Odins Day Reflection : Faeries, Offerings, the Full Moon and Protection

Blessings to all of you on this Odin Day, 

    It's been a pleasant week with much going on. Graduations are happening and in this house the oldest son has moved into his next phase of life as the summer season is truly heating up and the sun is beaming down a bit more harshly. The crops are in the ground and sprouts of corn surround our little patch of wood and field. At the entrance of our woods near Odin's idol, another phase of life has begun.  A robin nest has been under our observation and the eggs have finally hatched revealing little leathery skinned creatures that will eventually be beautiful orange breasted birds. What a miracle. So much wildlife all around us. 

    Today I wanted to speak on Faeries and their role in everyday life. The full moon is tomorrow and this is a wonderful time to leave out offerings and such for the good people. Faeries are most active during the full moon and they are said to exact their revenge or be the most trouble for us humans around this time. I have noticed that when we live in harmony with them, things seem to go a little bit better. There was a time earlier this year that we had been missing some things for a while. We looked and looked and looked. We stopped and decided that the faeries should receive an offering. That week every single lost item turned up. 

    Lady Wilde writes, ‘on moonlight nights they often come up on the land, riding their white horses, and they hold revels with their fairy kindred of the earth, who live in the clefts of the hills, and they dance together on the green sward under the ancient trees, and drink, nectar from the cups of the flowers, which is the fairy wine.’

    The woods and fields should teaming with faeries on a full moon and so it recommended as much as you can to stay indoors, but if you must go out here are some ways to protect yourself. 

- Offerings and libations of milk and honey 

-Carry a piece of iron in your pocket

 -Wear a shirt or piece of clothing backwards as it confuses them 

-Carrying some St. John's wort or a four leaf clover or some ash from the May Day fires in a vile will keep them at bay

-Crossing running water 

-A red thread tied to your person, finger, neck, wrist etc...

    The faeries aren't good or bad, they just are. Treat them with respect and they'll generally leave you be. 

Be safe and may the gods bless and keep you. 

Jacob  

Odins Day Reflection : Are the Gods and Spirits real?

 

 Blessings to all on this Odin Day! 

    I have been slipping lately but trying to get back in the saddle after a brief illness. 

    I've entitled this reflection "Are the Gods and Spirits Real" because I have for my whole life run into a certain line of thinking that I'd like to challenge a bit. Maybe it's my wishful thinking that drives me but I can't help but feel this question is a plague on our modern mind and an idea that our ancestors simply took at face value. 

    Whenever I see articles from pagan folks, especially from academics, dealing with faeries or gods and push comest to shove, they will typically fall into the idea that the faeries and gods are merely something we made up and then go into various things that they are or are not. Archetypes, personifications of the weather and the elements etc. But the idea that theres an actual person or force named Odin, or that theres literally a faerie living in a tree, these ideas seem to concrete for their post enlightened brain to admit to, so they shield it with the abstract. And I get it, you don't want to feel foolish. So it's easier to say you believe in some larger over arching unnamable force that animates everything because again this is way less direct. Again this rationalism plagues us. This unwillingness to surrender to things we can't see, to accept things that older generations took as fact until the enlightenment destroyed those sensibilities and relegated them to the nursery rhyme and the fairy tale. 

    A story was collected in the 19th century called "The Pooka" by E.W. The story of the Pooka is interesting to be sure, but it is the beginning of this tale that interests me where the story teller decries the "school master" or rather education as having ruined the folk beliefs of old.

    He writes :

    "Now that "the schoolmaster is abroad," there can be no question that the warm sun of education will, in the course of a very few years, dissipate those vapours of superstition, whose wild and shadowy forms have from time immemorial thrown a mysterious mantle around our mountain summits, shed a darker horror through our deepest glens, traced some legendary tale on each unchiselled column of stone that rises on our bleakest hills, and peopled the green border of the wizard stream and sainted well with beings of a spiritual world."

    So are these gods and faeries real? I can't say for sure. I have had intimate experiences with them ever since starting this journey that I can't explain, but I do know this, treating them like artifacts won't accomplish much. We have been taught that it's irrational to believe in things you can't see. So we comfort ourselves by turning them into abstractions that originate from the self because that's somehow easier for us to swallow. But what if there is a wanderer, and his name is Odin, and he gained the runes knowledge through self sacrifice and we can actually know him and interact with him? 

    I was reading in a book by George Ewart Evans where he stated that a certain generation born before WW1 had a wealth of lore and superstition that they accepted as fact and that the following generation who experienced the War in it's fullness had this same lore and knowledge but viewed with skepticism. 

    I think the best way to combat this skepticism and this need to make everything rational or abstract is to get out into the natural world and commune with the gods. Nature is clearly their abode and the old ones knew this. So on this Odins Day, I challenge you to grab a walking stick, throw some incense and an offering into a bag, maybe a small idol if you have a specific deity you work with and go into nature, build a little altar and make an offering and meditate and let me know how that goes.  

-Jacob