Resources
Beliefs of Ásatrú, Heathenry and Norse Paganism
If you’re Heathen like us, you probably already have a good idea of what you believe. You also know we don’t have any kind of commitment to orthodoxy or enforcement of correct belief. We don’t need to tell you, and we aren’t dictating to you what you ought to or ought to not believe.
But this resource isn’t just for you. If you think about those around you who don’t know about our faith, it can be hard for them to hear “Mom, dad, I’ve become Ásatrú.” Or say you’re trying to talk to your spouse about you becoming a Heathen and they just look at you really confused. You’re probably used to people asking you what you believe in. And sometimes you might find yourself describing what the historical record and evidence shows about what is attested in the beliefs of Pre-Christian Germanic peoples only to be asked “OK, that’s great you know all that about the ancient Saxons, but… what do you believe? Are you saying you believe exactly what they did even if you don’t fully know what that was? Why do you believe that?”
This is selection of resources for that. As such, it’s going to be a lot less history focused and more focused talking about what people believe in Ásatrú, Heathenry and Norse Paganism today.
We are going to try to show you the diversity of belief in Norse Paganism, and this sometimes means that you are going to see views that are contradictory.
As an organization with a lot of years under its belt and a lot of perspectives to consider, we take a broad approach with regards to talking about Heathen belief and we will show perspectives that are going to actually be opposites. Some people who really think oaths and “oathing” are a central part of being Heathen and then others who think that “oathing” is archaic, anachronistic and should be discarded.
Some questions aren’t resolved, may never be resolved, and it may be that they aren’t supposed to be resolved, but we try to engage one another as best we can in the ongoing conversation that makes up our faith.
The basic beliefs of Ásatrú, Heathenry and Norse Paganism
“Ásatrú” is one name for our faith (among others) and it means “faith/trust/belief in the Gods.” Some render “Asa” as merely referring to the “Aesir” but that distinction is pretty meaningless. It just means “Gods.” So what does that faith mean? For the most part, it means three basic things, but there can be some variation here:
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- We have faith in the Gods.
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- We have faith in the spirits of ancestors, land and home.
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- We believe that the essence of these powers is goodness, kindness, compassion and love and that they share this with us through engagement in the gifting cycle.
Our tradition, our beliefs, are gained through engagement in particular action: the gifting-cycle that we talked about earlier. In our encounter with the sacred through action, we gain understanding of our beliefs and the grounding of that action. We do not get our beliefs from negotiation with a text like a Bible or a Qu’ran. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, of course. It’s just not what we do.
As far as our practices go: here is where you can get access to information on Ásatrú rituals and you can also find our Norse Pagan Holiday resources.
Do you really believe the Gods exist?
Most of us do, yes. Our sacrifices go somewhere, don’t they?
Please see our section on the Gods for further discussion of this topic, but there are a lot of beliefs about the existence of the Gods. Most of us do believe in the Gods in one way or another, but there is no orthodoxy within Heathenry. There isn’t a particular way people are told they have to believe in the Gods, we aren’t held to any particular credo.
Our view of the Gods changes throughout our lives. That’s normal. That’s exactly how it should be.
The spirits of ancestors, land and home
Many Norse Pagans may refer to themselves as “Nordic Animists” and specify that they believe everything around them has a “spirit” within it. You can certainly see this belief system reflected in what we know of pre-Christian belief. Some Heathens believe that the Gods themselves are another part of this spirit-world and are just greater powers of these spirits (which is in turn part of our world), some believe that the Gods are separate from it.
Ancestor spirits are spirits of our beloved dead and more.
Heathens will sometimes see these spirits as specific people, sometimes as a non-specific “ancestor” who represents the entire ancestral line, or sometimes as a patron of a particular vocation or profession. These need not be people who you’re biologically related to. Some people have adopted families and don’t know anything about their biological family, and that’s perfectly fine too. Who you worship as an “ancestor” has more to do with how you feel about them than whatever your biological relationship to them might or might not have been.
Spirits of the land are the spirits that inhabit the world outside our homes: trees, rocks, rivers, lakes, etc.
For many of us, there are spirits that inhabit everything, for others, they inhabit specific special features like a waterfall, a big tree or grove of trees or a hot spring. The exact delineation of “this has a spirit” versus “this doesn’t have a spirit” can feel pretty arbitrary, but to those who practice Heathenry it’s just a matter of understanding how we relate to the features of the world around us.
Spirits of the home are the spirits that inhabit our inner world: where we live, where we work and where we play.
These kinds of spirits share our homes with us and help us in our times of need. There are a lot of stories and superstitions that surround these spirits, especially stories of when they “misbehave” or they get upset with the humans who share their surroundings and play tricks on them. These stories are amusing and fun to tell, but most Heathens don’t walk around with the constant anxiety that something they do will upset the house-spirits, the ancestors or the land-spirits.
We engage with these spirits that share the world with us through the gift-cycle
Just like with people, we share gifts with the spirits around us. We assume, of course, that those spirits understand the gift-cycle too. But we don’t worry about it.
A good way to think about it is if something doesn’t understand the gift cycle, the worst thing that can happen is you simply get ignored. Imagine overhearing a conversation between people in another language you don’t understand. Eventually, either you try to make out what they’re saying by trying to engage in understanding, or you tune it out because you don’t understand it.
And anything that understands the gift cycle shares in that divine nature of goodness that we talked about when we talked about why we sacrifice to the Gods. The same divine nature that is within us is within those spirits too.
There is no orthodoxy in Norse Paganism.
Even as I type that, I can think of at least three groups I know of that enforce some kind of orthodoxy. But Norse Paganism inherits a resistance to codified belief from the general Neo-Pagan religious community. Pre-Christian Heathens don’t show indications of orthodoxy, but that’s cheating a bit because they don’t appear to have had a concept of orthodoxy to begin with, so there was no resistance to orthodoxy either.
While orthodoxy isn’t something you see, you also don’t see any resistance to it. Just like you don’t see unicorns around and you don’t see anyone with elaborate plans to capture unicorns either. It doesn’t make sense to have resistance to something that doesn’t exist as a concept.
Some in the community are so resistant to anything that even sounds like an attempt to codify the beliefs and practices of Ásatrú that even me writing this is going to have them upset.
In Asatru we extend our gifts to all of humanity.
What good have we done if we extend a gift to unknown wights in a distant forest but not to our neighbor? What honor have we done our ancestors if we give them gifts but refuse to fight the very same poverty that they may have endured? What good have we done if we give a gift to Freyr Yngve but don’t share our own abundance with the hungry?
The Gods may not need our gifts, but our neighbor does. The Gods do not need our shelter, but the family hunkering down for the night in a tent by the roadside does.
Not all giving is a gift. Sometimes we give someone money and expect something in return. I give you a dollar, you give me a candy bar. This is different. This is giving without expectation or even desire of return: the kind of holy giving that the Gods themselves do.
When you give to your neighbor, to the stranger in need without expectation: you express the very nature of the Gods.
The values of Heathenry can’t be distilled down to a single list, but they’re not what you’d expect.
The way popular media depicts Norse Paganism and the pre-Christian religion is sensational, dark and brooding. They show a world of grim and joyless Gods and even grimmer looking worshipers.
It’s not easy. Imagine trying to reconstruct Zen Buddhism when all you have are tales of the Samurai and the Hagakure. Zen Buddhism would probably look a lot different than we know it today!
In that spirit, we are less going to try to reconstruct the values of the past and instead show you how people are living the faith today. Here are some of the real values and teachings we’ve seen in Inclusive Heathenry.
What is a Hearth Cult?
Hearth Cult (sometimes Hearth Cultus if you want to get fancy) is just another way of saying the beliefs and practices of Heathenry in your own home or within your own practice-group (sometimes called a Hearth, Fellowship, Kindred or Community).
But, a Cult is a scary thing, isn’t it?
It can be, but not in this case.
For most Heathens, “Cult” is just another way of saying “what I do at home” or “what I do locally.” It’s your own riff on what you might call the general recipe of Heathenry. For example, my friend Hrabnas’ Hearth Cult uses Proto-Germanic as a liturgical language and has a holiday calendar that slightly differs from mine and uses different names for the holidays. Another friend of mine uses Frisian as her liturgical language, and they have a different set of Holidays that are reckoned differently than mine. Even more friends of mine have Pennsylvania Dietsch as their liturgical language and their practices and holidays might look quite different than my own.
That’s mostly where the hearth cults differ: the language they use, the names they use, the holiday calendars they follow and who the main teachers are in their particular traditions.
Where I might call Sveinbjorn Beinteinsson a teacher in my own practice, someone else might say their teacher was Robert L. Schreiwer, Rod Landreth, Jim Chisholm, Patricia Lafayllve or Prudence Priest. Everybody has an entry point somewhere, and most of us in Heathenry have had mentors or teachers who gave us a helping hand and helped us forge our own way. Thus, each of our own Hearth Cults can reflect the teachings of those early influences.
Some Hearth Cults emphasize their spiritual lineages more than others and trace everything back to certain authors or thinkers within Heathenry. Others don’t have much to do with that sort of thing.
Doesn’t it get confusing between a Hearth Cult and a Cult?
No. We have a good idea of what someone means when someones says they have a Hearth Cult versus when someone is talking about a cult. If someone is talking about a Hearth Cult in Heathenry, they aren’t saying anything sinister. They’re just talking about what they do at home.
Despite the variety, we all seem to get along just fine (with some notable exceptions).
The interesting thing about Heathenry is that no matter how different the home practices might be, we all have a shared general understanding of Heathenry. We can fairly easily recognize what is in the “wheelhouse” of Heathenry versus what isn’t, and we can find ourselves very comfortable as guests within other Hearth Cults.
A notable exception would be that inclusive Heathens do not get along just fine with white nationalist or Folkish Heathens, and vice versa.
White Nationalist and Folkish beliefs and their practices of white exclusivity are abhorrent to any Heathens of conscience who genuinely embrace the way of the Gods and the teachings of humanity, hospitality and generosity upon which many of our faith traditions are based.
“That’s just your UPG!”
In many conversations in Norse Paganism you’ll hear people using either one or a series of abbreviations of UPG, SPG or VPG. Most commonly, you will hear “UPG.” You might actually be hearing it right now as someone is reading this very paragraph and yelling that this is all just “UPG.”
The reason these abbreviations are so unhelpful is precisely because they can be used to describe a vast number of things people do to derive and develop religious beliefs and practices and how we justify them. We could have derived a practice from pure intuition or from “feels” but we equally could have derived it through a form of induction, deduction or synthesis
But even though they might not be helpful in the sense that they aren’t specific, they are commonly used, so it’s helpful to know what people mean when they use them.
UPG
“Unverified (or sometimes rendered as Unverifiable) Personal Gnosis” is a phrase people use to describe a personally held religious belief that does not derive directly from an authoritative text; rather, it comes from either interpretation, synthesis, intuition, deduction, or experience.
SPG
“Shared Personal Gnosis” is when two people have the same non-textually derived insight or belief that they have either arrived at independently or that they were convinced by argument that a belief is true or a practice is effective.
VPG
“Verified Personal Gnosis” is where the personal beliefs or practices someone has are also found in textual sources that are believed to be authoritative sources of information.
A more helpful framework for analysis of Reconstructionist Beliefs: Induction, Deduction and Synthesis
UPG is typically a “conversation ender” because it’s like saying “that’s just your opinion” without going into the specific methods you used to get to your conclusions. It’s certainly a way to keep the peace, but too often what happens is UPG gets dismissed as “feels over reals.” There’s no objective way to evaluate whether or not someone’s UPG makes more sense than anyone else’s UPG. UPG can spread based more on our affinity towards a person than any actual resonance with the truth. If you like a YouTuber or TikToker and are a member of their fan club for example, you might be more inclined to accept their UPG based on your desire to keep your membership in that group rather than whether or not it actually makes sense to you.
This is where philosophy can come in handy to help out our thinking and spark more productive conversations. A framework some of us have been finding more useful to evaluate and generate propositions is Induction, Deduction and Synthesis.
Induction
Induction is a hypothesis derived from observation of data. The data can include things like literary texts, archeological finds, anthropological or sociological studies among other inputs. With observation, we can come to a hypothesis of what may be true, or has a high probability of being true, given a set of data. These are not rock-solid deductive conclusions, but just hypotheticals or inferences for what might be true given the data.
For example, if we see from archeological data that there are many Thor statues in Norway from the late Iron Age, we can use induction to hypothesize that Thor was probably worshipped widely in Norway in the late Iron Age.
Deduction
Deduction is where a conclusion must follow from a given set of premises by an operation of logic. If the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Someone could take hypotheses that they have arrived at through induction, accept them as true premises and then deduce what must be true from those premises using deductive logic. For example, if we accept the premise that “Thunder is created by throwing Thor’s Hammer” and “Thor’s Hammer is only thrown to kill giants” then “Thunder is the sound of Thor killing giants” is the logical conclusion.
Of course, the validity and soundness of the argument has to do with the truth value of the premises and the ability of the logic used to preserve that truth value to the conclusion, but that’s enough logic for today.
Synthesis
Synthesis is one of the more interesting concepts in how we figure things out. It’s where two propositions that we accept as true contradict one another. Not just that they conflict but that if we accept one as true then the other cannot be true–and yet they both appear to be true. A synthesis is where we pull back and try to find out “what is the frame around these two beliefs that makes this apparent contradiction?”
For example, Snorri Sturluson says Baldur was killed by Hodr by accident. Saxo Grammaticus says Baldur was killed by Hodr because they were fighting over a Princess. The synthesis of the contradiction is: stories varied over time and place and it was acceptable for people to have different versions of the same basic story–this must not have been a religion that valued orthodoxy.
Ásatrú doesn’t have specific Holy Books. But that’s perfectly OK.
There are no holy books in Ásatrú and nothing comes close to being one. To have something be a holy book is not just to say something about its contents, but also to say something about the source of its composition. Many Muslims believe the Qu’ran was the literal revelation given by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. Many Christians believe that the Bible is divinely inspired.
Those kinds of claims were never made at the time about any part of the literature that now makes up a bulk of “what we know” about the pre-Christian beliefs and practices that form the basis of our modern faith.
It also says something about the construction of the religion itself. A religion with a Holy Book is generally constructed through a constant negotiation and renegotiation with this text. In Judaism, for example, many are encouraged to interrogate their faith and develop new traditions based on constant renegotiation with the texts that have come before. Christianity has new sects and traditions constructed out of whole new negotiations with the Bible. Lutheranism was constructed out of one monk’s interpretation of the letters of Paul.
This is so ingrained in us as modern Heathens that many of us will reference poems like the Havamal as justification for our practice today. That’s a negotiation with a text, which is something that was never done before. Our faith is based not on texts but on the practices that we do. We might find inspiration in poetry or stories, but those poems are more the product of our faith rather than the source of it.
We should not resist the idea that we are a modern faith that meets the needs of modern people.
Might as well upset everybody while we are at it. Ásatrú is a modern faith practiced by modern people. It is not a museum dedicated to preserving whatever fragments of belief or worldview existed before the decline of Paganism in Europe. Too often we see Norse Pagans asking to see sources for things that people currently believe where this is entirely inappropriate. It’s perfectly sensible to ask someone for a source when they make a descriptive claim about the past.
Not every conversation about our faith is a conversation about the past.
Read that again because it’s important and you will find yourself slipping into debates like that over and over again. “How did the Vikings treat women?” “Were the Vikings OK with slavery?” “What did the Vikings believe about the soul?”
Notice none of those questions are “How should I treat women” “Am I OK with slavery?” “What do I believe about the soul?”
Most of the articles we have here are providing sources about beliefs other people have, or that we believe people had in the distant past.
We want to provide the best possible resources on our faith that we can, so we have to be careful here. Always remember that when you’re reading these articles and resources, we’re having a conversation about a living faith. If you have questions about the pre-Christian pagan religion and what sources we have for it, we can provide that to you.
But if you were to answer all those questions in exact detail with sourcing for all your arguments it still would not help you at all. Because now you’re stuck with completely accurate beliefs that people held in the late Iron Age and not a single clue for what you ought to believe. Should you believe what people believed in the late Iron Age? Why? What in the whole religion compels you to do that?
If every debate you have about your faith is just a debate about what happened in the distant past, then I have bad news for you: your religion only exists there. It does not exist now. That faith, whatever it was, is gone.
You may be able to describe in detail what the ancient Vikings believed and still not believe a bit of it yourself. You have every source and citation you need but not a single reason why you ought to believe what you believe right now. There is still a yawning gap between what was believed and what you ought to believe.
Why is that? Because all of the questions you answered were answers about someone else, not you.
All those sources you gathered? They’re about someone else. You accurately described what someone believed in 786 CE on a small patch of land in Lower Saxony. Congratulations.
That’s why we’re doing this series. We want to close that gap. We want to answer questions about us, today. That’s part of why we exist in the first place. We’re an organization dedicated to education about a religion and serving a religious community that exists right now.
There has been sufficient ink spilt about how exactly Heathens should reconstruct their religion.
While this DIY attitude might have suited times past, there is a large corpus of present practice and tradition that stretches back 30-50 years that people have to confront, and that is far more important than whether or not you’ve read the Gesta Danorum.
The modern faith of Ásatrú is approaching its third generation. The people who originally were part of the inclusive movement have kids who were raised in the faith, and those kids in some cases now have kids that they are raising in the faith.
While some people want to be scholars to develop the faith further, other people want to serve their communities just as clergy or lay counselors. Everyone has a place here. Demanding everyone “do their homework” demands that everyone be some level of a scholar, and that’s simply not what everyone wants to do.
Not everyone wants to start from scratch and DIY their own religion from primary sources. Feel free to not do that.
Hey, I came here for magic, don’t you have some super-secret esoteric practices that I could get into?
Oh yeah, absolutely. We’ve got you covered there. Decades of influence and cross-pollination with other Neo-Pagan practices like those in Wicca or Thelema have resulted in the creation of many esoteric practices within Norse Paganism. Runic divination is a very popular one. Seidhr is another popular form of magic.
Do we all really believe in that stuff? Not uniformly, no. Those that do, though, really do buy into it. They experiment. They try new things. It’s a full-time pursuit for them.
For those that don’t, it can feel like a lot of grift, flim-flam and snake oil.
It’s best to think of Heathenry as a religion that contains some magic or esoteric practices within it rather than Heathenry as itself an esoteric or magic-based religion. Some people look at the runes and see the endless mysteries of the cosmos, others just see ABCDEFG…
