Essence of Paganism

Here we have Tom Rowsell saying that all paganism in Europe is defined by dedication to deities. He thinks it's all about the gods and worshiping the gods.

I think he has the wrong end of the stick there. Rowsell's emphasis on the gods leads him into some needless complexities, as well as some blind spots.

The essence of everyday paganism--the mentalité we want to recover--is honoring the ancestors and the local land spirits. Life at the household level.

The gods are something more. Too great a focus on them at a personal level is misplaced. They are too many for one person. They belong collectively to the community, to the nation, and to the great national holidays.

If we were to follow the pattern of our pagan ancestors, we neo-pagans in Europe and in the European diaspora would be participating, more or less gladly, in the "public" rites of Christianity. Our ancestors didn't get a pass because of their personal belief systems and neither do we.

I think many people understand this, but not all. But those who do understand don't know how to break out of the problem. It's as simple as recognizing that the ancestral world, with its mono-ethnic dominance, is likely gone forever.

It's easy to be a modern pagan if you focus on the personal and household sphere. But where the gods are larger than life expressions of ethnicity it's no longer possible for them to dominate the national community.

Our fellow citizens don't universally share either our heritage or our paganism. Not anymore, and probably not ever again.

• Boaz Vilallonga, "Conversation with Survive the Jive: Modern Pagan Practice and Belief", YouTube (Apr. 18, 2019).

More Information

• Spirit of our Forefathers, "The Purpose of Pagan Ritual", YouTube (June 28, 2019).

Hyper Masculinity

Ever run into one of those hyper-masculine LARP types, who make themselves into a cartoon Viking while thinking they're reconstructing old Norse religion? These Viking wannabes go and on about Odin, Valhall, and their fighting spirit.

One of the ways to spot someone who is still a baby in the faith is that they'll riff to orgasmic heights about how the Norse refused to a bend a knee to anyone, not even to their gods. That's the swagger of an adolescent male who's been reading too much fantasy. This post is for them.

Do your research. Our Norse ancestors had a culture easily recognizable as a relative of other old European cultures. Bowing and prostrating was a thing.

Here's a link to get you started. You want the list Bowing and Prostrating as Worshiping Practices. It's toward the bottom. The first item on the list is "Ibn Fadlan paragraph 85 describes the Swedish Rus prostrating before a carved image of a God."

• Grumpy Lokean Elder, "Heathen Statues and Idols, Worship Building Structures, Kneeling and Prostrating", Tumblr. Retrieved Nov. 3, 2019.

Don't know Ibn Fadlan? Think The 13th Warrior. It will be worth your time to read the whole list, and for each item to tack back to the sources so you understand the context.

Then, keep watch as you read. Can you find other instances where Norse men kneel? Here's one of mine.

As Beowulf lay dying:

"Then, kneeling before the broken king, Wiglaf undid his helmet and took him into his arms saying: 'Sire, stay with us in your hour of victory!'

"Then Beowulf opened his eyes and said: 'No my faithful friend Wiglaf, this is your victory. I name you King. The treasure is yours to do as you will with it. Just bring one piece that I may see it and hold it before I die which will be soon, therefore make haste. . . . I go now and I forgive those who ran from me in my hour of need. I thank you good and faithful Wiglaf for standing by me and now sharing my final moments. Carry me to the Whale’s Headland and build me a barrow there. Now I sleep.'"

That is nobility.

This Land

I've been wanting very much to read This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West, by Christopher Ketcham (2019). Then I cried the whole way through.

"A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West--and a plea for the protection of these last wild places."

If modern paganism will mean anything it will mean protecting our local place.

Norse Baptism

Even in the days before Christianity the Norse "baptized" their children. Meaning that babies were sprinkled them with water, apparently as a sign of accepting them into the family line.

• Jackson Crawford, "Norse Pagan 'Baptism'", YouTube (Apr. 12, 2017).

Banning Anglo-Saxon

This is just sad. And I don't mean the prospect of "academia" eliminating Anglo-Saxon as a category. I mean Tom Rowsell having a public meltdown, and using overwrought emotion, hyperbole, and ad hominem attacks to support his position -- the very tactics he accuses his opponents of using.

I would expect robust debate on a subject like this, not hysteria. If the accumulating evidence is beginning to show that "Anglo-Saxon" is no longer a useful category, that would be one of the most interesting debates of my lifetime.

But it seems that we aren't going to get that kind of debate from the racialist side. They need the category for ideological reasons, it seems, so it has to be beyond debate.

• Rowsell, Tom (Survive the Jive). "Ban Anglo-Saxon? The Push to remove Anglo-Saxons from academic discourse". YouTube, Oct. 27, 2019. Retrieved Oct. 29, 2019.

More Information

• Dockray-Miller, Mary. "Old English Has a Serious Image Problem". JSTOR Daily, May 3, 2017.
• Horsman, Reginald. "Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850". Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 37, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1976), pp. 387-410: JSTOR. Retrieved Nov. 14, 2019.
• Palmer, James. "Responsible Labelling". Merovingian World, Nov. 11, 2019. Retrieved Nov. 14, 2019.
• Rambaran-Olm, Mary. "Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting 'Anglo-Saxon' Studies". History Workshop, Nov. 4, 2019. Retrieved Nov. 14, 2019.
• Wood, Michael. "As a racism row rumbles on, is it time to retire the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’?”. History Extra, Nov. 4, 2019. Retrieved Nov. 14, 2019.

Revised to add links.

Antinous the Gay God

Wikipedia says, "Antinous (also Antinoüs or Antinoös; Ancient Greek: Ἀντίνοος; 27 November, c. 111 – before 30 October 130) was a Bithynian Greek youth and a favourite or beloved of the Roman emperor Hadrian."

The Temple of Antinous says, "Antinous is the God of all Gay people, he was a homosexual, and it is therefore our calling as gay men to restore his name and the place of his religion to the reverence of his ancient past." His modern cult has set his festival as October 28th.

I first encountered Antinous when I was a member of Nova Roma. A catchy shtick, I thought. For awhile I was in touch with the inner circle.

It still makes me smile, but -- incorrigible leftist that I am -- I've drifted toward mostly just being annoyed about the way Antinous Deus seems to make masculine beauty the highest expression of being gay. Bosh.

More Information

• Antinous the Gay God <antinousgaygod.blogspot.com>, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Temple of Antinous the Gay God <antinopolis.org>, visited Oct. 22, 2019.

Beyond Nihilism

"In 2011, Dreyfus and Kelly published a book, All Things Shining, which explores how how notions of sacredness and meaning have evolved throughout the history of human culture. They set out to reconstruct this history because they're worried bout its endpoint in our current era. 'The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things,' Dreyfus and Kelly explain early in the book. 'The shining things now seem far away,'" (Newport, 86).

"Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book's conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner. To illustrate this claim, they use as an organizing example an account of a master wheelwright--the now lost professional of shaping wooden wagon wheels. 'Because each piece of wood is distinct, it has its own personality,' they write after a passage describing the details of the wheelwright's craft. 'The woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works. Its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for.' In this appreciation for the 'subtle virtues of his medium, they note, the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a Post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual. The wheelwright doesn't decide arbitrarily which virtues of the wood he works are valuable and which are not; this value is inherent in the wood and the task it's meant to perform.

"As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. The task of a craftsman, they conclude, 'is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning meanings that are already there.' This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright, the authors imply, cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy." (Newport, 87-88).

I've quoted this passage at some length because the key insight is not fully understandable without it. The problem facing us inhabitants of a technological world is how to find meaning outside of ourselves. There seems to be no answer to that, at least not among the streams of nihilism and post-modernism. But here is a possible direction.

My question now is whether this insight, traditionalist as it is, can be adapted to modern paganism in a way that does not require patched up identities and re-invoked blind faith

More Information

• Dreyfus, Hubert L.; Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011.
• Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. London: Piatkus Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, 2016.

Odin vs Tyr

There's this thing, Odin vs. Tyr. The short version is that Tyr's name is cognate with the names of the sky gods in other Indo-European languages.

*dyḗws ph₂tḗr ("Sky Father") is the reconstructed name of the ancient Proto-Indo-European chief god. His cultural descendants include chief gods Zeus in Greece and Jupiter (Dieus-pater) in Rome. In India, he fell down the social scale: Dyáuṣ Pitr in the Rigveda. Likewise, among the Germanic tribes he was Tiwaz, and Tyr among the Norse.

These are all related names. The question arises then, was Tyr originally the chief of the Norse gods? Was he replaced, perhaps relatively recently, by Odin?

Maybe the story of Tyr losing his hand to the world Fenris is part of a myth that explained Tyr losing his kingship when he lost his physical perfection.

Maybe Jord ("Earth") was originally married to Tyr, as would fit the pattern of Sky Father married to Earth Mother. And if so, perhaps this explains partly why Freyja, daughter of Njord and (and Jord?) became differentiated from Frigg, the wife of Odin. That is, Odin the storm god might have been originally the husband of Freyja and son-in-law of Tyr.

We don't know, but there are some strong opinions out there. Personally, I'm partial to the idea of an original tripartite division as in Greek mythology. Earth, sea, sky. Here are some links so you can make up your own mind.

More Information

• Jackson Crawford, Tyr vs. Odin as Chief God (June 15, 2019), at YouTube, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Arith Härger, Tyr Vs Odin - Who was the Main Germanic God?, at YouTube, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Mathias Nordvig, Was Tyr ever a Germanic sky god? (July 7, 2019), at YouTube, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Tom Rowsell, Jive Talk: Who is Norse God Tyr... A Sky-Father? (June 16, 2019), at Survive the Jive, YouTube, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Tom Rowsell, Who is Woden / Odin / Wotanaz? (May 6, 2017), at Survive the Jive, YouTube, visited Oct. 22, 2019.

Related Posts

• Frigg is Freyja (Mar. 9, 2019).
• Three Elements, Not Four (Feb. 15, 2019).

Viking Mortuary House

In popular imagination, the old Norse people sent their dead to the afterlife in boats. Sometimes the dead were buried in ships, sometimes buried in graves in the shape of a ship, or maybe had their corpses launched to sea in burning ships.

But there were seemingly different customs in different families. Instead of sailing away, the dead might go to live in a particular place. They might even continue to live on the family farm in a mortuary house atop a burial mound, or in a cairn.

I'm leaving out cremation here, because cremation by itself doesn't tell us anything about the soul's destination, except insofar as we accept the theory that people who worship earth gods practice burial, while people who worship sky gods prefer tend to prefer cremation.

Discovery in Norway

In recent news, a mortuary house has been discovered in Norway (see link below). This type of find is fairly unusual, although probably mound burials were (probably) the standard practice.

According to Medievalists.net, "In pre-Christian times, it was not unusual to believe that the dead lived in the mound, and that the living should take care of what they called the people of the mound. This would involve bringing them gifts and food, so that in return they would ensure that the crops were good and that both animals and humans were fertile. People may have believed that if the deceased had their own house in the mound, there would probably be a greater chance that they would stay there, instead of wandering around, tormenting people."

The house is on the small side, about 9' x 15' but tall enough to stand in, suggesting that its use was more symbolic than practical. Project manager Richard Sauvage is quoted as saying, "We can see that the house once stood in the middle of a burial mound. That’s how we know that there probably was a grave inside the house,"

I wonder if there would be a separate house for each burial, or whether one house would serve an entire family.

Dying Into the Mountains

My personal choice would be going to live in a nearby mountain. In Iceland, a particular family believed they "died into the mountain". In other words, after death they lived on inside the mountain. Their particular mountain was Helgafell ("holy mountain").

The idea is described in Eyrbyggja saga. When Thorstein Codbiter dies, the saga says: "That same harvest Thorstein fared out to Hoskuldsey to fish; but on an evening of harvest a shepherd-man of Thorstein's fared after his sheep north of Holyfell; there he saw how the fell was opened on the north side, and in the fell he saw mighty fires, and heard huge clamour therein, and the clank of drinking-horns; and when he hearkened if perchance he might hear any words clear of others, he heard that there was welcomed Thorstein Codbiter and his crew, and he was bidden to sit in the high-seat over against his father."

Personal Note

For many years I liked the idea of being buried in Farson, Wyoming, near my grandparents. I used to say I wanted to spend eternity being part of the spectacular sunsets over the Wyoming Range. After I read Eyrbyggja saga, I thought I might rather "die into the sky" at Farson. I might still do that, no matter where I'm actually buried. Isn't that the essential idea behind scattering someone's ashes in a favorite place?

Then, years later, I had a dream where I sat up drinking with and talking to my mother's father. He is buried in Eden Valley Cemetery near Farson, Wyoming, but we were in the cellar where the house at Farson used to be. I had no sense of any physicality, nothing to describe about how it looked. In the way of dreams, I just knew that's where we were.

In the meantime, we keep a spirit house on top of the bookshelves. Ours has an Asian style. I wonder if we should make something more Scandinavian.

More Information

• "Erbyggja saga", chapter 11, Icelandic Saga Database, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• "Viking Age mortuary house discovered in Norway", Medievalists.net, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Archaeology Soup, "Archaeo-Chat: Viking Mortuary House?" (Oct. 13, 2019), YouTube, visited Oct. 22, 2019.
• Marianne Hem Eriksen, "Viking homes were stranger than fiction: portals to the dead, magical artefacts and ‘slaves’" (Mar. 13, 2019), The Conversation, visited Oct. 28, 2019.
• Christie Ward, "The Walking Dead: draugr and Aptrgangr in Old Norse Literature", Viking Answer Lady, visited Oct. 22, 2019.

Revised Oct. 28, 2019 to add link.

Ancestors vs Location

A friend who knows my particular interests sent me a link to this interview with Ingrid Kincaid, "the Rune Woman". I wish this channel were hosted on a platform that allowed bookmarking podcasts at a particular time stamp. The interesting stuff here begins about 47:30. I'd link to it if I could.

Ingrid sees her mission as "bringing back this awareness of the spiritual heritage of the people of Northern Europe". She adds that "we need to remember who we are so that we know where we're going. We're people who've lost our way".

We used to be tribal people too, she says. "We don't need to go to somebody else's culture and take that from them, if we can just go back through our own line and re-connect with our own heritage, where the people that we we call our ancestors, where they lived in connectedness to the earth."

Standard fare, so far.

Then Erik Arneson, the interviewer, asks Ingrid, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, whether there is still a locality to her spiritual practice or whether the rune beings are more tied to her ancestry than to a location.

An insightful question. Ingrid says they are more tied to her ancestry but they are not out of harmony with her location because, although their wisdom is location-specific for things like climate and terrain, the "truth is still there about the way life is".

She goes on. We haven't lived in these places long enough for the land spirits and beings here to recognize us. We haven't been here long enough to belong; we are still walking as strangers here.

Further, we don't belong in Europe, either. We weren't born there. Often, we don't even speak the language.

That leaves just our ancestors, who care about us because we're family.

That's an answer we might have expected. It's the dilemma of modern Americans who don't yet have a spiritual culture connecting them to the land, whose European ancestors gave up their ethnic gods a thousand years ago, and who are nevertheless dissatisfied with Christian religion.

After that Ingrid and Erik riff on nomadic life, on rootedness and wandering, and the Jewish people carrying their gods with them in the form of teraphim. I don't fault them. That's exactly where I take this discussion at this point, but it's a subject for another time.

• S01E10 Ingrid Kincaid the Rune Woman (Oct. 16, 2019), at Arnemancy, visited Oct. 18, 2019.

Related Post

• A Product of Your Culture (Oct. 6, 2019).

Updated Oct. 28, 2019 to add link.

Indian Soul

Jung said American society should seek to take on "the soul of the Indian" to find true peace. Carl G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Carl Jung (New York: Natheon, Bollingen Series 20, 1964), p. 49.

Old Norse Soul

"Prior to the introduction of Christianity, Old Norse seems to have lacked a word meaning 'soul' or 'spirit' in the sense that it is used today."

I've never yet been able to wrap my mind around the complexities of fact and theory about the parts of the soul in Old Norse culture. I've been partial to the idea of a tri-partite soul, on the theory it would have been an Indo-European pattern, but I'm staying open to actual evidence and other theories.

The idea here is that in ancient times there was no separable soul, that being a Christian idea. The person, what we would call body and soul, is treated as a whole.

However, there is an idea (07:24) that witches could separate their soul (hugr) from their body (hamr), according to Hávamál 155. Although Crawford notices only that this is a special case of witches, it is parallel to the travel out of body reported by Siberian shamans and their New Age analogs.

One interpretation would be that the soul is not normally separable from the body but could be separated with special magic, or perhaps also at death if the fylgia is a form taken by the soul.

More Information

• Jackson Crawford, "The Afterlife in Norse Myth (pt. 1)", YouTube (Dec. 11, 2018).
• Jackson Crawford, "Valhalla (Valhǫll): The Afterlife, pt. 2", YouTube (Jan. 30, 2019).
• Jackson Crawford, "Spirits: The Dís and Fylgja in Norse Myth", YouTube (Sept. 21, 2017).
• Arith Härger, "The Animal Fylgja", YouTube (Mar. 6, 2019).

A Product of Your Culture

The short version -- Nordic Journeys suggests Scandinavian Asatru is a spirituality while American Asatru is a religion.

The piece that interests me here is his idea that there is a difference of perspective between those who grew up in Scandinavia and those who grew up in America. The Scandinavians have learned Norse history as part of their own national history. The Americans haven't.

Let's remember here that the essence of paganism is not really exotic medieval European gods resurrected so Americans can do cosplay (although you might get that idea sometimes).

The essence of neo-paganism is finding modern ways to (a) connect to your ancestors, and (b) connect to the local land spirits. Maybe not everyone agrees with this assessment but I think on the whole we're becoming increasingly clear about this.

This two-part search means that Scandinavian Ásatrúar have both pieces, ancestors and land spirits, in a single Norse cultural package. Americans, on the other hand, only have one of the pieces, ancestors, and sometimes not even that.

The way I learned it, my great grandparents brought their tomte with them to America, but no matter how you look at it, one tomte for hundreds of descendants or one tomte to live among all the other land spirits -- the poor guy isn't going to make much of a difference by himself. He's certainly had to make friends in America.

My sense is that American simply cannot be Astatrur in the same way Scandinavians can. They are kindred spiritualities, certainly, but it's not possible for them to be the same.

More Information

• Diana L. Paxson, "Essential Asatru: Walking the Path of Norse Paganism" (2006).
• Arith Härger, "What is Asatru?", YouTube (Apr. 25, 2018).
• Mathias Nordvig, "Ásatrú in Iceland - Interview with Josh Rood", YouTube (Oct. 1, 2019).

Revised Oct. 28, 2019 to add links.