Welcome to Gygratru

There are many pagan groups who have returned to and explored the Old Norse faith, worshipping Oðinn, Þorr, Frigga, and the rest of the pantheon. Ásatrú was legally recognized in Iceland as a religion dedicated to these gods. Vanatru focuses on the Vanir gods, like Freyr and Freyja, and their connection with the natural world. There's even a religion that focuses on the Jötunn, Rokkatru, the giants who were manifestations of nature and who fought the gods to uphold the natural order.

My beliefs are less than a religion and more than a philosophy: Gygratru is my spirituality, in which I focus on the giantesses of heathen Scandinavia. These come from a belief system several millenia old, according to research by Lotte Motz, Gru Steinsland, Gunnhild Røthe, and others. Like many religions, Old Norse borrowed pre-existing faiths and rolled them into their religion—a prime example being Týr, once the chief deity in his own Germanic religion, later demoted to (ahem) Oðinn's right-hand man. The patriarchal Old Norse legends, and their Christian revision, did no favors to giantesses, casting them as hideous and malicious, employing them as a parable to encourage obedience and subservience in women.

The fact that could not be (re)written out of the Eddas was that the giantesses were a group of women the gods themselves could not control. They stole the gods' gold, forcing the gods to create dwarfs to make gold for them; they witnessed the creation of the first man and woman. Giantesses retained the knowledge of the protology and the earliest eras of the world, and the gods had to petition them when they required this wisdom. Oðinn himself had to resurrect a Völva (seeress) from the dead to compel crucial intelligence from a giantess.

All of this suggests to me that the giantesses were there first. Worship of the gods and goddesses and the Jötunn belong to others: Gygratru means "faith in the giantess." All my work goes to perceiving and understanding them, and the Giantess Archetypes provide me the strength, healing, and inspiration I need to move through this world.

In her shadow, I remain,

Aborigen, rúnskrá