The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I've kind of been all over the place the last little while and haven't given any offerings/deeds in forever. It's been at least a year since I've reached out and done anything meaningfully "heathen", at best guess.

A few weeks ago I planted a yellow rose bush by my front door with the intention of dedicating it to Frigga/Freyja (Frigja?). I've had intentions to paint (barely visible) miniature houses at some baseboards for the wights. I've been priming myself, I guess, but not really following through for awhile.

Yesterday however, I finally just went ahead and took a cup of coffee and tobacco out back and gave it in offering along with some silent prayer. It was for Frigja, because I've started to pull away from the intense masculine powers and drift towards the calmer female powers.

Today I took a break from cleaning (it bears mentioning that worth in homemaking is something I've been trying to focus on again and my prayer to Frigja involved this to some extent ), grabbed my phone and saw Google voice had randomly completed a search: æ.

So obviously I'm going to follow that rabbit hole and I click on the first result which is Wikipedia:

Æ (minuscule: æ) is a grapheme named aesc or ash, formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese. As a letter of the Old English Latin alphabet, it was called æsc ("ash tree") after the Anglo-Saxon futhorc rune ᚫ (Runic letter ansuz.svg), which it transliterated; its traditional name in English is still ash /æʃ/. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä.

That's...a bit of a coincidence right?

In my smoking cessation group we talked about the high rates of instances where people quit smoking and then later wind up getting cancer, and how that weird irony is often used to justifing continuing to smoke. The consensus though is that people generally intuit that their health is in the danger zone and this motivates them to quit,  but that its often too late. Like that,  I definitely think that "signs" are often confirmation of something we already sense deep down. And I know that Google voice gets turned on accidentally and picks up sounds all the time.

But seriously. The day after I give my first offering in a long time and my phone takes me to that?

I have a couple of questions. First, what do reconstructionists think of this type of woo? Would you accept it as something meaningful or as simply coincidence? What do others think of this as a "sign"? Finally, if it is potentially meaningful, what sort of symbolism can be derived from the ash?

Thanks for reading.

But seriously. The day after I give my first offering in a long time and my phone takes me to that?

Thanks for reading.

Isn't Yggdrasil supposed to be an ash tree? You said you've just started getting back into Heathenry after a long hiatus. I'd honestly think you'd be justified in seeing this as a "good omen" so to speak.

It has been a haitus from a more recon path, but I've been experimenting and questioning within heathenry for awhile (see: post-Ragnarok heathenry). Practicing heathenry/deeds were pretty much non-existant though.

The world tree is said to be an ash, but that's such a large thing that I'm not sure how to pin it down to something relevant to me. (Does that make sense?) Also æ can apparently stand for gods/æsir?

I've never really looked into runes and rune meanings but one site today said aesc stands for protection. I'm a glass half empty type most of the time so my first thought with that was that it's a warning. :p

Ah, OK... that makes the Yggdrasil interpretation seem more likely to me, though. From what I remember of the Ragnarok Heathenry thread, you were making a new paradigm - a new framework. And Yggdrasil is literally the framework of Heathen cosmology. I mean, it's the structure all those realms stand on. Perhaps this is a message that you need to stop experimenting, and try to settle down?

I have a couple of questions. First, what do reconstructionists think of this type of woo? Would you accept it as something meaningful or as simply coincidence? What do others think of this as a "sign"? Finally, if it is potentially meaningful, what sort of symbolism can be derived from the ash?

Thanks for reading.

 
Embrace the woo. That is all!

Æ was a sign that she heard all of my worries, and that she had an insight for me. All within one symbol.

 
I guess I would say that this is the first time I felt the truly reciprocal relationship of heathen worship. I gave an offering and within 24 hrs I was provided  with helpful, relevant information. It definitely changes my perspective on offerings now. Its less going through the motions and doing it for the idea of abstract reciprocity and is now... a more realized, actual, dynamic. There's more of a purpose and intent behind it then what was there before. More life.