On my rosary I include three goddess beads, one for each of the tribes, giving thanks to Frig, Freo, and Hel with citrine, amber, and tiger’s eye respectively. The first two are obviously honored as the queens of their garths and homes, but calling the third “queen of the eoten or rökkr” seems more dubious, unless I envision the three as representative of the Over, Middle, and Underworlds, in which case her inclusion is especially fitting.

More than that, I owe her a great debt for scaring the shit out of me when I needed it most. Fascinated by heathen mysticism, I essentially set out woefully unprepared and grandiosely delusioned as to my intent. I was, to put it bluntly, humbled before her, and I didn’t mess with shit I didn’t understand from then on. The next day I bought her a rose, dried it on my altar, and left it in the snow for her as an offering. She has been in my prayers ever since, even if the observance is somber.

When I pass over the tiger’s eye bead, I invoke her as “Guardian and Gatekeeper, Giver of Grace.” I see her as both protecting the living from the dead as guardian and regulating souls’ entrance into Death as gatekeeper, but also as ruling over a place that, while sorrowful, ensures each soul is given something to eat at death’s table.

As a culture we have such an unhealthy relationship with death in part because of the distance we maintain between it and us, pretending as though we will never die or artificially extending life without extending its quality. Death was a common occurrence centuries, even decades ago, but now we shield ourselves from it and fear it irrationally, pretending it doesn’t exist and trying to mask the pain of loss. To live is also to die. Death deserves our respect and reverence. But nobody said it would be easy.

I believe Hel appeared to me at that time in part because I had just lost my paternal grandmother, the woman I felt closest to of all my relatives, and was experiencing the loss of someone dear to me for the first time in my life. (I was lucky to have gotten away without knowing death until I was nineteen, but it also made me that much more keenly aware of her passing.) Hel did not comfort so much as confront me, and I was able to cope with my feelings on my own. Seeing even that tiny glimpse of Hel while I was struggling with grief for the first time put a lot of things into perspective, and allowed me to puzzle out my thoughts on death in a spiritual context.

I remember Ruth by a number of small trinkets of hers now stored on my altar, and feel her when I call upon my family’s Ides. She is not gone entirely; I still have my memories of her.

The significance of Hel being my first mystical experience makes Hallows all the more appropriate for the beginning of a serious year-and-a-day study of saxon paganism and witchcraft. I begin with the death of my old life and will end with death again, completing the cycle and preparing me to start my spiritual journey anew. My ancestors will be there with me, the women whom I honor on the fourth bead of my rosary, moonstone. “Ancient Ancestors, aid us and our own.” When I like three candles for them on Hallows, may they be a beacon in the darkness of the long nights of winter soon to come.

I seem to come back to this question again and again as I tease out the threads of my spiritual tapestry, drifting between paths and even religions. Right now it seems extra poignant because of the discussions I’ve been having with Eric, my Jewish boyfriend, who continually teases me that I’m going to convert and become Jewish.

When I first began dating him I lacked any knowledge about Jews whatsoever, only my insistence that Israel was an aggressor state, that Jews were oppressing the poor Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and that Jewish settlements and military retaliations were singularly to blame for the stalled peace process. (Let me tell you how quickly that came to an end. I have since tried to understand more about the conflict, but it’s difficult when my favorite leftist authors and organizations, like Noam Chomsky and Democracy Now, are also seemingly staunchly anti-Israel.)

Being the religion junkie that I am (and hating ignorance perhaps most of all), I quickly proceeded to check out a bunch of books from the library on the topic.  But, strangely, I had to hide the books and my thoughts from my parents. I began to understand the extent of anti-semitism when I realized my parents were more concerned about me learning about Judaism that witchcraft. My mother has even bought me Llewellyn almanacs and calendars before, but reading about the Torah and mitzvot and Israel? Awkward. “Watch out for Jewish boys,” my grandmother warned me, “they only want Jewish girls who can give them Jewish babies.” The message was hammered into me by my peers when they began to seriously suggest that I stop seeing him solely on the grounds of him being Jewish. One of these friends lives with a Wiccan, so you can’t say that they’re simply an intolerant person in general. To spite them, I now tease that I’m going to become “a Jewess brood mother” and will like it, and they can go fuck themselves. They’ve stopped bothering me about it since. (To Eric I play the other side of the coin, calling myself the shiksa he wishes he didn’t love.)

My resolve made all the stronger by my friends and family’s assholery, I tore through the books quickly. I was fascinated by the traditions of intellectual debate, the concepts of loving-kindness and charity, and the theological flexibility that comes with Judaism being more of a culture than a religion. I found out my Russian paternal grandmother likely had Jewish roots, though that meant nothing for my own status as gentile. I even began to consider what my home might look like if I observed Shabbat, went to Temple, and raised my children to be Jewish. I imagined a wedding with my Jewish groom, my Jewish best friend as the maid of honor, a chuppah, a ketubah, and the sound of breaking glass. I bought a book on converting and learned everything I could about the process, from the bet din to the mikvah.

It wasn’t too far from what I believed, I told myself. The mystery of Elohim’s simultaneous plurality and singularity could explain my polytheism, and I had always held the pantheistic belief that there is a divinity that comprises the entirety of the universe and even the gods who are otherwise distinct, called the All. It wouldn’t be too different to change the “All” to “Adonai,” to go from the wheel of the year to the Jewish calendar, wiccecraeft to Kabbalah, galdr to davening. I thought the things that I wanted from paganism were there, more strongly, in Judaism: actively partaking in ritual at home, a strong community to connect with, a God whose tenets matched my own liberal philosophy. Most of all, I would have a partner to share these things with, reluctant though he might be.

But I began to grow frustrated that for all that I would have to dedicate myself entirely and be essentially a textbook Jew to convert, Eric would always be more Jewish than me (having had a Jewish mother) even though he would be more lax about observing holidays, studying Torah, and believing in God in the Jewish sense. He wanted to see his children bar or bat mitzvah’ed but didn’t care about much else. The important part was being Jewish, not living Jewish.

More than that, I couldn’t shake my own Gods. A monochrome view of the world would never quite suit me, and where did my totemic inclinations and magical aspirations fit in? I couldn’t convert if I was still a pagan at heart, even if I could celebrate family and toast to l’chaim alongside the Jews I loved. That leaves any children I have with him without a solid Jewish identity, but I can’t bring myself to change who I am for the sake of others. I also like to think that would be a sin in Judaism, and I respect the tradition too much to convert without my heart and soul in it.

What this brief episode of interest in Judaism has done in my life is to really teach me about where I stand and why I gravitated towards paganism in the first place. What makes it so that I cannot join the house of Yisrael, no matter how much of a headache that might save me down the line?

Simply, monotheism does not honor life in all its myriad forms the way paganism does for me. By distilling everything down to One, a good deal of variation is lost, from the dark to the fertile to the righteous to the warlike. Paganism is more sensitive to these nuances and addresses them directly, either in the festivals or the Gods themselves, the elements and the spirits of place, plant, and beast. And I’m pretty sure I cannot commune with Falcon in ritual and then go on to recite Kaddish at dinner, or maintain my altar and hang a mezuzah on my front door (unless some of my housemates want to, but that’s their choice).

And so I’m back to where I started, just in time to seriously prepare for a year-and-a-day course of study starting on the 31^st, when I will be celebrating Hallows. I had given myself that deadline back in June, not realizing it would be just enough time to work through my fascination and trepidation with becoming Jewish and come full circle back to Saxon paganism. On that night I’ll honor Hel again for the first time in years, who marked my first true mystical—if absolutely terrifying—experience, and remember the ancestors who brought me here as the veil between worlds thins. The late fall/early winter has always been my most spiritual time, with its dark, rainy nights and cold, cloudy days, and so I will begin and end my course of study with its power.

I ask for faith now, Holy Ones,
and in this, I gather up the last wisps
of what faith I have left, that You
will hear me, that some among You
may feel moved to guide me, that but
one of You will speak to me, aloud or
in the profound silence of the soul
and that I may receive into my hands
all the tools I need to build that faith into
nothing so much as a mighty fortress,
but the crumbling wall which, I know,
I shall have to scale again and again.

– Elizabeth Vongvisith, Be Thou My Hearth and Shield

30 Days of Saxon Paganism Index