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| "For Karin's Name Day" by Larsson (1899) |
After over a decade of being consciously polytheistic I think perhaps it is possible that I may have some useful advice for people new to polytheism. All of the advice below comes from years of studying mostly Roman and Germanic sources, as well as some others (such as Celtic polytheism, Buddhism and Hinduism), as well as my lived experience.
There is no one and true way
The first and most important piece of advice I can give is to completely ignore anything that follows if it does not resonate for you. I am not a guru, and I suggest you be wary of anyone else who holds that they have discovered the one and true way to be a polytheist. Polytheism does not just imply a plethora of Gods but also a plethora of approaches to the divine.
There are no texts which are the polytheistic equivalent to the Bible
Polytheism predates literacy and flowered in an age of limited literacy. Therefore there are no texts that should be regarded as absolutely authoritative. The closest you can get to this in Germanic polytheism is the Havamal, which is part of the Elder Edda (also known as the Poetic Edda). If you are new to Germanic polytheism I suggest reading The Saga of the Volsungs, then the Elder Edda (because many of the poems relate to the story of the Saga of the Volsungs). If you want something really easy to read then the Prose Edda is a great starting point, though fallible.
In Roman polytheism there is nothing quite like the Havamal, in terms of spiritual guidance, but if you can get a handle on Ovid’s Fasti and Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods you will learn a great deal - though neither of these texts are particularly easy to read for beginners. A good beginners text is Beard, North and Price’s Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook, and to get an overview of the Roman mindset Shelton’s As the Romans Did is great. There are a number of good scholarly books dealing with Roman polytheism but they tend to focus on Roman polytheism as a State religion, with only glimpses of how polytheism would have been experienced by ordinary Romans. Of ancient texts Ovid’s Metamorphoses is perhaps the easiest bridge to understanding Roman polytheism, as well as Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.
