Modern Heathen

Patterns for troll dolls. You can even make a troll fanny pack or a troll bag. I feel strange about trolls this...whimsical though. Sort of like those Neo-Pagans that insist on seeing faeries as being twittery little creatures.

Can I still be a Heathen and enjoy cute trolls? What about the Moomins?

Decorative cornstalk bundles are now being offered for sale in my region and I'm not sure what to feel about that.

The first time I ever saw cornstalk bundles as a harvest decoration was when I moved out to western Massachusetts. Western Massachusetts is full of little farms, many of which grow corn. There, cornstalk bundles really are a harvest decoration. You see them tied decoratively to a mailbox, and you know that a farmer stuck them up there after pulling them out of his field, or at the very least, a local bought them at a farmstand.

Cornstalk bundles on Cape Cod are just all wrong. As much as we still farm these days, we farm cranberries. We seed shellfish. Historically, we harvested salt.

A proper harvest decoration for Cape Cod would be strings of cranberries. You could add shells. If you wanted to get fancy, you could add branches from bayberry, blueberry, beach plum, wintergreen leaves and sweet fern. These are all things that you can eat or use that are local to the region and have historical weight behind them.

The cornstalks are just so damn fake here. An example of a "tradition" randomly imported, with no thought to context or history.

Hmm. I don't think I'm talking about just cornstalks any more.

Raven Kaldera's Nine World's Journey

This link was posted to the seidr list. It's Raven's account of a nine-day Nine Worlds retreat done at the request of Hella. Very intense stuff. Ritual journeying without a net if you will. I was impressed by it because I'm impressed by anyone who is willing to do something "weird" and then who is willing to write about it in an articulate fashion.

If you're interested in "shamanic practices" (and I put that in quote marks, because everyone thinks something different when you use the "S" word) in a Heathen context, you should go check it out.