Before Christianization, Nordic cultures held a deeply relational and animist worldview in which land, weather, plants, animals, and elemental beings were understood as participants in a living ecology of consciousness. This wisdom was transmitted orally – through story, seasonal ritual, and lived practice – rather than through formal texts. By the time the Icelandic Sagas were written, Christian theology had already influenced the narrative record, braiding ancestral animist perception with new religious frames. Tracing pre-Christian Nordic cosmology therefore requires careful discernment through anthropological study, particularly through the examination of folk stories, holiday traditions and folk medicine, where ancestral ideations of ecological relationship, seasonal intelligence, and animist perception continue to live beneath theological overlay.

In this workshop, we will explore ancestral Nordic belief systems and examine how illness was understood not simply as physical dysfunction, but as a disruption in relationship with nature. We will consider how this relational understanding of existence shaped ways of tending body and spirit.

We will then trace how this worldview continues to live today through the Nordic concept of friluftsliv – “open-air living” – a cultural practice that honors regular immersion in wild and semi-wild spaces as essential to health, resilience, and belonging. Rather than viewing friluftsliv as a modern lifestyle trend, we will explore it as a contemporary expression of an older animist worldview: a living thread of ancestral wisdom woven into present-day life.

Participants will be introduced to ancestral Nordic cosmology, the complexities of working with partially Christianized source material, and practical ways to thoughtfully integrate relational models of health into herbal practice and contemporary wellness culture. This session invites us to consider how a narrative of belonging within a conscious ecology shapes our understanding of medicine – and how perceiving through other ways of knowing endures as a human capacity, through sustained, reciprocal  relationship with nature.