The Hammer
Defender of Fate
I would describe my worldview as polytheistic, creationist, animistic, deterministic, and relational, rooted primarily in Druidry and Celtic-Germanic Heathenry.
These labels need some explanation, though, because I don't necessarily mean by them what people first assume.
At the foundation of my theology is polytheism. I believe the Gods are Many. Odin is not simply another name for Thor, Freya, Brighid, the Morrigan, or Freyr. I understand the Gods as distinct beings or powers with their own identities, relationships, personalities, histories, spheres of influence, and agency.
I also don't assume that something must be omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, eternal, or responsible for creating the entire universe before it can meaningfully be called a God. Those assumptions largely come from particular forms of monotheism. They aren't requirements of polytheism.
A God can be immensely powerful without being all-powerful. A God can possess tremendous wisdom without knowing everything. Gods can struggle, change, form relationships, make mistakes, suffer, and perhaps even die.
Norse mythology illustrates this particularly well. Ragnarök includes the deaths of Gods, but it is also part of a larger cycle of destruction, survival, renewal, and rebirth. Divinity does not necessarily mean immunity from becoming.
That matters to me because I don't see perfection as necessary for something to be worthy of reverence. In some ways, the limitations and struggles of the Gods make relationship with them more meaningful.
My worldview is also influenced by the Druid concept of the Three Kindreds: the Gods, the Spirits, and the Ancestors.
The Gods are not the only beings worthy of relationship or reverence. There are also the Spirits, the many beings and powers belonging to the more-than-human world, and the Ancestors, those who came before us and helped create the world into which we were born.
I understand ancestry broadly. It can include familial ancestors, cultural and historical ancestors, and even the enormous evolutionary lineage of beings through which humanity came into existence.
Likewise, when I speak about Spirits, I don't necessarily imagine nature as an otherwise dead collection of objects with invisible ghosts inserted into it. My animistic tendencies run deeper than that. A forest isn't merely lumber waiting to be harvested. A river isn't merely so many gallons of water moving downhill. An animal isn't merely biological machinery.
They are participants in a world of relationships.
And that doesn't mean abandoning biology, ecology, chemistry, or geology. Those disciplines help describe what these beings and systems are and do. Animism concerns how I understand my relationship with them.
I also don't draw a sharp boundary between nature and the divine. This is probably one of the places where my theology differs most strongly from conventional Western monotheism.
I don't imagine nature as one thing and the Gods as supernatural beings standing somewhere outside it, occasionally reaching into the universe to interfere with its machinery. The divine can exist within nature and through natural processes.
Depending on what exactly we mean by "God" or "Spirit," I am even open to understanding things such as Earth, evolution, natural systems, and other vast processes as Divine.
My working conception of divinity is fairly broad representing something greater than humanity and worthy of worship or reverence as potentially divine. But that doesn't mean everything is secretly the same God.
Recognizing connections between things doesn't require collapsing their differences.
The Many can remain genuinely Many while participating in something larger than themselves.
I also describe myself as a creationist, but not in the common young-Earth or anti-evolution sense of that word. I accept evolution, common descent, geology, cosmology, and scientific investigation. I also have no theological problem with abiogenesis if life ultimately arose from nonliving chemistry.
None of that contradicts creation in my worldview. Creation does not require the Gods to periodically violate natural laws.
If natural processes are themselves part of divine activity, then evolution can be a means of creation. Chemistry can be creative. Geological processes can be creative. Stars forming elements are creative. Organisms reproducing, mutating, evolving, dying, and becoming the material from which other life emerges are all parts of an ongoing process of creation.
So when science explains how something happens, I don't see that as automatically eliminating the possibility of Gods.
This is where I distinguish methodological naturalism from metaphysical naturalism.
Science operates through methodological naturalism: it investigates observable natural causes because those are the kinds of explanations science can test.
Metaphysical naturalism goes further and claims that natural reality is all that exists.
The first is a scientific method. The second is a philosophical position. Science can describe evolution without answering whether evolution participates in something sacred or divine.
One of the concepts that ties much of my worldview together is Wyrd. I understand this as the interconnected web of causes, relationships, actions and consequences through which reality continually unfolds.
Wyrd isn't simply "fate" in the sense that everything is following a prewritten cosmic script.I see it more as an ongoing process of becoming. Everything that exists arises within relationships to other things. Every event emerges from conditions that came before it and becomes part of the conditions from which later events emerge.
Nothing exists completely by itself. The past shapes the present. The present reshapes what becomes possible in the future.Our actions become threads in that web. And so do the actions of other people, animals, ecosystems, societies, Ancestors, Spirits, and Gods.
This is where Wyrd connects strongly with my version of determinism. I don't believe choices somehow appear from nowhere. When I make a decision, that decision arises from who I am: my biology, experiences, relationships, memories, beliefs, desires, emotions, circumstances, and reasoning. And all of those have causes.
But I don't think that means I don't make choices. I believe agents exist, but I don't believe agents exist independently of the causes and relationships that made them who they are. I make choices precisely because I am the kind of being capable of weighing reasons, forming desires, considering consequences, and acting.
The fact that there are causes behind that process doesn't make the process unreal.
In fact, imagining a completely uncaused decision doesn't seem to rescue agency. If an action occurred for absolutely no reason and arose from nothing about me, it would look more like randomness than freedom.
So I don't see agency and causation as opposites. I am an agent within Wyrd, not an agent standing outside it. And I don't necessarily exempt the Gods from that principle either. Divine agency doesn't have to mean causeless agency. Gods can participate in relationships, history, obligations, consequences, and causation just as other beings do.
Now, that same reasoning influences how I understand the self. I don't think the self exists as some completely isolated thing hidden inside the body.
Who I am exists mostly through relationships.
I am shaped by other people, my culture, my ancestors, my environment, my experiences, my body, my memories, and countless interactions extending backward through time.
That doesn't mean individuality is an illusion.
It means individuality is relational.
A knot in a net is still a distinct knot. But remove every strand connecting it to everything else and there isn't much of a knot left.
This same principle applies more broadly to my polytheism. Things can be deeply interconnected without being identical. Unity does not require sameness.
I am also comfortable with liminality, with things existing at boundaries that aren't always cleanly divided into one category or another. That is why I often resist rigid either/or distinctions.
Natural or divine.
Individual or relational.
Determinism or agency.
God or natural process.
Objective or psychologically experienced.
Sometimes those distinctions are useful. Sometimes reality doesn't cooperate with the boxes we've created for it. Something can be natural and sacred. A person can be an individual and constituted through relationships. A God can be distinct while participating in Wyrd.
An experience can occur through the human mind without that automatically proving that its significance exists only inside the human mind.
And I am comfortable sometimes answering questions with either/or, neither/nor, both/and, or not-this/not-that, depending upon what the categories are actually describing.
My religious practice is consequently much more relational than doctrinal. My relationship with the Gods isn't primarily based upon believing the correct propositions about them. Nor is it based primarily upon obeying an infallible revelation or avoiding divine punishment.
It is based upon experience, reverence, reciprocity, offerings, devotion, relationship, and participation. The Gods can provide wisdom, inspiration, strength, protection, challenge, or simply presence.
Humans respond through offerings, ritual, remembrance, hospitality, devotion, and living in ways that maintain good relationships with the Gods, Spirits, Ancestors, other humans, and the world around us.
That idea of reciprocity is important. Religion isn't simply asking supernatural beings to give me things.
It is relationship.
And my ethics grow out of much the same framework. I don't think morality requires a divine lawgiver handing humanity a list of rules. Instead, morality emerges within relationships between beings capable of affecting one another.
Questions of harm, consent, autonomy, reciprocity, responsibility, empathy, justice, community, flourishing, and consequences matter precisely because our actions affect other beings.
Wyrd makes that almost unavoidable.
What I do doesn't end with me.
Actions produce consequences. Those consequences alter relationships and become causes themselves, spreading outward through the web.
This also explains why determinism doesn't eliminate responsibility.
Holding people accountable is itself part of the causal world. Teaching, praise, criticism, boundaries, restitution, laws, compassion, and consequences all influence future behavior. Responsibility doesn't require someone to have mysteriously stepped outside causation before making a choice.
It requires recognizing them as an agent whose actions matter within a network of other agents.
My use of mythology also doesn't require treating myths as scientific textbooks or literal historical transcripts.
Myths can communicate truths about Gods, relationships, cultures, values, death, transformation, sacrifice, chaos, order, and human experience without every event having to function as modern historical reporting.
Odin sacrificing himself upon Yggdrasil for the runes, drinking from Mímir's Well, or seeking wisdom through sacrifice tells us something about Odin and about the pursuit of knowledge regardless of whether we approach those stories like archaeological field reports.
Likewise, Yggdrasil itself is powerful imagery for how I already understand reality: worlds, beings, Gods, humans, Ancestors, past, present, and future interconnected within something vastly larger than any one participant.
The mythological and philosophical reinforce one another.
I experience and relate to the Gods as agents. But exactly what sort of beings Gods ultimately are, and how divine agency relates to human psychology, consciousness, nature, culture, and whatever reality may exist independently of us, is something I'm still exploring.
I don't think acknowledging psychological mediation automatically explains the Gods away. Every human relationship is psychologically mediated. I don't experience another person without my brain being involved either.
So the interesting question isn't merely whether religious experiences involve psychology. Obviously they do.
The harder question is whether psychology completely explains what is being experienced.
And on that question, I'm comfortable saying:
I don't know yet.
For me, uncertainty isn't the enemy of religion.
Sometimes it is where genuine theology begins.
Taken together, I see reality less as a machine made of isolated objects and more as a living web of relationships and becoming.
The Gods are Many.
The Spirits are Many.
The Ancestors are Many.
Human beings are animals produced through billions of years of natural history, yet capable of relationship, reverence, reasoning, creativity, and worship.
Nature is not merely scenery surrounding us. We participate in it.
Creation is not necessarily something that happened once in the distant past. Creation is happening continually.
Evolution creates.
Death creates possibilities for new life.
Relationships create people who did not exist before those relationships shaped them.
Our Ancestors helped create us, and our actions are already helping create the world inherited by those who come after us.
And running through all of this is Wyrd: countless causes, beings, relationships, actions, and consequences woven together into an unfolding reality.
I don't stand outside that web.
Neither, necessarily, do the Gods.
We are participants in it.
Distinct, but interconnected.
Many, without needing to become One.
These labels need some explanation, though, because I don't necessarily mean by them what people first assume.
At the foundation of my theology is polytheism. I believe the Gods are Many. Odin is not simply another name for Thor, Freya, Brighid, the Morrigan, or Freyr. I understand the Gods as distinct beings or powers with their own identities, relationships, personalities, histories, spheres of influence, and agency.
I also don't assume that something must be omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, eternal, or responsible for creating the entire universe before it can meaningfully be called a God. Those assumptions largely come from particular forms of monotheism. They aren't requirements of polytheism.
A God can be immensely powerful without being all-powerful. A God can possess tremendous wisdom without knowing everything. Gods can struggle, change, form relationships, make mistakes, suffer, and perhaps even die.
Norse mythology illustrates this particularly well. Ragnarök includes the deaths of Gods, but it is also part of a larger cycle of destruction, survival, renewal, and rebirth. Divinity does not necessarily mean immunity from becoming.
That matters to me because I don't see perfection as necessary for something to be worthy of reverence. In some ways, the limitations and struggles of the Gods make relationship with them more meaningful.
My worldview is also influenced by the Druid concept of the Three Kindreds: the Gods, the Spirits, and the Ancestors.
The Gods are not the only beings worthy of relationship or reverence. There are also the Spirits, the many beings and powers belonging to the more-than-human world, and the Ancestors, those who came before us and helped create the world into which we were born.
I understand ancestry broadly. It can include familial ancestors, cultural and historical ancestors, and even the enormous evolutionary lineage of beings through which humanity came into existence.
Likewise, when I speak about Spirits, I don't necessarily imagine nature as an otherwise dead collection of objects with invisible ghosts inserted into it. My animistic tendencies run deeper than that. A forest isn't merely lumber waiting to be harvested. A river isn't merely so many gallons of water moving downhill. An animal isn't merely biological machinery.
They are participants in a world of relationships.
And that doesn't mean abandoning biology, ecology, chemistry, or geology. Those disciplines help describe what these beings and systems are and do. Animism concerns how I understand my relationship with them.
I also don't draw a sharp boundary between nature and the divine. This is probably one of the places where my theology differs most strongly from conventional Western monotheism.
I don't imagine nature as one thing and the Gods as supernatural beings standing somewhere outside it, occasionally reaching into the universe to interfere with its machinery. The divine can exist within nature and through natural processes.
Depending on what exactly we mean by "God" or "Spirit," I am even open to understanding things such as Earth, evolution, natural systems, and other vast processes as Divine.
My working conception of divinity is fairly broad representing something greater than humanity and worthy of worship or reverence as potentially divine. But that doesn't mean everything is secretly the same God.
Recognizing connections between things doesn't require collapsing their differences.
The Many can remain genuinely Many while participating in something larger than themselves.
I also describe myself as a creationist, but not in the common young-Earth or anti-evolution sense of that word. I accept evolution, common descent, geology, cosmology, and scientific investigation. I also have no theological problem with abiogenesis if life ultimately arose from nonliving chemistry.
None of that contradicts creation in my worldview. Creation does not require the Gods to periodically violate natural laws.
If natural processes are themselves part of divine activity, then evolution can be a means of creation. Chemistry can be creative. Geological processes can be creative. Stars forming elements are creative. Organisms reproducing, mutating, evolving, dying, and becoming the material from which other life emerges are all parts of an ongoing process of creation.
So when science explains how something happens, I don't see that as automatically eliminating the possibility of Gods.
This is where I distinguish methodological naturalism from metaphysical naturalism.
Science operates through methodological naturalism: it investigates observable natural causes because those are the kinds of explanations science can test.
Metaphysical naturalism goes further and claims that natural reality is all that exists.
The first is a scientific method. The second is a philosophical position. Science can describe evolution without answering whether evolution participates in something sacred or divine.
One of the concepts that ties much of my worldview together is Wyrd. I understand this as the interconnected web of causes, relationships, actions and consequences through which reality continually unfolds.
Wyrd isn't simply "fate" in the sense that everything is following a prewritten cosmic script.I see it more as an ongoing process of becoming. Everything that exists arises within relationships to other things. Every event emerges from conditions that came before it and becomes part of the conditions from which later events emerge.
Nothing exists completely by itself. The past shapes the present. The present reshapes what becomes possible in the future.Our actions become threads in that web. And so do the actions of other people, animals, ecosystems, societies, Ancestors, Spirits, and Gods.
This is where Wyrd connects strongly with my version of determinism. I don't believe choices somehow appear from nowhere. When I make a decision, that decision arises from who I am: my biology, experiences, relationships, memories, beliefs, desires, emotions, circumstances, and reasoning. And all of those have causes.
But I don't think that means I don't make choices. I believe agents exist, but I don't believe agents exist independently of the causes and relationships that made them who they are. I make choices precisely because I am the kind of being capable of weighing reasons, forming desires, considering consequences, and acting.
The fact that there are causes behind that process doesn't make the process unreal.
In fact, imagining a completely uncaused decision doesn't seem to rescue agency. If an action occurred for absolutely no reason and arose from nothing about me, it would look more like randomness than freedom.
So I don't see agency and causation as opposites. I am an agent within Wyrd, not an agent standing outside it. And I don't necessarily exempt the Gods from that principle either. Divine agency doesn't have to mean causeless agency. Gods can participate in relationships, history, obligations, consequences, and causation just as other beings do.
Now, that same reasoning influences how I understand the self. I don't think the self exists as some completely isolated thing hidden inside the body.
Who I am exists mostly through relationships.
I am shaped by other people, my culture, my ancestors, my environment, my experiences, my body, my memories, and countless interactions extending backward through time.
That doesn't mean individuality is an illusion.
It means individuality is relational.
A knot in a net is still a distinct knot. But remove every strand connecting it to everything else and there isn't much of a knot left.
This same principle applies more broadly to my polytheism. Things can be deeply interconnected without being identical. Unity does not require sameness.
I am also comfortable with liminality, with things existing at boundaries that aren't always cleanly divided into one category or another. That is why I often resist rigid either/or distinctions.
Natural or divine.
Individual or relational.
Determinism or agency.
God or natural process.
Objective or psychologically experienced.
Sometimes those distinctions are useful. Sometimes reality doesn't cooperate with the boxes we've created for it. Something can be natural and sacred. A person can be an individual and constituted through relationships. A God can be distinct while participating in Wyrd.
An experience can occur through the human mind without that automatically proving that its significance exists only inside the human mind.
And I am comfortable sometimes answering questions with either/or, neither/nor, both/and, or not-this/not-that, depending upon what the categories are actually describing.
My religious practice is consequently much more relational than doctrinal. My relationship with the Gods isn't primarily based upon believing the correct propositions about them. Nor is it based primarily upon obeying an infallible revelation or avoiding divine punishment.
It is based upon experience, reverence, reciprocity, offerings, devotion, relationship, and participation. The Gods can provide wisdom, inspiration, strength, protection, challenge, or simply presence.
Humans respond through offerings, ritual, remembrance, hospitality, devotion, and living in ways that maintain good relationships with the Gods, Spirits, Ancestors, other humans, and the world around us.
That idea of reciprocity is important. Religion isn't simply asking supernatural beings to give me things.
It is relationship.
And my ethics grow out of much the same framework. I don't think morality requires a divine lawgiver handing humanity a list of rules. Instead, morality emerges within relationships between beings capable of affecting one another.
Questions of harm, consent, autonomy, reciprocity, responsibility, empathy, justice, community, flourishing, and consequences matter precisely because our actions affect other beings.
Wyrd makes that almost unavoidable.
What I do doesn't end with me.
Actions produce consequences. Those consequences alter relationships and become causes themselves, spreading outward through the web.
This also explains why determinism doesn't eliminate responsibility.
Holding people accountable is itself part of the causal world. Teaching, praise, criticism, boundaries, restitution, laws, compassion, and consequences all influence future behavior. Responsibility doesn't require someone to have mysteriously stepped outside causation before making a choice.
It requires recognizing them as an agent whose actions matter within a network of other agents.
My use of mythology also doesn't require treating myths as scientific textbooks or literal historical transcripts.
Myths can communicate truths about Gods, relationships, cultures, values, death, transformation, sacrifice, chaos, order, and human experience without every event having to function as modern historical reporting.
Odin sacrificing himself upon Yggdrasil for the runes, drinking from Mímir's Well, or seeking wisdom through sacrifice tells us something about Odin and about the pursuit of knowledge regardless of whether we approach those stories like archaeological field reports.
Likewise, Yggdrasil itself is powerful imagery for how I already understand reality: worlds, beings, Gods, humans, Ancestors, past, present, and future interconnected within something vastly larger than any one participant.
The mythological and philosophical reinforce one another.
I experience and relate to the Gods as agents. But exactly what sort of beings Gods ultimately are, and how divine agency relates to human psychology, consciousness, nature, culture, and whatever reality may exist independently of us, is something I'm still exploring.
I don't think acknowledging psychological mediation automatically explains the Gods away. Every human relationship is psychologically mediated. I don't experience another person without my brain being involved either.
So the interesting question isn't merely whether religious experiences involve psychology. Obviously they do.
The harder question is whether psychology completely explains what is being experienced.
And on that question, I'm comfortable saying:
I don't know yet.
For me, uncertainty isn't the enemy of religion.
Sometimes it is where genuine theology begins.
Taken together, I see reality less as a machine made of isolated objects and more as a living web of relationships and becoming.
The Gods are Many.
The Spirits are Many.
The Ancestors are Many.
Human beings are animals produced through billions of years of natural history, yet capable of relationship, reverence, reasoning, creativity, and worship.
Nature is not merely scenery surrounding us. We participate in it.
Creation is not necessarily something that happened once in the distant past. Creation is happening continually.
Evolution creates.
Death creates possibilities for new life.
Relationships create people who did not exist before those relationships shaped them.
Our Ancestors helped create us, and our actions are already helping create the world inherited by those who come after us.
And running through all of this is Wyrd: countless causes, beings, relationships, actions, and consequences woven together into an unfolding reality.
I don't stand outside that web.
Neither, necessarily, do the Gods.
We are participants in it.
Distinct, but interconnected.
Many, without needing to become One.
give me a blank page over a lookup table any day.
