“Truth can be both our shield and sword in the battle of life.”
There are people who influence us not only through what they teach, but through the manner in which they live what they teach.
Over the last several months, my friend Torna Braggison has offered me a remarkable degree of openness, patience, friendship, and spiritual guidance. He has answered my many questions, challenged me to think more deeply, and helped me better understand a Heathen worldview that cannot be reduced to symbolism, abstract belief, or solitary spiritual consumption.
Torna is the author of Power Through Truth, an exploration of the relationship between sacred breath, truthful speech, oath-keeping, honor, and spiritual power within the Heathen tradition.
His guidance has continually returned me to something more demanding: conduct.
- How do we speak?
- What do we promise?
- Do our actions uphold our words?
- Can the people closest to us trust what comes out of our mouths?
- What happens to us (personally, socially, and spiritually) when they cannot?
What if truth is not merely something we believe, but something we breathe, speak, promise, remember, and live?
Truth Is Not Merely an Idea
Modern people are accustomed to treating truth primarily as a matter of intellectual agreement.
We ask whether a proposition is correct, whether a doctrine is factual, or whether someone possesses the proper beliefs. Religion often becomes a matter of assenting to particular claims. Politics becomes a competition between competing narratives. Online identity becomes a collection of publicly declared values.
But declaring a value is not the same as embodying it.
A person can speak endlessly about compassion while behaving cruelly. Someone can build an identity around authenticity while lying to the people closest to them. A spiritual leader can speak of love, healing, transcendence, and divine truth while refusing accountability for the damage caused by their conduct.
Words alone do not prove character.
Within the framework Torna presents, however, words are not inconsequential. They are not merely sounds, opinions, or disposable expressions. They are carried upon the sacred breath and given force through the character and intention of the speaker.
Torna describes Ond as the sacred breath of life, the divine spark gifted by Odin. Our words ride upon that breath, and when we speak, we give those words a kind of life. Their quality is connected to the truth, intention, and honor of the person speaking them.
Speech therefore becomes more than communication.
It becomes participation.
We breathe something of ourselves into the world.
The Breath Behind the Word
In Völuspá, Odin’s gift to Ask and Embla includes Ond—the animating breath without which they do not yet fully possess life. Torna connects this sacred breath to speech, creativity, ecstatic power, ritual, galdr, and the ability to shape reality through will and expression.
This does not mean that every passing sentence is a magical incantation in the theatrical or New Age sense.
It means that speech carries consequences.
Words can establish trust or destroy it. They can bind people together, orient a community, transmit memory, establish obligation, inspire courage, or leave another person spiritually and emotionally disoriented. A truthful word spoken at the right moment can restore someone’s sense of reality. A deliberate lie can make another person doubt their own perception.
Our words affect the world because other people must live inside the reality those words help create.
This is one reason truth matters so deeply to me.
I do not want truth to remain an attractive principle I discuss in essays or podcasts. I want the people in my life to know that my word means something. I want to follow through when I make a commitment. I want to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable. I want to recognize when my conduct contradicts what I have claimed and accept the responsibility of repairing what I can.
That is not always easy.
Truth as lived accountability demands more than being “right.” It demands self-examination, restraint, memory, courage, and humility. It may require us to admit that we have behaved dishonorably. It may force us to stop protecting the version of ourselves we would prefer others to believe.
Truth can defend us, but it can also cut through our own self-deception.
It is both shield and sword.
Words in the Well
One of the most compelling ideas in Torna’s article is that some words carry more weight than others.
He distinguishes between common or everyday speech, words placed “in the well” through intimate or sacred relationships, and the giving of formal oaths. Each carries a different degree of personal, communal, and spiritual consequence.
We all understand this intuitively.
Telling a cashier that we are “fine” when we are having a terrible day does not carry the same moral weight as lying to a spouse, deceiving a close friend, betraying a confidant, or breaking a solemn vow.
The closer the relationship, the more of ourselves we place behind the word.
Words spoken to those who trust us become part of a shared memory. They shape how another person understands us, themselves, and the relationship between us. Words spoken during ritual enter the memory of the group. Stories told by the skald or bard help shape a people’s understanding of their ancestors, heroes, virtues, and obligations.
These are words placed into the well.
The well can be understood as Mímir’s well, ancestral memory, cultural memory, or the accumulated memory of the community. What is spoken does not simply disappear after the vibration leaves the air. It continues through consequence, reputation, story, recollection, and relationship.
A truthful word can strengthen the speaker and those who hear it.
A dishonest word can poison the well.
The Spiritual Weight of an Oath
An oath carries the greatest weight because an oath is not merely a prediction about what we hope to do.
It is an act of binding.
Torna describes an oath as something given life through sacred breath and powered by the will. The oath involves not only the person who gives it, but the recipient, the witnesses, the place, and the spiritual powers invoked or present. Until it is fulfilled or broken, the oath continues to possess force.
This is almost incomprehensible within a culture of casual promises.
We say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” “I’ll always be there,” “You can trust me,” or “I swear I’ll change,” often with little awareness of the weight those statements carry for the person receiving them.
Our society encourages constant speech while teaching very little discipline of speech.
We post immediate reactions. We make dramatic declarations. We promise more than we can deliver. We publicly perform virtues we have not yet cultivated privately. We use language to manage how others perceive us, then become resentful when we are held accountable to the identity we presented.
A Heathen understanding of oath asks us to become more careful.
- Do not promise lightly.
- Do not offer your word merely to relieve the discomfort of the present moment.
- Do not invoke trust when you are unwilling to behave in a trustworthy manner.
The answer is not to become silent, emotionally unavailable, or terrified of commitment. It is to understand that a promise contains part of the self. When we repeatedly keep our word, we become someone whose speech possesses weight. When we continually break it, our words become thin and useless.
Eventually, no one believes us… and that isn’t because they are cruel, but because we have taught them not to.
Honor Is Accumulated
Torna connects the keeping of oaths with Hamingja, a concept often translated as luck but also associated with honor, power, fortune, and the accumulated strength of the self.
This is not luck imagined as random cosmic favor.
It is closer to luck that has been cultivated.
A person who consistently acts with integrity develops trusted relationships, a dependable reputation, communal support, and an internal sense of coherence. Their words and actions reinforce each other. They become spiritually and socially substantial.
Keeping one’s word strengthens the whole self, while dishonorable conduct weakens it.
We might recognize this even without using explicitly spiritual language.
A trustworthy person is often surrounded by people willing to help them because they have proven that help will not be wasted. Their reputation opens doors. Their community remembers their conduct. When hardship comes, they are not entirely alone.
This is not always fair or perfectly reciprocal. Honorable people can still be betrayed, harmed, or abandoned. But the larger principle remains: character accumulates.
So does dishonor.
Every promise kept or broken becomes part of the person we are becoming.
Truth as Communal Participation
Truth is often framed as an individual possession: my truth, my beliefs, my authenticity.
But Torna’s article presents truth as profoundly relational.
As a bard and skald, he writes that believing in the moral truth of a story allows the teller to connect with those listening. Honest words can create a communal experience in which teller, listener, folk, hero, deity, moral teaching, place, and ancestral memory are brought into relationship.
Truth does not merely sit inside the mind.
It passes between people.
It is sung, remembered, witnessed, and enacted.
This is where the concept becomes essential to The Wisdom of Participation. Traditional cultures did not generally understand humans as isolated consumers of spiritual information. People gathered. They sang. They told stories. They made vows before witnesses. They remembered their dead. They carried inherited obligations. They participated in the maintenance of a shared moral world.
The skald did not simply deliver “content.”
The community did not merely observe.
Everyone present became part of the remembering.
This is radically different from a spirituality centered on private revelation, personal vibration, or self-created metaphysical truth. The well does not belong to the isolated ego. It contains the memory of relationships—between the living, the dead, the Gods, the land, and those yet to come.
What we place into that well matters.
No One Can Embody Truth on Our Behalf
Christianity famously places the words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” into the mouth of Jesus.
In that worldview, truth is ultimately embodied in and accessed through a singular salvific figure. The believer is asked to place faith in that figure and the theological claims made about him.
The Heathen framework explored here places the emphasis elsewhere.
Truth is not merely a person to profess belief in. It is a standard we must demonstrate through conduct.
No savior can keep our promises for us.
No doctrine can repair the trust we have broken.
No spiritual identity can substitute for honest speech.
No declaration of belief can transform dishonorable behavior into honorable behavior.
Truth must be renewed each time we speak carefully, fulfill a commitment, admit a wrong, make recompense, resist convenient deception, or allow our actions to bear the weight of what we have claimed.
It must be breathed and lived.
The Question Before Us
My upcoming conversation with Torna Braggison will explore the relationship between Ond, speech, oath, honor, memory, galdr, storytelling, and spiritual power.
But beneath the terminology lies a deeply human question.
What kind of person does my speech reveal me to be?
Do my words give life, orientation, and trust to the people around me?
Do I make promises carelessly?
Have I confused saying the right things with becoming an honorable person?
Have I demanded truth from others while excusing dishonesty in myself?
And when I fail, am I willing to make recompense rather than simply inventing a more flattering story about what happened?
Truth is not merely the absence of false information.
It is the alignment of breath, speech, memory, promise, and deed.
It is the weight accumulated when we repeatedly prove that our words can be trusted.
It is what we place into the well.
It is what others will remember.
And it is what remains when every attractive spiritual claim has been stripped away and only our conduct is left to speak for us.
Links:
Power through Truth Substack article
The Lessons of Asgard– WorldTree Publications, 36pgs. Completely revised, with original kennings to the Gods by Torna Braggison. An introductory study of the principle Gods & Goddesses in the lore.
Morphic Resonance and Morphic Fields – an Introduction
Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans
Consciousness and the Return of Panpsychism with Dr. David Skrbina
Taste0ftruth Tuesdays 