A former Marine and Green Beret, Martin is also a Heathen priest — and a guide to psilocybin-enhanced therapy for other vets suffering from severe PTSD.
In the podcast episode he describes how guided psilocybin therapy can “turn off the suicide switch” for vets suffering from PTSD and a like a purpose, as he once did.
You can almost hear the gears grinding as host Dale Stark, an outspoken Christian, struggles to reconcile his respect for Martin as a warfighter and his discomfort with his Heathen talk. To his credit, he moves through that as Martin insists that he will work with people of any religious background, or none. And there is good discussion of the last thirty years of religious-freedom legislation at the federal and state levels.
Martin’s books include Barbarian Spirit, which “details his journey using psilocybin mushrooms to heal a state of apathy that had plagued him for over a decade since retiring from the military.” Here he discusses “a warrior’s path to spirituality” on YouTube. From the Barbarian Spirit description on Amazon:
There has been a great awakening that we are in a spiritual war, without really understanding what that means. I didn’t know either, so I went to the place I could find out. Barbarian Spirit is what I found walking the spirit realm, both for me and for us. Things are far darker, and the hour far later, that I ever would have dreamed. But we are not without hope. Part personal journey, part prophetic vision, Barbarian Spirit will change the way you see the world around you.
A possible animal sacrifice location in the Howard Beach area. J.C. Rice (New York Post)
The New York Post had two articles recently on apparent animal sacrifice in the Jamaica Bay area of Long Island (politically in both Brooklyn and Queens).
Animal sacrifices are surging in Queens, with chickens, pigs and rats being tortured, mutilated or killed in “twisted” religious rituals in parkland surrounding Jamaica Bay, The Post has learned.
In a little over a month, at least nine wounded animals or carcasses have been discovered in the federally-managed Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel — including five live pigs with partially severed ears.
Creatures recovered from the revolting scene also include a near-dead baby rat tied up in a bag with chicken bones; a freshly decapitated chicken head; a live hen in distress; and a dead dog with its neck snapped.
Ethnographically, the article adds, “Jamaica Bay has been a popular religious site among members of the Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean diaspora living in nearby neighborhoods, including Richmond Hill and Ozone Park..”
In essence, per the Court, animal sacrifice for religious purposes is not illegal in the United States under the First Amendment.
Animal sacrifice pops up repeatedly in the Bible. Many Muslims partake in qurban (animal sacrifice) at the feast of Eid al-Adha. Some Orthodox Jews have a practice of waving a live chicken overhead while praying on Yom Kippur Eve, then slaughtering it for a meal according to the kosher rules. And Christians describe Jesus as the Supreme Sacrifice, some descibing themselves as “washed in the blood of the [sacrificial] Lamb.“
A. J. Jacobs, a non-religious Jewish writer in NYC, devotes a semi-humorous section of his book A Year of Living Bibically to attempting to join Hasidic Jews iin this ritual.1
Animal sacrifice was a key religious practice of the pre-Christian peoples of Germanic Northern Europe. It is now being revived by some modern Pagans who reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic religious traditions, drawing on medieval Icelandic literature as well as Anglo-Saxon literature and other related sources (155).
Jefferson Calico’s 2018 book Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary Americadevotes an entire chapter to the topic, examining its social, religious, and ethical contexts, noting that “Eating the sacrifice2 becomes a sacred as well as a dissenting act that calls into quesion and occasions a critique of secular, mainstream American eating practices” (314).
The Asatru would have eaten the “blotted” pig — were the ones found abandoned by some urban homesteader? A dead dog? Killed in ritual or killed to cause pain to its owner? Baby rat? (Mom made him get rid of it?). Cops3 operate with simple categories. What happens when you make a collar and end up in court being grilled4 by a First Amendment lawyer? Is it easier just to put up some lights than sort out the perpetrators, when some are criminals and others part of a protected class?
Subtitled “One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” the book describes his attempt to follow all the Hebrew Bible’s rules while living in New York City — with a very patient wife. [↩]
June 5th is the feast day of Boniface, an English monk who went missionary-ing among the German Heathens, who put an end to his career in 754. But they did not write the history books. Planting a tree would be an appropriate way to celebrate.
From Wiccan covens assembling in English drawing rooms to Rodnover midsummer gatherings in rural Russia, the modern Pagan religions represent a fascinating and diverse component of our contemporary religious landscape. Although their age, numerical size, and comparative cultural marginality leaves them outside the so-called “world religions”’ that attract the bulk of our attentions, I strongly believe that this family of new religious movements warrants far greater understanding among scholars of religion. In particular, these traditions offer us important insights into the modern reception of Europe’s pre-Christian heritage, into the construction of new religions, and into the complex interplay of gendered, ethnic, and religious identities in the 21st century.
Calico’s Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America is interesting in part because he was approaching Heathenry as a non-practitioner, something that set his work apart from much of the ethnographic research on modern Pagan traditions that had gone before. One of the things I particularly appreciated about Calico’s book was the attention he gave to issues of class, a topic often overlooked in academic studies of modern Paganism. Like the earlier work of Mattias Gardell, Calico’s project also highlighted the role of white nationalism and related far-right ideologies within certain sectors of the American Pagan milieu, an issue many other scholars had avoided.
If you are reading this blog, you have probably read The Triumph of the Moon, but all of these are worthwhile — I need to find Kimberly Kirner’s American Druidry now.
This survey is a means of gathering information about beliefs, behaviors, and demographics from Heathens and Pagans in the United States and Canada. It will ask you questions about aspects of your religious and personal life , and your opinion on hot-button issues. Its results will tell us what Heathens and Pagans have in common across borders, and how different Pagans are within them. For the purposes of this survey, “Pagan” is defined as anyone who practices a form of Paganism and / or identifies as a practitioner of any form of Paganism, and “Heathen” is defined as anyone who practices a form of Heathenry or Asatru or identifies as a practitioner of any form of Heathenry or Asatru.
Warning: A lot of the questions are about race, guns, and politics, so if you are uncomfortable with slicing and dicing that stuff, don’t go there.
Since I acquired this book for Equinox Publishing’s Pagan studies book series, I am happy to see it praised by an astute writer on Pagan history like Doyle White, who called it “one of two important works on American Heathenry that have appeared over the past decade.”
A little bit about Calico’s scholarly journey is interesting:
Many of us have experienced paradigm shifting moments during our educational journeys— those moments of discovery that unfold for us along new and unexpected paths. These moments arise from all sorts of stimuli—disciplined reading, insights from our teachers, and from seemingly random “aha” moments, to name a few. In my own journey, one of those moments came for me in reading Carole Cusack’s Invented Religions (Routledge, 2010) . . The cumulative effect of that book rescued me from a previously dismissive attitude about new religious movements and opened a new world of scholarly interest. I had entered my PhD program initially intending to pursue research on Islam. However, a conversation with my supervisor—strangely enough about the 1994 Olympics hosted by Norway—caused me to re-evaluate and drew my attention to the growing presence and influence of Paganism in the contemporary world. As I discuss in the introduction to Being Viking, an offhand question in a graduate seminar stirred my initial curiosity about Heathenry and led to it becoming a major interest. A chance conversation with a friend, Dr Thad Horrell, while walking to an American Academy of Religion (AAR) venue in San Diego led to a new line of inquiry and research that helped me to better understand the tributaries of American Heathenry.((You don’t get these experiences on Zoom.)) Rather than one over-riding passion, my interests and work have been nudged along by these sorts of important and transformative experiences.
Read it all here, including the part about being an “outsider” researcher at Heathen events.
Michael Strmiska (currently teaching in Latvia) writes,
Being Viking deserves great praise and wide readership as an extremely detailed and well-researched historical and ethnographical study of the American variant of the New Religious Movement (NRM) variously known as Heathenry, Heathenism, Asatru or Modern Norse (or Germanic) Paganism.
Calico ably addresses many dimensions of the American Heathen religion from the biographies and contributions of religious leaders such as Stephen McNallen, Valgard Murray, and Diana Paxson to such particular practices as the sumbel (a toasting ritual); the blot (an alternate form of the sumbel)), and seid/seit (an oracular rite). In addition, Calico examines the devotion to medieval Icelandic and Germanic literary and religious texts as key source materials, the dedication of many members to practicing premodern folk crafts from Norse and Germanic tradition, variant forms of organization that have developed over time, questions of the importance of ancestral identity in the self-definition of Heathenism, and the important and enduring debate between “universalist” and “folkish” forms of the religion over who should be allowed to participate in and affiliate themselves with the religion.
Being Viking deserves great praise and wide readership as an extremely detailed and well-researched historical and ethnographical study of the American variant of the New Religious Movement (NRM) variously known as Heathenry, Heathenism, Asatru or Modern Norse (or Germanic) Paganism.
Heathenism, to use Jefferson Calico’s preferred term for the modern Norse Pagan movement in America, is a form of modern or contemporary Paganism that endeavors to create a workable contemporary version of pre-Christian Norse Paganism as was once practiced in Iceland, Scandinavia, and Germanic Europe. Being Viking is the product of many years of participant-observation fieldwork research that Calico has conducted among Heathens in the United States and informed by extensive reading in the literature of NRMs in general and Modern Norse Paganism in particular. He builds on the previous work of such scholars as Jeffrey Kaplan, Mattias Gardell, Jenny Blain, Jennifer Snook, and myself.
Calico ably addresses many dimensions of the American Heathen religion from the biographies and contributions of religious leaders such as Stephen McNallen, Valgard Murray, and Diana Paxson to such particular practices as the sumbel (a toasting ritual); the blot (an alternate form of the sumbel)), and seid/seit (an oracular rite). In addition, Calico examines the devotion to medieval Icelandic and Germanic literary and religious texts as key source materials, the dedication of many members to practicing premodern folk crafts from Norse and Germanic tradition, variant forms of organization that have developed over time, questions of the importance of ancestral identity in the self-definition of Heathenism, and the important and enduring debate between “universalist” and “folkish” forms of the religion over who should be allowed to participate in and affiliate themselves with the religion.
The universalist conception holds that Modern Norse Paganism should be open and embracing to any person anywhere regardless of ethnic or racial background who feels a sincere spiritual interest in Norse Pagan gods and traditions. The folkish perspective holds that membership in the religion should be mainly—or even exclusively—limited to people of European or Germanic descent. Calico also provides valuable discussion of the problematic “metagenetics” theory propounded by Stephen McNallen, a pseudo-scientific attempt to ground Heathen spirituality—and folkish exclusiveness—in European genetics.
Calico juxtaposes the historical development of each topic while also providing colorful sketches of particular Heathens and their life-situations and religious practices. The author traces the lineages of different organizational structures that have undergirded the development of American Heathenism such as the Ring of Troth, more commonly and simply known as the Troth, and the Asatru Folk Alliance (AFA) pointing out their differing attitudes toward both religious practice and preferred practitioners, with the Troth being the more open and inclusive structure and the AFA the least, with a pronounced emphasis on ancestry and ethnicity that many observers have reckoned a thinly masked form of racism, or at the very least, very attractive to racists. Calico uses the metaphor of a river into which tributary streams feed and swirl as a means of explicating the different intellectual, cultural and social “streams” of influence that have fed into American Asatru, and this is an effective and intriguing manner of conceptualizing the internal diversity, dialogue, and conflict in the religion.
Being Viking is part of Equinox Publishing’s Pagan-studies book series, of which I am the longest-surving editor, a tale of success, frustration, corporate marriage and corporate divorce, and who knows what will happen next?
Angela Puca, who recently earned a PhD in religious studies while still managing to be a dominant figure in Pagan-studies YouTube, has interviewed Jefferson Calico, author of Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America, which I consider to be the best new study of Heathenry that is accessible to both scholars and practitioners. But as one of the editors, I am biased.
In case you wonder about “Heathenism” versus “Heathenry,” he gets into that at the beginning.
A rising number of young adult females use Instagram, posting pictures with hashtags which alert Instagram users to their specific interests. Heathens have also begun to use Instagram and in order to better understand this new feature of the religious movement I interviewed fifteen Instagram account owners whom I identified by three factors.
1. Their use of three or more of the following hashtags: #norsewitch #heathengirl #seidr #volva #galdr #norsepagan #heathensofInstagram #witch #runes #viking #shamanism #witchesofInstagram
2. Their personal identification as Heathen, Asatru, Norse Pagan, or otherwise expressing spiritual belief in a Nordic mythology.
3. The account had at least 500 followers, indicating the likelihood of having an impact on Heathens, Pagans, and sympathetic individuals.
My focus is to document the processes and dynamics of Instagram as a medium for religious communication from the point of view of producers of religious content: the alpha Instagram account owners. The data shows that these young females apply significant theological thought in their posts and most have a strong sense of responsibility to teach others about Heathenry. The data departs from previous research on Instagram and Heathenry in that the account owners appear to have altruistic motives in the first instance and an affirmative non-political epistemology in the second.
Click over to Ethan Doyle White’s blog, 
