Winifred Hodge Rose
As you come to completion of your Heathen soul lore study program, this seems like a good point to ask yourself what you’d like to do with the soul lore you’re learning. Are you satisfied with how it’s going now, or is there more that you’d like to do with it? Here, I’ll share some suggestions about a few of the potential paths or directions you could consider, if you want to take Heathen soul lore farther.
The Path of Relationships among your Souls
This is the foundation of Heathen soul lore, and it’s what we’ve been working on so far, with my two soul lore books and the soul lore study program online. Working through Book I / (or the articles on the Heathen souls online) is like an introduction and a meet-and-greet with your souls. This is where you began opening conversations with your souls, along the lines of: “You seem like a really interesting person! Tell me more about yourself.” And you began discovering that—surprise—you have a lot in common with them!
So then, in Book II (or the soul lore study guides online) that you’ve just worked through, you began pursuing more in-depth friendships with your souls. This is where you got to know them at a deeper level, below the intriguing surface chit-chat. You come to realize that you’ve been through a lot together, over the course of your whole life. You’ve grown up together and worked through challenging situations, shared the ups and downs of life. You’ve started to understand how your everyday self and all your souls rely on one another, and all participate together in all aspects of your life. Your wounds are their wounds, your triumphs are theirs, your dreams and aspirations are theirs, your relationships with others depend on them. Your souls are not, now, just interesting new people you’ve met. They’re now heart-friends, soul-friends. You can see the outlines of rock-solid, fully conscious, vital relationships coming into being among all of you.
This is an amazing accomplishment, and you may find that further growth along this path of personal relationships among your souls is entirely satisfying on its own, without any need to enhance or shape it in more formal ways. This kind of inner experience and growth is something I’ll be exploring more in future soul lore writings.
Or, you might like to consider some additional paths for practical, applied soul work in your outer life, of which there are a potentially endless number! I’ll mention just a few of them here, to give you some ideas.
The Path of Vocation
This is where you pursue Heathen soul lore, and knowledge and relationships with your own souls, as a way of enhancing your own vocation(s) in life, whether a career type of vocation, or an avocation—something you do because you love it and are dedicated to it, even though you are not hired and paid for it. As an example, perhaps you are a healer of some kind: a conventional health care practitioner, a therapist, a mentor, a counselor, or involved in alternative methods of healing. This can also include healing yourself in your own ways, and being part of healing groups such as recovery and support groups.
I believe that Heathen soul lore has an enormous amount to contribute to healing efforts, which all need to be based on a soul-level understanding of people, their wounds, their strengths, their circumstances, their hopes and fears. Introducing and guiding others along a Heathen soul lore path would be one way to do this, but many people would not be interested or comfortable with that. I am not suggesting any proselytizing here; that’s not something Heathens really get into. But your own understanding of soul lore, and your own experience with it, can be applied to the work you do, without any need for drawing others into specifically Heathen beliefs and practices, unless they wish for that. You can find ways to make use of the general soul lore concepts and insights in your healing work, without making it specifically Heathen.
I’ve used healing as an obvious example of a vocation that can be greatly enhanced by applying soul lore to it, but I think that any vocation or avocation can be so enhanced. How about management? Any position where you are responsible for other people, and / or the work they produce, will be improved and strengthened when you understand and relate to people at a soul-deep level. People are often not treated well by supervisors and managers, and managers are themselves under a great deal of stress and pressure between the layers of people above and below them. Understanding soul lore and applying your knowledge and experience of it in the workplace can work to everyone’s advantage, wherever you are in the hierarchy.
Handling stress better, enhancing job performance in any way, maintaining physical and mental health and stamina on the job, creating good relationships with your colleagues, customers, suppliers, supervisors, everyone you work with—soul lore can help with all of that. If you are working in any kind of inspirational field, including arts and crafts, technology development, performance, the benefits of a strong flow of soul-energy are clear.
Paths of Relationship with Others
A great many of us think that the most important part of life is parenting. The applications of soul lore to give your child the best possible upbringing are numerous and vital. Grandparents, other relatives and close family friends, teachers, caregivers, mentors, counselors, coaches, group leaders like scouts—all who deal with children can benefit those children through their own understanding of Heathen soul lore, and applying that understanding toward supporting the healthy development of babies, children and teenagers. Again, there is no need to impose Heathen beliefs on anyone who is not interested; this is simply a matter of applying your own insights and experience with Heathen soul lore toward the promotion of children’s wellbeing and growth.
The same discussion applies to all our relationships: marriage, partnership (intimate partnerships, business or community enterprise partnerships, volunteer projects, etc.), friendships, work and neighborhood relationships. Not to mention the advantages of a soul lore perspective when holding any position of responsibility or influence within Heathen groups and communities: clergy, leadership, volunteer service, etc.
The Path of Healing
There are so many ways to apply Heathen soul lore to healing, whether it is healing oneself, supporting our nearest and dearest on their healing paths, or working as a healer in many different professional contexts. Healing needs to happen on so many levels: spiritual, emotional, mental, behavioral, physical, social levels. Not only humans need healing: ecosystems, landscapes, water bodies need healing. Animals, domestic and wild, need healing. Spiritual beings like landwights need healing. Larger human groups need group healing. Even concepts, cultural memes and practices, social systems themselves, need healing.
There is work for each of us here, and our own insights and experiences with Heathen soul lore will stand us in good stead, as we pursue whichever healing paths may call to us. I believe that our healing efforts will be crowned with greater success, greater depth and rootedness, when we approach them with an experiential knowledge of Heathen soul lore, along with all of the other knowledge, experience and compassion we can bring to bear.
The Path of Creativity
Understanding and practicing Heathen soul lore can greatly inspire and expand all the creative expressions of our lives. This includes not only artistic, inventive, and other such expressions of creativity, but creativity in other areas such as problem-solving, finding solutions to everyday difficulties, and enhancing our relationships with humans, nature, wights, Deities.
Problems are part of life; they constantly crop up in our relationships, our work, our home life, social life, etc. Drawing on the creative powers of our various souls to find truly inspired solutions to these problems is one of the important ways that we, and all our souls, grow and mature in this life. In other words, the path of creativity means not just ‘getting by’, squeaking through the challenges of our life. It means applying inspiration so we can use whatever problem we face as a springboard, to make a quantum leap into something a whole lot better than ‘just getting by.’ It means using the good old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention” to inspire us to invent a better way to address that necessity, not just struggle to repeat old, worn-out ways of trying to get around the problem.
Creativity can apply to all aspects of our life. It can enrich our relationships and lead them in new directions. It can bring beauty, insight and interest to our life and other people’s, and inspire them in turn. It can inspire our children to develop their own inspiration, to grow and expand their own souls. Knowing and growing our own souls opens paths of creativity out into all directions of life. Following any path of creativity draws the energy of Ahma, rising from the very wellsprings of creation, here into the world of Midgard to enrich us all.
Heathen Esoteric Paths
Heathen soul lore is itself an esoteric path, and it can vigorously branch out into all of the different activities and knowledge-pursuits that can be included under ‘esotericism.’ This includes spirituality, mysticism, and religious practices; all the many branches of magical practice; ‘natural philosophy’; all the arts of energy-working; working with wights and other non-physical entities; spaecraft and other forms of divination; helping the dying and the dead on their paths, contacting and working with ancestral spirits; esoteric work with the inner powers of nature; and many more endeavors. Esoteric work is a huge, complex and promising branch of human experience, where we can greatly benefit by bringing Heathen soul knowledge and experience into our practices and our development of esoteric knowledge.
I won’t go on with more examples of soul-paths here, because there are as many examples of soul lore application, as there are people who potentially may want to apply them! If you are drawn to apply soul lore further in your life, I hope that current and future soul lore will be of use to you. But more important is to develop your own insights, skills and applications, that result from your own progress in living Heathen soul lore and using it in the activities of your life. If you can then produce blogs, podcasts, articles, books, and so forth, about what you’ve learned, that would be of great benefit to the rest of us! My hope is to see the applications of Heathen soul lore expand outward in many directions and ways in this world and bring betterment to us all.
The Challenge of the Heathen Soul-Path
Life is full of challenges, and we need to be able to count on all our souls—their strength, wisdom, resilience—to cope with whatever life sends our way, and pursue our own expanding vision of life’s meaning.
The Heathen understanding that life is an ordeal—an ongoing challenge laid down for us by orlog and by the nature of life in Midgard—offers courage, guidance, and moral support to us on our strenuous but worthy paths of life. There is no such thing as a permanent stopping place on this path. There is only growth and striving, only the struggle to walk toward an ever-evolving vision of…something…that shines at the farthest horizon of Being. Walking this path is our life; this is what life really is—not the achievement of some static, idealized state, or piles of possessions and status symbols, but the striving itself toward our own ever-evolving vision. And think about it: this path does not end when we die; the path goes on, and our souls go on with it, whether they are embodied in this life, or disembodied in other realms of existence.
We don’t walk this path alone. Though we each need to follow our own vision, we have much in common with others who walk these paths of life as well, and with those who have gone before us, and those who will come after. When we are aware of our own souls and the souls of others, these commonalities become more apparent, and more important than surface differences of opinion, appearance, lifestyles, circumstances, culture, etc. I am not saying that we are all ‘the same’ as everyone else, whatever that means, and I am not downplaying our differences and our individual distinctions, which are important and real. I’m saying that we have meaningful things in common, and that it is worthwhile to seek a deeper comprehension of our shared humanity through a profound understanding of the souls that create who each of us really is, here in Midgard.
May the Holy Ones bless this path,
this sacred ordeal of human life,
for each one of us
and for humanity as a whole, together.