The Gods

Resources for Heathens about the Norse/Germanic Gods

Asatru is a Polytheistic religion where we worship many Gods.

Even though in theory we can worship a great deal of Gods, in practice, most of us worship only a handful regularly. No one in Asatru is required to worship all the Gods or even to know all their names and stories. There are about 8 Gods that are very commonly worshiped, and then several that are less commonly worshiped. This isn’t an exhaustive list either.

This list includes beings that are not considered “Gods” by all in the Heathen community. We’re defining “God” descriptively here rather than prescriptively. That is to say, we’re just telling you who many people worship versus telling you who they ought to be worshiping.Just because the God you worship doesn’t show up on this list doesn’t mean it’s not a God!

Like we said before, this isn’t an exhaustive list of the only things you can possibly worship in Norse Paganism. If a name is mentioned somewhere in the literature, or found on a stone somewhere, chances are you can find someone out there who has a practice surrounding that where that’s a deity.

Don’t get discouraged! Just because something isn’t popular doesn’t mean it’s not right.

Commonly Worshiped Less Commonly Worshiped (but still out there)
Odin Ullr
Frigg Hel
Freyja Idunna
Loki Heimdall
Njord Skadi
Freyr Yngve The Norns
Tyr Fenrir
Thor Jormungandr
Balder Foseti

Heathens, in general, believe in the Gods, but we believe in different ways.

The better question is more like how many different ways do Heathens believe in the Gods. Because there are a lot of them.

  • A common position among Heathens today is hard polytheism: the idea that the Gods are separate entities, with distinct personalities, existing independently of human consciousness, and able to act independently of humans or of each other.
  • Some Heathens acknowledge the existence of many Gods and may honor them all when appropriate, but focus their devotion on only one, a position known as henotheism.
  • Heathens can also be found who espouse soft polytheism where the Gods exist and appear to exist independently, but are ultimately aspects or avatars of a greater single Godhead.
  • An offshoot of that is Heathens who feel that certain named deities are actually hypostases (aspects) of others; for example, Frigga’s handmaidens are sometimes thought to be hypostases of Frigga herself, reflecting different aspects of her total being.
  • There are also Heathens who espouse pantheism and say the Gods are identical with the entirety of the universe or panentheism where the Gods contain the universe and permeate everything in it, but also extend beyond it.
  • Some even express agnosticism (the existence of Gods cannot be decided on the available evidence) or atheism (Gods do not exist, or at least there is no compelling evidence to believe they do).
  • Most Heathens would also subscribe to some degree of animism: the belief that places, objects, and even plants and animals are inhabited by their own spiritual beings, the “wights” or vættir.

This openness can pose difficulties for newcomers who come from a religious background with a definitive doctrine that everyone is expected to espouse. What’s the right way to believe? Sorry to say we don’t have an answer for you.

And you’re no less of a Heathen than anyone else because you don’t know, or because you favor one opinion over another. There are going to be times in your life when you pass through all these different attitudes towards the existence of the Gods.

And in practice, we generally all get along.

There are several characters in the sagas who don’t worship any Gods; they are called gó›lauss, “Godless.” When asked about their religious beliefs, such people might say, like Bárðr in fiorvalds fláttr tasalda:

ek trúi ekki á skurðgoð eda fjándr. . . Hefi ek því lengi trúat á mátt minn ok megin.

“I don’t believe in idols or in the devil. . . so I have long trusted in my might and main” (ÍF 9, pp. 124-125).

Or, like Finnbogi the Strong, they might simply say

“ek trúi á sjálfan mik”

“I trust in myself ” (Finnboga saga ramma 19, ÍF 14, p. 287. See Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North, pp. 263-268.)

We have no evidence of orthodoxy in pre-Christian Paganism, and there’s no need for us to invent one.

As far as we know, ancient paganism never developed a formal list of propositions which had to be accepted in their entirety by anyone wanting to “profess their faith.” And we wouldn’t expect to find one either.

Rather, there appears to have been a wide range of beliefs and practices among people. At a larger scale, pagan traditions varied widely by region, and they changed through time as their societies changed. The attempts that a few Heathens have made to formulate something like a theological creed, along the lines of “I believe in Odin, the Allfather Almighty,” have never really caught on.

In fact, the Old Norse word used in the literature for what we would call “religion” is not trú, “faith, trust,” but sidr, “custom.” When the sagas speak of the pre-Christian religion, they usually call it forn sidr, “old custom.”

What was religion to them? As far as we know, it was just “what we do around here.”

Modern Norse Pagans have followed this pluralistic model, though since we are all reading from the same sources, there may be less diversity in practice than what someone might see throughout the Germanic world in times prior.

Anyone can worship the Gods regardless of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity or ability. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it.

Folkish white nationalists believe that a person’s “natural” religion is determined by their presumed race–defined here as either white or some shade “of color”. They believe that the natural religion of white people is some form of idealized Germanic Paganism, and that Christianity was a Jewish trick played on white people to get them to submit to Jewish domination.

So-called “Folkish Heathenry” has been discarded by Heathens today as a deeply destructive ideology based in white nationalism.

It used to be the case that Folkish white nationalists and Heathens worshiped side by side. We read the same books. We learned with them. We performed the same rituals and even created some together. We shared horns of mead with them. We shared meals with them. Our kids used to play together at the same campground retreats.

The hope was that somehow our shared interest in faith would overcome their commitment to the project of white nationalism and they’d someday stop. They’d grow out of it. We’d be so kind and accepting that it would somehow rub off on them.

But that didn’t happen and in retrospect it never was going to happen.

At some point, they were always going to choose white nationalism over our faith–it just took too many of us too long to figure that out.

The regret we have isn’t that they chose what they chose despite our efforts, our regret is all the people that were turned off or turned away from sharing our faith because at one time or another we decided trying to keep a white nationalist happy was more important than the safety and inclusion of anyone threatened by them.

The only valid forms of Heathenry today are inclusive. Full stop.

There is no “universalist” and “folkish” camp of Heathenry anymore. The question has been decided: folkism is derived from and adheres to an explicitly white nationalist and antisemitic political project and it will pursue the goals of that project to the same genocidal end that brought about the Final Solution.

We support all people, of whatever descent, who are drawn to the Gods and the spirits in the world around us and engage with them through our faith. Telling someone that they need to “find their own Gods” or find “the traditions of their own ancestors” is not Heathen. It is a form of discrimination and it is a spiritual poison.

We as an organization are firm in our stance that one’s presumed or perceived ancestry, ethnicity or race has no bearing on an individual’s right to practice our faith.

You’ll find some Heathens who scorn “eclectic” or “dual-trad” people who worship both Germanic Gods and Gods of another culture. But this isn’t in keeping with our faith.

Actual pre-Christian religions were far more flexible: King Rædwald of East Anglia (thought to be the king buried in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo) put a Christian altar in his temple, alongside the harrows of his tribal Gods. This seems to have bothered the Christians far more than it did the pagans in his realm. (Bede, Ecclesiastical History, II.xv; transl. Sherley-Price, pp. 132-133)

This doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone. There were no “hard borders” between Germanic, Celtic, Roman, Sámi, Slavic, and Baltic linguistic and cultural areas: religious ideas could and did travel back and forth (Gunnell, “Pantheon? What Pantheon?,” p. 58).

The Pagan revival movements of the 50’s and 60’s were enthusiastically eclectic, to the point where Paganism could cynically be described as a “spiritual buffet”  and some of the backlash to this feeling has lead to Norse Pagans throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Especially around the 90’s to the early 00’s, Heathens started to look upon our other Pagan ‘cousins’ with something of a haughty disdain–for their lack of scholarship, their refusal to provide any other sources besides their “feelings” and “experiences,” and for snatching different pieces of different religions without any regard for how those religions are actually practiced.

Today, maybe due to the softening that comes with old age, most Heathens have embraced the more tolerant and open view of eclecticism. Though some insist “dual-trad” isn’t really a thing and it’s actually just a person’s single tradition made up from a fusion of two traditions, but that’s just splitting hairs.

Heathens are divided on this topic. On the one hand, you have Heathens where these are all just names of the Divine beings. Thor, Tor, Donnar, Thunor… It’s the same as Frank, Francis, Francesco and Francisco. But to other Heathens these are completely different beings.

How do we resolve this?

Here’s the secret: we don’t. 

Or, at the very least, we keep working together despite those differences.

As a religion that puts more emphasis on practice and finds our faith in action, if we can still worship together, work together and share common cause, we can debate later the finer points of the metaphysics of how exactly our Gods exist.

And while Asatru, Norse Paganism, Forn Sed and Heathenry might be used as more general terms, there are also traditions like Urglaawe or modifiers like “Frisian” or “Frankish” that are more specific and come with different religious, cultural and linguistic differences.

But what unites us is greater than what divides us. While our languages might be different, the names and concepts of the Gods might be different, most Heathen traditions share deep values of hospitality, justice, compassion, kindness and generosity.

In practice, most Heathens will gladly attend events held by people with different traditions and beliefs and simply in their own minds work out which God is which. For example, a Norse Pagan who uses Norse names like “Freyja” might be attending a ceremony performed by people who prefer to use more Continental Germanic terms and names. They might say “Nehalennia” and a Norse Pagan might think “Ah, this means ‘Idunna’ to me” or “this means ‘Freyja’ to me.”

It’s advised to keep those thoughts to yourself, though. As it’s likely to spark a debate that’s ultimately unresolvable.

Why do Heathens worship the Gods?

There are a few reasons a Heathen might say that they worship the Gods. Here are a few popular ones.

The Gods make a way for us when we can’t see one.

People frequently pray to Thor for overcoming the obstacles in their path, or pray to Loki to transform their obstacles into a path. Whatever the reason, we feel stuck in something and we don’t see a way out. We pray to the Gods to help us see that way or to make that way for us.

The Gods are our light in the darkness.

Sometimes the path gets so dark we can’t even hope to see the next step in front of us, or we wonder why we even bother with anything at all. People also pray to the Gods for connection and their friendship in the hardest times, if not only to help us believe again that good times can return.

In giving our gifts, we reflect the benevolent nature of the Gods.

To some Heathens, the Gods are little more than characters in a divine soap opera with petty squabbles, secret agendas and interpersonal drama.

To other Heathens, the Gods embody the very nature of goodness, and it is through the gifting cycle that we engage with that goodness and identify ourselves with the divine. We show the Gods, through sacrifice, that we are of their nature and they return our gift with their gifts. To these Heathens, this is one of the most critical aspects of Pagan worship. In our rituals, we are reaffirming the goodness of graciousness, generosity, friendship and kindness. We give without expectation, but in faith that the goodness that is in us is in the Gods as well.

The Gods and Goddesses of Heathenry can be defined as “the deities worshiped by the names they were called by peoples who historically spoke languages in the Germanic family.”

The earliest cultures that can be identified as probably speaking Germanic languages date to about 500 BCE, but records of their cultures and religions are extremely sparse until the first century CE. Documentation increases through the Roman and Migration Ages.

By far the most complete information we have comes from Iceland after the Christian conversion, where, thanks to a unique set of social circumstances, medieval Icelanders were willing and free to incorporate some of their pre-Christian poetry and literature into some of their sagas and their handbooks on how to compose poetry.

Some of our practice derives from other Germanic languages, as well as in folklore and folk practices mostly recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries.

People often assume that in a polytheistic religion, each deity has a specific function that he or she is “God of.” This is a popular misconception.

Many popular books and articles on Norse mythology start with that assumption—Tyr is the God of War, Thor is the God of Thunder, Freyr is the God of Fertility, Freyja is the Goddess of Sex, and so on.

But this model of “departmentalizing deities” poses some serious problems. If a man today can take the roles of Husband, Father, Son, Boss, Employee, Coworker, Buddy, and perhaps others during the course of just one typical workday, can’t the Gods and Goddesses take different roles?

What’s clear from an examination of the literary and archeological sources on pre-Christian religion is that there never was a single, unified “Germanic faith”, with a common essential worldview and pantheon, in which every deity had an assigned role (Gunnell, “Pantheon? What Pantheon?,” pp. 56-58; Schjødt, “Reflections on Aims and Methods,” pp. 265-267).

Even the literature has the deities acting in multiple different ways and accomplishing all kinds of tasks.

    • In the literature, Freyja certainly does have a sexual side but she also claims half the battle-slain warriors, and she wields the powerful magic known as seiðr.

    • Thor may be shown as a warrior against jotuns, but other stories show him using his hammer to restore creatures to life, showing him as a healer or a hallower.

    • Odin gets the most complex treatment in the literature, and may appear as a kindly adviser, a father of great dynasties, a dark and devious betrayer, or a master of mighty and terrible magics who undergoes torment to win wisdom.

The Gods and Goddesses cannot be reduced to a corporate org chart.

While there are some spheres that various deities are especially known for, most of them can be honored or asked for help in many different ways. In modern Heathenry, it’s not obligatory to focus on all the Germanic Gods and Goddesses at once. There will probably be some that you are drawn to, and others whom you might honor only in passing. And this is normal.

We do not all accept that Medieval Germanic Heroic Literature was “correct” in describing our Gods

Some Heathens pound on the Edda and insist descriptions contained therein must be accurate, or else.

It’s hard to take this position seriously because some of these arguments sound reminiscent of a player arguing with a DM about the stats of the Sword of Dagonath or how much Necrotic damage a Lich can do against armor imbued with the Holy Relic of Gelionad. Someone throws “UPG” out there and the whole place just erupts into finger pointing.

But let’s take a step back here.

Why do people assume that any particular text is definitive?

If it’s a role playing game, of course the authority of the text matters because otherwise you can’t continue to play the game. Everyone has to agree as to the stats of the Sword of Dagonath or else the game cannot proceed, the Lich doesn’t get slain, everyone leaves, and all that Mountain Dew you bought doesn’t get guzzled.

But it’s very clear from reading the source material of Norse Paganism: our religion just doesn’t work that way and it never has.

Debates over whether so and so was “a giant” or whether Ymir was Odin’s great-grandfather just never seem to have happened. People never killed each other, that we know of, over whether Loki was involved in the death of Balder or if it was just a dispute between two Princes over the hand of Princess.

In short, the stories about the Gods reflect far more about the society and the people of the late iron age and early medieval period than it does about the Gods. The stories about the Gods are ultimately about the society in which they were worshiped: what that society or what this or that poet valued and cared about and so on.

We worship the Gods in a very different social context, and we do not limit our own stories and experiences of them to the experiences that people had thousands of years ago.

It’s helpful to think of religion like language and to approach it with the same open mind and curiosity.

When you’re talking about someone else’s language, they have different sounds to describe the same things we do. You might say “dog” and they might say “hund” or “goh.” This applies both to the most mundane things as it applies to the most holy things.

Our perspectives on divinity are conditioned by our upbringing and the world around us. It’s conditioned by our relationships and the experiences we have. We could all be looking at the same light source, but we take it from different angles and wearing different sets of lenses.

Maybe at some level, all Gods are somehow One; maybe not. Maybe all Gods are manifestations of a single divine energy; maybe not.

These are questions best pursued over a pot of tea or six pack, in our opinion.

Even the Christian God?

Many of us come from a Christian family and most of our families have been Christian for a very long time (1000 years or more). Some Heathens come from Jewish backgrounds and some even from Muslim backgrounds. But we’re all talking about the same thing: Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah… “The Big Guy.”

Many Heathens come to the religion having suffered trauma from their family’s version of Christianity. This can sometimes lead to feelings of anger and sadness. And they came to Heathenry looking for a refuge from that history. We’re happy to provide that hospitality and refuge for people to heal.

But in principle, and while personal experience may make individuals feel otherwise: we treat the Christian God or the God of Islam the same as we do the Gods of anyone else. We treat Them without hatred and without prejudice.

Regardless of the claims that any God makes about themselves, or anyone makes about their God; respectfully, we see it differently. While the propositions of some religions might exclude our Gods; respectfully, we do not feel the same way. We’re always going to disagree in that regard.

The way that we worship the Gods is through the performance of the ritual of Blót.

This isn’t, of course, the only way Heathens express their devotion to the Gods, but it’s the most common one and the one that most of us can participate in with others. Some of us have our own meditation or trance practices, but all of us recognize what Blót is and most of us have some idea how to do it.

This is where an important distinction comes in between ‘worshiping” the Gods and “working with” the Gods. We are using the word “worship” here, but you’ll see both used to describe how the relationship with the Gods is mediated. Is it mediated through acts of worship? Or is it mediated through an exchange of power like the relationship between a teacher and a student?

We are going to set aside “working with” the Gods for now, because that’s a topic better suited to discussions of magic and personal devotion. We’ll just talk about Blót.

What do I offer to the Norse Gods?

There is no pre-Christian resource that we know of that tells you exactly what offerings should go to which God, and any such information is purely anecdotal based on what modern worshipers feel is appropriate. For our purposes, the thing sacrificed is not as important as how it is sacrificed. The Gods are not divine pets, hungrily waiting for some of their favorite foods to be delivered by their eager worshipers. The Gods do not think of you as their waiter and no God will smite you for giving them Cabernet when they clearly ordered Merlot.

Thus, we are not going to include any section on specific offerings. We don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea that our Gods are petty, precious or particular. If you personally happen upon an offering that you feel is just right, then that’s your tradition and your business.

You can find many resources on our Gods in our resource library.