If you want to become a god, at least consider the options first.

I’m with the Christians critiquing those who are using generative AI in an attempt to become god-like. I agree with Pope Leo’s beautiful argument that machines cannot become wise, and therefore cannot make ethical decisions. I agree with him, and I think we can take it even further.

To me, a vast machinery built to organize information and create a hierarchy and take from the poor to feed the fiendish hunger of the lonely rich is nothing new in the least, and is, from where I’m standing, an obvious downstream flow of the imperialist Christian cosmology that has shaped our modern worldview.

I’m pagan.

And I’ve looked for many years now into how we arrived at this place in history. Most of us don’t think about it very often, but our spiritual beliefs or assumptions underpin every ethical decision we make in life, because they tell us what matters. Does the world — the actual material, blood-and-sweat world of loss and agency and zits and turning seasons and disabled babies and puberties and the creaking voices of the elderly — matter to those who support extractive AI, except as something to transcend?

There were particular steps in the journey that brought us to the shared assumption that there is a hierarchy of value with some sort of imaginary (white, male) objective truth at the top and embodied things like soil, snowflakes (how dare they), “the third world,” belly fat and menstruation at the bottom. And I’m afraid those steps had a lot to do with the Christian god, and the many ways he has been weaponized across centuries to suit the agendas of the shortsighted and the cowardly.

When Christianity, originally a religion of generosity, self-sacrifice and freedom, aligned with the Roman Empire (rather early in the game, sadly) monotheism stopped being purely a socialist ideal (divine love for all!) and turned in many ways into an imperialist death-cult (one god, one king!)

When somebody accuses you of “playing God” these days, they are speaking from a Christian worldview. They are talking about an all-powerful, disembodied storm god who lives above the earth and for whom control is a primary motivator.1

Pagan gods weren’t (aren’t) generally like that. Pagan gods exist in relationship. They are known, generally, for what they give and how they fit into the community of things. The actual Earth. The actual world. Even if what they give is violence or death (like Norse Odin, Roman Mars), they are always balanced by gods of the opposite poles, who offer beauty, lovemaking and birth (Norse Freya, Baltic Laima). They are situated. They are defined by relationship, not domination.

One of the longest-standing premises of Christianity is that the world is fallen — less valuable than the beyond-world — and that the best case scenario is one where we transcend that world of relations, ascending into the imagined perfection of heaven.

In modern western thought, even the secular, post-Christian versions, up there matters most. Down here is often just a way to get up there.

Meta corporation named themselves for this fantasy of aboveness. They’re not hiding it. They want to be on top.

Western Christianity historically positioned itself as the antidote to embodied things, as the meta to the material world. I’m sure this began as an appeal to the love that lies beyond all things. But this obsession with transcendence that we have all inherited can make it easy to forget that there is not only a love beyond all things, but also within all things. And I know they are one and the same love.

There is no god beyond the world. You need not sacrifice the world to get to your gods because they are already here, all around, in everything. Sun, Moon, Water, Earth: Saulė, Máni, Ganga, Mat Zemlya.

Before the over-god there were gods of all races, all kinds, all places, all things. Don’t forget the gods are still real and right here. Please don’t forget you too are real. Please don’t forget your life is worth inhabiting.

Humankind’s primary mode of relation with gods, believe it or not, is a gift-cycle of mutual offerings. Gods, before we were sold the idea of the meta-god, were by definition relational. They are embedded in things. And generally, they are defined by what they give instead of what they take.

If we want to become like gods, let us become like the gods we already know well.

The Sun, for example.

Pagan Lithuanians call her the mother of humankind. We exist because she exists. She asks for nothing in return, extracts nothing. No payment plan. Our fate is tied to hers. When she dies one day, so will we.

If you want to become godlike, become like the Sun. Use your enthusiasm to multiply the exuberant, clamouring life all around you. Beam your overwhelming joy on every tiny thing you at your feet, illuminating each particularity with your blasting furnace of enthusiasm. Make your face a bronze plate of infinite acceptance. Make your embrace bigger than the very idea of Mother. Light up the actual moon. Share so much brilliance that neighbouring planets will be able to read by it morning and afternoon, and will bring their children out to play in its warmth. Make yourself unforgettably generous in your mortality; give your life and death with the same ecstatic pulse of energy, an unstinting, blinding brightness of heart. Exalt all things within your radius. Shine so hard your rainbowed eyes burst and your aura can be seen light-years away. Love into exhaustion, knowing the medium is the message is the paper is the love note is the love that cannot be destroyed and shines through every green leaf, raises the insects to buzzing, the sweating youth to embracing, the midsummer fires to leaping, the seas to crashing and the day to its dawning and yawning, dewy rest.

Bless you.

Happy midsummer. I thank the gods you’re alive.

Danica

PS: Pagan Camp has sold out for this year! Beautiful, new, brave things are possible!

I’m writing to share some updates about Pagan Camp this July 27-30th. First, sadly Aoife Loudon will not be able to join us this year after all. However, I am pleased to announce that the Scottish Borders-dwelling druid Sarah Long will be joining us instead, as well as highland-born storyteller Mackay, and musician and music educator Annie Schermer of the U.S. All three of them are trusted and respected friends of mine who I am certain will bring the grounded magic that will make this event really special. Read more about them on the website!

If you’re wondering why you’ve received this email, I recently added folks from my sign-up links, including my Pagan Carols Songbook download, some of whom opted in a few months ago. If you do not wish to receive emails from me, feel free to unsubscribe below.

Our workshop offerings will include Lithuanian pagan chant, Old Norse wisdom literature, visual art with the land spirits, embodied singing, myth as medicine, and more. I haven’t yet decided which workshop I will teach, myself, so if you’re attending and have a request, drop it in the comments and I will take it into consideration!

And I’m pleased to say that of the 37 spots at Pagan Camp, there are only four remaining. If you have been planning to join us, please consider that these tickets may sell out in a matter of days, and that we will close registration on June 25th. You are welcome to comment below if you have any questions.

Learn more and sign up

My partner and I climbed Tinto Hill last week on an unusually balmy day to feel into the ceremony we will all bring to its top during Pagan Camp, and we heard the magical cuckoo sing nearly all the way! (Scroll down for the blooper recorded right before this)

I hope you can join us in southern Scotland this year. It’s sure to be a beautiful, even life-changing experience.

Wishing you very well, and I will talk to you soon.

Danica

PS: sometimes the cuckoo can also be coy:

Heads up, today is the last day to sign up for my programs the Well of the Wyrd and the Golden Thread! I’ll be closing the doors at midnight Pacific time.

Join the Well of Wyrd now

The Golden Thread is sold out for this round. Reply to this email to get on the waiting list!

I was recording the third audio class in the series that will open the Well of Wyrd membership, dedicated to Skuld, the norn whose name could be translated as “shall be,” and I suddenly made a connection I hadn’t before, between the Völuspá’s vision of the future and our time — today.

One part of that poem that never fails to move me is the description at the end — often forgotten — of how the earth rises again out of the sea after the great destruction, and the eagle hunts above the sparkling waterfalls, and the gods find the golden game pieces they lost in the grass when the wars began early in history, and play once again.

I recalled that when I lived in Iceland in 2021-2022, one of my favourite things to do was to visit the National Museum, just next to the university where I was studying Icelandic language, and gaze at a miraculous object that was found near Akureyri in the 19th century. It’s a little bronze statue of Thor, holding his beard and sitting in a chair.

It’s only a few inches tall, but it is an incredible thing: a depiction of Thor from around 1000, the year that Iceland officially converted to Christianity. A god from the heyday of the gods. It was found on the ground, and possibly once used as a game piece. I have a replica of this statue that I have carried around with me from place to place since that time.

Pagans knew about finding objects on the ground from past generations. And no doubt they would have made objects with that in mind as well. They were as clever as we are, and as aware of time’s passage. This maybe-gamepiece of a god is a generous gift from the past. An accident, but also an offering.

I was looking at these pagan texts because I wanted to give people guidance from paganism about the future. And what I found there was not what we usually find when it comes to meditations on one’s future self. It wasn’t like “picture the big house and vacation to Italy that you’re going to have in five years.” It was more like ,

Cattle die, kinsmen die,

one dies oneself the same;

I know one thing that never dies:

the renown of every dead man.1

What I found in the old texts was an invitation to step into the future far beyond our own lives, to the bare threads that will remain after our names are forgotten, to the merest suggestion of our once-personhood.

Like indigenous traditions worldwide, European pagan wisdom suggests we consider generations into the future when we think about the impact we have in this life.

Archaeological time. Story time.

In Irish myth, the figure Oisín goes to the otherworld for three years, and comes back to find it has been 300, and though nobody he knew is still alive, the stories of his life adventures with the Fianna remain, spilling from the mouth of the first stranger he meets.

Pagan wisdom asks you to consider:

How will you shape the story of this world at the level of your culture? How will you change the notes of the song that plays on beyond your own dancing? How will your love thread through eternity when your bones are dust and the world has sunk and risen again?

Each of us has already changed the world in a million ways just by existing. When the fire in our hearts meets the fiery needs of others, strong links are forged that change the destinies of worlds.

Even the gods, for a time, forget to play, and lose their golden gaming pieces. And yet, generations later, after untold losses, those same pieces are found on the ground, and the game begins again.

Take heart, the thread continues.

Today my two new offerings, the Well of Wyrd pagan audio membership, and the Golden Thread small group coaching circle, begin.

And the doors close today.

[edit, Golden Thread sold out]

Will you join me there to spin the thread of your spiritual destiny to shining?

Sign up now

With love,

Danica

I’m writing today to let you know I have released a new podcast episode, and share what’s inspiring me today.

In the episode, A felt sense of destiny, I tell the tale of how an illness and burnout in 2015 — a twist of fate — led to me starting the Fair Folk podcast, and set me on the path to follow my pagan calling full-time, which included travelling all over the world, meeting the most incredible singers, pagans, folklorists (and trees) and ever deepening my faith in the potency of following your natural inclinations and joy.

It’s been ten years since I started Fair Folk podcast! Can you believe it? I barely can.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

What’s inspiring me today:

Yesterday my partner shared a recording of the Hindu Gayatri mantra (link fixed!) sung by Suresh Wadkar with me, a chant for the sun god Savita which is thousands of years old and appears in the Rig Veda (a text that records many deep spiritual roots shared with indo-european paganisms across Europe). I listened while journalling, and I must admit it was hard not to dance — so I did! This mantra feels like sunshine bottled, if you’re having one of those springtimes where you could use some of that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about pagan chant and ritual song (what’s new?) and while listening I noticed in the corners of my being that I had been feeling a little bit of self-judgement about not being more of a conventional “proper” songwriter, that my melodies often come out short and simple and you know, often really pagan.

While I listened to this mantra I remembered that chant is a massively valued, time-tested, sacred and beautiful thing, and it’s maybe only in the context of Western capitalism that someone would grow up thinking their songs weren’t good because they came out devotional. So I recorded this little pep talk for you (and reminder for me too).

I came across this photo today of the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning lounging on one of her creations with sunlit cliffs in the background, and it gave me some rich pagan feelings, indeed.

I’ve also been dreaming about iron age garb as pagan ceremonial dress (as a historical-fashion-oriented person this is a big inspiration for pagan ceremony and some of the most beautiful pieces I’ve seen are made by a woman called Ekaterina Velga. What you wear in ceremony is a personal choice, but I find the shapes and fabrics of pagan times really do it for me.

Finally, if you’re considering joining the Golden Thread small-group coaching circle, you should know there are only two of nine spots remaining!

There is also plenty of room in The Well of Wyrd, with folks joining every day, and the closer we get to starting the more excited I am to shower everybody with abundant pagan inspiration and support far away from social media, ads, and the news cycle — just immersed together in the lovely clear waters of ancestral wonder.

Can you picture us dipping into the well together? I can.

Speaking of pagan abundance, I’m not sure if I mentioned, but these two offerings were designed to be a follow-up to Abundance Paganism, my signature course (and my general vibe).

Here is a podcast interview (of me) with a former participant who LOVED it. (I love you Britten!)

Here is the episode where I described the concept for the first time in 2020.

Abundance Paganism is by no means a prerequisite for these current offerings, but if you’ve taken it you’ll feel right at home in the Well of Wyrd. Folks who sign up for the Golden Thread get it free.

Folks who sign up for Well of Wyrd also get any of my recorded courses at 10% off, including Abundance Paganism. (I just decided that this morning. ☺️)

Both of these offers begin this Monday, April 20th.

If you have questions about either one, just hit reply and I’ll tell you what I know!

Bless you and your good heart today,

Danica

It’s Monday and I want to share a little fun with you. Maybe that sounds unimportant, but it is a deceptively powerful thing, fun. One approach to life that I love and have a huge measure of faith in is simply following the fun. The more fun you have, the more success, one could argue. What fun looks like to you, specifically, could be the definition of your calling.

Heads up, if you’re thinking of joining the three-month Golden Thread small group coaching circle to support folks with a spiritual calling, today is the last day to get it at the discounted earlybird rate! Just reply to this email if you are curious but aren’t sure if it’s for you. I’ll tell you the truth. The price will change at midnight Pacific time / 8 am Tuesday UK time.

When I visited Lithuania last September to research pagan weddings, my friend Eglė Kašėtienė told me about her own pagan wedding, emphasizing the role of humour in traditional weddings, basically telling me that laughter is the most important part of ritual. She strongly believed that if the folks attending don’t have at least one moment of fun together, a release of tension, the ceremony lacks is sealing glue.

There is something to that.

I was going through some old photos this week to make a little summary of the past ten years since I started Fair Folk podcast, and I found a little note I had written to myself:

If our life is a ritual, as some wise people advise us to consider it, it can’t hurt to approach the whole journey this way, when we can.

Here is the video, if you want to relive with me some high points from the period in which I began devoting my life to the gods:

To experience it with a sweet soundtrack and read folks’ lovely responses, watch it on instagram. Or you can just listen to the accompanying song here while you watch :)

Keep reading for my paganism and destiny meme dump in email form :)

As I mentioned above, today is the last day to join my upcoming Golden Thread coaching circle, a 3-month supportive container for folks who want to deepen into their spiritual calling.

I’ve been following my own wild calling along its many twists and turns for many years now, and I feel strongly called to hold space for others in bringing their own callings into focus at this time. I want you all to connect with the sense of your callings in the body, to grasp the wild fuel and fire that embodying your most heartfelt, most tender, realest, most mystical and wildest dreams generates.

I want this for you whether or not you join me in this container!

I don’t always make working with me in such a fulsome way available, so this is a rare opportunity. Here is what some folks have reflected about working with me as a coach:

To anyone reading this thinking of signing up for one of Danica’s coaching calls, I highly recommend!! Danica gave me priceless practical advice as well as incredible encouragement and inspiration to go after my biggest dreams. The phone call I had with her felt like laying foundational cornerstones for my creative pursuits moving forward. Thank you Danica! -S.F.

The coaching session with Danica was the most impactful choice I made before starting my business. Danica’s sensitive and intuitive approach really gave me the confidence and direction I needed to kickoff my first successful year of working for myself. - Max Sechzer

This coaching container isn’t just for folks who want to follow their spiritual calling as a profession, but for anyone who is feeling a longong for structure, fuel, support, permission and abundant access to all of the experience and insight I have gathered from making things happen in my own pagan calling.

Is this the moment to finally dive in to the stream of destiny?

Join the Golden Thread

And if you’re like, hey Danica I want that but you know, easy, well there’s an parallel container running from April 20 - July 20 called the Well of Wyrd which is just £20 a month and taps you into the same waterway, but in a light, on-the-hoof kind of way.

join the well of wyrd

For those of you still reading (Hi! I love you!), I’m excited to say I have recorded TWO Fair Folk podcast episodes in the past two days, and I can hardly wait to share them with you. The first is a full-length episode about destiny, and the second is a once-in-a-lifetime conversation with an elder druid at the threshold of the otherworld, recorded only this morning, and which I was unspeakably honoured to be a part of.

The destiny episode will be out in the next couple of days, gods willing! If you’re not subscribed to the podcast yet, hop on so you get the episodes as soon as they arrive.

Now for some memes, right?

Okay, that’s all from me today!

Wishing you very well,

Danica

It’s destiny month here at Fair Folk headquarters and to be honest I’m ovulating, so I’m sending along all the inspiration I find while I have the gusto to share it!

Here is today’s portion…

First off, the website-minotaur yielded to my efforts, so I can proudly say there are now payment plan options set up for both the Well of Wyrd (the light, cheap-as-chips, audio-only 4-month offering) and the Golden Thread (the indepth, fire-under-your-ass 3-month group coaching container for jump-starting your spiritual calling). These are the last online things I’ll be offering until the autumn and they begin April 20th!

I’ve also made a playlist to go along with these offerings so if you want to dream along with me, click here to listen.

Last night had our first facilitators meeting for the Pagan Camp gathering I’m hosting July 27-30th, and it’s shaping up to be SO sweet and magical that I can hardly wait to bliss out there with everyone who can come. If you’re thinking about it, it will likely sell out, so it’s a good idea to get your ticket sooner than later.

I made a five-minute pep talk this morning about how embracing destiny is like radicalization (the good kind), with a story about how I noticed I was always fawning in the face of god, so to speak. I hope it gives you some fuel for embracing your own agency.

Some free things I have enjoyed recently:

Sophie Strand cracks the code on why most modern fiction is such a depressing bore. I’d privately had my theories but this is the best explication I’ve encountered: “These short, spare novels are essentially contemptuous.”

Rūta Žemčugovaitė champions yearning as the headwaters of the future: “The harder the deprivation, the stronger the imagination.”

And some podcast gold, an episode from Asia Suler simply about setting boundaries, which of course is never simple.

Warmly,

Danica

I’m writing today to let you know I have two related but very different offerings beginning April 20th: The Well of Wyrd, an audio-only membership program, and The Golden Thread, a small group coaching container for those with a spiritual calling. [Both programs will have a payment plan option available soon.]

The Well of Wyrd is a four-month pagan membership hosted on the Telegram app. The membership is a unidirectional audio channel, with the option to join a group chat, but no requirement to do so.

Members will receive voice messages (minimum once weekly) with various offerings including:

• mini-lectures

• prompts for reflection or journaling

• pep talks

• visualizations

• ritual examples and ideas

• ritual songs and chants

• seasonal lore

• ancestral stories

• bits of archival research

• any or all occasions for wonder and optimism as they arise

Plus, when the membership begins you will have immediate access to three new classes guiding you to touch in with your pagan destiny and refresh your orientation toward its call.

All of the membership offerings will be delivered by voice message, so you can access them at your convenience, whenever you need to reconnect your inner life to the colourful threads of tradition and emergence.

Basically I’m offering you a low-cost little door to the deep, bright well of destiny to carry around with you and take out when you’re under a tree somewhere, or on the bus, while walking, while doing the dishes, while your kids or boss are distracted, when you’re lonely or discouraged, or when you’re excited and looking for treats to feed to the running hound of your life’s momentum.

Join the Well of Wyrd for £80

The Golden Thread is a three-month small group container (max 9 participants) to support you in making moves on your spiritual calling. In this coaching circle you will receive the structure and fuel to beckon your gifts out of your heart and mind and into the world, drawing on your inner courage and wisdom and the vibrant energy of kinship to really start to make things happen.

Typically called a mastermind in the coaching world, this small group container will give you individual mentorship in the context of a supportive community which will reflect and bolster your own creative and spiritual process.

What’s included

• Three 90-minute group coaching calls with the Golden Thread group (hot-seat coaching)

• One 60-minute one-on-one mentorship call with me within the 3-month period

• Three supportive classes in following your spiritual calling from a pagan perspective, created by me in response to the needs of the group

• Full access to all of my previous recorded courses (!): Abundance Paganism, Pagan Ritual Song, Unearthed, Gathering the Gods, and Wonder Club

• Free membership in the Well of Wyrd from April 20 to August 20, 2026

The Golden Thread is for you if…

• You might be an artist, a teacher, a maker of historical or mystical things, a writer, a podcaster, a budding ceremonialist, and you’re ready to step into a deeper commitment to your spiritual practice and make it more tangible in the world.

• You feel called to do something unique and rooted in traditional spiritualities, and you feel this is the moment to start to really make it happen.

• You long to live a life with spirituality at the centre, and declare to the world more clearly what you have to offer.

• You have an ambition that most people wouldn’t understand which needs a gentle but nourishing nest to grow in.

• You’re ready to make bold, material steps toward your spiritual destiny!

Join The Golden Thread

If you have any questions, just hit reply to this email.

Wishing you very well,

Danica

Two things happened in the last few days that made me not want to write to you about fate today, though that is what I plan to do. On Saturday a druid elder I adore said his goodbyes to his earthly friends, and a couple of hours ago I failed my first drivers’ license test in the UK.

But I sat down today and instead of asking myself “how can I say something Interesting and Important to people on my email list” (which is what I initially thought I had to do but wasn’t up to), I asked, “How can I share the love I have so much of with anyone who wants to receive it?” and it became clear to me that these recent events only enhance and deepen what I mean to offer you in this missive.

Read along, if you will, and I’ll share what I have in my hands about wyrd (the Germanic pagan notion of destiny), and the ways it twists and turns to the good (though — fair warning — often through the snake pit of the utterly miserable).

The modern English word weird, meaning unusual or uncanny has its ancestry in Old English wyrd and Old Norse urð, both with many valences but generally meaning fate or destiny. I spoke some about this notion in Old Norse paganism in general last week and this week I would like to write a little bit more about some of the ways it seems to me we are invited to actively engage with this force, web, spring, or committee, to name some of the ways it has been or can be visualized.

This Sunday night I returned to Scotland from a weekend journey south to Stroud, England, where I attended the living memorial of my friend, an elder druid called JJ Middleway, who is nearing the end of his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. This lover of ceremony and community didn’t want to miss his own goodbye party, so a few close people booked the largest church in Stroud and filled it with 400 of his friends to celebrate his life while he was still able to attend.

The elder druid opened the event by describing how he sees the arrival of his unexpected guest, cancer, as a gift and a teacher, and how he intends to embrace death “like a lover.” Indeed, with its abundant flowers, ivy garlanded pillars and brightly dressed and singing pagan guests (including a djembe-playing vicar and an clever speech from famous historian Ronald Hutton) the event looked far more like a wedding than a funeral. JJ recited a poem he had encountered after a particularly devastating period of his life — the period that initiated his transformation from ordinary dad and employee of the department of National Defence to a flamboyant, purple velvet-clad druid who breaks into song and poem at the least provocation.1 The poem illustrates the hard-won heart-opening that occurs in the crucible of hardship:

The heart’s wave could never

have risen up so beautifully

in its cloud of spray

and become Spirit

were it not for the grim old cliffs of destiny

standing in its way2

I must admit, sitting in my plastic folding chair, I felt resistance to his framing of death and destiny, both. I don’t want this elder to die. I don’t want to embrace my own death, and I certainly don’t want to slam into any grim destiny-cliffs anytime soon. My emotional body reports we have all experienced enough hardship these past few years, thank you very much. I’d like to imagine things could even get easier for a period of time, if we could be so lucky. But as I sat there for four more hours and heard person after person speak and sing of the beauty JJ has abundantly channelled since he embraced his life’s calling to be wild and weird and overflowing with childlike joy and love, well, I ran out of space in my being for resistance. I just got inspired.

“Why would I be angry at cancer?” he said, “if it weren’t for cancer, all of this (gesturing at the massive, beautiful gathering) never would have happened.”

I mean.

It was only in the 19th century, well into the Christian and modern era, that the word wyrd twisted into weird, an adjective meaning unusual or uncanny. Before that it was a multi-valent noun, a thing-word whose meaning included fate, history, and basically, what happens. Its Indo-European root *wert means “to twist” and is related to the Latin verb vertere, “turning.”3 Isn’t it beautiful given this etymology that when we speak of the unexpected (the weird) which happens in life, we still call it a turn or a twist of fate? Life unfolds in a spiral with little to no visibility of the road ahead. We can slow down the wagon, but the turns keep on coming. Wyrd invites us not to see fate as a straight line toward a predetermined result, but as a dynamic, emergent thread.

So the question comes into view over and over: what agency do we have in that turning of fate?

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The primary means of communication between humankind and otherworldly beings in the pagan past was the making of offerings. It’s clear that in Old Norse pagan religion people regularly made sacrifices of food, drink and other valuables to gods and other beings like the álvar (elves) and the dísir. Surprisingly, there is no unambiguous reference to offering-making to the norns, the agents of destiny, in any written texts. This may be because they were not considered gods in the ordinary sense, though Old Norse texts do include gods among the norns’ ancestors, along with elves, dwarves, and possibly jötnar (a term sometimes translated as giants). Is it possible people made offerings to all sorts of otherworldly beings, and for some reason excluded the norns, despite their central role in pagan mythic narratives and in daily human life?

Personally, I often find myself inspired to make offerings to the norns, for example, if I come across a tree with three trunks and a pool at the centre, or a spring or well at the foot of a tree. I do wonder if the apparent absence of references to norn-offerings in Old Norse texts might not even reflect historical practices, but rather the heavily patriarchal period in which these texts were written. The records we have of Old Norse religion emphasize the worship of male gods, especially those associated with battle, which is unsurprising of texts emerging from the late Iron Age, a period whose economics and culture were heavily shaped by the values of warrior chieftans. The record strongly suggests that in earlier centuries in pagan Scandinavia goddesses and feminine supernatural beings were equally prominent in mythology and religious practice, if not more so. But sadly that record, emerging as it does from that later, patriarchal period, is poor in specific examples of such goddess worship.

Then again, there is some evidence I would argue does suggest a precedent for offerings made to norns, or at least to similar beings.4

To begin with, impressively abundant deposits of valuable goods (as well as human sacrifices) have been uncovered from offering sites in sacred bodies of water across northern Europe, and sacred bodies of water are commonly connected with feminine deities and otherworld beings. In Indo-European cultures in general, a strong association exists between bodies of water and the origins of life as well, a theme with which the norns are also entangled, considering their central role in human birth and death. One of the most common objects found in these offering-hoards is the sword, bent or twisted out of shape. In Njal’s Saga, a group of valkyries (which have connections to norns) are depicted weaving the destiny of a battle in northern Scotland using human body parts as thread and weights, and a sword as a shuttle:

On Good Friday5 that event happened in Caithness that a man whose name was Daurrud went out. He saw folk riding twelve together to a bower, and there they were all lost to his sight. He went to that bower and looked in through a window slit that was in it, and saw that there were women inside, and they had set up a loom. Men's heads were the weights, but men's entrails were the warp and wed, a sword was the shuttle, and the reels were arrows.6

This episode does not directly name the norns, but they are often assumed by scholars to be referenced in some way by the account, since it presents the fates of warriors and work with textiles as causally related. Considering the norns are connected with fate and bodies of water, is it possible weapons like those mentioned in this narrative could have been offered to norn-like figures in the hopes of protecting a warrior or army before battle, or to thank them for a triumph after a fight? It’s certainly within the realm of possibility.

Another pagan Scandinavian narrative, Norna-Gests þáttr, (the story of the norns’ guest) shows three women, variously called norns and spákonur or völur (seeresses) welcomed as guests at the home of the titular hero on the day of his birth, where they outline his fate. Two of the norns respond to their good treatment at the household by granting the child an incredibly long life and good luck, but the third norn, having been insulted by her two companions and guests at the gathering who had shoved her off of her stool, undercuts the gifts of the first two by saying the hero’s life will last only as long as one of the the two candles burning above him at his birth.7 The eldest norn extinguishes the candle and tells his mother to protect it from burning further. After living three hundred years, Nornagest narrates his life at the court of Óláfr Tryggvasson, a key figure in the Christianization of Norway. The king convinces him to convert to Christianity, after which he lights his life-candle, which burns down, and he dies.

One of the most rule-bound and sacred covenants in traditional cultures worldwide is the mutual upholding of hospitality, and the pagan cultures of Europe are no exception.

It seems obvious to me that the hospitality that Nornagests’s family offered to the norns resulted in his beautiful destiny. His name itself reflects that the norns returned the gift given to them: after hosting the norns, thereafter Nornagest was their guest. This story suggests that its author believed there is indeed a degree of negotiability to one’s destiny, both in offering-making to the norns (of a kind), and in what one does with the decrees they pass down, if the two are not already the same thing. Because Nornagest was aware and accepting of the details of his fate, he was ultimately able to steer it in the direction he desired.

So what does this mean for our own destinies and challenges, for my friend who is dying, and less consequentially, for the fact I’ve failed my recent UK driving test? It’s true that the turns of fate delivered by wyrd are often hairpin sharp, whether those turns present invonvenience, illness, disability, injury, or death itself. Nevertheless, every moment gives us the choice of whether we deny and resist the bends, or whether instead we gaze right into their mysteries, embrace the moment, and like a dancer who gains speed and agility by completing the turns initiated by their partner, lean in and make something truly beautiful of life, spinning our threads out into glittering infinity.

The gift cycle of destiny is a complete circle. We continually make offerings to the norns and they continually offer them back. The norns give us the fertile, strange circumstances of life. Our offering is to gracefully accept when we can. This exchange is so subtle to be indistinguishable from the fabric of time woven with effort. The norn-offering comes whether or not we accept it. Not accepting produces pain. Still the offering arrives. Close one eye and the offering is a curse. Switch it out for the other eye and it’s a gift again. Like Oðinn at Mímir’s well, which eye would you offer to gaze only on gifts?

If there were a law of hospitality for what happens it might be that if you accept the events of life with grace and hospitality, they will return your hospitality with wisdom. Is it not your own room that you furnish with your disposition? There are no guarantees that things will go well, in fact they often won’t, but when the sharp corners come, I hope you will be dancing while you take them.

I’m wishing you very well!

Warmly,

Danica

PS: I’ll be writing again on Monday to share the only online programming I’ll offer until the autumn, based on the same themes I’ve been working with these past two weeks: destiny and the pagan path.

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In these times of instability and worldwide grief, I’ve been considering what I might be best positioned to offer to your minds and hearts, those of you who show up here to receive what I might share.

Bless you for your attention; it is truly sacred.

In my research into paganism, a particularly bright thread draws my eye and feels like an anchor these days. That thread is the subject of DESTINY.

So over the next few weeks, I’ll be offering information and reflection on the subject of destiny in paganism, in order to inspire you in your spiritual practice and offer a new or deeper perspective on your place in the world — even if that perspective is to discover how deeply the idea of destiny doesn’t resonate with you :)

Why is destiny relevant to modern pagans?

First off, destiny (Old Norse Urð / Old English Wyrd) was an absolutely central part of Germanic pagan tradition, the stream of paganism that has been a special focus of my research over the past decade.1 Germanic paganism boasts one of the best preserved literary traditions in northern Europe, especially in the form of Old Norse poetry and prose, and in that textual record, destiny is central to the definition and experience of humanity.

You’ll note I use the words destiny and fate somewhat interchangeably here. Scholars tend to use the word “fate” for Urð / Wyrd, but I find the word destiny carries fewer negative associations, so I tend to prefer it when I’m referring to modern practice.

In Völuspá (the seeress’s prophecy), the Old Norse poem that is considered one of the best preserved containers of knowledge about pre-Christian cosmological belief, the first two humans, Ask and Embla2 are found like driftwood by the gods on a shore in Midgard lacking fates — or you might say, lacking direction or a place in the world. After three Æsir gods give them breath, inspiration, locks of hair and colour (or possibly genitalia), the poem describes three feminine figures called Norns who give them their fates (and all humans thereafter), inscribing them in wood with runes:

‘I know a standing ash, it’s called Yggdrasill,

a tall tree doused with white mud;

from there come dews, those that fall in dales;

it always stands, green, above Urðr’s spring.

‘From there come maidens, knowing many things,

three [maidens], from the sea [or hall] which stands under the tree;

one was called Urðr, the second Verðandi,

— they inscribed on a stick — the third Skuld;

they laid down laws, they chose lives

for the sons of men, the fates of men.3

The Norns are mentioned frequently in Old Norse mythological texts and sagas, and it’s said they determine the fate of each human at their birth.4 This fate tends to be assumed to mean the moment and means of a person’s death, but often also includes major details of one’s life, such as where one will live and what one will experience, from the wonderful to the tragic. The Norns are described as helpful and cruel by turns in Old Norse poetry, often depending on whether or not events are going the way the speaker wishes they would.

As the poem Voluspá describes, the Norns dwell at the root of Yggdrasil by Urðabrunnr (the Well of Urð) together, where sometimes a pair of white swans are also said to swim. Their names Urð, Verðandi, and Skuld seem to mean, “‘That Which Has Happened’ or ‘Fate’, ‘That Which Is Happening’ and ‘That Which Shall Happen,’”5 connecting them to the movement of time, which we moderns also understand to determine our births and eventual deaths.

The title Norn possibly means “twiner” as in one who spins thread or yarn. In one influential description of the Norns from the Old Norse poem Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, they twine three golden threads together from east, west, and north at the titular hero’s birth, spinning the consolidated thread from the centre of the night sky, which is referred to poetically here as the “moon’s hall.” This golden thread is Helgi’s illustrious fate. The night Helgi was born, the poem says,

‘Night fell in the farmstead, Nornir [Norns] came,

those who shaped a life for the princeling;

they decreed that he would become the most famous king

and be thought the best of Buðli’s descendants.

They twisted fate-strands with strength,

[…]

they set in order the golden strings

and fastened them under the middle of the moon’s hall.

East and west they concealed the ends,

where the praiseworthy one possessed lands in between;

Neri’s kinswoman threw onto the north-road

one fastening — she decreed that it should always hold.6

I personally love the visual cue of a golden thread of destiny that guides us through our lives. It’s an image I recall from a particularly intense childhood fever during an extended bout of pneumonia I suffered at the age of eleven. In my fevered state I saw in front of me a golden thread strung very tight, and I recall trying with all my diminished energy to focus on keeping it intact, fearing it might break. And gratefully, it did not break.

When I first heard of the Norns’ golden thread of destiny, the image immediately made sense to me as a metaphor for our inner life force and connection to this world: sacred, fine and beautiful. Perhaps in my childhood illness I sensed the mix of delicacy and tenacity with which we are woven into this life, like a thread that runs invisibly along, but one day will necessarily break and become part of some other mysterious weaving.

In this wee video I describe one way this golden thread can be put to positive application in our modern lives.

Destiny, in the old sources, is not generally open to negotiation.7 But it is clear that one could sometimes access information about one’s destiny, usually through divination and prophecy. One more way it seems to me that we can learn about our destinies now is to pay attention to what inspires us, what we feel called to deepen our connection with, regardless of our upbringing, our expectations, or what we think is the most rational path forward.

Do I really believe in destiny?

I really do, actually. I may not approach it in precisely the same way that an Oðinn-worshipping professional warrior of the 9th century would have, and that’s appropriate to the context in which I live.

But I do have one thing in common with that warrior: despite the abundance of lifestyle options I have in this world, a sense of destiny can fortify me in situations where I don’t appear to have much choice. For instance, I have little choice in the political decisions of major nation states which cause war, climate change, and famine. The choice that I do have, no matter what happens from now on, is how I respond, and where I put my life energy, my love, and my passion.

Ultimately, the old pagan view of destiny — inflexible as it may seem — puts a fine lens on who we decide to be in this world, exactly because it highlights for us what is beyond our control.

I’ll give you one more example (of many) showing how fate appears in Norse mythology, and then be on my way for now. I’m actually surprised by how long this email is already, and there’s plenty more where this came from!

In the Old Norse poem Skírnismál, from the same collection as the two above, the god Freyr sends his messenger Skírnir to Jötunheim (often translated as Giant-land) to propose to the Jötunn Gerða on Freyr’s behalf.8 As he approaches Gerða’s hall, Skírnir encounters a herdsman sitting on a grave-mound and asks the man to help him get past the vicious dogs guarding the entrance. The herdsman says he will not help him, and asks why he would risk his life trying to see her anyway:

“Tell me, herdsman, | sitting on the hill,
And watching all the ways,
How may I win | a word with the maid
Past the hounds of Gymir here?”

The herdsman spake:
“Art thou doomed to die | or already dead,
Thou horseman that ridest hither?
Barred from speech | shalt thou ever be
With Gymir’s daughter good.”

Skirnir spake: “Boldness is better | than plaints can be
For him whose feet must fare;
To a destined day has mine age been doomed,
And my life’s span thereto laid.”9

My day of death is already determined, Skírnir says, in keeping with the pagan Germanic worldview. I may as well be brave today.

The circumstances of our birth and death are beyond our control. How many more aspects of our experience are ours to choose is an ongoing question.

What pagan notions of destiny and fate say to me today is that the most powerful choices we can make are the ones we make when it seems we have no choice.

The last thing that dies (and perhaps the thing that never dies) in our earthly being is the fire that burns bright in our heart for the beautiful, the precious, the sacred and the pure, the beacon that draws our gaze in the direction of measureless love.

I invite you to revisit the the fiery strength of your own golden thread today, the way it calls you into the embodiment of bravery and truth, because those qualities live right at your centre and only need the smallest fuel to blaze again.

Close your eyes for a few moments if you will, and feel the sensation of that golden thread at your centre, or picture it in front of you. How does it feel to you? How does it look to you? It’s a part of you but it also extends, shining brilliance beyond your body and your life alone, through the night-worlds and day-worlds beyond.

I’m wishing you strength and good passion today,

Danica

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There are three gatherings coming up between now and September that I will be facilitating and performing at that I would like you to know about! Please come along and let us glory together in real, embodied community, reverence for the wild and living world and also LET’S PLAY, yeah? At the moment I am really vibing with the idea of social play as revolution, as I share in this video:

The first of the gatherings I want you to know about is the absolutely gorgeous Inner Wild Retreat, an intimate 7-day retreat weaving somatic work, ritual and group process with the magic of the Scottish Highlands from April 25 - May 2nd, 2026.

This transformational retreat is designed to reawaken and rewild your true nature, to help you remember what it feels like to listen, feel, soften, and stand in relationship with the living world again, connecting with land, animals and the true, inner pace of your being.

It will be hosted by the insightful and talented duo of award-winning documentarian and land-practitioner Lizzie Mackenzie and depth-oriented psychotherapist, supervisor, and intuitive guide Kathryn Kupillas.

I’ll come along for a portion to offer seasonal, ancestral stories, lore and songs by the fire and accompany blessing and singing to the ancestral highland cows as Lizzie and the rest of us guide them to their summer pasture. The ancient migration of animals (cows / horses / sheep / birds & co.) is what makes the Beltane celebration such a sacred one in Celtic lands and elsewhere, and I am very excited to bring my own contribution to that rich field of magic.

If you’ve been feeling like it’s well time for a reset and a reconnect, I strongly recommend this retreat. Don’t hesitate to book an inquiry call with them, since signups end soon.

Learn more about the Inner Wild Retreat right here.

Next on the calendar is Pagan Camp, a three-day gathering for pagan ceremony, celebration and learning in southern Scotland across the Lughnasa full moon, July 27th to 30th.

This event will be hosted by myself and pagan ceremonialists Aoife Lowden of Ireland and Scotland, Ignas Šatkauskas of Lithuania, and Haukur Bragason of Iceland.

Since I announced this event a few weeks ago, we have had several people sign up, so we only have five spaces left at the early bird rate. If you want to get your ticket at a discount, act soon!

(And if you’ve emailed with an inquiry, I will be getting back to you soon.)

This event will invite you to go deeper into your own pagan callings, following your devotional instincts toward kinship, play, and the nourishing ancestral spiritual traditions of northern Europe.

Lughnasa is when the pagan Celtic tribes gathered for centuries to climb hills, play games, make offerings, share the harvest and perform handfastings. Let us follow in their example and gather the tribes!

Click here to join us at Pagan Camp.

Questions about the event? Email us here.

The Song of Oak & Ash, a mythopoetic retreat running from the 27th—31st of August on Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands is now open for registration!

This is the third time I have been a facilitator at this literally legendary retreat, and I cannot say enough about how immersive and powerful this container is.

Oak and Ash gathers the AH-MAzing storytellers Daniel Allison of House of Legends and Sorcha and Aron Hegarty of Candlelit Tales and incredible musician Sam Gillespie and myself for storytelling, song, ceremony, and communal craic (as they call it in Scotland).

The setting is epic, the vibe is epic, and this time it will even be held at a warmer time of year!

Here is what a participant reflected about last year’s retreat:

“My experience at the Song of Oak and Ash was nothing short of transformative.

The hosts, Daniel, Danica, Sorcha, Aron, and Sam, wove together a beautiful, bright community and reaffirmed my faith in the power of story, song, and convening on the land to guide us through these uncertain times and find the kind of healing and magic that we’ve known is possible in our bones all along!

Walking the land, watching faces dance in firelight, swimming in the cold waters of the loch, standing in ceremony at the waterfall, listening to the ancient stories, music, and lore shared--- this all lives in me and will sustain me for a long time to come.

This experience also compelled me to continue the journey and apprentice with Daniel as a storyteller. If you feel compelled to join this gathering, make haste! You won’t regret it <3”

Carmen, USA

You can sign up for the Song of Oak and Ash now by clicking here.

I’m feeling very grateful that my work will bring me together with others in such beautiful, rare spaces this year!

If you’re not able to make it to any of these in-person events, please know I’ll be announcing some fresh online offerings soon so we can gather in devotion and delight across the ethers and from our many lands.

Sending heart-love to you all, dear beings,

Danica

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You’re hearing from me because you are a paid subscriber to Enthusiastica, my mailing list on Substack. First of all, thank you so much for supporting my work! It means more, possibly, than you can imagine. I have the incredible privilege of focusing on and following my creative callings every day, and you all have held me above water ov…

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Today I have the great pleasure to announce something I’ve been dreaming of, in one form or another, my whole life:

Under the full Lughnasa full moon from July 27th - 30th this summer, I’m hosting an event called Pagan Camp in southern Scotland that will bring together pagans of all backgrounds in ceremony, learning, and celebration.

I’m excited because what we know about historical paganism is that it was largely defined by communal rituals. By contrast, for many pagans now spiritual practice happens alone. And that is appropriate to the lives we are living — most of us spend our days in ordinary neighbourhoods, driving to jobs or working from home, doing our best to bring some magic into a largely secular, disenchanted worldview.

So how can we hope to experience the togetherness of the ancient ceremonies that empowered and refreshed our ancestors?

Well, on top of the micro-rituals of the ordinary months and days, our ancestors would occasionally also travel to larger, rarer festivals from their distant home villages, farms and hunting and gathering-grounds.

These events didn’t happen every Sunday on the imposed Roman calendar system; a gathering of the tribes might happen just once a year when the weather is best and the animals are out at pasture, as it did at Lughnasa in Celtic areas, where people would take advantage of the weather and the newly-harvested food to celebrate, to play competitive games, and to meet and formalize year-long handfasting matches. Some gatherings were reserved for every seven or nine years, like the famous blót (offering-making) at the great pagan temple in Uppsala, Sweden described by medieval writer Adam of Bremen.

The field research I have done over the past decade in folklore and paganism has shown me that even a few days spent in sacred ritual space with others passionately devoted to the revival of nourishing traditional culture can change the whole direction of a life.

Our ancestors knew this too.

I long to brings pagans together so we can set our powerful, loving, collective gaze on the present. So we can see and be seen. So we can understand our own agency and our own relationship to living and revived tradition in real time.

I long to bring pagans together to sing and speak and drum and dance and play our belonging in this world into being, across the long summer afternoons, before bed, and again when we wake with the life-giving sun.

I long to bring pagans together so we can study one another, so we can see the surprising places where our ceremonies and ideas reflect eachother’s, and learn from the compelling, beautiful places that they don’t.

I want us to put down for a moment the endless niche-ing into witch / heathen / shaman / animist / magician / seer, and witness ourselves as part of a group that not only respects our individuality, but also reflects it in that magical way that only a group of embodied people together in one place can.

I’ve invited experienced and respected ceremonialists from three traditions — Germanic (Iceland), Baltic (Lithuania), and Celtic (Ireland & Scotland) — to join me in leading ceremonies and workshops over these three days. Click here to read more about what these incredible tradition-bearers carry with them to offer at the gathering.

If you too feel the longing to gather this summer with others in sacred revival of traditional European spiritualities (whether or not you call yourself pagan), I invite you to join us at Pagan Camp at Wiston Lodge in southern Scotland this summer.

Learn more and get your ticket here

Wishing you very well,

Danica Boyce

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Tomorrow I’m teaching a workshop with somatic practitioner Veronica Rottman, and I’ll just say right away that I believe this could be the most interesting and transformative workshop I’ll offer this year. If it interests you, I do hope you’ll join us there.

Sign up for Sacred Waters: Healing at the Well of Brigid

There’s a real and important connection between somatic (body-based) witnessing / trauma integration and the folklore of wells and springs, whose special patron is Brigid, the Celtic goddess who embodies spring, rebirth, the fires of poetic inspiration and healing. Her day is February 1st, and has been since pre-Christian times.

That is what Veronica and I are offering at this two-hour workshop: a chance to tune into the folkloric images, narratives and sounds that resonate with the body’s sensitive nervous system and emotional map, and watch and nurture what happens in the body through the somatic channels as we encounter these stories and songs. I bring the stories and songs, and Veronica guides us into the body.

Brigid is fire. Brigid is water. Brigid invented keening (the Gaelic song of mourning). Brigid melts the winter ice and invites us to be reborn on the threshold of the seasons.

I know many of us could really use some rebirth these days.

For those of us who have complex trauma (or any kind) I believe that somatic witnessing — especially the sort offered and taught by Veronica — is a massive missing piece in the puzzle of disembodiment accompanying the analytical approach to healing the “mind.” Mind and body are never separate, and I so appreciate the chance to bring the body more fully into relationship with the folklore I love so much tomorrow.

The workshop is $75 USD (£55) and happens at 9-11 am PT / 11-1 pm CT / 5-7 pm BT.

Join us in the class!

If you haven’t heard it yet, people keep telling me how meaningful the podcast conversation I had with Veronica was for them. Some listened more than once:

Listen to The Body Keeps the Lore

And if you want to know more about Brigid specifically, I suggest this beautiful telling of her life by Sorcha of the Candlelit Tales podcast: Brigid Awakens Imbolc.

Wishing you very well whatever you do this Saturday,

Warmly,

Danica

This week I have been thinking deeply about wells and springs and after recording a podcast episode with the inspired somatic practitioner Veronica Rottman on the resonance of water folklore with nervous system healing, alongside a 5-day telling of the Parzival holy grail myth by the legendary Martin Shaw that my partner and I attended online.

I’m spinning with intuitions about how the holy grail myths are tied up in that picture of mythic well and spring and trauma and love and healing (along with geese, why are there always geese near that mythic well? I have some theories) and it’s safe to say I am literally bursting with webby connections and fiery convictions…

But that would be a messy fountain to receive in your inbox today, so I’ll let that bigger picture simmer on the hob and instead offer what I hope are a couple of tasty snacks!

You can listen to The Body Keeps the Lore, my conversation with Veronica Rottman, right here.

In the episode I share some of what I know of wells and springs folklore after more than a decade of research into the subject, and Veronica shares how this folklore resonates with her work — somatic trauma integration for the (cis-gendered, cyclical) female nervous system. It’s a really wild and beautiful and often numinous conversation that I’m proud to share with you.

Give it a listen!

Second, Veronica and I are hosting a workshop this Saturday ahead of Brigid’s Day / Imbolc, where we will weave with practice what we wove with words in the podcast episode: somatic witnessing and exploration into the body’s emotional waters dancing with the folklore, story, and song of the Celtic goddess Brigid, and the wells and springs that often bear her patronage.

It’s called Sacred Waters: Healing at the Well of Brigid and we would love to welcome you there at 9-11 am PT / 11-1 pm CT / 5-7 pm BT. Tickets are $75 US.

We can’t reduce the meaning of folklore to any one thing, flatly equating the womb with the well, for example, but we can, by paying loving attention, focalize avenues for illuminated networks that open up beautiful questions: if the well and the womb and the nervous system and the world tree are connected, how does healing (read: re-integration) operate in any and all of the above?

Wishing you very well this week,

Warmly,

Danica

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Happy Wren Day, and the start of the conventional 12 days of Christmas!

A St. Stephen’s day wren song from Wales for your enjoyment:

I’m writing today to say one simple thing:

If you would like to join the Pagan Ritual Song course this year, this is the last day to do so! I don’t know when I will be offering it next online.

Why I love this course:

One of the most life-giving and kinship-building aspects of culture that has been lost to modernity is our sense of ownership of sacred song.

What I want for you is to feel your voice as a tool for making-sacred: for dwelling in deep time with the ancestors, for blessing friends, places and occasions, and for visioning into a more beautiful future.

Most of us have lost this simple skill. But we have everything we need to reclaim it, today.

Registration closes on Saturday December 27th at the end of the day.

You can join Pagan Ritual Song Course for £345 (Roughly $455 USD), or for the three-month payment plan @ £115/month click here!

What you’ll get out of this course:

The lay of the land
A generous survey of what pagan ritual song is historically, from epic poetry through supernatural and seasonal folk song, as well as examples of what it can be now.

Inspiration
Plenty of tools, resources, and encouragement for creating and learning ritual song, especially suggestions for traditional texts, melodies, and topics to adopt and remix.

Community
We will meet bi-weekly to share the songs we are creating and learning. You’ll also have access to a private discord server where you can connect with your classmates and share ideas and mutual support. There you can collaborate, make playlists, foster friendships, and plan extra meetings together as you wish!

Structure

Our song-sharing sessions will give you a (gentle) deadline to help motivate you to get on with it and make or learn a song! Deadlines that involve other people really help me to let go of perfectionism. I hope this helps you as well.

Here’s the schedule, if you need to see what you’re available for:

Please email me if you have questions about timings and access to the course.

Class & Meeting Schedule:

Sunday, January 11 : Class 1: Ancient song: What do we know about European song before Christianization?

Saturday, Janury 17: Song-sharing session

Sunday January 25: Class 2: Offering and request: Prayers and charms past and present

Saturday January 31: Song-sharing session

Sunday February 8: Class 3: Ballads of the supernatural: pagan themes hidden in plain sight

Sunday February 15: Song-sharing session

Sunday February 22: Class 4: Blessing the moment: songs for specific occasions

Sunday March 1: Song-sharing session

Sunday March 8: Class 5: Seasonal song: songs to honour the cycle of the year

Sunday March 15: Final song-sharing session

All meetings are on zoom at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET / 7 pm BST.

All lecture classes are live and recorded and all song-sharing sessions are live and unrecorded.

I hope these days are being sweet and kind to you!

Warmly,

Danica

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I’m writing to let you know that today I’ve posted a new episode on Fair Folk Podcast, a beautiful in-person interview with Irish sean nós (old-style) singer Chan Reid in her home in Hastings, England. We talk about the experience of living as an immigrant far from one’s ancestors, and how experiences of migration and dislocation resonate in the heart of Irish traditional song and music. Chan sings some heart-cracking-open songs, and even obliges me by explaining, in simple terms, how Irish traditional singers do those crazy “diddly bits” that make sean nós songs sound so unbelievably cool.

Chan is such an incredible, warm, special person that on meeting her in October I immediately knew I wanted her to be on the podcast, so all of you could meet her as well. So please, go listen to the episode, and let the heart’s love she shares through her words and songs touch you as it has me.

You can find the podcast episode here.

Since we are here, I thought I would share three more pagan / folkloric Christmas films that bring me joy! Scroll down for those watching suggestions.

But first, a reminder that registration for my Pagan Ritual Song Course ends on December 27th, which is this Saturday! If you were hoping to request or give it for Christmas, now would be the time to do so. Click here to learn more or to register.

Now, here are three midwinter films I have thoroughly enjoyed, and highly recommend for this time of year:

The Snow Queen (1957)

A Soviet adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a powerful queen of frost who kidnaps the young boy Kay, who must be rescued from the Snow Queen’s castle by his best friend Gerda. This film version of the story is really lovely, and apparently was a huge influence for Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli), who said it was his favourite film.

The Night Before Christmas, from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Gogol (1961)

In this story, a Ukranian village’s lovelorn blacksmith tricks the devil into helping him get a pair of the Tzarina’s shoes because his crush asked him to. This film is hilarious and irreverent and very very vibey.

The Green Knight (2021)

This film is beautiful, poetic, and originates in mysterious medieval tale with roots in pre-Christian beheading lore. Did you know the famous Middle English Green Knight tale was set at Christmas time? I had forgotten until I revisited this film last week and was blown away, once again. This one is not kid-friendly, FYI.

Sampo (the Day the Earth Froze) (1964)

This is an approximation of the Finnish folkloric/mythic epic Kalevala, much abridged but sincere in its effort, I believe. This soviet representation of mythic-era Finnish people is somewhat ridiculous, I admit — and yet there is a mystery and glory in this film that can’t be denied. Perhaps its silliness is no less than any fantasy film of its era. I saw this for the first time last month and I just loved it. Judge me if you will.

That’s all for now!

Wishing you sweet midwinter feelings.

Warmly,

Danica

Holy moly, it’s awesome to see how many new folks have come on board in the past few days, some after downloading the Pagan Carols Songbook! You are so very welcome here.

Yesterday I sent out The Big Solstice List, full pagan and folkloric things to listen to (and watch) this Yule, including all six of the Christmas Fair Folk Podcast episodes I’ve made, A four and a half hour solstice playlist, and my favourite stop-animation pagan Christmas film. If you are new here, you really won’t want to miss that.

If you’re wondering who I am, I’m Danica Boyce, a paganism and folklore educator, writer and singer. I’ve been making the popular educational podcast called Fair Folk about these topics for 9 years. I’m passionate about helping folks access nourishing traditional culture from (mostly northern) Europe, whatever their background.

Today I’m writing today to give you all a heads up that the 15% early bird discount for my upcoming Pagan Ritual Song Course expires at the end of Tuesday December 9th — my birthday! I’ve also added a 3-month payment plan, so folks who need to spread the cost out can now do so.

With the early bird discount, the cost is £300 (roughly $395 US) until December 9th.

With the payment plan, that’s 3x £100/month, (or $132 US).

Sign up for the Pagan Ritual Song Course

If you’re interested in bringing sacred song closer to the centre of your life, and you’re willing to stretch your comfort zone in a very supportive environment, this is the course for you!

You fit here if…

• You desire a larger repertoire of songs, chants, hymns for the contexts that actually matter to you

• You wish your engagement with spirituality felt more embodied and integrative

• You want to be able to offer something sincere and traditional to the land, to spirits, gods, trees, animals and other beings

• You sometimes find pagan ritual contexts awkwardly quiet!

• You wish to build confidence in creating and sharing songs for special occasions and spiritual gatherings

From a past participant:

“Danica’s pagan ritual song course was eye-opening and inspiring. I hadn’t realized how much I needed my own song to come into my practice and life until I took this course.

Her knowledge and guidance was priceless and the songs I created because of these shared gifts are songs that still live in my heart and are sung almost daily.

It’s a step towards connecting with yourself and well worth the time and investment”

- April

Sign up today to get the discount!

If you have any questions about this course or other aspects of my work, simply email me here, or comment on this post.

All the best to you,

Danica Boyce

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As the Christmas music begins its annual flood into the shops and living rooms of the western world, I’m writing to share some of the treasures I’ve uncovered in my decade of research into traditional and pagan folklore of the Yule season. I have had my eye on earth-honouring, animistic, and ancient songs, stories, and ritual from around northern Europe, and the yield continues to amaze me with its abundance.

In this email I’m sharing my three favourite midwinter albums, all six of the Christmas Fair Folk Podcast episodes I’ve made, A four and a half hour solstice playlist, and my favourite stop-animation pagan Christmas film.

May these humble offerings be like an ancestral quilt to wrap around you this season, to insulate or inspire as needed.

I’ll be releasing a new Fair Folk podcast episode in the next few weeks as well, so if you want to know as soon as it drops, subscribe to the podcast now. (Then come back and dig these treasures!)

Before I get started, a reminder that signups for my upcoming course Pagan Ritual Song ends soon, on December 27th. If you want to join me reclaiming sacred song this winter, click the link to join now! It may go without saying, but this course would make a gorgeous solstice gift to put on your wee list as well.

Three Christmas albums I listen to every year:

Triakel - Vintervisor

The absolutely gorgeous Vintervisor (winter songs) album by the band Triakel, whose singer Emma Härdelin (of Garmarna) is one of the most distinctive voices in Swedish folk singing. Many of these melodies are absolutely enchanting, the instrumentation is lovely, and these songs have no equivalent in the English language, so the novelty level is high!

The Wilderness Yet - Turn the Wheel Round

I love to listen to and share this album of winter folk songs and carols, “Turn the Wheel Round” by the Wilderness Yet, which achieved the difficult feat of having little reference to Jesus or shopping. Their muti-part harmonies are gorgeous and their songwriting and adaptation are seamless. You might not even notice how adeptly they avoid cliché while you listen, rapt.

Loreena McKennitt - To Drive the Cold Winter Away

This one is close to my heart, as the harpist and singer Loreena McKennitt is a Canadian national treasure. This tape played in our home from my toddler days, and was my first introduction to some of the greatest folk carols in the English language. I believe this album was a gateway for many a young person into the deep world of pagan imagination itself.

My big solstice playlist

Click here to listen to the 4.5 hour 🔥🌲 Big Fat Solstice 🌲🔥 playlist, the biggest and most popular one I have made so far, packed with carols with pagan themes, folk songs, wassailing songs, songs for advent, and many other musical muses to keep you feeling sparkly and cozy for the rest of December. I update this every year, and this year is no exception!

Fair Folk Podcast Christmas episodes since 2016

Over the past nine years I have produced over six hours of Fair Folk podcast episodes with a Christmas / Solstice / Midwinter theme. If you use Spotify (and I really understand if you don’t, but it’s what I’m working with at the moment) today I have made a playlist of every one of them in a row, so they will be easier for you to find!

Below are all of the Fair Folk Podcast Christmas episodes — take your pick. They are linked via apple podcasts here, but you can listen to them on all the usual podcast apps.

Read on for my favourite pagan Christmas film below!

Gnome for Christmas: the Midwinter Household Spirit (2019)

This episode draws on the folklore of the household spirit (gnome, tomte, tonttu, nisse, domovoi, et al)and the folk music of Scandinavia to explore the ancient traditions of animism and ancestor veneration at midwinter.

Winter Solstice, Queen of Feasts (2018)

This episode traces the age-old European origins of many of the Winter Solstice traditions we enjoy today, from mother goddess worship through stories of the wizard child Jesus, to Christmas fortune telling with bones.

Little Christmas: December Almanac (2022)

This episode surveys the folklore of the first half of December, including St. Nicholas’ Day on Dec 6th, St. Lucia’s day on Dec. 13th, and the solstice. As we approach the darkest point of winter, I ask you to follow the rhythm of nature and turn your gaze to the small, the domestic and the precious.

Our Supernatural Landlords: folklorist Terry Gunnell on northern European winter guising traditions (2020)

In our second conversation on Fair Folk, folklorist Terry Gunnell and I discuss the northern European folklore of the winter season, especially the tradition of guising and monstrous visitors in pagan and Christian times, and -- getting to the juicy stuff -- how male deities came to dominate the Nordic sphere in the Viking era, when it is rather obvious feminine deities used to play a significantly larger role.

The Twelve Days: December Almanac (2022)

This episode explores folklore and pagan origins of the 12 days of Christmas, with a focus on the feminine winter figures of Perchta, Holle, and Grýla, featuring a conversation with Jenn Campus, author of A Guide to Celebrating the 12 Days of Yule.

Rarer Carols (2016)

This episode features some of the more ancient and obscure midwinter traditions that have endured alongside Christmas, as well as some lesser-known carols of this festival, many of which are pagan in origin.
Content warning for animal sacrifice and general heathen revelry.

Saints and Demons of December (2016)

This episode, you’ll learn about Swedish mumming traditions and St. Lucia day, St. Nicholas’ stranger past manifestations, and you’ll meet St. Stephen, the first man to be stoned to death for bringing a rooster back to life.

My favourite pagan Christmas film

I grew up watching this 1985 stop-animation film made by the Christmas special specialists, Rankin & Bass, who you may know from their popular claymation feature film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

It’s called the Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and is based on a 1902 book of the same name by L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Oz books (eg. the Wizard of Oz). It’s short and sweet at under 50 minutes, and it’s child-friendly too.

My parents taped this special on VHS from the television one year, and we saw it every year thereafter.

Revisiting it as an adult, I have been amazed at the inventiveness of the timeless pagan world it evokes, with fairies and a magic axe and a child-rearing lioness, and the sincerity and tenderness of the animation.

Honestly, it gives me more every time I watch it. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat!

That’s all from me today! Feel free to add your own suggestions for seasonal listening and viewing in the comments below.

Wishing you very well,

Danica Boyce

You can join the Pagan Ritual Song course anytime before December 27th. Just click here to get on this magic train!

Since I was little, I knew that singing was magic. It gave me life, and was inseparable from the experience of joy itself. If you felt alive, you sang. And as a kid, you feel really alive. In fact there was even a rule at our house made especially for me — no singing at the table — which I can only assume was there to make sure I remembered to eat too, in the midst of all my singing.

Recently I recalled one of the songs I composed with a friend as a kid while bounding hypnotically in circles on a trampoline beneath the tall trees. It was a mix of heartbreak song — à la the pop music we were all immersed in at the time — and a list of all of the supernatural beings we could think of. It went something like this:

She’s flighty as a fairy

Pretty as a pixie

Helpful as an elf

But poor as a dwarf without you

She’s your heavenly angel

— not me.

In the years after those trampoline composition days I became less and less confident about singing in front of people and composing songs. I entered the teenage and adult world of singing-as-a-perfect-and-sexy-and-professional-performance. It was devastating. It shut me down creatively in ways I am still recovering from, but I have, in the last ten years, dedicated much of my work to healing from this song-suppression, both for myself and for others.

This is not something only I experienced as a child, but something people in Europe and North America have experienced culturally for at least a hundred years, if you count industrialization as the point we put down our songs, or a thousand and more years, if you count the departure point as when someone told us our songs had to go through the filter of religious doctrine to be acceptable.

The suppression of song goes hand in hand with colonialism. Our ability to let ourselves spin songs, free and wild, quiet or raspy or squeaky or “too loud” or when we are “supposed to be doing something else” (according to whom?) is part and parcel with our ability to make things sacred on our own terms, and to recognize and feel with our bodies the sacredness that exists all around us.

I saw how this suppression played out even in a country that many of us imagine to be especially musically gifted when I conducted field research on folk singing in Iceland. Icelanders were told by their colonial occupiers across centuries that they simply “couldn’t sing,” were “completely unmusical,” and that their singing was no singing at all, rather “the wailing of the old timers,” presumed soon to die out. These are the conditions in which folk song, the song of ordinary people, shrinks and hides.

Similar stories play out across the world in modern western capitalism. If you ask your own elders about their experience of song, you’ll usually hear how singing was even in their childhoods, not that long ago, a part of everyday life, and has since almost unnoticeably gone mostly silent.

The farther back you go, the more that song and the sacred both were a part of everyday life. Prayer songs while cooking. Prayer songs while building the fire. Prayer songs while walking, while laying down to sleep, when waking in the morning.

But our connection to song and the sacred cannot be taken from us in essence. Not ever. This is because what makes the world sacred, that vast beauty from which the great song continuously hums, is precisely what makes us sacred. And because of this sacredness, as a species, as the children of our countless resilient ancestors, we will never lose our ability nor our will to spin the sacred with our voice. Our song came to us before we even stood on the ground. Song is a gift of tree-dwelling species: birds, bats, tree frogs, primates, humans. The trees taught us to sing, to call across the canopy, and later the hilltops and the Savannah, and we sang that gift back to the trees and all the world, and will continue to do so.

In this month where, almost magically, the ordinary rules are suspended and ordinary people are again invited to sing, and even with a shared repertoire, I invite you wholeheartedly to sing this December, if you want to.

Sing for the children who need to look up and know that song is a good and a constant and not just for “special” people. They need to hear your song, your view on reality. Sing for the elders whose eyes light up with memory and grace when they hear that familiar tune. Sing to the snow that is there or that you wish to invite to fall again. Sing to the night sky glimmering, sing to the fire, sing to the cold earth who needs our cheer, sing to your neighbours whether they know what to do with that or not, make your offering to bells, to tinsel, to memory, to that one streetlamp after midnight, to a mother or to a miraculous baby or to the rich dark and silence itself.

Here’s a song I recorded the day before yesterday with my friend the sean-nós (traditional Irish) singer Chan Reid. The lyrics are adapted by the Wilderness Yet from the popular medieval carol, and slightly adjusted by myself to fit this more common melody.

I’m writing not just to urge you to sing this December, but also to let you know two things: first,

I’ve made the pagan carols songbook from the yearly pagan carols singalong I have held the past few years available for download so you can hold it in your hands and bring it to gatherings this month. You can download it here, along with a link to a playlist with melodies. It’s free, so if you like it, please forward this email to someone so they can enjoy it too, or share a post on instagram, or just print it and give it to someone in person! It’s not fancy, but I hope it’s effective.

Second, I have now opened registration for my Pagan Ritual Song course for a second time, beginning January 11th!

Sales end December 22nd, and the earlybird rate of £300 (roughly $345 USD) is in effect until December 9th.

In this five-unit, ten-session live-taught course, I introduce the major themes and structures of early and traditional song that lend themselves to ritual contexts, and support folks to create and sing new pagan songs, drawing on the abundant melodic and lyrical well that is our cultural inheritance.

It was a great success last time, with a virtual avalanche of ritual songs created by participants, so this time I’ve created plenty more opportunity for the sharing of songs in real-time, unrecorded sessions every other week.

Think of this course as a library, and myself, your facilitator, as a librarian. I am here to help you find the information and inspiration you need to create beautiful experiences of connection wherever you are at right now in relation to music and ritual. The only prerequisite is a willingness to play, and to challenge the limits of your creative expression – a little or a lot, that’s up to you.

learn more here

Here’s what a past participant said this week about the course:

Danica’s pagan ritual song course was eye-opening and inspiring. I hadn’t realized how much I needed my own song to come into my practice and life until I took this course. Her knowledge and guidance was priceless and the songs I created because of these shared gifts are songs that still live in my heart and are sung almost daily.

It’s a step towards connecting with yourself and well worth the time and investment.

- April

I hope some of you will join me there! If you participated last time, you can email me to ask me for a special discount.

Wishing you very well,

Yours,

Danica

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Before I get into today’s letter (which I hope you’ll check out, as I put a lot of love and research into it), I have a small announcement to make:

Unfortunately, the release of the book of winter folklore I announced was coming out this winter with Hyldyr Press has been delayed until next autumn. We found ourselves looking at a late-December/January release date and opted instead to begin sales of the book at the start of (next) winter instead, so folks can really dig in for the duration of the season. This means that next autumn you will be seeing two(!) new books from me, the Around the Wheel of the Year picture book with illustrator-author Phoebe Wall from Chronicle Books and A Wreath of Winter with Hyldyr Press. I hope it will be worth the wait for anyone who was looking forward to sitting with this book next to a fire this Yuletide!

And as far as the ways you can engage with my work right now — most winters I offer a course for sale over December, taught live online starting in January, and this year will be no exception. I’ll shortly be announcing what that course will be, and inviting you to join me there in the new year. It seems to me that gathering together at the creative wellspring is more important than ever these days. You will be hearing from me plenty over the first half of December whether or not you’re opting for any of my paid offerings, since as we all know, this is the (un)official month of my three favourite things: folklore, paganism and song!

And if you can’t wait until January, remember you can get any of my recorded courses on cultural healing and spiritual and creative practice immediately from my website.

Now for today’s missive!

I often say that I came to European folklore and paganism because of what I learned from indigenous people on the west coast of what’s called Canada while studying an education degree with a special focus in indigenous pedagogy. Today I’d like to share an example of the threads that weave between and connect our disparate cultures, and the ways these threads can animate the healing and decolonization of culture worldwide.

What’s amazing to me, though maybe it sound over-simple, is that Indigenous peoples have living indigenous culture. You could even say, for the sake of defamiliarization, that indigenous peoples have pagan culture. That is they have a significant measure more continuous oral and material tradition from the time prior to contact with Christian imperialism than most other cultures. They might not call that tradition “pagan” (reasonably, considering the weaponization of that term against them) but for those us attempting to heal the culture loss of Europe, it’s a wonderful thing to realize: we can learn things from other cultures. Not always what exactly to do, in terms of specific practices, but more what to look for and what questions to ask, perhaps. The shape of a gesture, or the animating spirit. That’s an empowered way to learn.

This is not to say European indigenous cultures are completely gone, but Empire’s work in suppressing and confusing the animistic and kinship-oriented worldviews of people living on the European continent started a lot earlier than it did in North America. Therefore nearly all of the records we have of spiritual practices and worldviews from pre-Christian times are written by the dominant culture, and therefore we can’t be sure how much their biases colour the picture, or whether the picture is sometimes completely invented.

I recently got my hands on one of the first somewhat comprehensive academic books in English on the Slavic thunder god Perun, The Slavic Storm God Perun: Archaeology, History, Ethnology by Patrice Lajoye.1 Its author rejects the idea that Slavic paganism can’t be reliably studied, which is a common assumption in scholarship on the topic. The belief that the pagan culture of any region simply “cannot be known” is sometimes, it seems to me, motivated by an unwillingness to consider what paganism actually is, aside from the ways it might resemble organized (universalist) religions. If your definition of “religion” is basically something that resembles Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, then it’s no wonder you can’t find traces of pagan religion, since they definitively don’t resemble those religions. But they do precede them.

I’ve just began reading the book and already something exciting has happened. I was reading aloud to my partner (who had since fallen asleep, as usually happens when I read aloud to him) and I came across an account that really shook something inside me.

Some context, before I share what I found in the book: One of the main weapons of imperial Christianity against European pagans in the era of mass conversion was the destruction and supplanting of sacred sites and temples. It was ordinary practice, for example, for a missionary and several thugs to arrive from a foreign country and invite all the locals to watch them hew down a sacred tree or a whole sacred grove, to prove the superiority of their god to the one the residents revered in the place.

Later they might build a church on top of the site, often utilizing the wood or the stone that comprised the original “temple.” Even the wording I’m using here betrays the ways that our modern colonized culture can’t “see” paganism. Most pagan cultures didn’t have temples-as-buildings, for example. So it’s very easy for us to miss the fact that a sacred site was even there prior to a church, since it wouldn’t have resembled what Christianity has told us a place of worship even looks like. One clue is if there is reference to an oak grove in place names or old maps. An oak grove isn’t necessarily always a pagan sacred site, but if there’s a very old church there now, the odds are high that this place was special before the church arrived there. The same is true of a stand of old yew trees. Wait long enough, and the archaeology will often eventually show that a pagan sacred site preceded the Christian one.

Another bias of the colonial lens is the tendency to favour written texts over oral tradition. You can see this lens at work if you reflect on how indigenous peoples were (and still are) dispossessed of land in North America. The people with written documents — usually who wrote those documents themselves — refused to acknowledge any other means of “proving” the right to access and control land than their own. And that system, for the most part, still stands, though many people are working hard and slowly succeeding in changing that precedent. The same happened in Europe during Enclosure. You better believe it was the people with documents rather than oral agreements who kicked the commoners off the land, burned villages, forced people onto boats to North America, and whose descendants still claim to “own” most of the land in Britain, for example. We were all born into a culture where words on paper mean more than those that beat in our blood and on the wind.

So here I was reading this newly translated book on the Slavic thunder god Perun,2 when I came across an account of the destruction of a carved wooden pole representing that god, reportedly the most worshipped among the residents of Kyiv (modern Ukraine) at that time. I should mention there were several records over the years of the events quoted here, and that as time went on, details were added to the account. This is a later version of events. Just the same, it was the one with the most narrative impact, and therefore one that rather suddenly brought me to tears while reading. Here is an episode in the Christianization of Kyiv from the year 988:

When he [the converted Prince Volodomer] arrived, he ordered the idols [representations of gods that he had previously installed] to be overthrown. He had some cut up and others thrown into the fire. He ordered Perun to be tied to a horse’s tail and dragged up and down below Boryčev to the stream; and he ordered twelve men to beat him with sticks, not that he considered the wood to have any feeling; but to insult the demon [sic] who, in this form, had deceived men, and to punish him for his deceptions. […] Yesterday he was honoured by men, today he is insulted. While he was being dragged along the Ručaj [stream] to the Dnipro, the pagans wept over him, for they had not yet received holy baptism.3 Now, after dragging him, they threw him into the Dnieper [river]. Volodimer said to his servants: ‘If he stops anywhere, push him back from the shore until he has passed the cataracts [rapids]: then you will leave him.’ The wind threw him onto a beach which has since been called the beach of Perun, a name it still bears today. […] He built the church of St. Basil on the hill where the idol of Perun and others stood, and where the prince and people made sacrifices to them (Lajoye 30-31).

A version of the story from a year later added this touching detail, though not without its anti-pagan bias:

“a riverside dweller from the Pidba went in the morning when Perun was stranded on the bank and pushed him back with a pole: ‘My little Perun [Perušice] you have eaten and drunk enough so far. Now continue floating far from here.’ And the filthy object disappeared” (Lajoye 32).

Once you process how culturally dismissive the above account is, you might notice how it doesn’t refer only to a depiction of a god in the form of a carved pole, but rather Perun by name, as if the violence enacted on the pole has actually vanquished the god himself. It seems to me though, that despite the narrator’s apparent intention to demonstrate Perun has been rejected and destroyed, the pathos invoked by referring to him by name, as present and real, and horribly mistreated, is powerful. We don’t expect to hear anti-pagan Christian records admitting to the reality of the gods they hope the locals will reject. But indeed this is what these records tend to do. Medieval proponents (shillers?) of Christianity, from missionaries to princes, believed in the pagan gods as much as the pagans did, they simply saw them to be in competition with their own god, the one they believed everybody should worship.

In fact, some accounts of the removal of the Perun pole include descriptions of Perun’s residual influence in the places significant to the pole’s removal. From the 988 redaction of the Sofia First Chronicle:

“And after they had made him fall with ropes, they dragged him through the mud, whipping him with rods and beating him; and a demon4 came out of Perun and began to cry out: ‘O woe is me! I have fallen into these merciless hands!’ And he floated under a great bridge and threw his club onto the bridge; and even today with this club, fools beat each other to please the demons” (Lajoye 32).

Across Europe, one of the most consistent features of thunder gods is possession of a weapon of some kind, whether it be a lightning bolt, like that of Greek Zeus, or a literal hammer, like that belonging to Thor. Thunder (and by extension, lightning) gods tend to be connected with the use of tools, possibly due to their relationship to fire, loud noises and sparks, like those produced by the pounding of metal on stone with a mallet in blacksmithing. This report, which remained in the historical record into the 17th century in at least two forms, and likely the oral tradition as well, demonstrates that Perun was clearly understood by the Kievian Rus to be alive and influential even after his pole had been removed and after the locals had converted to Christianity.

Archaeological and textual evidence demonstrate that god poles were carved in many places across Europe in pre-Christian times, including some Slavic regions, the Baltics (where the tradition continues in a mostly Christianized and secularized manner), definitely in Scandinavia and Germany (perhaps echoed in modern day maypoles), and also possibly in the British Isles, as archaeological evidence for Woodhenge may attest. Carving sacred poles was once, arguably, a distinctive feature of pre-Christian religious culture across Europe.

Reading the account of the Perun pole and the way it was pushed down the river, my heart wrenched and my eyes welled when I realized I was reading something that resonated with stories I had heard before, ones from the west coast of Canada, nearly a thousand years later.

I first heard of the English-Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau from a book of poetry called the Place of Scraps by Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel. When this book came out in 2013, I was a high school English teacher in British Columbia, and I loved to share the poems from the book with students, in order to inform them about the history of colonialism in our area of the world, and to show them an example of an accessible sort of writing called erasure poetry that they could try themselves.

The Place of Scraps draws on Marius Barbeau’s 1950 ethnographic book about northwest Canadian indigenous carving called Totem Poles. Though Barbeau is lauded as the “father” of Canadian folklore and ethnomusicology, his work on indigenous culture embodies what’s now called salvage anthropology, that is the study of a culture done in a way that presumes that culture to be disappearing. As a result of this assumption, salvage anthropology often contributes to the destruction and erasure of the culture it nominally seeks to protect from destruction and erasure.

If this seems a niggling complaint, consider that not only cultural belongings of these living and resident indigenous peoples were stolen on a massive scale by westerners, but so were the bodies of their ancestors, oftentimes having been removed from active burial sites. By the 1980s, the number of indigenous bodies objectified, artifact-ified, and held in museums, collections and other institutions worldwide was estimated to be between 300,000 and 2.5 million.5 Like the cannibalistic Wendigo monster of Algonquin tradition, colonialism literally consumes human beings, bones and all.

I can’t repeat these statistics without feeling grief. I know this is a good thing. My ability to feel pain for the losses other human beings is so closely tied with my ability to feel pain for my own losses and those of folks more closely connected to me, that they may be one and the same thing. To paraphrase my thesis supervisor, Adrienne Williams Boyarin, whose research focuses on medieval antisemitic narratives, “these are historical texts to be felt,” not simply read or analyzed.

Marius Barbeau is remembered by the dominant culture for his ethnographic and ethnomusicological accounts of Quebecois culture and that of indigenous communities on the west coast of Canada. First Nations also remember him (perhaps primarily) for the theft, sale and relocation of up to a dozen iconic west coast totem poles, many belonging to the Nisga’a Nation. Records of these sales can be patchy, but clear — though heavily biased — documentation remains of the acquisition and sale of two of the most prominent poles in the Nass Valley. One, standing at a massive 81 feet, known as the Sagawe’en pole (or Sakau’wan) Barbeau removed to the Royal Ontario Museum, where it has stood for nearly a century, incongruous in the context of a purpose-built wraparound marble staircase, far from the place it was carved and stood from the 19th century to 1929 when it was cut into pieces and taken away.

Having failed to convince an unwilling elder to sell him the pole in years previous,6 Barbeau tried another party:

“The same summer, I purchased the totem from his nephews. It stands now in a better place for its preservation. Lost to all notice in the northern jungle, it would soon have tumbled to the ground and decayed, whereas it is now on display for everyone to see and may last forever.”7

Barbeau’s salvage anthropogy is clearly on display here, as well as his any-means-necessary “this belongs in a museum” approach to the coercive acquisition of Nisga’a cultural belongings. The condescending tone with which he describes the pole’s fate, with the gaze of locals rendered irrelevant, and the landscape described as a “jungle,” echoes global racist dynamics that include the European slave trade as well as the less-known enslavement of indigenous peoples of North America. He shows no concern for the desires and traditions of the present and rightful owners of this cultural belonging, instead seeing it as a universal — read: European — historical artifact in need of saving.

Claire Omhovère describes the pole’s removal in her 2019 article “What Place Takes Place in Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps ?” Note the means of transportation of the stolen pole:

“It took an additional six years for the transportation of the carved post to be organised from the Nass valley to the freshly built extension of the ROM [Royal Ontario Museum] in Toronto. Because of its formidable size, the sculpture had to be cut into three sections that were floated down the river to the Pacific coast, where they were shipped eastwards by rail to the financial and economic centre of the Dominion. The Nisga’a totem pole now stands with three other poles from the Pacific Northwest in the stairways flanking the East Wing of the ROM” (17).

Barbeau apparently thought he was rescuing cultural objects threatened with neglect. What he didn’t know what that in the indigenous carving traditions of the west coast poles were erected with the intention that they would eventually return to the earth, naturally. And before that, they would remain a visual record of animistic belief and clan history and relations and be a reference for story and history. As long as the craft of carving and the oral traditions that accompany them remain, passed between generations, no poles are “lost,” they simply participate in the circle of life as it continues through time. (This, of course, is my interpretation based on what I have read and heard, and indigenous folks may have another explanation of their own local traditions.)

In response to Marius Barbeau’s theft and erasure of indigenous culture, poet Jordan Abel made erasure poems out of pages of Barbeau’s text in The Place of Scraps, effectively un-writing what was written over the culture of his ancestors. One page of Barbeau’s book detailed the removal of the Sagawe’en pole from the Nass River Valley; Abel erased most of the text from Barbeau’s page, leaving the following words scattered in the space remaining:

The removal of indigenous peoples from their lands was (and remains) a primary feature of the cultural genocide enacted by the Canadian-British government across the late 19th century through the 20th. One of the most prominent features of this genocide was the residential school system, wherein in concert with various Christian churches, the colonial government forcibly took indigenous children from their families and held them in state schools in an attempt at mass assimilation into the settler-colonial culture. In the above poem, Jordan Abel uses the scraps of Marius Barbeau’s own words to demonstrate the connections between the removal of indigenous cultural belongings and the removal of the very human beings to whom they belonged underpinning the theft.

Believe it or not, there is actually good news to share in the story of the totem poles stolen from First Nations by Marius Barbeau. Another of the esteemed poles Barbeau sold to a museum is the House of Ni’isjoohl Memorial Pole, also from the Nass Valley and belonging to the Nisga’a Nation, which was carved in 1860 by master carver Oyea Tait, primarily from a single piece of pacific red cedar, as a memorial to Ts’wawit, the intended future chief of the Raven Clan who was killed in a conflict with the Tsimshian Nation. Barbeau removed the Ni’isjoohl Memorial Pole in that same summer of 1929, during the hunting season when most residents were away and couldn’t object, selling and eventually shipping it to the National Museum of Scotland for six hundred Canadian dollars. Barbeau’s written account claims (again) that an elder authorized this sale, but Nisga’a oral tradition contradicts his claim, saying the elder’s signature was forged.

In 2022, the Nisga’a Nation sent a delegation to the Scottish National Museum in Edinburgh to request the return of the Ni’isjoohl Memorial Pole, setting a formal process in motion which led to the rematriation of the pole in 2023. The word rematriation holds significance here; the Nisga’a are a matrilineal society and so have specifically asked that this term be used by those discussing the pole’s return.

It’s the first time I have heard the word before. How does it feel to you to read it?

The Ni’isjoohl Memorial Pole was the first totem pole to be returned to an indigenous nation by a UK national museum. The success and recognition of the Nisga’a’s right to reclaim the pole in this case is an encouraging example of a historically colonial institution engaging with another culture on its own terms, by acknowledging the legitimacy of oral tradition as a historical document on par with (European, colonial) written documents. It’s a powerful precedent. Some might not be surprised it was a Scottish museum who agreed to the rematriation, considering the historical experience of colonization and mass displacement faced by Scottish people themselves, not least in the Lowland and Highland clearances of the 17th to 19th centuries, which contributed massively to Scottish migration to Canada, specifically.

[content warning: reference to violence against women in the paragraph below]

I grew up about a two hours’ drive from the Nass Valley, and I live about an hour’s drive from Edinburgh now, a new arrival in the country that several of my ancestors left for Canada across those same centuries. I don’t know their reasons for emigrating. A childhood friend of mine died at 34 years old in 2018 under suspicious circumstances along the Highway of Tears, a stretch of road where so many (mainly indigenous) women have gone missing and been murdered it has acquired the very name of grief. That is where I grew up. This is also the highway that branches off to the Nass Valley, whose titular river flows from the same Sacred Headwaters as the Skeena River, in which my friend Chantelle’s body was recovered, later identified by her tattoos.

I know my friend’s death is intertwined with the unsafety of women and indigenous peoples across Canada and the world, and unfurls as well from the historical oppression and displacement of the peoples of Europe under waves of imperial colonization (Roman, Christian, British, Russian, etc.) in the centuries prior to this one. I feel entwined in the histories and geographies presented here in more ways than I can number.

And yet nothing about what has happened in Europe or Canada was inevitable. The Highway of Tears is not a prophecy. Indigenous culture is not disappearing. The rivers are not indifferent. European-descended people are not genetically programmed to be oppressive or ignorant. As long as we are alive we have a choice in how things are going to turn out. Even after we pass, our reverence and creativity echoes through time to fortify the hearts of future generations.

A Nisga’a delegation held a private ceremony in the Scottish National Museum before the scaffolding was built that would facilitate the safe removal of the memorial pole and its return home by air. I am so moved to imagine the events that took place in that room. Can you picture it? How would it feel to speak, to sing, to drum to the incredible handwork of your ancestors, an entity in itself, and invite it home again after a century of absence?

According to Dr. Amy Parent (Sigidimnak’ Nox̱s Ts’aawit), a key figure in the pole’s rematriation, the Ni’isjoohl Memorial Pole serves as “a living constitutional and visual archive.” This is helpful information, as there are plenty of notions of what totem poles “mean” from a non-indigenous perspective, including the common misinterpretation embodied in the expression “low (or high) man on the totem pole.” Readers interested in European pre-Christian tradition may also note that the totem poles of indigenous peoples of Canada do not represent gods, as European carved poles often did, at least as far as I understand. Nevertheless carved poles from both continents tend to refer to mythology, history, animism and local cultural values, in the form of an object powerfully sacred to its cultural and material context.

Just this autumn another pole was returned to the Nass Valley from the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, and in the blessing ceremony made by a Nisga’a delegation before the pole was shipped, as its people sang and drummed to it, participant Rodney Moore (Luu-Anyee), reported that he saw the pole breathing. He stated, “carved poles aren’t just pieces of wood. They tell your family story. So they are part of your family, and are living beings.”

The poles are living and human cultures are living and changing and can be revived. Cultural healing takes place in the passionate witnessing of the world’s deep aliveness and connectedness and the innate value that emerges from that life. Ceremony cultivates this witnessing, as does holding space for grief between people and between cultures. I’m certain the rivers grieve along with us.8 And then those rivers water the trees that have sheltered and fed us and taught us to sing and drum and carve sacred images from the time before we walked on two legs.

I hope that witnessing indigenous folks advocating for the integrity of their nourishing traditional culture sparks something inside the hearts of readers from other backgrounds, whether it is a sense of shared dignity, or the passion to take up or appreciate a sacred traditional craft, or simply the knowledge that more healing and redemption is possible than we have been taught to hope for.

May we stay present to the blessings and the vulnerabilities that connect us: human, plant, river, land. May your losses be held in tenderness.

Yours,

Danica

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