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.