Let’s be harshly honest here: heathens do not generally become heathens because of superior philosophical leanings in Heathenry. That’s not to say that the philosophy is flawed or inferior in some way- I would hold the opposite, in fact. What I mean is, most of us are not heathens because in the beginning, we agreed that this was a worldview of fundamental truth.

Heathens, for the most part, come into this religion by some mixture of three currents: Romance, Reaction, and Revelation. True, we are seeing an increasing number of second and third generation heathens reaching adulthood and keeping the faith, but the vast majority of us are converts, from a culture where there are few people out converting through reason and morality. We come to Heathenry with less than pure intentions, although ultimately, I don’t think it’s our intentions that matter here.

Many of us start out eclectic pagans, witches, or occultists. Here, all three currents are present- We are Reacting against a perceived spiritual lack in the overculture, we are taken in by Romance of an old religion from an old world with old Gods, and it is not uncommon for those already mystically aligned to be pushed over the edge into a germanic religio-magical practice by a Revelation.

Heathenry flourishes in hotbeds of racism. This is again Romantic and Reactionary, a longing to return to world as understood by a mythologized white race that never existed, a lashing back at a society that one feels they are losing a foothold in, driven by an overculture that is more and more blurring the lines between one thing and another, which can be threatening to some people. In prisons and gangs, we see people turning to an old European religion in an attempt to understand and justify this threat, to make sense of a world that collides with an immutable worldview, and adopting it’s tenants to hold together a group of like minded individuals.

Military Heathenry, Ethnic Heathenry, Asatru, Northern Tradition Shamanism, seemingly endless pools of Heathens who do things in seemingly endless combinations of ways, being pulled together by these three main currents. Some people remain in their pool forever, living their lives twenty something years and longer as Asatruar, as Seax-Wiccans, as an Odinist, while others lose interest and return to the overculture a Christian or Atheist. I’m not judging these people in the slightest; part of the human condition is our utter inability to know what is happening in heaven, and there’s certainly value in the majority of these things. What I’m doing here is acknowledging; some people move away from the larger subsets of Heathenry and simply begin to call themselves “Heathens”, often with tribal or cultural modifiers. These people begin to change, to change in the way other heathens may not.

This is a process of Becoming. It’s been said before, it’s been written about in pages and pages, but it’s what we are doing in every moment of Heathenry. We focus our efforts, we see something we want, and we begin to Become. As we learn and study, we are more and more convinced that there is something there for us, that there is something lost that needs to be reclaimed, that we are doing this for a reason beyond our initial Romanticism or Reactionism or divine experience. This is something we want.

It’s a long process, and I’m not sure if it can ever be finished. It took me about three years to just grasp the idea of Wyrd, and even now I’m making near constant tiny modifications to my understanding of a foundational concept. And it’s not just understanding; we are always doing, Becoming something new in our actions as well as thoughts. I, personally, have found it harder to lie, to cheap out, because Heathenry has fundamentally altered the way I look at the world- Do not break your oaths, do not go back on your word, because that is not right, that is dishonorable. This is a good change, it is a change I am proud of, I am proud I have become someone honest and reliable where if I had walked a different road I may not have, and it is profound. I have, in that way, Become a heathen.

But it’s never enough. There are always a thousand milestones, roadmarks we aren’t even aware exist at times, to making us more heathen. There are always roads we look at and must decide, “Should this be left in the past?”. Every day, we alter the world we walk in because we alter ourselves. Every day, we do things in a thousand unheathen ways- How many of us blaspheme because we’re told all along either that our Gods aren’t real, or that they “have a sense of humor”? How many of us fail to return a gift because the thought doesn’t even cross our mind? How many of us value our sense of individuality so highly we allow it to harm others in our lives? Do you genuinely believe that the dead are not gone? Do you disrespect your surroundings, never thinking for once that a sapience might be living in that forest, in your attic?

Heathens are going to be constantly barraged by thoughts from two currents- the overculture, and the new age. We will never be able to achieve a perfect balance between Heathenry and the overculture, and it is senseless to try and appease the New Age, but we must regularly come to terms with the thoughts these things give us. Both of them will call us strange and maybe even ostracize us for piety- Most people don’t handle well the idea of multiple Gods, and too many that acknowledge Gods lash out at the idea of worship. Our practices and philosophies may seem brutal and outdated- we build rock altars and sacrifice chickens on them, we are, by and large, not pacifists who believe that everything must be resolved with minimal damage.

We cannot allow the process of Becoming to alienate us, because without our communities, heathen or otherwise, we will be incomplete. But I do not think I am alone when I say we cannot allow ourselves to revert, to become another generic pagan, to be re-christianized, because we have seen and felt things that we can no longer live without. We have experienced the ecstasy of worship, we have known the peace of brotherhood, and we have built foundations of the moral-legal rocks of oaths and frith. If anything, we need to double down on our efforts, for those of us who the Becoming has not yet become naturalized, and go deeper into what it is to be heathen, to explore this world with every aspect of us, our logical minds, our emotional hearts, our practical bodies, and to explain and dissect, to encourage others, to move forward at all costs.