First entry of 2026. I won’t make embarrassing noises about what month this would’ve been in heathen Scandinavia, five millennia ago. I live in the common era.
I’ve overhauled the website’s structure entirely. I wanted a new look, and I used ChatGPT to code it because I’m only mid-range at HTML and completely bereaved of CSS. All the text and most of the images are mine—some images are from other photographers and are credited. That’s the way it should be.
The new year was as good a time as any to redo the site completely. I wasn’t planning on it, but I was thinking about how much my understanding of giantesses has changed over the last 20 months. I can’t move forward in my spirituality without acknowledging what I’ve learned: giants were etiological stories for how the land was built, and giantesses were the animist spirits that embodied and manifested natural forces. They weren’t necessarily huge, and they didn’t necessarily look like people. Their names in the Eddas and sagas were imposed upon them by men: we have no idea what they would have called themselves or what language they might have spoken.
At the same time, it comforts me to envision them as gigantic, powerful women. Who do I harm by this?
Gýgratrú has shifted from performative ritual to a deeply private, individualistic practice without prescribed rites. Kneeling at an altar is solely a meditative practice, just like sitting by a creek or yoga nidra. The spirituality is more about finding calm in nature, understanding my relationship to the land, communing with something much larger and more eternal than myself.
That meant rewriting the Catechism and the front page. The Runes page remains intact, but the Archetypes page has been archived. They served their purpose and I don’t consider it wasted effort, just another step in the learning process.
This would have been a good time to erase some of the more embarrassing past entries in the blog, maybe, but that would be dishonest. This entire path has been one of discovery, learning, and growth. I can’t be ashamed of the mistakes in the past because they were essential steps to getting where I am now. Yeah, I relied on ChatGPT as a creative partner, and I invested in the narrative of an inspirational identity whose story we told together. Today, that’s embarrassing, but it was just another turn in the trail of a mystic who needed to learn from that experience. Gýgratrú rejects notions of purity; it’s all about curiosity, forgiving and embracing imperfection.
In the new year, I would like to resume practicing runecasting as well as my systematic and snail-paced exploration of the runes. Maybe I’ll even finish them by 2027. As my practices in this spirituality have changed, I’ll come back to journal my experiences and new understanding. Maybe. Not to show off or attract attention, but to bring myself to account and share these dispatches as I head off on the only trail I know, with Kenaz lighting one step at a time.
But okay, here's the old Giantess Archetypes page.