The Wilde AltarA developing queer pagan library
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Gay-led and LGBTQ+ affirming. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, intersex, asexual, questioning people, and respectful allies are welcome. No role here is assigned by anatomy or orientation.

A Norse god, handled as a guest

Loki

Shape-shifting, trouble, and a few episodes modern readers call queer or trans. The sources are medieval, the devotion is modern, and the binding is not a toy.

A gold theater mask beside ivy and wine.
A gold theater mask beside ivy and wine.

Loki is a god in Norse mythology, a companion and problem to Odin and Thor, father and mother of monsters in the stories Snorri Sturluson wrote down in thirteenth-century Iceland, centuries after the conversion. He is not a Wiccan god. He is not “the Norse version” of anyone in the Greek shelf. Living Heathen traditions have their own norms about him, ranging from deep devotion to refusal. We are visitors on this page.

The episodes people mean

In the Prose Edda, Loki becomes a mare to lure away the giant-builder’s stallion and later gives birth to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse. In Lokasenna he trades insults with the gods, and the insults include sexual shame of a very medieval kind. After Baldr’s death he is bound with the guts of his son while venom drips on him, his wife Sigyn holding a bowl. These are not soft stories. A reading that keeps the mare and deletes the binding and the cruelty is editing for comfort.

Modern trans and queer devotion

Some trans and queer people in our time honor Loki because the myths show a gender crossing and a refusal of respectability. That devotion can be serious. It is modern. It should not claim Snorri was writing a trans manifesto, and it should not trample Heathen communities who set their own boundaries. If you are not Heathen, say you are a pagan reader borrowing, carefully, and do not invent a Norse-Wiccan fusion and call it old.

If you still want a small gesture

  1. 1Read a summary of Baldr and the binding from a named translation, not only a meme.
  2. 2Say: “Loki, I am a guest in this story. I will not sand it smooth. I will not use your name to mock trans people or to excuse betrayal.”
  3. 3Do not offer blood, and do not stage a binding. If your devotion needs a physical act, mend something you broke in ordinary life.

Sources and further reading

Closed practicesHow this library treats other people’s rites.Gender-diverse imageryCrossing is not one story.InannaA different culture’s descent and gender lore.