Table of Contents
Honoring the Gods Rightly
We venerate the Gods of the Ingvaeonic peoples as real, distinct, and sovereign beings — not metaphors, not archetypes, not facets of a single undifferentiated divine unity (thought they may be that, ultimately). Each has their own nature, their own portfolio, and their own relationship with us. This is the animist and polytheist commitment that underlies everything we do, and it shapes directly which beings we welcome into our worship.
Proscription on Uncouth Wights
We venerate those divinities who are life-affirming — beings whose character and influence support hælu, freod, and gástdóm. This is not an arbitrary preference. It follows from the Threefold Goal itself. A tradition oriented toward health, community, and genuine spiritual connection has no business inviting into its sacred spaces beings whose primary character is the destruction of those things. Entities of malice, chaos, and dissolution — whatever name they bear — are not welcomed in our rites, because to welcome them would be to work against the very purpose of our practice. We call such beings þyrs, and we leave them alone.
This position requires no exhaustive list of forbidden names. The principle is sufficient: if a being’s primary nature is harmful to human flourishing and to the bonds of community, it has no place in our worship. Practitioners who wish to engage with such beings do so outside the bounds of communal Ingwine practice.
However, in the interest of clarity, we do call out a few examples, as explicitly inappropriate for worship within the bounds of our tradition. Principally, we do not venerate Loki. This being we view as a distortion of a sacred force that represents the fire of the altar, and as such, modern interpretations of his true identity are corrupted beyond utility. Further this being is not mentioned by this name, in any West Germanic context, as a god our ancestors worshiped. Given the unfortunate predilection of some modern groups to advance the worship of this being, or other Thyrses, Eotens, and similar unlucky wights in a manner that has become socially destructive, we find we must expressly ban in Ingwine gatherings, the veneration of Loki.
Similarly, we ban the veneration of Grendel, or similar beings whose nature conflicts with our life-affirming alignment, and which have been identified by the Ge-Þing as anathema. Their names will be listed here, should this prove to be needed.
Foreign Gods and Syncretism
The Ingwine Heathen tradition acknowledges the historical reality of cultural contact among the Germanic and neighboring peoples. Trade, migration, intermarriage, and political alliance all brought different traditions into contact, and that contact left genuine traces in the lore. We do not pretend otherwise.
What we reject is the careless or uncritical blending of unrelated traditions — the modern habit, common in Pagan circles, of treating all mythologies as equally available to any practitioner for any purpose. This is not syncretism in any historical sense. It is eclecticism, and it tends to produce a practice with no coherent center.
Our position on genuine relationships with beings outside the Ingvaeonic sphere is guided by a single animating principle: the Gods are real and distinct. They are not masks of one another. They are not interchangeable. A non-Germanic deity, encountered through genuine relationship, is to be understood as what they are — a sovereign being from another tradition — not absorbed into our framework as a variant of Woden or Frig. Where our tradition already venerates a deity in their native Ingvaeonic form, that form is preferred. Where an outside being contradicts our core sida and teachings, the relationship is not compatible with communal Ingwine practice.
The goal of this sidu is not to police private devotion. It is to protect the integrity of what we do together — to ensure that the shared tradition remains recognizably itself, rooted in historical sensibility rather than the spiritual marketplace of the modern age.
Solemnity and Reverence
The pre-conversion Ingvaeonic peoples approached their sacred rites with deliberate reverence. Tacitus, observing the Germanic tribes in the 1st century CE, noted that their sacred assemblies were conducted with sobriety and decorum — that the sacred space demanded a particular quality of presence from those who entered it. This is not a modern imposition. It is one of the oldest attested sida we have.
In the Ingwina Ferræden, we hold the same expectation. Those attending a blót, a sacrifice, or any formal religious ceremony approach the occasion with reverence for the Gods, the Ancestors, and the wights being honored. The solemnity of the rite reflects the reality of the presences being engaged. This is not performance — it is acknowledgment.
Excessive intoxication or conduct that diminishes the integrity of the rite is inconsistent with this sidu. Weapons — other than those consecrated to a sacral function — are not brought into sacred space. These are not arbitrary rules. They reflect the understanding that the sacred is genuinely different from the ordinary, and that the threshold between them deserves to be marked and respected.