"What makes Tribal Heathenry so different from Neo-pagan Germanic organizations such as Odinism and Ásatrú? What does it stand for, and what are the main objectives of this movement within Heathenism?"
This video points out what should be obvious--neo-pagan reconstructionism is not the same as historical re-creation or re-enactment. I'm not so sure I haven't been guilty of that myself. We are not, or should not, be re-creating the past. We're not doing cosplay. We're not building a religion. Our goal should be to understand the world view of the past and bring it into the present. (See the difference?)
Our ancestors were life affirming. They lived in the world as they knew it. Before they invented other afterlives, when they died, they died into the landscape, to be here still.
We have that living spiritual world all around us. Our focus should be the community, not the gods; a community that includes the ancestors and genii loci. We should be looking for our spiritual allies among the people who had a reason in life to help us.
I don't think Sweden is banning runes, although everyone is freaking out about a badly worded statement that opens the possibility they might. Part of the fight against racism. Good God.
Sorry boys. Seidh is for women (and gay men). It always has been. I'm always puzzled when I meet hyper-masculine men, devoted to the old gods, leaders in their communities, and then they claim to practice seidh.
Doesn't it seem that if you're reconstructing an old religion, particularly one that prides itself on its scholarship, you might want to preserve its basics? Even if they conflict with your own prejudices? Maybe particularly if they conflict with your own prejudices.
The goddess Freyja was the first practitioner of seidh. It's one of the arts of women, probably because it's association with spinning and weaving. The practitioner (seidkona = seidh woman) would use magic to foresee the future, then re-weave that strands of destiny. We don't understand much about how it worked originally, but it likely involved a ritualized act of spinning and very likely also had some sexual element, perhaps including penetration.
I've seen it suggested that in a warrior society the use of magic might have been seen as unmanly. A real man would confront his adversaries with force of arms, not sneak around with magic. It's an intriguing idea but I would want to see clearer evidence.
In our modern world there is nothing unmanly about weaving or spinning, and no shame to being gay, but in something that involves re-creating their religion we might prefer to preserve the old ways. The Rígsþula§28 says Jarl was taught the runes by his father Rig. Modern men who want to practice magic should be leaning on that passage as their authorizing verse.
Update
January 27, 2021: Jackson Crawford has a new video about Norse attitudes to predicting the future (see below). "The Norse have a really weird attitude toward knowing the future. It is awesome and a mark of your incredible wisdom if you can do it accidentally, without trying. But if you try, you're at minimum a weirdo, and probably a foreigner if you're a woman, and you're a pervert and among the worst people living if you're a man."
More Information
Jackson Crawford, "Seiðr Magic and Gender", YouTube (Dec. 6, 2018), visited Oct. 27, 2019.
Modern shamanism is very problematic. Staunch defenders and rabid detractors. My eyes glaze over. The debate typically resolves around opposing ideas that the word shaman originated in a very specific cultural context so must not be (or can be) used for analogous practices in other cultures. I don't find that kind of formalist argument very persuasive. In fact, in general it strikes me as the kind of argument often favored by shallow scholarship across the board.
One of the dimensions I think many people are missing is that there has been a sea change in the way New Age people deal with the past. The Boomer generation (often called the Old Hippies as a lighthearted reminder) is still very often focused on philosophies. They choose up sides. They're Buddhists or Theosophists or Wiccan or whatever. But always something.
On the other hand Millennials are often indifferent to ideological systems. They tend to focus on the tools. They like crystals, tarot, astrology, I Ching, meditation, or whatever. They want things they can use to do something they want to do.
I think the reason this is significant for shamanism is that the word has become a shorthand for a cluster of techniques that help the practitioner become their own healer. And at the same time it's a reminder that many of our ancestral cultures seem to have had village healers who can be plausibly argued to have been similar to American Indian medicine men. From that carefully worded sentence, one takeaway might be that neo-shamanism gives Americans their chance to copy American Indians without engaging in cultural appropriation.
If it can't be called shamanism then someone, somewhere had better find and popularize an alternative word. It's too useful to give up.
Penelope, Julia. "6 Reasons To Stop Using the Word 'Shaman'". The Wandering Witch, Patheos (Mar. 11, 2019). This is among the best presentations I've seen arguing against using the word shamanism. Retrieved Mar. 19, 2019.
Frigg is Freyja. I'm sure of it. I've been sure of it since my teens. I don't know how I became associated with this idea among my friends. Maybe I've just been a bit on the vocal side. But I am associated with it, and I accept that. I'm even judgmental about people who disagree with me on this issue, and I'm okay with that too.
So you can imagine how pleased I was the other day when Jackson Crawford (my favorite Colorado cowboy but really Old Norse Specialist at University of Colorado) published a video Frigg and Freyja, where he looks at the arguments. He does say the majority position among experts is probably that the two goddesses are different in the late Norse tradition. But then he gives good arguments against it.
The essential idea is that Odin's wife Frigg might originally have been the goddess of love and sex, as well as the domestic household goddess. Freyja, which means lady, might have been her title. Then in late Norse times, at least in some areas, she became separated into two different goddesses.
Probably the main argument is the Frigg is married to Odin (Óðinn), while Freyja is married to Óðr. These are essentially the same name. Further, both Óðinn and Óðr are noteworthy for taking long trips and being absent from their wives for long periods of time.
The elements that convinced me are more domestic.
Freyja chooses half the dead, and Odin gets the other half. To me this small detail strongly implies they are husband and wife, but makes almost no sense if they are not. In one story Odin favors the Vandals while his wife Frigg favors the Lombards (Winnilers). To me, this is an obvious sort of story in a world where they are also dividing the dead between them.
Then too, Freyja was the first practitioner of seidh magic, which she taught to Odin. Seidh was a shamanic magic that was considered unmanly (ergi), probably because it was centered on spinning. It's easy enough to understand why Odin, that master of magic, would want to learn and use it (to predict and influence the outcome of battles), but I think not so easy to understand why Freyja would teach it to him unless she was his wife.
After Crawford published his video I thought it would be worth spending some time catching up on "current thinking" among Norse neo-pagans. I was pleased to find in one of Arith Härger's videos (The Divine Lady Freyja) an explanation of how the goddess might have become separated into two different characters. It's Härger's idea that it might have facilitated conversion to Christianity if Frigg, the king's wife and the model of domestic virtue, was analogized to the Virgin Mary, thus emphasizing the virtue of married women, while sexy Freyja was demonized.
Arith makes the point they were the same everywhere except the Norse.
I like to point to Ynglinga saga §13 as proof "Freyja alone yet lives". What the passage really says is "Freya alone remained of the gods" (after the death of Frey).
Iain Moncrieffe believed the kings at Uppsala (Sweden) were ritual incarnations of Frey, married successively to the goddess Freyja, from whom they derived their right to the throne. Frey and Freyja were children of Njörd and his unnamed sister. (I think it's obvious she must have been Jörd. That kind of rhyme permeates Norse genealogical myth.) If so, and I think there is some evidence centering around Brísingamen, then it seems this must have been either an earlier tradition or a regional variation. And what then of Freyja? Odin and Jörd were the parents of Thor. I've never been able to puzzle out whether Odin then married Jörd's daughter Freyja or whether in some way Jörd and Frigg might be the same person, and also still have Frigg be the same person as Freyja.
More Information
Jackson Crawford, "Frigg and Freyja", YouTube <youtube.com> (Mar. 6, 2019), visited Mar. 23, 2019.
Jackson Crawford, "Wagon of the Vanir", YouTube <youtube.com> (Oct. 26, 2019), visited Oct. 27, 2019.
Just the other day I was writing about American pagans tying themselves to ancestral European ethnic paganisms. I expressed skepticism. Surely cultural heritage belongs (mostly?) to the people whose own national heritage it is. More, anyway, than to the people whose ancestral heritage it is. (If you're not following that summary, this is not the topic for you.)
After making this argument for many years now, as soon as I took the time to write about it, even so superficially, I came across an obvious counter-argument. Here's a link to Tom Rowsell, talking about how replacement populations appropriate and re-name local features.
"Anglo-Saxon pagans appropriated the Celtic burial mounds and Bronze age burial mounds in a new religious context, using them to bury their own dead and also for meeting places. The Christians later adapted these burial places for yet another context, as an execution ground and a designated haunt of devils and demons. Pagans today often worship at Neolithic monuments in an anachronistic way quite incongruous with their original purpose, but this does not make it less authentic paganism when we consider how historic pagans themselves appropriated monuments of other peoples for their own purposes."
The example is not perfect, though. Rowsell's discussion centers on appropriating and renaming barrows, without distinguishing between cases where the place is appropriated because the invaders have buried their own dead there, and other cases.
As I write about this subject I'm trying to avoid making a direct connection to old Nazi blood and soil arguments. Very difficult because these ideas are the same at base. I often hear objections from modern pagans that they're different, and that's what I'm exploring. Are they really?
Before I started studying any of this, my framework was the story in 2 Kings 17. This is how I expected paganism would work when transplanted to a new land. (Yes, I had a Christian education.)
24 The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They took over Samaria and lived in its towns. 25 When they first lived there, they did not worship the Lord; so he sent lions among them and they killed some of the people. 26 It was reported to the king of Assyria: "The people you deported and resettled in the towns of Samaria do not know what the god of that country requires. He has sent lions among them, which are killing them off, because the people do not know what he requires." 27 Then the king of Assyria gave this order: "Have one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land requires." 28 So one of the priests who had been exiled from Samaria came to live in Bethel and taught them how to worship the Lord. 29 Nevertheless, each national group made its own gods in the several towns where they settled, and set them up in the shrines the people of Samaria had made at the high places.
"Teach the people what the god of the land requires." That's how it seemed like it should work, and I wonder if perhaps Rowsell's discourse on barrows just doesn't range far enough.
My thought is that every pagan nomadic people faces this same dilemma. You have your own ethnic gods, who are your ancestral gods as well as your own deified ancestors. Then you also have the gods of the land, who unknown unless you can learn something about them from neighboring people.
This, by the way, is why there are always two tribes of gods. The Olympians and the Titans. The Aesir and the Vanir. It's not that there has been some sort of conquest. It's that by definition there have to be two types of gods. As far as I know this idea is unique to me. I haven't convinced anyone else yet that generations of scholarship on this issue is pure bunk.
I generally like Tom Rowsell. Keeping in mind that he's operating as a advocate for his particular views. Sometimes, though. He goes over the line. I hoped this one might give a more nuanced view of Julius Evola. Nope. It's a lot of "begging the question" and "straw man arguments". Rowsell gets so agitated he's no longer thinking clearly. I did finish it but just barely.
