Aborigen

Oh, the rebel, the loner, the misunderstood creative type, the manic pixie dream girl.

There’s an element to American society that simultaneously idealizes and rejects the outsider. People fantasize about themselves being outsiders, the one with the forbidden secret, the one who bravely voices unpopular opinions. They’re the only one doing it, everyone else is mindless sheep, and no one else can understand them. Yet you confront them with a real outsider, someone living boldly and authentically, someone who makes them realize they’re lying to themselves about something important, and the encounter rarely goes well.

In light of all this, why would someone choose the path of the outsider?

Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’re just born on the outside. Sometimes, in the course of exploring yourself, growing and developing, you discover things about yourself that place you on the outside. Recall that beautiful moment in Barbie, when the titular doll nearly upends her dance party by wondering whether anyone else thinks about death.

To callously paraphrase some lofty philosophy, Carl Jung believed we had a duty to explore ourselves, to deeply understand and know ourselves on all levels. And if that led us down a path of weirdness, we had a responsibility to explore it to its extent and send notes back to society on what we find along the way, regardless of how those missives would be received.

What Sets the Giantess Apart

That’s kind of what I’ve done in my spirituality, my revision of giantess-worship. I’ve moved beyond inflated breasts and tiny streaks of blood on a sneaker sole and begun exploring a diversity of giantess aspects. I don’t expect to convince anyone of my findings, and I’m constantly rewriting them as I go: this is only my journey. Certain things have been revealed to me, through certain channels, and my curiosity is such that I need to understand them, what they are and where they come from.

This is the path of the giantesses in Old Norse myth … just, without the navel-gazing and lack of self-confidence.

In the legends and epics of Iceland and ancient Scandia that have been passed down, the giantesses were present every step of the way. They’re much older than Odin and Thor and all that: Old Norse borrowed spiritual and divine elements of discrete religions and rolled them into their own stories, just as Christianity did with the pagan beliefs of the lands and peoples they conquered. And despite being watered-down and attenuated in the retelling by Odin-worshippers and Christians, the giantesses were still the retainers of ancient knowledge, a group of women that the gods themselves could not control.

Three giantesses stole the gods’ treasures, compelling the gods to create dwarfs to manufacture gold for them, and in this act the gods forgot how to make gold. Three giantesses were present for the creation of the first man and woman. The giantess Gullveig was slain, incinerated three times by the gods, and she kept coming back to life. With her ability to reincarnate, scholars believe she manifested as other giantesses throughout the legends, like Heiðr and even the fearsome Angrboða. And the last scene of Ragnarok is that of a giantess on a hilltop, nursing a wolf at her breast who then leaps up to devour the moon and kick off the end of all creation.

The male-dominant religion of Old Norse told unflattering tales of the giantesses, depicting them as willful and disobedient, parables meant to instruct women on how to behave for men. Male giants were forbidden from relationships with goddesses, but gods could select giantesses as their occasional consorts: Tyr and Loki, among others, were the results of such union. In his raids against the Jotunn, Thor made sure to slaughter the giantesses, in order to slow down the procreation of the ice giants. Christianity rewrote the stories as well, denigrating these powerful women, such as when King Olaf dragged the statue of Þorgerðr behind his horse, asking his soldiers who’d like to purchase a woman. Despite these revisions, the giantesses are still sources of tremendous power and influence. Many more of them are named than the giants, and they’re certainly more active in the myths than their male counterparts. FFS, the giant Hrym who steers that great, morbid ship Naglfar (“nail-farer” or “corpse-ship”) with Loki, the ship made out of the fingernails and toenails of the dead, bearing all the giants and monsters to Vígríðr, heading into war against the gods? Even his name merely breaks down to “giantess wrangler.” He doesn’t have an identity outside of his relationship to giantesses. How did he like his coffee? “Whatever she’s having.”

Giantesses retain all protological wisdom that the gods occasionally need. This is important to bear in mind, when considering that pagan worship of giantesses existed long before notions of Odin coalesced. No matter how Snorri and the Christians mischaracterized them, they could not deny the fundamental truth that the giantesses were there first.

Standing Apart, Necessarily

A giantess cannot hide her nature. She towers above trees, she looms over we petty humans. She can’t put on a gray business suit and blend into the downtown lunch rush. Doing nothing, standing still or lying dormant, she yet commands eyeballs and imagination. There’s no wishing she were someone or something else—all she can do is embrace the fact of her existence, celebrate it regardless of how those around her treat her.

When it occurred to me to draw up the Giantess Archetypes, and then when these millennia-old giantesses called to me, there was nothing I could do to deny that. Whatever one thinks of Cowboys & Aliens (2011), there’s a line in it that’s stuck with me through the years. The preacher Meachum is engaged with Doc, who’s failing to learn to shoot a rifle, grieving the loss of his wife, and questioning his relationship with God. “Certainly you don’t expect the Lord to do everything for you, right?” Meachum says. “You gotta earn his presence, and then you gotta recognize it, and then you gotta act on it.”

To paraphrase this for the theme of this essay: You have to earn the presence of the Giantess. When the Giantess presents herself to you, you have to honestly recognize it for what it is. And when you recognize it, you are compelled to act upon it. At least through my practice of Gygratru, this spirituality is very active: You have to be aware of what’s going on around you, and you have to improve yourself at all points, and all this so you can influence a better world for everyone.

The giantesses, during and before the Old Norse myths, were stewards of the earth. They represented the natural order. The Jotunn were cast as the bad guys of the myths, but their worst crime was nothing more than fulfilling the natural order of creation and destruction. The Norns (three more indomitable giantesses) knew this, and despite the gods’ petitions, they would take no action to change a single thing. Even the Valkyries, the handmaidens of Odin, would “disobey” their lord, acting on an agenda he chose not to perceive.

Her Mystery

This was the secret meaning of the rune Perthro, to perceive and reconcile with the role of Fate throughout the course of events. Perthro represents mystery, intuition, and fate, aspects to life that have been attributed to women. Intuition has always been the domain of women; women are the great unknowable to men, in a conquest-based society that has robbed women of agency and participation. And as for fate, look at the recurring message of the Norse Norns, Macbeth’s Three Sisters, or the Greek Moirai, analogizing the traditional handiwork of women—weaving (from which we take the distaff and turn it into the iconic magic wand, a symbol so powerful that the church banned it 2,000 years ago)—into the tapestry of our existence.

What few know is that the rune for Perthro, ᛈ, represents the core of femininity. Berkano is invoked for growth and fertility, and people believe its rune, ᛒ, represents womanhood because it resembles a pair of boobs. Great, but Perthro represents the vulva, another enduring mystery to men. I’ve said it before: the opposite of a patriarchal society is not one in which women take the place of men as dominators of society. A matriarchal society is one in which all people have equal support, equal chance to succeed and develop themselves. It thrives not by conquest but by trading, sharing goods and the best ideas by which all prosper.

Where am I going with this? Frage ich auch.

No! I remember. The giantesses weren’t the bad guys, they embraced and enacted their roles within nature. Odin’s crew, and male-dominant society at large, would not trust the Norns and their mysterious wisdom, and all the action in the Norse myths is that of the gods defying fate and the natural order, imposing their individual will upon the world … only to fail. Everyone knew their part to play except the gods themselves; the gods performed in defiance of what was preordained. I understand the romanticism behind that, admiring the ill-fated attempt of these powerful men to stand and fight regardless of the outcome.

And yet … take a look around at our world, the warming and rising acidity of our oceans, earthquakes happening where they shouldn’t, soil that no longer nurtures like it should, piling mountains of nonbiodegradable garbage, and our assault upon the world’s jungles and forests, attacking the lungs of the planet … and ask yourself how noble it is to defy the natural order.

Now I find myself on this unusual path, unheard-of today but 4,000 years old, at least. I have performed for the giantesses, they have called to me, and 2025 will see whatever comes of that. Like a giantess, I can’t duck my head and pretend to be like anyone else. It would be more than dishonest to deny what I have been shown, it would be tantamount to blasphemy against the gods … worse, the giantesses. This outsider-lusting, outsider-fearing society of ours proclaims “fly your freak flag high,” and something greater compels me to obey.