Day 11: Pantheon – Overview

If you have been following my blog for a while, then you’ll know that I look into a variety of neighboring cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, with greater emphasis on Magyar cultures (and it’s influences) because there’s so little known about its pre-Christian past compared to Germanic or Slavic cultures.  This mixture applies to the gods as well. Even if I have names, there’s little to no explanations or descriptions for many gods so I have to fill in the blank so to speak with concepts from possible cognate gods and with my own UPG. So while I do prefer to make things as historical as possible, and I base as much as possible in evidence presented by literature and archeology, there are some things that are gonna be major UPG here to at least keep things making sense for me.

Explanation on the cosmology structure can be found here. It’s essentially a World Tree structure, growing out of a giant deer skull. The Upper World is the crown, the Middle World the trunks and surface roots, and Underworld is below the surface deep into the skull. Surrounding this is the ancient sea, creating an island of sorts out of the skull and tree, and is ringed by mountains on the horizon. Surrounding all this are the Mother and Father of all, being both the material and the makers of all that is and will be.

The Origin

Arany Atyácska (Golden Father), Hajnal Anyácska (Dawn Mother)

Mother Danube (the Primordial Waters)

Upper World

• Sunna (The Sun)
• Napkirály (King of the Sun)
• Mano (The Moon)
• Hold Anya (Lady of the Moon)
• Turul (Heavenly Messenger)

Middle World

• Nagy Boldogasszony (Queen Mother)
• Szélkirály (King of the Wind and Rain)
• Hadúr (King of War)
• Csodaszarvas (Miraculous Doe)
• Tündér Ilona (Queen of Fairies)
• Tabiti/Kresnik (Hearth Fire/Sacred Fire)
• Fra Berta (The Bright One)
• Volos/Zomok (The Serpent God)
• House and Nature wihts
• Ancestors

Underworld

• Ördög (King of the Dead)
• Wihts of bad things

I’m going to be giving each one here a post (if I haven’t already) with my own understandings and associations, that way their roles will (hopefully) become clearer.

I also want to point out that the high gods are primarily Magyar ones, but the lower gods and mythologies are what I tend to associate with more Germanic and Slavic wihts (along with some Ho-Chunk and other Great Lakes tribes’ wihts, since I live in their area). This is the pattern I tend to find when researching Hungarian stories and culture, where the more formal sagas are distinctly Magyar, while the informal tales feel Slavic.

Day 10: Patrons

I don’t have any patrons. It’s not a concept I believe in. However, there are gods that have great personal significance for me: Csodaszarvas, Fra Berta, Volos, and Parom. If I did believe in patronage, they would be the ones I’d petition.

In the past I’ve also referred to Grandmother Spider as being a significant deity for me, but lately I’ve been questioning the idea. Spiders themselves are still highly important to me, but I really don’t know if the spider experiences actually have any link to Her. Rather, like the foxes, I’m starting to feel that the spiders are significant beings in their own right, rather than being representative of a deity.

(And I know that I keep referring to “the foxes” without any context. They’ll be day 14 of this list, as they’re a unique aspect of my beliefs and experiences that need their own space to be satisfactorily described).

Day 9: Beliefs – Deity Gender

I briefly discussed this in my first Non-Binary Mysteries post so it might sound repetitive, but I want to make the 30 days of Paganism structure as complete as possible.

My beliefs about deity gender (or the gender of wihts in general) are not strongly held. Several of my gods have been depicted in both male and female ways (no third genders simply because the source cultures were binary, as far as we know), but the depictions are usually in favor of one gender over the other. Volos (Veles), for example, is primarily depicted as male. Yet there are giant snake/dragon beings that share everything with the “standard” Volos associations, except they’re described as female (or they’re mentioned as suckling young, which is a traditional sign of being female). Many deity depictions of my gods are like that, where there’ll be either an opposite-gender version in one of the stories, or there is an opposite-gender counterpart with a similar name (Fra Berta has many names, one of which is Lady of the Ember Days. There is also a Man of the Ember Days, with no distinction other than being the male equivalent).

I do ascribe to certain gender depictions for certain deities without switching back and forth simply because that’s either how I’ve come to know them in the stories, or it simply “feels” right. Having Csodaszarvas or Fra Berta be female feels the most comfortable to me due to their motherhood associations and due to how “female” is viewed in the culture I’ve grown up in. When I left Catholicism and started researching all this, it was empowering to me to see these powerful and important figures as a sex that I’m viewed as, as the sex that’s lower in rank compared to males. But as I got older and became more comfortable with myself, the gender of the deities became less important to me as well.

I also started to realize that the deity’s genders were more symbolic of how they worked with humans and how the sexes were viewed in the source cultures, rather than anything actually involving sex or genitalia, which allowed me to become more apathetic about their gender as well. For instance, Nagy Boldogasszony is always described as female. This isn’t because she biologically has a uterus, xx chromosomes, etc., but because she has consistently been the god to petition to for women’s protection in pregnancy and birth. That association carries over to the more symbolic realm, where the Magyars considered agriculture and earth-related endeavors to be associated with female qualities due to the appearance of the earth giving birth to new life each year (my suspicion, assuming the “original” Magyars were steppe riders, that this is an adoption from their agricultural Slavic neighbors once they became more sedentary). Her becoming conflated with the Catholic Virgin Mary solidified the female depiction.

I find that the high gods, due to having more “official” descriptions compiled over time, tend to be the ones with gender associations, while the lower gods and local wihts are usually more ambiguous. The foxes have no apparent gender, for instance, nor do the nature wihts that I’ve come in contact with thus far. The one local wiht that I met up near Door County, WI  (The “White Lady”) was female, but that’s because she appeared as a form of Virgin Mary to a future nun and her followers accepted that vision as fact (I’ll go into that in a future post, as she was a one-time visit rather than a permanent part of my pantheon, since I don’t live there anymore). That’s how she “felt” to me too, so that’s how I’ll consider her until it’s indicated otherwise.

Day 8: Patronage and other deeper relationships

Ya know, this could have been another short post like a couple of others but I’m gonna try to delve into this with a bit more meat because there’s a lot that can be said about this, even if I don’t get personally involved. I’ve also had conversations recently that have given me a lot of food for thought regarding deities and how humans relate to them in my worldview. As a refresher here’s my previous post going over what I felt deities were in general. In addition to that, I feel that I must add here that the term “deity” is more of a title or a class of being rather than a species of being, so to speak. They’re basically big wihts, one who rules over a major function, group, and/or area as determined by the reference culture (a wiht may be a high god in one culture, but a low god in another, and be completely meaningless in yet another culture). It all depends on who you ask whether one is a deity or not, and for me there’s a gradient or hierarchy of wiht status rather than clear categories of “deity” vs. “non-deity”.

Like I said in my Being Heathen post, I don’t believe in the concept of patronage when it comes to wihts. It feels hubristic to think that they would do such a thing for us, let alone be directly involved in our lives at all. It also feels very contemporary Christian, what with the idea that we can have a personal, familial relationship with Jesus/God and the concept of a patron saint for certain sects. I have a suspicion that the idea of personal patronage is a Christian influence due to so many Neopagans coming from Christian cultures. Yes, there is evidence for individuals to have a patron-like relationship with a god, but those individuals are usually big deals like kings or chiefs, not a regular civilian (i.e. Turul appeared to Emese’ to fortell the birth of Almo’s, in a style not unlike the angel speaking to Virgin Mary about Jesus. Almo’s becomes the ancestor of the ruling family of the Magyars and by extension the leader of the Magyars. He wasn’t just any baby that Turul got involved with). I don’t consider “gods of a group” type (such as a “god of farmers” or “god of magicians”) are to be considered personal patrons because they’re for the whole class of people as defined by their work, not any one individual as a whole.

Instead, what I feel actually happens is that a person pledges their devotion to a wiht, gives them offerings, shrine space, and attention, and the wiht might take interest in them. There is a concept sometimes used in Germanic heathenry called fultrui that references this idea (essentially translated into a relationship of trust in a deity) but there is no equivalent in Magyar culture that I know of currently. However, there are totem-like concepts present that likely have a similar relationship of trust, protection, and reciprocation for the group as a whole. Turul is the obvious one, as she fortold the birth of the founding ruler and is an important representative symbol to this day, but Csodaszarvas’s role in leading the men to their wives and thus their future cultures could also be considered a totemic one.

As you can probably tell, I do not have a lot of deeply personal relationships with most wihts, god or not. There are those who are very special to me, but it’s a matter of me being in devotion to them out of awe or gratitude rather than them patronizing me. I don’t expect them to even notice me that often, let alone interact with me or my kind. Very few of my gods are close to humans or have any need for direct, individual interaction, and most of them do not have human-like features or tendencies. Those that do get heavily involved in human lives, such as the hearth/fire wiht, are an exception rather than a rule. Other cultures tend to be the opposite, such as the Hellenic gods. Why that is, I cannot say. But coming from a Roman Catholic background where there can a ritual devotion for nearly everything and everyone, I have to say I much prefer the hands-off feel of my gods. It may seem a bit harsher and more distant, but they’re still very real and very special to me.

Day 7: Holidays

Slowly but surely we’re chugging along with the 30 days of Paganism meme, and this is one of my favorite topics to talk about!!

I love personal calendars, especially when you start seeing how they evolve according to one’s environment and home culture. Mine is no exception, as it’s a blend of Pagan and Catholic traditions from the ancestral lands carried into the US. Due to my currently solitary nature, continuous research, and the fact that changes in life are prone to happening, my calendar is tentative rather than being hard and fast (despite having specific dates listed), and is not entirely religious in nature.

Winter

• Feast of the Dead (October 31-November 2)
  • A mixture of US Halloween festivities and the more solemn ancestor worship of European All Soul’s Day, where ghosts and spirits are awoken and the ancestors return. The growing season has officially ended.
  • Honors: Ancestors
• Harvest Celebrations (Late November)
  • These are usually several family-oriented days (including US Thanksgiving) that center around gratitude for the last of the harvest. Usually by this point all the native plant species have gone dormant for the winter, and the migratory birds have past. Deer hunting season traditionally occurs this time as well.
  • Honors: Nagy Boldogasszony
• Krampus Night/St. Nick’s Day (December 5-6)
  • A fun little Christmas holiday where the kids leave out their clean shoes in anticipation of some goodies from St. Nick. A holdover from family traditions.
• Green Sunday (1st week of December)
• Copper Sunday (2nd week of December)
• Silver Sunday (3rd week of December)
• Gold Sunday (4th week of December)
  • These Sundays are a holdover from Advent, as mini-celebrations in anticipation of Karascunt and the Rough Nights. Due to the names I also use the days to reference a corresponding Magyar deity (Copper – Hadúr, Silver – Szélkirály, Gold – Napkirály)
• Karascunt (December 21/22)
  • Winter Solstice festival full of fire, drink, and merryment to celebrate Csodaszarvas carrying the Sun over the river to begin the year anew and overcome the darkness. First day of the Rough Nights. Spinning stops by this night.
  • Honors: Csodaszarvas
• Bertchten Day (January 5-6)
  • This day ends the Rough Nights and the new year begins. The sun finally overcame the darkness and the light continues to grow in strength. Spinning chores resume. Also known as Twelfth Night (evening of Jan. 5)
  • Honors: Fra Berta/Lutzl (though she is also associated with all 12 of the Rough Nights)
• Day of the Bear (February 2)
  • Midwinter celebration in anticipation of the season’s end. The Bear awakes and bring with it the first hints of life and hope in a time where patience and food stores are wearing thin. “Spring cleaning” and purification processes occurs at this time. Winter expulsion begins.
  • Honors: Szélkirály
• Zöldágjárás (usually mid-late March)
  • First hints of life appears in the trees and shrubs, and the initial bits of greenery is brought inside to continue the purification process. Boughs of greenery are formed into arches and wreathes for women and children to dance under, and boys splash water on girls (purity and fertility rite, most likely). Birds are migrating back at this time.
• Fruit-grafting day (March 25)
  • Fruiting tree branches that are starting to bud are grafted and hopefully successful. Several traditions regarding death and fertility surround this day as it is also the Catholic holiday of Mary’s conception of Jesus.
  • Honors: Nagy Boldogasszony
• Walpurgis Night (April 30)
  • Winter expulsion ends, compelling the ghosts and ancestors back to sleep. Most migratory birds have returned and begun their breeding season.

Summer

• May Day (May 1)
  • Summer begins. The fields and markets are readied for the growing season.
• May Crowning (May, usually mid-to-late May)
  • Fields are cleared and sown, and seedlings transplanted, as the risk of frost is gone by this time. First harvest occurs around this time (depending on what plants are growing). Leaves have returned to the trees. Flowers are offered to the Queen of May by young girls.
  • Honors: Nagy Boldogasszony
• Szentiván-éj (June 24)
  • A summer solstice celebration of fire, successful crop growth, and remembering the ancestors. Peak growth and first major harvests are occurring around this time. Apples are served to the fire and to the graves.
  • Honors: Csodaszarvas
• Goldenrod Days (late September-early October)
  • A completely made-up period surrounding the autumn equinox to mark Summer drawing to a close. The Goldenrod flowers are in their full, yellow bloom, as if they absorbed part of the sun and took away some of its vigor. Apples are harvested at this time, and the birds are undergoing their fall migration.
  • Honors: Volos/Zomok

*Deities and their associations here will be discussed further in later posts of this meme. Some associations are traditional, some are not. Those with / between two names refer to the same being.

**The inconsistency of the names is due to some English counterparts being too vague to be a useful label, so the source culture’s holiday words are used instead to refer to their specific traditions that I observe (i.e. “Karascunt” in place of “Winter Solstice”). Exception being Zöldágjárás since there is no English counterpart in existence.

Day 6: The power of prayer/reciprocity

Day 6 of the 30 Days of Paganism meme. This will be another short one like the Day 5: Magic post because my attitude and use of both concepts are very similar.

Given that this asks about the POWER of prayer/reciprocity rather than solely the belief, I’ll take this literally and answer this as I don’t think there’s a whole lot of external power to prayer. Rather, it acts internally to relieve anxieties and restore a sense of control in one’s life.

Course, that armchair-psychology approach to it hasn’t stopped me from praying to the foxes (more on them later), ancestors, or to certain gods when I was in need of something like a job or even a good grade. What was the American saying, that there’s always going to be prayer in schools as long as there are tests? It’s meant to be a joke but it’s a sad truth.

Even if I believe that it doesn’t actually do much, I still make sure to reciprocate and give offerings to whoever I prayed to for their help, especially if my request was fulfilled. Do I know for sure if what I wanted happened because of chance or because of who I asked? No, but I’ll live as if the latter was the cause.

Day 5: Magic, spellcraft, mysticism etc

Back to the 30 days of Paganism meme. This will be a quick one.

I have very little personal interest in magic. Aside from the occasional casting divination and partly magic/partly prayer type of ritual in dire situations it has little purpose in my life. I do enjoy reading about magic rituals in historical/anthropological texts however.

As far as beliefs go about magic, I’m kind of agnostic about it. I don’t really have any belief in it, but I don’t have much of a belief against it. I’m highly skeptical of people who claim to be witches, magicians, shamans, or sorcerers and they’ll have to do a lot before I believe they’re not full of themselves or being delusional (I can’t control who uses those labels, but there are too many cases where I find the use of the labels extremely questionable and ignorant of what they actually mean, and I blame New Age literature for much of that).

However, I will admit that I think certain people in the world do have a legit magical/spiritual skill, and that there is a time and place for mystics in today’s world.

Day 4: Birth, Death, and Rebirth

Hm, since I haven’t read other people’s entries to this meme in a while, I’m not entirely sure what the underlying question is: beliefs (such as where we go when we die) or associations (such as the deities of birth and death, or funeral rites). I’m going to treat this as all of the above unless someone corrects me ahead of time.

Birth

“Nagy Boldog Asszony” Silk Painting by Somogyi Réka

I’m going to assume that we all know where babies come from (i.e. it ain’t the stork delivery service). So there really isn’t much in the personal-belief department regarding birth and pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, cells divide, and if all goes well those bundles of cells eventually form a being that’s ready to be pushed out (or surgically removed) into a world that’s drier and colder than Mommy’s uterus. Not much room for spiritual imagination. Now the concept of an embryo’s soul or personhood, that’s another thing entirely. I believe (no basis in anything cultural, historical, or scientific, just a personal belief) that the embryo starts developing into a person soon after the heart starts beating. Or, to put it another way, the formation of a soul puts the seed of life into the embryo’s body and makes the heart start beating. I say “formation” because I don’t really believe in reincarnation. I also say “start” because I don’t believe the “soul” is done developing (or becomes complete) until long after birth, if at all.

As you can see, I tend to connect soul development to physical development. This is primarily due to my view on the soul being intertwined with the physical body, so much so that they’re practically one and the same (this is based on the world-accepting nature of general heathenry and the pre-Christian/early Christian descriptions of the dead). I am not housed in my body, I AM my body.

As far as rituals go, if I ever do give birth there will probably be several. In the pre-Christian past there seems to be naming ceremonies which celebrate both the birth of the child and it’s acceptance into the community through giving the child an identity. This purpose has continued to this day in Catholicism under the guise of baptism. Because my family is Catholic, I probably will give my hypothetical child a baptism so as to reference that familial inclusion (plus, it’ll cover some bases in case anything happens to me and my family has to raise the child in my place, or if I have to put the kid into private school).

I’ll also probably do my own ritual introduction of my child to the world. I don’t have my books near me at this time, but I recall some Slavic cultures having a sort of “baptism” where you show the child to Earth and Sky, ask for protection and guidance from particular deities, and have a party afterwards. That’s basically how a Catholic baptism goes in my family, you do the ritual in Church a month or so after the baby is born, then you head over to Gramma’s house for a big dinner with all the extended relatives rolling into town. Gifts, primarily money-based ones like bonds, were given to the mother to cushion the child’s nest egg. We can see a similar theme in folklore, where a poor father goes out looking for a godparent to help with child-rearing finances. Stuff happens, and the father ends up with a wealthy godparent for the kid. By having the child be formally accepted into the family, the child gains access to familial support.

If I were a mother, then I would be able to include Dec. 26th in as a day of honor, since that’s a day linked to the deity Boldog Asszony and her associated motherhood trait. That day seems to have been reserved for families, particularly mothers with their children, so obviously at this point it’s not a part of my calendar. Otherwise, birth of life in general is reserved for the spring and early summer, like during the Easter season and May Day.

Death

From The Faraway, Nearby (1938) by Georgia O’Keefe

Death is a little less straightforward, and I’m not entirely sure what to think. I tend to keep to my non-romantic preferences in that once someone’s dead, that’s pretty much it. However, I also participate in ancestor worship, which entertains the idea of some stage of existence after death. I’m not certain either way, and I could care less. If I do end up simply six feet under, that’s fine. If I go to a land of the dead and rejoin my family, that’s fine too.

Aesthetically, however, I do find the stories and figures surrounding death to be fascinating. Death itself is a natural state of being rather than a wiht, but I do think there are wihts that are involved with the dead and dying. There are several, big and small, that are known: Ördög, Woden, Veles, Berchta (specifically dead children that were marginalized), and numerous others that I don’t know the names of at this time. The main roles seem to be land-based, where they head the land of the Dead, and/or psychopomp-based, where they collect the dead into a group and lead them somewhere (either on a journey or to the lands of the dead). The variations on these themes are common and numerous around Europe, and pretty much around the world. For years I was deeply interested in the psychopompic beings specifically, as I wanted to spiritually work in that “field” myself. Course, that was back in the confused days when I thought I could be a shaman. Nowadays my “psychopompic work” is limited to giving my respects to dead animals that I may find out in the field (no dead humans yet, though you never know what the future holds).

I keep the “land of the Dead” imagery alive in my personal cosmology because I don’t see that as being world-rejecting, like Christianity’s heaven/hell is. The lands of the Dead seem to be physical places on (or in) the same Earth that we live on when alive, just a different location. I prefer the imagery of a hollow mountain the most, probably because it’s ubiquitous in the folktales I read the most (and my ancestral homeland is riddled with mountains). My second favorite resting place is a wetland. I live by wetlands and they held so much symbolism for my pre-Christian ancestors that I feel compelled to keep wetlands in my personal cosmology. I just find them so mysterious and lovely at the same time, especially the ancient sphagnum (quaking) bogs with their visible history. Realistically though, the land of the recent dead would be the cemeteries. We don’t really have mountains in Chicago, given that it started out as a wetland prairie, and it’s probably a health hazard to dump bodies in a bog, so the imagery will have to be relegated to stories only.

I do not have much in the way of funeral rites that are related to paganism. If a family member dies they go through a Catholic funeral and get buried in the Church’s cemetery. When I die I’d like to be cremated or left to rot naturally and have my remains be put in a marsh. Nothing too fancy, though I certainly wouldn’t complain if a giant statue of me in a cool pose was built in the city square.

Rebirth

Simply put, I don’t believe in it. But if it does happen, then cool; I’d like to come back as a land wiht in that marsh my body gets dumped in. Or I’ll hang out in my giant statue and be a city wiht, conferring good luck on the residents while messing with the annoying tourists.

Day 3: Deities

Because there are slots later in this meme that accounts for specific beings and pantheons, I am going to instead use this part to describe the natures and roles of deities in my view.

It used to be that I would just consider myself a strict polytheist, meaning that every deity is its own being in the way many humans consider each physical individual to be their own person. Nowadays it’s not so straightforward (though I still could be considered a polytheist). I have a tendency to be analytical about life, but deities are so difficult to do that with. For starters, no individual is going to meet most of the known deities in the world, let alone unknown ones. All we have to work with, for the most part, is what someone else says. Second, with the beings we DO have personal experiences with, we often still work with assumptions based on other people’s word, and sometimes there are disagreements. When there are disagreements, how do you know it’s actually the same being? How do you know the being you’re contacting is actually the “right” one? Third, how on earth is a deity that’s supposed to be connected or rooted in a specific geographical location or a specific group of people contacting you halfway across the world? Why would they even do that to begin with?

See what I mean about being analytical? I was that kid that  Sunday School teachers loathed.

It came to a point where I even questioned my questions, because they just weren’t getting any answers. I went back to square one, this time with my cultural interests in hand, and started doing comparative analysis on deities from various Eurasian cultures (I figured sticking with what I know instead of thinking globally would make it easier). I started looking at the human-deity relationships more than the mythological descriptions, and started developing a line of thinking similar to the creators of Waincraft. I had noticed that there are underlying similarities in function that numerous deities shared, which previously would have been considered coincidences or neighboring influences. A short while later, a discussion started on Asatru Lore’s forum on “gods as functions”, which went into the idea in great detail. That pretty much cinched it for me, because things were finally starting to make sense. Not everything of course, but I’m ok with that.

Where I am currently is a mixture of polytheism and god-functions. I keep the polytheistic belief with the beings that I have had personal experiences with. I “know” they’re there, so I can assume that they are their own beings. This tends to be associated the gods of low mythology (the ones with local cults) and totemic qualities (meaning clan-based, as in the academic form of “totem”). The ones that I do not have experience with, or the high gods, tend to be considered god-functions instead. For example, Thor/Donnar/Perun/Parom/etc. I treat the names as titles (referring to a Storm God) rather than representing individual beings. I do not assume the storms in Chicago are directly from Donnar or Perun all the way in Europe. I instead assume that there is a storm being HERE that’s the cause, and I call it a deity name as a title to refer to the storm-god function.

Confused yet? Trust me, in practice it’s not really that complicated. For one thing, it’s not like I meet a lot of deities in the first place, so I hardly have to think about these categories. I also don’t have to do anything with these categories when reading about deities in my heritage’s mythology, because they’re just in the stories at that point. If there are deity-associated holidays, like with Boldogasszony on Dec. 26th, then I simply pay respects to the deity and their associations at that point. No need to get into categories when I haven’t actually met them.

As for my other questions, such as the ones regarding long-distance contacts, I pretty much gave up on those. I figure that, if humans can figure out a way to communicate and mingle from afar, then so can gods. Besides, those questions would not have been useful in any way even if they could be answered, so there was no point in pursuing them.

Day 2: Cosmology

Day 2 of the 30 Days of Paganism meme. I’m currently waiting for the Dead Supper to finish cooking, as it’s the eve of All Soul’s and the start to both Winter holidays and ancestor veneration. It’s not much, just a pot pie and some fruit, but it’s something decent that we can share.

Hmm, cosmology, where to begin. Well, for starters, there is the folkloric view that I’m sure many of you are familiar with. Three levels, Upper, Middle, and Lower, forming a tier that can be illustrated as a tree or a mountain. We and much of visible earth exist in the Middle realm. The Upper realm is accessed via climbing up the World tree or World mountain, and the Lower realm is accessed via going down a cave, well, or similar holes in the ground.

It’s all well and good for art and stories, but I have a problem with leaving it at that. At the very least, there’s got to be numerous intertwining “trees” and “mountains” connecting many aspects of the three realms. Falling into a hole under an ancient tree isn’t going to lead one to THE underworld, it’ll be A world. Which brings me to one of my main assumptions: the otherworlds aren’t so “other” in that they might as well be totally different planets. I believe that there are layers of reality, the different worlds so to speak, that are all here (just go watch a Miyazaki movie, something like Totoro, you’ll get what I mean).

Of course, these are not the beliefs of someone who has done anything to travel to different realms, physically or otherwise. It’s simply the views that have made the most sense to me so far.

The second main assumption comes from my ecology background: the web. Ok, ok, and it also comes from my arachnology background,  but particularly ecology. You remember those food chains or food webs? It really is like that, and EVERYTHING, from the richest human to the seemingly insignificant bacterium, are connected to numerous other beings. When you trace out all the connections, it’s like a huge, dense web and nothing is left out of it. I view the concept of worlds and realms similarly. I can’t imagine that any world exists on its own.

The third, and final, assumption is also the most simple and applicable for my case. The home vs. the wild. My home is my “land”, the forest is their land, and things happen when that border is crossed. It’s the stuff of numerous horror stories and what-not-to-do folktales, but personally I don’t mind it much (this goes back to my tendency to go to liminal spaces I mentioned in my community post). Plus, I have to enter the forests and fields anyway for work, even if there’s danger.

So there you have it, my 3 types of worlds that describe my cosmology.

Edit: I went through this post so quickly that I forgot to mention my favorite “view” of the worlds. Evidence is scanty, but in Hungarian lore there are plenty of stories of a world tree that a taltos must climb to accomplish whatever he is doing (often a young boy, which makes me wonder if these tree-climbing theme was an initiation ritual or a time to realize his powers he was born with). There is one form of that world tree that is said to grow out of a horse or deer skull. Given that antlers do look like trees, and how widespread the deer cult was across Eurasia, it’s not a stretch to imagine a body or a skull having the worlds grow out of it. Look at Norse mythology, they took it much further and cut up a giant, using various body parts to make the worlds and people.

While not always practical or applicable, for reasons I explained earlier, I do imagine the worlds most frequently as the World trees growing out of a deer skull, antler-like, in a primordial ocean. The same primordial ocean reference in the creation story from Hungarian legends. This helps me both in art and in making a loose organization of the wihts, like the gods (only done for my own sake).