Penn: The Critic to "I Do What I Want" Pipeline and Would You Know More (Patreon)

The Critic to "I Do What I Want" Pipeline; or I'm turning 40, and all I got was this wizard hat

I’ve felt very limited by circumstance throughout my life. It spawned out of things like chronic pain, massive amounts of undiagnosed OCD, and a parental strategy best described as an attempt to shrink my world to exclusively encompass my mother. These starting conditions are going to have the effect they have—namely one becomes what they must to survive.

Me? I learned ‘no.’ Deep, to my core, I learned that the things I wanted simply were not for me, and I put up shields. I became invisible—the King of the Hidebehinds, as it were—and I turned hypervigilance into a source of power. For most of my life, then, I watched. Closely and cautiously, and from a carefully selected pool of shadow.

Friends were not for me, not really. People have to see you to know you, and well, that wouldn’t do. Whether the strategy was to pick one person to hide behind, or to develop a whole fake person to wear to school, there was a calculated distance—a ‘no.’ Mind, I got really good at it. I like to describe my high school years as having a lot of social power, and basically no social capital—I could manifest more or less whatever I wanted, as long as what I wanted wasn’t to be broadly accepted.

Music, art, writing—none of that was for me. My mother wanted me to be a math teacher like her, after all, and you don’t need piano lessons or, you know, joy to teach math, or whatever other close-enough to be acceptable career I would have been funneled into. Didn’t help that my fiction and poetry would silently disappear from my notebooks if I left them at home, should they be a little too racy for my parent’s Southern Baptist sensibilities. Nor did it help that my mother was a principal at my high school, so even though I was adept at charming the adults around me, they were never able to solidify into the allies I’d have needed to deviate from my assigned life. Everyone was a narc. Everyone was a threat. And so art was another ‘no.’ Inconsequential. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could do it, it’s that I thought I simply wasn’t allowed.

Actually, I want to sit with that for a moment: I wasn’t allowed. I don’t actually mean “my parents didn’t allow me to play guitar,” I mean that some great unknown cosmic force came down from above with the decree. I was simply not for me in some ineffable and intrinsic way. It was for people who… as much as I have spent my whole life thoroughly believing this bullshit, I’ve never had an actual end to that sentence. It was for people who had been allowed lessons? People who had already started? People who… what? had a special “allowed to be a musician” permit? I don’t actually know where you get those.

No. It was all ‘no.’ All variations of the same thing: It’s not safe to be seen. It’s not safe to be heard. to be wrong. to be known… Thing is, that’s all bullshit. At least in the context of my adult life. The time of my life where that was true has long passed.

These days I’ve gotten some damn pain management, an OCD diagnosis, and a violent disowning, and now I’m doing… whatever all this is. It’s still taken some time and work to get here. The KonMari method of mental health management is my favorite trick for this: Say thank you to the coping mechanism that is no longer serving you and let it go. Sure, easier said than done, and yes I had a complete panic attack at a Guitar Center a few weeks ago even considering touching a hand drum (I did, eventually, play the drum), but looking at, and understanding your maladaptions turns out to be revolutionary. Just dump it all out on the floor and find the bits that are still serving you; keep those, of course. They’re your coping mechanisms, after all, they should be working for you not against you.

When I concluded my daily album reviews column I declared the project a magical ritual to turn myself into a critic. That sounds cheeky, and it is, but it’s also true. It’s not the whole picture, of course. The magic starts earlier, and didn’t stop there. To any extent, the transformative process of becoming one’s self is a lifelong project (rust, you know, it never sleeps), but this specific transformation has been dizzying to watch, even while standing solidly at the helm of it.

I’d been “an artist” in some nebulous way for years, So the jump to “comics artist” when El offered to write me our first Olive Peaseblossom script was easy enough. And you have to remember, I’m the guy who would, just a couple years from that point, declare himself a priest of an obscure language goddess—words, and especially those words one applies to themself, have always held a strong power for me. It’s why ‘no’ worked as devastatingly as it did.

But “comics artist” was huge. Both in terms of my sense of self, offering direction and artistic fulfillment, and in terms of my daily life. Comics are a lot of work, and by the end I was doing everything except the script myself, always to my ever-raising standards. I did not have free time, I had work. Work that I have loved, to be clear. I would not be who I am right now without the years that I gave to Taz, Terrence, and Molly. I learned how to tell a story. I learned new ways to see comics, and structure. I learned lettering, and layout, and that I am madly passionate about both. More than any of that I learned how to allow myself to be seen. Or, well, I started to learn it; that would pick up the pace in a big way with the reviews.

The saying, attributed to Jack Kirby, is “comics will break your heart.” Perhaps any artistic venture when applied to the meat grinder that is capitalism will do the job, but it is certainly a statement with resonance in 2025 standing in the wreckage of the industry. Most of my comics artist friends have left the field, or else left and returned in a diminished capacity. You see comics chew through even great artists with stress injuries, financial pressures, publishing companies, and unrealistic deadlines. Not to mention that it is legitimately just very hard, very slow work.

There was a moment, between issues 4 and 5, I think, where I didn’t even stop to celebrate the issue we’d just finished. That should have been a sign that I was burning out and needed to pause, but I’d assigned “comics artist” to myself, and that had power. So I didn’t pause, and sure enough I burnt out, giving myself a nice wrist injury in the process. The burnout was not entirely the fault of the work, and to be clear I don’t resent the work one bit. I have nothing but fondness for it, and I’m really looking forward to putting the final cover together—it’s going to be something special.

And it was being a “comics artist” that got me to go to the UK comics convention Thought Bubble for two years in a row. I got to meet people whose work I knew and respected. I put an issue of my comic in the hands of Jamie McKelvie—an artist I’d be hard pressed to deny as an influence on my storytelling style. I thanked him for that influence, stumbling over my own nerves with every word. I got to briefly chat with Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, whose video series Strip Panel Naked exploring the formalist structure of comics was what I disappeared into before I drew even my first panel, about lettering and about storytelling. I also put a comic in his hands. (I was just slinging those things around, lol.) He flipped through the pages of issue 3, apologizing in the most British way possible for the rudeness of doing so, before stopping to ask me how I made Taz’s watercolor textured boxes.

But the real thing that stood out both years was ending up in late evening conversations with critics and writers. It buzzed under my skin—this sense that of the groups of people here, these were my people. By the second year, I’d already quietly decided I might want to write. I was early in the Bluesky era of reviews at the time, and I went home with a complete certainty that I needed to be a critic.

So I became one. Through work and magic and determination and that ever rising tide of my own standards. It threw me off balance more than I expected it to. I’d spent so much work sorting out my mind to accept “I am allowed to be a comics artist” that doing something else felt like a betrayal of that self. But inch by inch, criticism ate up the space in my mind. There was one evening when I was looking at two thousand or so words about some album, and the time, realizing I’d spent my whole work day on it. And more that it felt good—this was what I wanted to be focusing on. Of course, I ran face first into that ‘no’ I thought I’d left behind me. No force from the heavens came down and told me I was allowed to be a critic—never mind that no such force was going to do this, clearly it meant I was not actually allowed to do it. It’s nonsense, of course. While there are credentials one can get for writing, really all you need is a blank page, and to know how to find what’s interesting in your topic. Jump over to music and you get Lars Ulrich, who, while recording Metallica’s second album, was asked by producer Flemming Ramussen if every song started on an upbeat. The drummer responded by asking what an upbeat even was. “We started telling him about beats. That they have to be an equal length of time between that hit, that hit, and that hit, and you have to be able to count to four before you come in again,” Ramussen continues. And like, this was after they’d already defined Thrash, you know? Credentials and forces from on high be damned.

I was reeling, and made what was to me a radical decision to start calling myself “a critic.” I had, in just a couple years, redefined what I was allowed to be and do twice. What’s a third or fourth time?

Today on Bluesky Andrew Hickey, the man behind A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and just an all around delightful person, mentioned thinking about recording his own music. I was delighted by this (as of this exact moment, 1,726 words of delight) because just yesterday I wrote down in this stupid Moon Journal thing I’m doing—yeah, I’ll get back to that in a moment, actually—that my goal for this Aries New Moon cycle was to record something—to stop noodling and practicing, and just record a fucking song. Maybe several of them. Fuck it. I’m ready, and even if the ‘no’ that my mind has attached to music is one of the biggest I’ve ever faced (I only got my piano like… a couple years ago, I’m not allowed to record a… oh shut up) it’s going down.

I replied to him enthusiastically, and made a comment that I was pondering a critic-to-“I do what I want” pipeline. Thinking about how freeing writing criticism was, and how it opened up a whole world of possibility for me. How it, more than any other skill I’ve ever picked up (and I do have something of a habit of picking up new skills) has changed my relationship to art and to myself. Thinking about how Kieron Gillen, although he is primarily known as a comics writer at this point in his career, started as a critic, and is writing games now. How cool is that? It’s a pattern I feel like I’ve seen before, and it’s as glorious as it is obvious; of course the deep focus on detail and connections that criticism requires will, either as a consequence of the work teaching and honing that skill, or as a consequence of people who are just like this deciding to be critics in the first place, design people who spin off to do what they want. I love it.

Anyway, in the midst of that internal panic about changing “I’m a comics artist” to “I’m a critic” I was sitting with that obscure language goddess I’ve mentioned a few times. I mused to her, kind of in passing, that what if my primary work was not comics, and it wasn’t criticism, but it was being her priest—because of the shape of her, all my creative work could easily be done in that context. Which, I don’t know if you’ve ever met a god, but you really can’t say shit like that to them if you’re not willing to follow through on it. She, unsurprisingly liked the idea… so, here we are.

Of course continuing to be a writer isn’t enough to fill that prompt, and I’ve been backburnering figuring out what ‘priest’ even means in my context for a while. Yet again, we’ve hit a place where there are no real sensible credentials I can achieve—and I care less about credentials than about doing it meaningfully. There’s definitely still a ‘no,’ but I’ve gotten better at seeing them as projections, and I suppose I really can’t claim I’ve not been given permission from on high this time.

So, this gets us to my wizard hat. One of the paths to legitimacy I was looking at, early in this process was a magical society called the Rune Gild. Now, as you may recall from El’s giant heathen flounce, they have some massive problems, but none of that is relevant at the moment. What is relevant is that their initiatory process involves doing a very specific daily ritual, keeping a wizard journal, and telling them about it. They describe this ritual in detail in The Nine Doors of Midgard, and fundamentally it’s just some rune themed chaos magic. It’s a touch ridiculous, but daily ritual practice just gets powerful if you do it seriously. (See, for instance, my reviews column.)

Even if I were cool with joining a blatantly fash-adjacent group, there was no world in which I was going to let them define my first experiences with ceremonial magic. Nope. Not happening. I’ll wizard myself, thank you. So I’ve been doing that. I’m up to my eyeballs in Aleister Crowley, and have notebooks of notes on things like Thelema, hermetic Kabalah, and Tarot. I’m also studying in what is functionally an apprenticeship with a friend who is the priestess of her faith community with a shiny Doctorate of Divinity that there is no world in which I bother going for. She’s running it like a school with a small cohort of us, giving us assignments like the following essay, and that moon journal I mentioned (roughly short term goal setting. Aries is for taking a risk, trying something new, and exploring your desires, apparently.)

So far it’s ranged from spiritual leadership topics, lore study specific to our shared faith, world religion, and ritual work. The other aspirants are calling it “Wizard School,” which, again I’ll wizard myself, thank you very much. (I’d actually started calling my personal study “Wizard School” before I started this one, so I was very amused by that. My wizard school was a lot more Prime Chaos and correspondence tables, but you know…) Admittedly, I’m rebelling against the program at all, in that I’m pretty insistent that if I’m going to write something it’s going to be worth reading and not just a school essay, and so I’m taking the directional freedom she’s giving us quite liberally. But it does help that I already had “write about magic shit” on my horizon before I was offered the position, and in fact the one below was half written and abandoned when the heathen drama took one of its spectacular nose dives.

So that’s what I’m up to right now. I’m not remotely done writing media criticism—you can look forward to seeing an essay on horror films in the nearish. I’m also deep into the Golden Falls Library of Esoterica project—I expect I’ll write up some updates about that as it goes for the “writers notes” tier patrons.

You know how Alan Moore declared that for his fortieth birthday he would terrify his friends by “going completely mad and declaring [himself] to be a magician” rather than bore them with a normal midlife crisis? Well, my fortieth birthday is coming up in just a month and a half, so really, I’m ahead of the curve.

Would You Know More:
Why the Fuck Are You a Heathen Of All Things?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—why Heathenry? 

It’s riddled with problems: heathens are, as a whole, way too lax about their fascism problem, the fact that they even have a fascism problem, the rank odor of penis honor and masculinity that wafts by as yet another beard fetishist and male empowerment activist turned reconstructionist pops up out of nowhere with a full horn of his overly sweet homemade mead, the massive unchecked drinking culture, and just, you know, its general viking-by-association thing. And that’s not even an exhaustive list.

Add to that the fact that quite recently, my regional Heathen community let me down in a massive, personal way that belied a deep moral cowardice and shined a light on the structures set up to ensure power remains in the hands of the already powerful and those obnoxious queers remain quiet or, at least, silenced. But that can happen in any community of size. There are men with outsized egos everywhere, and they never go anywhere without their yes-men all lined up and ready to defend literally any behavior. It’s not a Heathenry thing; people who are dead set on not hearing a thing a trans person says exist in every corner of my world. It’s endemic to, well at least America, I can’t speak to anywhere else.

So yeah, I’m pissed, and I’m hurt, and I’m grieving my illusions. I watched as my spiritual community shook and fell around me, even as I was gathering my resources and working hard at building myself into a resource for that very same community. But fine; I’m able to forgive the forgivable, ignore the rest, and move on with my work. For all that I am angry and wounded both by the actions of a couple people and the inaction of many others, I never seriously considered abandoning “heathen” as a part of my identity.

Alright then, the next question becomes “what does that mean?”

Let’s start with “why that word in particular.” At its core Heathenry describes modern Norse pagan practice. But there are a lot of other labels for that, each of them with their own nuances and annoyances.

A common, although seemingly out of vogue, choice is Asatru, with its vague sense of structural approval. I’ve heard people call Asatru the “official name” of the religion, which is, let me tell you, hilarious from the people that blew a fuse over the suggestion that there might be any kind of orthodoxy. The word comes out of Iceland in the 70s when some pagans decided to bring back the old folk religion, and established Asatru, or Ásatrúarfélagið — the Asatru Fellowship. But I digress. Even as I suspect I know anyone who prefers it as a term, it is a mild red flag for me. There’s a strong connotation of order, orthodoxy, and stubborn resistance to growth that accompanies the word Asatru, at least in an East coast American context. (As I understand it, the heathen experience in other countries is vastly different from ours here, where we’re all the children of Puritans or the victims of such. I expect that is especially true of the connotations of identity labels.) There’s also just the word itself, which combines the words As (the Aesir/gods) and tru (faith). This rankles a bit, as the Aesir are not the only gods that heathens venerate. It is not intended to cut the Vanir out of it’s scope, and in practice there are plenty of Asatru working with Freyja to be found in the world, but that twat that runs Northeast Thing calls himself Asatru, and it was him who hailed the Aesir, the spirits protecting Iceland, and no one else when opening a large scale heathen event that explicitly included more than the Aesir as gods and that was, notably, happening in America, well out of the jurisdiction of Icelandic dwarves. To quote the late, great Steve Albini, “if the dumbest person is on your side, you’re on the wrong side.”you know? 

Asatru also has the problem of the Asatru Folk Assembly, a white nationalist group founded in the mid-nineties, which is a great transition to the label folkish. This is also a term that has gotten worse over time, most especially now in this current era of fascism. Go back only one decade from now and you’ll find perfectly inclusive heathen communities accepting people who call themselves “folkish,” without even as much as a raised eyebrow. These days it is such a massive red flag as to be a full stop: this person is telling you he is a Nazi. The argument, back when it was more acceptable, was that Asatru, as a faith, is to do with one’s ancestry, and history, and the history of one’s ancestors… you see how this is gonna go wrong from a mile away, and sure enough it did. I can only hope that everyone I knew that was getting by calling themselves that as a way to flag “I really like to wear tunics” have moved onto some other language by now, or at least that their peers have seen their arguments that black people can’t have Norse ancestors for what they are.

But in the exact same manner as there are only two genders, there are two “kinds” of Heathenry: folkish and inclusive, the latter claiming to be, well… inclusive, and thus solving the problem for good through the tried and true method of asking Nazis to please not come to your party. As is always the case with such easy answers to real problems, this is, more often than not, little more than virtue signaling. It says, “you can wear your Fuck the Nazis tee shirt here and get praised for having done the work” more than it says, “all are welcome here,” even as it roughly means to say the latter. Recently a heathen acquaintance posted to a regional Facebook page about his own group, which he was calling “radically welcoming.” That the first comment was someone being belligerent that he’d not used the word “inclusive” instead tells you all that you need to know about that orthodoxy that these people apparently don’t have. While the word “inclusive” or something flagging the same intention is a prerequisite before I’ll go anywhere near a new heathen group, it is in no way sufficient. I do not even bother calling myself an inclusive heathen; it seems a bit redundant once you know any single other fact about me, and has the same plastic aftertaste to it as Asatru, even if it is not, itself, indicative of a problem.

Another word you might find used for a heathen is the, to my mind, overly sterile “Norse pagan,” or the even worse “Norse reconstructionist.” There is nothing particularly wrong with either one, although I always expect the second set to come out with a “well, actually” at any moment. From a completely personal preference perspective, I don’t love to identify as pagan. I clearly am one, but the image that pagan draws up in the mind is one of Silver RavenWolf’s Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, which, as I recall, opens by suggesting the teen hide the book from her parents. (My mother, upon finding this book hidden in my room, was not impressed with that suggestion. And for once that’s actually fair; I’ll give her that one.) Clearly pagan means all kinds of things, but there’s a reason I never quite landed in one of the more RavenWolf styles of pagan which is easily described by looking up the titles of all of her other publications. (To Ride a Silver Broomstick, eh?) So much modern pagan practice is little more than the self-help section of your big box bookstore, only with a persistent smell of patchouli and a collection of pretty rocks and mason jars. Listen, I like patchouli, rocks, and mason jars as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t be caught dead in the self-help aisle.

So, if Norse pagan is just a touch too generic, Asatru is right out, and inclusive adds nothing of value in the context of a personal identity label, you’re mostly left with “Heathen.” It has the annoyance of smug Catholics who love to imagine that they are the only person to ever notice that “well, actually ‘heathen’ means non-Christian,” but other than that it's a word that just seems to get out of it’s own way, describing a faith that is community focused in a way that “Norse pagan” fails to. 

But none of that addresses the real question: why this faith, nazis, dipshits, and all? The cheeky but true answer is that it’s where my gods are. When I was a young baby witch, hiding books I’d already roughly decided were not for me under my mattress, I failed out of the feminine divine for reasons that largely foreshadowed my failing out of the feminine everything else. I just never quite found my home in pan-pagan contexts, especially as a kid working on my own in secret. The Greek gods, who were the most available to me in that era before Reddit and Wikipedia, felt too prim and formal. They were as disinterested in me as I was in them, and that was that. And you’d be hard-pressed to find much else at the Rocky Mount public library. So I eked what spirituality I could out of my Christian surroundings and made my silent prayers to an ill-defined moon goddess I’d met riding the ocean waves one hot summer night. I developed a strong practice of animism during that time, or rather, I recognized the animism that I just natively run on as a thing, and nurtured it into something purposeful. 

“Animist” is a word often used by heathens these days, meaning broadly the practice of ascribing personhood to the world around you, whether you only take it as far as hailing the land spirits (preferably of the land you’re on, Dave) when you start a ritual, or if you thank the toaster oven in the morning when you make breakfast. Heathenry has always been really proud of its historical roots and reconstruction (important, but meh), our ancestor worship (usually fine, but when it goes wrong it’s yikes on several fucking bikes, and besides, it’s a bit of a touchy matter for a disowned kid), and our focus on community (that one’s good, at least when it’s not a lie) but more and more often I’m hearing heathens declare that it is a uniquely animist faith. I’m not particularly convinced that any of these things, although they are all present in Heathenry, are exclusive to it, but there is a place within the Heathen context for a sort of crazed magical thinking. Our big guy is a mad wizard after all.

Oh, yes, that’s another one isn’t it? Odin, the All Father, the god so hungry for knowledge and magic that he threw his own eye in a well, hung himself for nine nights on a magic tree, ran around the cosmos waking up dead seers to quiz them on family drama, and has pointedly learned as many kinds of magic as he has been able. Weirdly, that decade ago when Asatru was a much more prevalent word for the spiritual tradition, there was also a strange cultural reluctance toward magic in American heathenry. These days it’s still oddly gated and poorly taught, but we seem to have, at some point, realized that Heathenry is packed with magic. “Wizard” is an extremely silly word for “person who is adept at magic,” and Heathenry has its own terminology like “galdr” (chanting and singing as magic) and “seidhr” (oracular trance work), but as I mentioned, they’re oddly gated and as a person currently unmoored from a community that I can serve, I don’t use them to identify myself. (That said, I like that the word “wizard” feels silly, and absolutely do use it to describe myself these days since picking up the study of ceremonial magic. One should never take their practice too seriously, even and perhaps especially when it’s dead serious.) 

Even if I don’t use the words, though, I love the magic that flows through Heathenry. With my old group in North Carolina I got to be a seer in seidhr rituals, learned to cast and read runes, and how to make and run a ritual. For the first time I got to see people around me speak to the Earth in ways that made sense to me. There was an Odinsman there who just periodically knew things and whom everyone felt the need to warn me about. “You don’t have to be like Danny,” they’d tell me. (This did not have the intended effect.) Twice, at rituals, I’ve watched people, in the heat of the moment, cut their own palms open to bleed for their gods, and only once was anyone shocked or dismayed about it. (“Oh, yeah, that happens.”) I’ve been to even more events with explicit rules against it and anecdotes to match (the cowards). I’ve been present for an animal sacrifice—which as I was a vegetarian, was the first meat I’d had in over a decade, and would be the last for another few years. I’ve seen a seer completely lose the plot of where she was as she said something vaguely incomprehensible to the rest of the audience, but which made the recipient gasp. Hell, I’ve been the seer giving the incomprehensible message to the person who needed it.

So there’s a real way in which the answer to “Why heathenry” is just that it’s where the unhinged wizards are. And I just kinda love an unhinged wizard. I need magic in my spiritual practice, and I have never quite seen the point in moderation—if a thing is worth doing, I’m going to do it as hard as I can. Spiritual practice feels like a thing that wants and rewards fervor, and there’s nothing wrong with intensity for its own sake. Heathenry is a spiritual practice that has a space for something like a Danny, which means it has a space for something like me. Sure, I didn’t have to be like Danny, and in a lot of ways I am not. But he knew what he saw in me, and he wasn’t wrong about it. 

There’s also, for someone who is perpetually treated as one, something profound in finding a faith that is so concerned with adopting Outsiders. Even our gods do it: the Vanir are a whole second set of gods that got adopted into the tradition, and that’s before you start looking at wronged foot fetishist Skadhi who married in as a Giant, yet a third kind of Outsider, or at Loki himself, whose story of being adopted as Odin’s brother isn’t one we have in recorded lore. Even Odin was an Outsider before he married into the Aesir via Frigg. The place for Outsiders is key and fundamental to Heathenry, and we have a lot of very specific lore warning us to be generous with those that come to your door.

But at the end of the day, I was right the first time. Heathenry is where my gods are. More often than identifying myself as a heathen to others, I’ll use Lokisman. Which is a bit of a compromise, to be honest, as most Lokispeople annoy the shit out of me. Loki is the god hailed at rituals with fart jokes, cinnamon candies, and plastic McDonald’s toys. There’s a dedicated lack of seriousness clinging to the connotations of Loki, hardly aided by Tom Hiddleston, however good he looks commanding a crowd to kneel. It belies either a very surface understanding of the figure, or worse, a sweetening of him to make him more palatable to the anti-Loki crowd that comes hand in hand with the fascism problem I mentioned at the very start.  His followers have an often deserved reputation for being annoying shits: all the worst queer theatre kid stereotypes directed toward the task of being zany,  The Unmanaged Borderline Personality Disorder That Walks Like a Man, decked out in blue hair and a “not today Jesus” crop top. This candy coated nonsense is better, I suppose, than the reputation Tyrsmen have for being rigid, unthinking rule-followers, or the perplexing “war goddess Freyja is my sweet sexy love mommy” crowd, but it’s still just boring. But every faith—probably every god with a sizable enough collection of followers—has those that are only able or willing to engage with them on their most surface level. It can hardly be too big a mark against Heathenry or Loki. 

More completely, my stock answer to quickly identifying myself to other pagans is that I’m “a Lokisman in service to Sága,” teeing my wife up to come in with her response that she’s “a Ságaswoman in service to Loki.” Which is a bit, sure, but in true Lokean form, that doesn’t make it any less apt. My connection to Loki is not one that ever felt like it was chosen so much as an intrinsic part of myself that was only waiting to be named. It is, in some key ways, trivial. In practice it is my service to Sága that takes the bulk of my attention. 

It helps, I suppose, that I define my work for her such that it encompasses my writing, making the majority of my waking time be, in some way and to some degree, service to my Lady. A good trick to a fulfilling spiritual life, it turns out, is to define the things that fulfill you as spiritual. So in that regard, perhaps even more than I’m a Heathen, I’m a Critic.