What happens when divine guidance doesn’t match your self-image?
Picture this: You’re crashed on a friend’s futon in Osaka after a night of sake and karaoke. Normal dreams, nothing fancy.
Until a literal God tears open your dreamscape, yanks you into another dimension, and introduces you to a Goddess you’ve never heard of.
That’s what happened to me. And I said no thanks.
I fully believed that the experience was “real” in that sense that it was so much more than a dream. It was visceral. A tree-bark-skinned Odin literally reached into my dream like he was tearing through a dimension, lifted me with two fingers on to a silver platform, unrolled a tapestry of embroidered figures. The pantheon.
One of them stepped forward as a luminous three-dimensional woman who simply stated: “I am Nanna.”
Who Is the Norse Goddess Nanna?
When I woke up frantically Googling obscure Norse goddesses at 6am while my friends made coffee, I found almost nothing. Unlike the wealth of material on Freyja or Frigg, Nanna’s story is barely documented.
Here’s her Wikipedia-level mythology: She was the wife of Baldr, the beloved god. When Baldr was killed, Nanna was so overcome with grief at his funeral that she died too and was placed on his burning ship alongside him.
That’s it. That’s her whole story.
Wife of. Died of grief. The end.
And I thought: Absolutely not. Why would I work with her?
I already work closely with Isis, who is also a grieving widow. Her cries for Osiris were so frightening that a child is said to have died from hearing them. From that, I could see the affinity – a clear connection between me and “grieving widows.” But that is not the aspect, or archetype, that I work with when I work with Isis. I approach her mostly as the wisdom keeper, the magician, the Throne. The grief is part of her, sure, but not all of her.
For Nanna… it looked like it was all of her.
I thought for a few days on the interaction. I concluded that I simply didn’t want to be defined by devotion to a partner, especially a man. Women have done enough of that! I didn’t want “wife” as my primary spiritual identity.
So despite Nanna appearing, radiant and patient, I closed the door.
What I Missed
Here’s the thing about saying no to a Goddess: you don’t always know what you’re actually refusing.
I rejected Nanna based on an assumption. The truth is that we don’t have enough written records or captured folklore & oral traditions to know that the patriarchal Wikipedia version of her story is the whole thing.
A devoted wife, dies without her man, placed on his pyre like a belonging.
It’s easy to read that myth as: women should be so attached to their husbands that they can’t survive alone. Or: wives are property.
But what if there are other myths about her? And what if in this one, that’s not what the myth is about at all?
Think about the context. We have thousands of years of history where women were forced into marriages as children, forced to marry men decades older, forced to remarry uncles when their husbands died just to avoid destitution.
Marriage was rarely about love. It was about survival, property, and politics.
Most modern feminist scholars would likely agree that historically, marriage ended up being slavery or servitude for the majority of women. It’s not surprising that contemporary generations are wary and rejecting of it.
In such a world, what would it mean to actually love your spouse? To choose someone and genuinely want to be with them? To experience such depth of feeling that losing them felt unbearable?
It’s almost punk, in a Romeo & Juliet sort of way.
One reading of Nanna is: be so devoted to your man that you can’t go on without him. Perform your grief publicly at the funeral pyre so everyone knows you were a good wife.
Another reading is: what a gift to have experienced that kind of love at all. What a rare and precious thing, to have a beloved.
And I’m sure there are more readings we could make, especially if we had more information about her role in Norse mythology. If she is indeed a Love or Spring Goddess, as some theorize, we could make reasonable hypotheses that she could have also been associated with possibly art, music, poetry, or herbal healing. We simply don’t know.
In a way, I’m doing the work of patriarchy by taking her story at face value. By believing that she is her Wikipedia entry and rejecting a relationship with her, rejecting the hand she extended to me to learn more, I’m guilty of the very sexism I thought she was perpetuating.
The Timing I Didn’t Notice
When I made that video years ago about turning Nanna down, I mentioned it casually that my story is just an example of how we can say no to deities who don’t fit our path.
But as I was recording, I realized something I hadn’t connected before.
Around the time Nanna appeared to me, I was in the middle of truly forgiving my husband. Not surface-level “I forgive you” while still holding resentment – I had done that. But the real work of deeper forgiveness, of seeing where I had been wrong too, releasing the old hurts, and choosing the relationship fully.
We’d broken up once or twice while dating. We had significant differences. There were things that needed forgiving. And right in the middle of that process, a goddess of devoted partnership showed up in my dreams.
Maybe she wasn’t offering me the “grieving widow” archetype at all.
Maybe she was offering something about what it means to truly love someone. To forgive. To choose your partner not because you have to, but because you want to. To experience the kind of bond that, yes, would devastate you to lose — because that’s what love actually is.
I could have used that wisdom. I was literally in the middle of needing it.
And I said no thanks, because I didn’t like her job title in mythology.
What Are You Actually Saying No To?
I share this story not to say you should accept every deity who knocks on your door. Discernment matters. Gods and spirits have their own motivations — they’re not just batteries for your practice. You should be as thoughtful about spiritual relationships as you are about who you let into your inner circle.
But it’s worth examining what you’re actually discerning.
When I said no to Nanna, I was rejecting an assumption. An impression I’d inherited from a patriarchal retelling of her myth, filtered through centuries of “women belong to their husbands” conditioning. I never verified whether that impression was accurate. I never asked what she might actually be offering. And in doing so, I was perpetuating what I wanted to resist.
Is the thing you’re resisting an assumption you have, or something you’ve confirmed through direct experience?
Is it based on what you’ve inherited from elsewhere, or what you actually know?
What would it look like to say: I’m not sure about this, but I’m willing to find out?
The Archetypes We Resist
I’ve thought a lot about this pattern since then — especially after Sekhmet started showing up in my life and I initially resisted her too. (Bloodthirsty warrior goddess? Me, a Pacific Northwest forest girly who plays druids in video games? No thank you.)
Turns out I am a warrior of the fiery Sun. I just didn’t want to see it.
The archetypes we resist most strongly are often the ones that would require us to expand our self-image. To wear a mantle we’ve decided doesn’t fit our aesthetic. To become someone we haven’t given ourselves permission to be.
Looking back, I suspect Nanna wasn’t asking me to make “wife” my whole identity. She was asking me to honor the part of myself that loves deeply and forgives fully — to see that as sacred rather than as weakness. And she was probably looking to tell more of her story to someone. And that someone could’ve been me.
I’m still not working with her actively. But I’ve stopped dismissing her. And when I think about my marriage now — the forgiveness we’ve practiced, the choice we keep making to be together — I think maybe she left something with me after all.
Even when we close the door, the offering doesn’t always disappear.
Your Turn
What divine guidance have you turned down? What spiritual connection have you shut the door on because it didn’t match your self-image?
I’m not saying you should accept everything. But it might be worth asking: what were they actually offering? And is the thing you rejected an assumption you inherited, or something you know to be true?
Sometimes the Goddess we need most is the one we’re most afraid to meet!
Go Deeper
If you’re navigating a moment of spiritual discernment—trying to figure out which archetypes are calling you, which ones to work with, which ones to release—that’s exactly what Pocket Witch is for. Three months of tarot, ritual, and coaching to help you find your path.
And if you want to explore goddess archetypes for your career and ambition, Goddesses for Work is a 40-page guide to getting started.
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