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.

Warmed by the Sun

One of the things I enjoy about John Frawley is that he is connected philosophically to Neoplatonism, as of course a proper astrologer would be. Not for him the lightweight philosophy of modernism.

In The Real Astrology Frawley says, "God too, from enfolding the cosmos, has been pushed out to some infinite distance, where He was soon forgotten. The Sun, symbol of His manifestation, was made central, but no longer central to the cosmos, only to one little, obscure corner of it. Although our immediate perception tells us otherwise, we are assured by the scientists that there are far bigger and brighter stars than our Sun: bigger and better gods" (pp. 61-62).

This was the project of Enlightenment science. In the process of opening the Universe, we humans lost much of our ground in local space in order to become grounded in a bigger world.

Then Frawley continues—and here is his genius—"Even in spiritual terms we see the consequence of this: every far-off faith is more attractive than that to which we are born, as if we have the choice of being warmed by suns other than our own" (page 62, emphasis added).

This image of being warmed by our own local Sun is vivid for me. Was it something my mother said when I was little? Maybe. I don't remember. Until I read Frawley I thought of it in terms of living Under a Western Sky, a title I've used in the past for this blog. And there is the famous saying of the Roman poet Horace: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea.)

Now Frawley has given me a larger context for the same idea. The Sun that warms us all shines on me only in the place I am, while at the same time all those other suns, the zillions of stars, create a beautiful tapestry in the heavens but they do not warm me, not this body, not where I am.

From there, it is no leap at all to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and spiritual guide to the West. He tells his listeners not to become Buddhists. We don't need you, he says. If there is something in this tradition you find valuable, take it back to your own people. Transform your own culture rather than trying to become something you are not.

From Living Buddha, Living Christ: "I always encourage them to practice in a way that will help them go back to their own tradition and get re-rooted. If they succeed at at becoming reintegrated, they will be an important instrument in transforming and renewing their tradition. . . . When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. . . . Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.”

That is the part that intrigues me. My world is full of folks who are not centered in their own local religious space. A good many of them, including most of the neopagans and good many Buddhists and Hindus, aren't even centered in their own time. I dabble myself, because it's all just so damn interesting, but I decided a long time ago that I want the cultural component of my religion to be invisible to me. If I can see it, then what I'm doing is something other than spirituality.

More Information

• John Frawley, website. The tradition in astrology, alive and well in the Twenty-first century.
• John Frawley, The Real Astrology (2001).
• Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (1997).

Ancestor Worship

Short version: blood doesn't count. What matters is spiritual connection.

You have many ancestors and they had many different belief systems. You aren't heathen because your ancestors were heathen. That way of thinking disrespects both your ancestors and your path.

You are not your ancestors. You can't be them, you can't think like them, your culture doesn't give you the same way of being in the world they had.

Whatever your spirituality, you have chosen it. You are not impelled by your ancestors or your ethnicity to choose a particular path. The spiritual world is limitless. Your job is to explore for yourself, not to blindly follow someone else's path.

The material presented in this video is considerably more nuanced than this simple summary. I was particularly taken by the argument that if you believe in reincarnation, each time you reincarnate in a new body you have a different set of ancestors. If those new ancestors took precedence over your own spiritual history, then you would be making the material world superior to the spiritual world.

The only way out of this dilemma is to conceptualize your spiritual path as being continuous from life to life. It's in your subconscious, not in your blood.

This video is basically a rebuttal of the 19th century idea that ancestor worship is connected to bloodlines. In the ancient world it was not about biology. It was about connections.

Those we call ancestors would be our adopted parents, as we see in Romans who followed the family cult of their adopted father. They would include the person for whom we are named, because that was a very Germanic way of conceptualizing reincarnation. They would include our cultural heroes (and gods) regardless of our blood connection to them. And they would include all who are well-disposed to us, by any connection we find meaningful. Basically, anyone in the spirit world who might be well-disposed toward you.

Our ancestors were looking for ways to extend and strengthen their social network and relationships. They wanted allies, not purity of blood.

• Arith Härger, "Ancestral Worship Exclusively About Blood-Line?", YouTube (Aug. 25, 2019).
• Arith Härger, "Cult of the Ancestors - Honouring the Dead", YouTube (Oct. 3, 2018).

Revised Nov. 4, 2019 to add link.