With this post, I shall attempt to give you and the many others like yourself some basis of understanding to guide in the development of a genuine spiritual practice and expound upon metaphysical principles and their mechanics. Please bear with me.
Before there were gods there were raw, primordial spiritual forces. The earliest Romans understood and referred to these as "numen" and in the beginning, represented them by simple runic symbols. The symbol was merely a tool for engaging with and invoking the latent, spiritual force that it represented. Over time, these symbols morphed into the vivid and colorful pantheon of Roman gods that we know today. However, the latent, underlying forces were still the same. Ask a small child to draw a house and they will probably draw some permutation of a triangle on top of a rectangle with a smaller rectangle inside for a door. An adult might draw a much more developed house, however both images represent the same thing.
The archetypal bearded man in a black cloak i.e. Odin was one such late symbol of the Norsemen. In those days, it may have served as a connection to a true primordial power. But with the advent of Christianity, the pagan tribes were assimilated into a new tradition and no one was left to reinforce its true meaning. With time, the connection faded away.
The norse-folk of old do not exist anymore and their symbols are dead. Attempting to engage with those symbols today is pointless and merely LARPing, since no modern man can understand them in their true, original sense no matter how much you grow your hair out or hit the gym. Going back to the child analogy - if you went back in time and asked caveman Grug to draw a house, his representation would hardly be recognizable to modern man, and of little value to us.
The most genuine and expedient way to practice paganism in our time is to create new, contemporary symbols arising from our imagination which meld our original, current conceptualizations with those parts of the old that are still relevant. Through these new symbols, we can begin to re-engage with those same, primordial forces that have existed throughout time.
This is what is meant by "re-birthing" the gods i.e the preservation of fire - the duty of every generation. The phenomenon of Kek is probably the most notable such occurrence in a very long time.
I would like to add that one of the most important spiritual principles is that "as it is above, so it is below". In other words, events in the physical, material realm are merely the result of occurrences in higher planes. There is an occult teaching - the sevenfold nature of man - which holds a key to power. As outlined in H.P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, man is composed of seven "bodies" existing on seven corresponding planes. These are (starting from the lowest) the physical, the astral, the vital, the passional, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the divine (atma). By engaging with the higher, non-physical planes, it is possible to affect outcomes in the physical world. Luckily, every one of us has a tool by which we can engage and communicate with these higher planes and that tool is the mind.