By I. M. Knosp
Our Old Ones once kept ancient groves, places both sacral and holy, where Gods would frequent and make their home away from home. Beneath the roots of these ancient groves would be the beloved dead of the people who tended it. Both burial ground and hallowed ground these Groves were but one branch of a custom of sacred groves and burial trees. One that remains as one of the most important and beloved was that of the Home Tree, a Tree grown beside or even in the middle of a home or hall. Where a grand ancestor may be buried or honored. A place held dear in our very souls. These trees like many others were cut down, lost amongst the broader wood or became the location of a sacred area appropriated by the Foreign Faith.
In the very roots of these trees dwelt the afterimage of our beloved dead, the roots having wound themselves through the flesh and bone, nourished and strong from the blood of our kind. The afterimage of their ghosts remained, honored in their intertwining roots that through trunk and bough reached forth towards the sky. Their ghosts living on both in the realms beyond and in our memories, while others may be scattered into ash across the seas, fields and groves or buried in mounds and crypts to honor them these roots were the living idol to our beloved dead as much as we ourselves are the living idols of our bloodlines.
As our own ancestors stemmed into many clans yet maintain the same root, so too do these home trees. They root us to our story, our kith and kin. These Home trees and groves were not religious practices in what we may think of them, they were and are inherent to us. Something that just seems right when it must be done, same as washing the body or saying final farewells to a loved one. Naming a newborn, revealing them to the clan and community, the little boys training for war with sticks, the little girls weaving plots and flower crowns, to gather beside the family hearth in winter, to feast in fall telling ghost stories in the twilight, to feel the chill down your spine from the woodland gods, to cheer before the oncoming storms, to love in the summer, to come together to start a family, to celebrate our child’s birth and their coming of age, to one day meet Death herself when our final doom meets us.
All of these are inherent, experiences we must have trained out of us for otherwise we shall revel in all we are, the roots and branches unsevered, regardless of where they may be planted.
This! This is Paganism and Heathenry. Our Old Ways. Our True Traditions. Marking us as one of our kind and of our land. Uncorrupted, or in the words of the Foreign Faith… Edenic. Who and what we are going back into the mists of time to an age of heroes and monsters. To where memory is stored in sinew and ligaments more so than in our conscious thoughts themselves. The foreign faiths attempt to sever these roots, they attempt to eradicate their woven web of ghosts and memories, of lore and romances. But so long as we live, so too will our roots and branches thrive, our beloved dead and Grandest Ghosts dwelling within and beneath our mighty boughs, fertilizing the roots with all we are.
Thus when we feel lost or uprooted, fear not. Simply reconnect your roots to that of the Old Home Tree.