deviantbirds:

Buzzing by ~rieke-b

phobs-heh:

Ivan Aivazovski, Storm on the Sea at Night (1849)

(via spectralradiance)

(Source: autothoughts, via spaceykate)

(Source: newstaircase)

isopod:

This print of a saw-whet owl by Gwen Partin is actually a greeting card, but I’ll put it in a frame anyway.

(Source: allegorys, via mopoki)

dewognatos:

amber-and-ice:

fuckyeahhardfemme:

Loki is best known as the God of Mischief, but he is much more. He is one of the three Gods who gifted humankind with life. He is the God of the Hearthfire, a place more commonly held by Goddesses in other pantheons. He is the mother of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged stead. Some of His other children include Fenrir, the World-Eating Wolf; Jörmungandr, the Midgard-Serpent; and Hel, the Giantess-Goddess of the Underworld. Most interesting and least known, however, is that Loki is the patron God of Ergi, or, Unmanly Behavior. Ergi includes a wide array of attributes and activities, from cross-dressing to receiving anal penetration. Also of interest, argr, the adjectival form of ergi, also translates in modern usage as angry or annoyed. In conclusion, Loki is (one of) the patron God(s/esses) of Hard Femme.

(submitted by detectivepunchymchitsthings)

Even when reading fairy tales, I have never understood the tendency to treat liminal figures with hostility. With caution and distrust, yes, but with open aggression? These beings are powerful, useful, and necessary.

Loki is about as liminal as you can get. The Norse/Germanic worldview doesn’t function on concepts of good and evil, but on chaos and order. The world of humans is order, the world of jotuns (the natural world with all its forces) is chaos. (I’m drawing this off the idea of cultivated land being protective and wild land being dangerous in the lore. Stepping onto cultivated land was a method of escaping from malevolent wights and the like, and hedges, often used as markers between these things, were places where the two worlds mingled; liminal places). Some of the gods are more attuned to the natural/chaos side of things, the non-human side, than others. This is not an evil thing, nor is it a good thing. The natural world is not seen with the same reverence as it is in other pagan systems, nor is there a sense of inherent goodness and purity attached to it. The natural world simply Is. We come from it, draw our sustenance and survival from it, but it is much bigger and more savage than us, and it is right to both respect and fear it. To think otherwise is arrogance.

As our concepts of the natural world, how it functions, and the forces that make up our universe change, so will our concepts of and relations with the gods. This is only natural, and I don’t think it ought to be fought against. Our myths are not Revelation, they are collections of our ancestors concepts and relationships. Certainly we need to strive to understand those and rebuild them, but what about new myths, new sagas? What relationships will we lay down for our children in this folkway? I do not believe that the gods are precisely what we envision them to be, but neither are they invented. Whatever they are in actuality, who can say? But I believe our concepts of them, their spheres of influence, their names are invented and can and should shift with our own understanding of the world and universe. (However, Aphrodite =/= Frejya =/= Hathor,  Odin =/= Zeus =/= Ra…whatever the entities themselves are, they are not the same going by different labels depending on culture).

So I think perhaps as we revive this worldview, our concepts of the gods are changing. We are not our ancestors and our world is not their world. Our minds and lives, our very realities, are different. And I think that our concept of Loki is changing the most. I’ve described him before as being like nuclear power: extremely powerful, potentially very useful, but we don’t entirely understand it and it can devastate our world if we aren’t painstakingly careful. That seems to fit his role as the in-between of the nature-chaos/civilization-order spectrum, but it’s his human world aspects, his social aspects, that seem to be the most contentious, as so far as we can tell, he has never had any before. (The hearthfire associations have sketchy support at best). As the negative associations with “unmanly” behavior are deconstructed, Loki’s “unmanly” attributes and actions become less negative and more neutral. It’s almost like he’s becoming the god of deconstructing socially created assumptions, but in a way he’s always been that. Still, this worldview is still pretty new and unsure. We don’t know what Loki’s social role is just yet; it’s still being built. We know a bit of what he was to our ancestors, but we haven’t quite figured out what he is to us.

(Going way out to sea here, but I’ve always felt one of the primary functions of any trickster figure is to check the gods for arrogance, remind them of the constant interplay between chaos and order. In this sense, the binding of Loki is like the suppression of that, the forgetting that we are tiny, and the unbinding of Loki (Ragnarok, which is A battle, not THE battle. It isn’t an Armageddon; that’s some Christian interpolation) is the remembering of that. Don’t we all feel small after a massive earthquake? After a hurricane? After a nuclear reactor is cracked and all we can do is try our best to limit the damage? The universe tends toward entropy; order is only temporary. It’s no bad thing to remember that.)

Reblogging because this commentary is wonderful, and I’d already liked the picture before reading it.

(via allgothsgo2helheim)

nouveaufindesiecle:

repeating pattern with squirrels

(via chasingthegreenfaerie)

73x5sunrises:

noelarthurian:

Bear-Clawed. Ink & watercolor on 6”x9” Arches 140lb cold press.

Devotional piece.

I’m doing art again, guys :)

alextooth:

http://www.facebook.com/rodrigoluff

savannahhorrocks:

I am not generally open for commissions these days, but every now and again I’ll open for a sketch commission or two. This was one I took today :3 Really pleased with the outcome.

ALSO woo I have scanning ability again! Lots of art, debating what to upload and what not to, but there will be uploads coming up. Bit by bit. I don’t want to do it all at once. <XD

Character belongs to “Mime” on deviantart and was commissioned by her friend “Megalithic” :3

Parakeets and Gold Fish Bowl (by richardr)

Four Seasons… Now Summer (Alphonse Mucha ) (by Beatrycze.)

thewoodbetween:

Illustrated by Alan Lee ~ from The Lady of the Fountain (‘The Mabinogion’)

(via dewognatos)

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s A View of Oyster Bay by chaostrophy on Flickr.