the one you’re in, and it devalues the friendship you already have. Celebrate the relationships you have and the uniqueness of them. Whether those relationships are with other people or with gods, no one can have a relationship with someone else that you have. No one else can be you.

So, if you’re chasing a relationship someone else has with Loki, stop and think about it. Is that really the relationship you want with him? Or is there a different one that would serve you both better?

Conversely, if you’re condemning someone else’s relationship with Loki, why are you doing that? Why are you devaluing someone else’s relationship instead of pursuing the fulfillment of the relationship you hold with Loki?

Jealousy and/or condemnation aside, the point I’m trying to get across here is this: pursue your own relationship with Loki, your way. Don’t take someone else’s relationship and use it as an example of what the “right” relationship looks like. Stop judging yourself and other people for having the relationships they do.

Simple solution, right? Now if only putting it into action were as easy as it sounds. Then again, nothing worth doing is ever easy. The gods we honor aren’t safe, and the paths we walk are the ones we forge.

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The Change Loki Wreaks

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Loki can bring cataclysmic change into the lives of those who follow him, and that may be the hardest aspect of Loki to deal with, especially for those who are unprepared for what exactly that can mean.

In the Loki’s Wyrdlings Facebook group I run with Karlesha Silverros, a member asked what happens after Loki introduces cataclysmic change into a person’s life and whether Loki stays around to provide comfort and soothing during the change.

In my experience, Loki only introduces change to that degree when there are truths inside a person they have refused to acknowledge for too long. The hardest work we will ever do with Loki is learning to face ourselves. I’d say if Loki had a single piece of advice to give to everyone who follows him, it would simply be the old Greek tenet of “Know thyself.”

It is when we forget to acknowledge the deepest truths of our inner self that Loki introduces truly chaotic levels of change, as he is rather intolerant of people hiding from themselves. A simple acknowledgment that you do lie to yourself about certain things can go a long way in mitigating the level of chaos, as it suggests a willingness to come to terms with the truth of your own life.

From my perspective, I’d say a person who comes to Loki and sees a cataclysmic change in a small period of time is a person who has lied to themselves, repressed their feelings, and put themselves last in their own lives for far longer than they realize. It is easy to delude ourselves into believing that we are happy with the lives we’re leading, but the gods, and Loki especially, see the truths we refuse to admit to ourselves.

This is why so many people stay in relationships they know are unhealthy far past the time they should have pulled out. It is why people stay at jobs that go nowhere, refusing to chase the dreams they hold dearest to them because it’s safer to risk nothing than to chase a dream and fail – yet the most rewarding of those two options is to chase the dream. Whether you fail or succeed matters far less than the effort you put forth to realize your dreams. It is why people who are often discouraged in academics drop out of school so often rather than pursuing the opportunity to prove the people around them wrong.

Loki, as Lothur, gave us passion. To see us fail to utilize that – what else would he be compelled to do but introduce change to see the gift he gave us put to use?

From my perspective, the best way to be close with Loki is to be real with yourself, to be honest about your dreams, and to pursue them with as much passion as you can bring forth.

As for the other question asked, about being comforted during a change that Loki has introduced, why would he comfort someone over an action he has taken? Loki generally has reasons for the things he does, as all gods do, and to ask him to comfort us over change he has brought to us is, from my perspective, a bit insulting. It is like asking a fire to be supportive of the fact that you’re too hot sitting next to it.

Our gods aren’t safe, and inviting Loki into your life automatically means inviting the potential for a cataclysmic level of change in every aspect of your life.

The changes he brings are always for the better, assuming that you are able to make yourself face up to the truths you’ve denied for too long. We live in a society that doesn’t really encourage self-reflection or self-knowledge, and it is an essential skill to develop if you plan to work with any god, but it is doubly essential if you wish to work with Loki.

I reiterate – our gods are not safe.

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For Loki: A Lost Reflection Found

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So, I found a reflection I wrote back in April when I was going through my notes on my phone. Sometimes, I forget that I write reflections on my phone, but this particular one seems relevant to share here, as it was written on April 1st, which is often considered a particularly good day to honor Loki.

I feel like I’m always dancing on the edge of every group I join, and I wonder what fitting in would feel like – would it hurt? Would it feel like truth, like coming home, like being free? Would I find acceptance? Would someone finally embrace me, with all my faults and imperfections, and tell me, finally, that I’m allowed to breathe? Or would it be just another moment of loss, of self-defeat? Would I have to give up part of myself, sacrifice a bit of me, in order to find a way to fit? 

I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what the truth is. I doubt I’ll ever know because the truth is, I’ll never fit. I’ve never fit, and I’ve tried. The gods know I’ve tried to fit in; I have tried to adapt. I have tried to remake myself in the image of the groups I can see parts of me in. But nothing ever sticks, not really. What does stick doesn’t quite take, doesn’t quite mold itself to my skin, doesn’t quite embed itself in my flesh, doesn’t quite mesh with my mind. Always, something holds me apart, sets me aloof – just slightly – so that a life of outside looking in is all I’ve ever been allowed to know. 

Even with my friends, I know I don’t quite mesh, don’t quite fit, don’t truly belong because everything I am is too different, too me to be adapted into something not quite right. I see how my friends try to see me, try to understand, and it hurts the most because I know they never can. They can’t reach down into my heart and pull out the truth of my soul. They can’t see the depth of the emotions running as currents between us, and I can never adequately express myself because what I feel is too deep, too primal and raw, for words to do justice.

I hang on the precipice, grasping the edge over the abyss with desperation, trying to find a way to get more than a finger-hold on the edge. I’m watching everyone else around me, seeing the way they’ve found solid ground to stand on, wishing I had what they have because I am so precariously close to falling out of this world. But I’m not angry they have it when I don’t – I’m too busy trying to figure out how to overcome the predicament I find myself in, too besieged by the problem before me to care that no one else seems to be struggling with this problem. 

Except no one else seems to notice the difficulties besieging me, and they keep asking me to create a bridge for them to cross from one solid stance on the ground to another. I am transition, and I am desperately trying to provide for everyone else and also find my own path out of the ravine I’m hanging over. No one stops to ask me if I need help, but it’s not because they don’t want to help. It’s more that they can’t see that I’m not standing on solid ground. They buy an illusion I don’t have the eyes to see, and they assume I’m standing on the ground beside them with some sort of magic peak from one piece of ground to the next. They don’t see my pain….They can’t. 

Whether they want to or not doesn’t matter because the illusion is all that they can see, so if I speak, I’m silenced because what I see….The reality I live within is an illusion to them, as theirs is an illusion to me. So, we’re always missing the point, the perspective of the other person’s life is ignored, and I find myself serving as a bridge because I can see the desperate importance in being taken at face value. Because for me, I’ve never had it. I’ve never been believed when it most matters, and that is when I am telling the most truth. Because truth doesn’t need to be distorted to be painful, and lies do nothing but enhance the illusion.

It’s no wonder I work so well with Loki….We’re both outsiders who don’t know what it’s like to simply be believed. 

 

 

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A Lokean Type of Courage

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One of the biggest groups of people who tend to find themselves interacting with Loki are those who have been abused in some way. The ones who have lost themselves and need to be guided back – who need to learn who they are again. Loki teaches us that it’s okay to not be okay. He teaches us that it’s okay to be wounded and feel the wound so that it can heal properly.

Until Loki came into my life, I had pushed the abuse that I dealt with growing up to the back of my mind. Learned to suppress it, to minimize it, to rationalize it into being less bad than it actually was. To some extent, I still do that. Because there’s the fear that follows me around that people are going to think less of me if they understand what I went through. That they are going to think me weak because I didn’t stop it, that they won’t understand that I couldn’t stop it.

It’s easy to tell people that I grew up in an alcoholic home and let them draw their own conclusions from there. It’s harder to explain the stark terror that I felt when my mother started drinking. The more alcohol consumed, the more violent and unreasonable she became. She would yell terrible things at me, telling me that no one would ever love me, that I was the reason she drank, that I could do nothing right. And I took that all to heart.

Because when my mother started drinking, I was eight years old. Up until that point, my mother had been the most incredible, doting mother that a child could ask for. She taught me how to read. She waited with me in the freezing cold for the bus to school. She made me snacks for when I got home from school. There was no one in the world that I loved more.

And then, like someone had flipped a switch, she became someone I didn’t know. Someone who terrified me because I couldn’t understand where my mother had gone. My life became a pursuit of escaping the terror she inflicted in me. I wanted to be anywhere but near her. Because I took what she said about her drinking being my fault to heart – I believed that I had caused the change.

So I did everything I could to be the perfect child. I performed well academically. I did my chores without complaining. I wanted my mother to be proud of me because I had this idea in my head that if I just did enough well enough that I could fix her. And I wanted to fix her because I missed the woman who had spent hours teaching me to read. Who had cared enough about me to stand beside me in the winter to make sure I got to school okay.

Occasionally, there would be flashes. Moments of sobriety where I would see her. In those moments, she taught me how to keep from being bullied. She taught me how to spot potential threats and how to guard against them. She also taught me how to deal with my empathic gift. And I loved her during those moments because that was the woman who I recognized as my mother. There was her, and then there was the woman she became when she drank.

She became domineering – everything was micromanaged. I had to fetch her drinks and fix them perfectly – eight ice cubes in each glass of water. I had to bring her glasses full of vodka. To this day, I cannot stomach the smell of pure vodka. If it’s in a mixed drink, I can always taste it. I told one of my ex-boyfriends this. He didn’t believe me, made a drink without telling me what he put in it, and I took one sip and handed it back to him. There was less than a thimbleful of vodka in the glass. The reason I can always taste it – the first time I ever tasted vodka, my mother forced it down my throat. I was twelve years old.

When I didn’t do something to her satisfaction, her favorite method of discipline was to use the handle of a broom as a cane. Compliance is pretty much guaranteed when you know that disobedience results in that level of pain. Because of that threat, as well as the continuous emotional abuse she threw at me, I lived in perpetual fear. I learned how to keep my head down and my mouth shut. I didn’t want to risk her ire – it was a matter of survival.

I constantly felt pulled in two directions – I loved her and I hated her. I wanted her to die, I wanted her to be better. She was in and out of the hospital up until I turned fifteen, when she passed away. With her death, my entire world fell apart. I blamed myself because I had occasionally wished for it to happen. I was tormented by guilt, feeling responsible for her death as well as feeling guilty for feeling relieved because she was gone. My beloved tormenter was gone forever.

What I didn’t realize until years later was that she had left me with incredible emotional scars. I couldn’t trust people properly – I went into relationships expecting them to fail. I was defensive, scared that people could see the me underneath – the broken, flawed me. The one who felt like she was falling apart. I pushed people away in a twisted effort to test their ability to handle my brokenness. No matter how successful I was at what I did, no matter what accomplishments I laid claim to, I always felt hollow. Empty. Because being successful meant nothing to me if I wasn’t the most successful. My mother succeeded in turning me into a perfectionist, incapable of appreciating my own success without feeling inferior for not being the best. And I hated it because I knew that other people would be happy doing the things I’d done. They would appreciate them. And all I had was this bitterness towards not being the best, about failing to win the best and most impressive awards.

To say that I don’t still contend with these feelings today would be dishonest. I still struggle with maladaptive perfectionism. I still struggle with the double-bind thinking that was dumped on me by my alcoholic mother. And I still sometimes feel that I will never be good enough. Not for myself, not for other people. But now, rather than have them define my life, they are just the bad days. The ones that fall in-between the mostly good ones.

Because Loki, when he came into my life, he made me face my past. He made me own up to myself. He forced me to stop minimizing the damage that had been done because wounds left untreated tend to fester. Facing my past wasn’t an easy thing to do. Learning to trust wasn’t an easy thing to do, especially because I had to learn to trust the world again. I learned to distrust it as soon as my mother started drinking. Started being afraid that everything I saw and felt wasn’t real, that there was an illusion separating truth from fiction because in no real world would my mother become what she became. I stopped trusting myself.

And self-trust is the first step in self-knowledge. How can you know yourself if you can’t trust yourself to distinguish reality from illusion, truth from deceit? I still struggle to trust myself. I may always struggle with that, but that’s okay. I’ve learned that it’s okay not to be perfect. That it’s okay to have wounds, as long as you are actively seeking to close them (festering wounds do no one any good), and I have learned that there’s a strength in me that few people can match because I had to go through hell to get to where I am today.

So when I say that the biggest group of people who are drawn to Loki’s path are those who have been abused, please understand that I say this with the understanding of someone who has gone through hell and come out the other side. You can’t come out unscathed – you come out scarred and battle-hardened. Lokeans are some of the fiercest people, some of the hardiest warriors, on the face of the planet because we’ve all lived through our share of wars.

When other people point to Loki and make claims that he isn’t a god, that he’s a Norse devil, or that he only finds purchase among the weirdest and fluffiest of people, it infuriates me. Because I’m not a fluffy person – no one who goes through what I’ve been through comes out of it and becomes the happy-go-lucky rainbows-and-unicorns kind of person that “fluffy” implies – and none of the Lokeans I know are very fluffy either. Scared, yes. Vulnerable, sometimes. But being willing and able to admit to fear and vulnerability isn’t a weakness – it’s one of the greatest strengths that we possess because being honest about fear? There’s no greater courage.

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Truth: My Interpretation

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Here’s my third essay on the Nine Noble Virtues, this time discussing Truth.

Truth

Truth is a relative concept, especially in matters of faith. What I believe to be true, others believe to be false, and vice versa. In this regard, I believe it’s better to accept everyone’s beliefs as valid, even if I don’t agree with them. When I was in high school, I had a conversation with a friend once, and I ended up telling her that I believed every path was valid. That every path leads to the same destination, so it doesn’t matter which faith you follow – nothing can be proven true or false, so everything might as well be true.

I’ve never been able to properly explain that belief because it’s incredibly complex, despite how simple it seems. I’ve had people ask me how it’s possible for every path to be true when certain faiths teach that only one path is correct. That isn’t a question I can really answer, but I still think all faiths are viable paths through life. I think that we all choose our own paths through life, though, and I feel it’s important to respect the decisions other people make.

I recognized a long time ago that my truth is not everyone else’s truth, and I have accepted that. There are billions of people in the world, and if we all walked the same path, life would be incredibly boring. And I don’t want to live in a boring world – I think we can all agree on that.

I’ve also learned, however, that my beliefs are rather unique. I’ve yet to meet another person who sees the world the way I do, and that’s actually pretty awesome. Because that means I have met a lot of people who see the world in ways I don’t, and I love seeing how other people see the world.

I follow Asatru, but I’m not a reconstructionist. A lot of people have jumped on me for daring to claim that faith when I don’t believe in Reconstructionism, but Asatru is so much more than just rebuilding a religion to me. I could easily say Norse Paganism, but that isn’t as accurate.

The main issue with reconstruction, for me, is that history and archaeology, despite how fascinating they are, require a lot of guesswork. Educated guesswork, sure, but guesswork all the same. I would personally prefer not to base my own practices on guesswork. In a way, I guess, I let intuition guide me.

And that’s probably because I spent ten years as an eclectic pagan before I ever discovered Asatru – well, I should say before it discovered me. I met a Heathen for the first time when I was 22, and we started discussing worldviews, and after that, I started having incredibly powerful dreams. Dreams that were directly linking me to Odin and the Norse Gods. It was the first time, in my entire pagan experience, that I’d felt the call of a particular pantheon so strongly.

Still, I wasn’t about to abandon everything I’d believed for ten years and embrace a completely new faith. I did research, and I learned that most of my beliefs fit within the Asatru framework. Everything except the reconstructionist part, but I’ve never believed in reconstruction. As I said, history and archaeology is just educated guesswork, and historical accounts can’t always be trusted – my experience with the school system has taught me that.

That doesn’t mean I don’t like learning about the history – it just means I take everything with a grain of salt, and if I agree with something, I adopt it. If I don’t, I do further research into it, and if I still don’t find it relevant for me, I discard it.

In any case, I believe our truths define us. When someone asks me what I believe and are looking for a more in-depth answer, I’m always forced to tell them that it’s complicated. Because to other people, my beliefs seem to contradict themselves. I’ll try to explain, but I have yet to find a way to properly articulate this, so bear with me.

I follow the Norse pantheon, but I believe that all Gods that could exist do exist – I just don’t follow all of them. I believe that the Gods are real entities, but I also believe they are the embodiment of different concepts, and each God embodies more than one concept. For example, Odin is the embodiment of wisdom, poetry, travel, etc. Loki is the embodiment of change, of catalysts, of fire, of laughter… etc. Tyr is the embodiment of balance, harmony, honor, courage…etc. And I could go on for each of the Gods and Goddesses, but that’s the general gist of it.

Then there’s the fact that I believe in one unifying cosmic source. That the Gods and Goddesses all spring from the cosmic source and are aspects of that source, split into many pieces in order to make it easier for people to comprehend that source. That’s probably the most difficult thing to explain to people because while I’m a polytheist, I’m also a pantheist and animist. The idea that the universe is everything in one and one in everything is a pantheistic idea, and a lot of people assume that pantheism and polytheism are incompatible. For others, I’m sure that’s true. For me, it works.

And that, to me, is what truth is. Truth is relative. Everyone views the world in a different light, and we all have our own truths. My truths are not going to be the same as someone else’s truths, and I’m okay with that. Truth is not only a singular concept but also a plural one. There can be one truth, but there can also be many truths. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for so many different faiths proclaiming so many different truths to exist in the world. Truth is relative to who each person is individually, to the way a person is raised, and to the culture that a person belongs to. We are a complex species. So, too, are our truths.