jprussell | (Reply)

From:

Howdy!

Thanks very much for your reply, given how helpful your comments were on the Hail Idun, I've been hoping you'd share some thoughts. Thank you also for your reply on MM this week - I had to get to bed early and didn't see it until after the post had closed and so wasn't able to reply directly.

As for your comments, yes, exactly! You've well captured some of what I'm struggling with here - trying to imitate as much of the "magic" of the Catholic Rosary as I can, while still honoring and embodying a genuinely different Heathen faith, which is obviously quite hard, and you got to the heart of the matter - how polytheistic should each individual prayer be? Focusing solely on Odin as the Allfather makes "mapping" between Christian and Heathen concepts easier, but it necessarily misses out on the core premise of "but our full religious expression has other Gods too." One advantage of the "set of prayers" approach is that I don't necessarily have to get everything into one single prayer, but the hope is that the entire sequence is reasonably complete, at least for one approach. Besides the "Allfather" and the "Hail Idun," there's also the "Tree Creed" and "Mark of the Wells," and I plan to also come up with a closing prayer. Already, the "Tree Creed" is more generally calling upon all the Gods, and the closing prayer might also do so, so maybe I'll have "polytheist bases" covered there, but it's useful to think about whether it ought to be more interwoven. To try to feel this tension out, I've been bouncing back and forth between tighter and looser inspiration by/imitation of the Christian "Our Father."

So yes, I'm firmly into needing intuition to guide me, and lucky enough to have some spurs to it in the form of comments like this, so again, my deep thanks.

As for your prayer, first off, thank you! Seeing others' takes is very helpful. And this is very nice. It has a good rhythm and some rhymes, which I have not been able to make work with the alliterative framework I've mostly been trying to stick with. And of course, you bring in Tyr and Thor, which continues the masculine focus of this prayer to contrast with the feminine of the "Hail Idun," but hits on the poly part of polytheism you brought up. So, altogether, I'll definitely be mulling this over before further tries.

Thanks again, and my blessings if you'll have them,
Jeff