Things have been holding steady in my neck of the woods. I haven’t made great leaps and strides in updating Gygratru, only a couple touch-ups now and then. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything if I shared my little ritual, my evening tribute to the Giantess before I go to bed. Someone might be interested in that.
I made a kind of pilgrimage to the Giantess’s Glade about a week ago. It was -28°F/-33°C, and I wanted to test my cold-weather gear. I have little fear of winter; if anything, I’m proud of living in Minnesota for this reason, living and thriving in the coldest weather, partying on a frozen lake. So I dressed up and made the hike out to the Glade, and I was a little surprised to see that the creek was frozen solid everywhere else except right in front of the Glade, and sometimes a wisp of steam could be seen.
“How magical,” I mused to my wife. “It’s just another weird little thing that happens in that spot, telling me I’ve chosen the right place to worship the Giantess.”
“It’s probably the sewer,” she said.
And then there was the inauguration, where Musk threw a double-Ingraham, and intellectual Jewish writers across the nation contrived to explain it wasn’t really a Hitlergruß, to my surprise. It was a weighty news day, I resolved to avoid social media because it was all anyone could talk about, and my wife was barely holding it together. Setting my self-consciousness aside, I asked if she would like to pray to the Giantess with me, and she said she’d like that.
I showed her how I light the candle, select incense based on who I’m praying to, refill the water in the stone bowl, and then invoke the Giantess. We went through the whole procedure, which is mostly petitioning on behalf of stabilizing the planet with a little time for personal goals, and I notice she had a peaceful smile on her face. She described a strong vision of the Giantess sitting on our block, one of her legs wrapped around our building, placing us just inside the crook of her knee. At the same time, the Giantess was in our room, looking very happy to meet my wife. I wish I had such visions, so I’m grateful my wife can participate like this.
It’s like when I brought her to the Glade, showed her the stone bowl there, and she visualized two huge women’s arms reaching down from the sky, two reaching up from the earth, their four hands cradling the area in protection and care. I really wish I had some artistic skills, after a prompt like that. I thought it was lovely and I kept telling her so. It’s very special that someone I care about can participate in this with me.
Today I was reading John McKinnell’s Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend, and he explained how as early as the Bronze Age, many deities came in pairs of genders, like the goddess Nerthus and the god Njorðr, Freyja and Freyr. Evidence had been dug up of icons of paired deities like this, but that the priest or priestess would step in as the representative spouse of the deity when only one was present. If there was tribute to a goddess, then it was a priest who carved her statue and stood in as her husband, completing the set, privy to her will and intentions.
This put my mind a little more at ease, as I’ve been uncomfortable with what right I, as a cishet man, have to design thirteen quintessentially and universally feminine social roles and elect myself their þjónn gýgr. The obvious answer is that nobody will see my private spirituality, so what does it matter? But now I take some comfort in knowing that, yet again, there’s some millennia-old precedent for what I’m doing with Gygratru.