Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me,
That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire,
The life and joy of tongues of flame,
And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune,
I may rouse the blear-eyed world,
And pour into it the beauty which you have begotten.
- Amy Lowell, “The Giver of Stars”
I’m Elizabeth Vongvisith, a Pagan monastic, spiritworker, and priestess-consort of the Norse god Loki, to Whom I am primarily dedicated. (Yes, I really do consider myself married to Him; no, it’s probably not much like what you’re thinking.) Life as a Lokean god-spouse and monastic is about what you’d expect: strange, sometimes requiring a lot of patience, with occasional bursts of completely random absurdity. I’ve been involved in Neo-Paganism to some degree or another since the time the earth was cooling and dinosaurs roamed the land (the mid-1980s) and have been Loki’s since 2003.
My other patroness, Hela, the Norse goddess of the dead, owns the work of my hands, and it was at Her instigation that I initially began chronicling my attempts to build a monastic practice for myself. While the first couple of years’ worth of posts here are specifically concerned with monasticism in a modern Pagan context, the main focus of this blog has shifted to a more generally relevant tone. I decided that, instead of talking about how to act like a Pagan monastic, I should now talk about actually being one, as well as being a vocational priestess, diviner, and Loki’s throw pillow. However, I am not an authority on any of these things, and I hope to learn as much from writing this blog as others might hope to learn from reading it.
Please remember that I’m only writing about my own experiences and insights; in your relationship to the Holy Ones, you may uncover a totally different understanding of things. Also, I’m a hard polytheist, meaning that I view gods as separate, conscious entities with wills of Their own, rather than as aspects of a single God/dess, god-forms, or archetypes residing in the human subconscious. I don’t expect others to conform to my point of view, but that’s where I’m coming from when I discuss my interactions with various entities, and whether or not my view is correct is not a subject on which I care to debate.
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Twilight and Fire is dedicated to Himself and to Her Ladyship.
