Author: Justin Durand

Bookman. Pagan. Moving Left. He/him/el.

Ancestors and Personal Power

“In traditional East Asian forms of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, connection to your ancestral lineage hs always been expressed as kind of a requirement. Real talk, right? Historically and culturally, ancestors are always involved. . . . When you do anything at all, it’s got to be on behalf of your ancestors or in the name of your ancestors, You talk to them. You ask them for advice. You, like, feed them, too.“

And not just East Asia, but all over the world.

“There is this belief in a correlation of some kind, a connection between your closeness to your ancestors and your personal power. The enduring wealth of family dynasties are explained through ancestral connections. Decline and a downfall of a family’s collected power is explained by a lack of or broken ancestor connections.“

There are many interesting pieces here. The place of adopted children in the family. How ancestral lines can be damaged. How they can be healed. How to create an ancestral altar.

I got a chuckle out of a comment about offerings at the ancestral altar. Just like Mom or Dad loves your gift even when you really got them the wrong thing, your ancestors react the same way. They like that you did something, even if it’s not quite right.

And now, I can’t resist adding a different point of view here. Mambo Sandy says, “Every ancestor don’t like your ass.” Good point, and some sane advice from what is probably my favorite YouTube video of all time.

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Pater Aeneas

Sum pius Aeneas, raptos qui ex hoste Penates classe veho mecum, fama super aethera notus. Italiam quaero patriam et genus ab Iove summo. [I am pious Aeneas, who carries my Penates, snatched from the enemy, in my fleet with me, known by my fame above the ether. I seek my fatherland, Italy, and a race from highest Jove.]

Vergil, Aeneid 1.378-80.

In my undergrad Latin class we translated Vergil’s Aeneid. If you don’t already know, the Aeneid is a propaganda piece composed by the Roman poet Vergil (70-14 BCE). It glorifies Aeneas, the legendary Trojan prince who was the supposed ancestor of Julius Caesar.

When Prof. Brian Sykes assigned nicknames to the haplogroups, he chose Gilgamesh as the nickname for the founding ancestor of haplogroup G. I’ve joked for years that he should have chosen Aeneas.

And yes, I get that this is a marketing ploy to make it easier for customers to relate to the science. I also get that this clever little system always chooses a nickname for the ancestor that begins with the same letter as the haplogroup itself. So haplogroup G has to have an ancestor name that begins with g. And the name Gilgamesh, from the Sumerian Noah, reminds us that haplogroup G originated somewhere in the Middle East. It’s not one of the major European groups.

Still. I’d rather have Aeneas as my mythical ancestor.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Haplogroup G2a, my group, is heavily concentrated in Tyrol and the Alps, and that is where my paternal line originated in historic times. (Swiss, not Swedish as you might suppose from my surname.) My intuition, all those years ago, that it might be connected to the Etruscans and their Rhaetian cousins is increasingly plausible. Presumably, then, the Rhaetian speakers in the Alps originated with those Etruscans who fled a Celtic invasion of Italy in the 4th century BCE.

The Roman historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, thought the Etruscans came from Lydia in what is now Turkey. The story he tells does not match Aeneas and his band of refugees, but it now seems clear there were other versions. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing 400 year later, thought the Etruscans were indigenous to Tuscany but admitted that his predecessors were “unanimous in stating that the Etruscans came from the East”. In fact, Aeneas seems to have been the founder-hero of the Etruscans perhaps from the archaic period and certainly long before he was Romanized.

Having been the mythological founder of the Etruscans, Vergil turned him into a proto-founder of the Romans, then the Habsburgs, those claimants to Rome’s legacy, made much of their own supposed descent from him.

Aeneas would be the ideal mythologized representation of the remote ancestor of haplogroup G2a. And that’s why I have him on my ancestral altar.

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Sic pater Aeneas intentis omnibus unus fata renarrabat diuum cursusque docebat. conticuit tandem factoque hic fine quieuit. [So our ancestor Aeneas, as all listened to one man, recounted divine fate, and described his journey. At last he stopped, and making an end here, rested.]

Vergil, Aeneid 3.716–18.

Traditional Adoption

There is ample evidence that European civilization has been invested in the idea of organizing kinship groups into patrilineages, time out of mind. The pattern is enshrined even in Proto-Indo-European and its descendant languages.

With this in mind, I’ve been trying for many years to get a handle on how our ancestors thought about adoption. Historically, adoption seems to have been very different from our modern world, where the motivation is to ensure the well-being of children.

I started with this question knowing only that ancient Romans had a practice where childless men would adopt a boy from a family with extra sons.

I expected to find arguments in favor of some theoretical “Indo-European” original. Instead I found wide differences in practice, as well as in theory. I’m focusing on just two of them.

I should add that it’s not clear to me how far modern scholars would go in accepting broad generalizations from 100 years ago. My interest here is not in modern theory, but in how this subject was explicated in the heyday of nationalism.

“Every where, as at Rome, ‘ the aggregation of families forms the gens or house. The aggregation of houses makes the tribe. The aggregation of tribes constitutes the commonwealth.’ The state is therefore the result of the expansion of its primordial cell; and the genealogical organization of the society precedes and overlaps the territorial. All these groups, lower and higher, regard themselves as united by the bond of kinship. But, as a matter of fact, the kinship is often assumed; and the heterogeneity of blood is explained as the result of the fiction of adoption by which relationship is artificially extended and strangers are admitted to the sacra (Kocourek & Wigmore, 198-99).

“The central principle of the Aryan [Indo-European] household is the Hestia-Vesta cult, or the worship of the sacred hearth. To gain the protection of the ancestral gods the hearth-fire must be kept always burning; and the care of the family sacra is the special function of the house-father, who is lord and priest of the family. . . . The primary purpose of the [marital] union is the birth of a legitimate son to perpetuate the paternal line and to foster the ancestral cult. So paramount is this motive that, in case no son is born in wedlock, resort may be had to adoption, or to analogous expedients for the fictitious extension of fatherhood” (Kocourek & Wigmore, 209).

There’s an elephant in the room. Behind these long-winded explanations about patriarchy, patria potestas, and agnatic descent, we see no attempt to claim a Proto-Indo-European original. Instead, the only argument is that patrilineal descent was so important for the family rites, it gave rise to systems of adoption and fictive kinship.

Roman Adoption

“To the early Greeks and Romans, the goal of adoption was to perpetuate the family based on the male line of descent and to ensure the continuation of the family’s religious practices. Thus, the adopter originally had to be a male without a legitimate son” (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia).

The Roman adoptio “was the ceremony by which a person who was in the power of his parent (in potestate parentum), whether child or grandchild, male or female, was transferred to the power of the person adopting him. It was effected under the authority of a magistrate (magistratus), the praetor, for instance, at Rome, or a governor (praeses) in the provinces. The person to be adopted was mancipated by his natural father before the competent authority, and surrendered to the adoptive father by the legal form called in jure cessio. When a person was not in the power of his parent (sui juris), the ceremony of adoption was called adrogatio. Originally, it could only be effected at Rome, and only by a vote of the populus (populi auctoritate) in the comitia curiata (lege curiata)” (Smith 1875).

Both adoptio and adrogato required a ritual called detestatio sacrorum (renunciation of private rites) at a comitia calata, a particular type of religious assembly called for particular purposes often involving family law. The adoptee renounced the sacra of his paternal family and placed himself under the authority and family sacra of his adopting father.

The arrangement was purely among the men of the families. “The effect of adoption, as already stated, was to create the legal relation of father and son, just as if the adopted son were born of the blood of the adoptive father in lawful marriage. The adopted child was intitled to the name and sacra privata of the adopting parent, and it appears that the preservation of the sacra privata, which by the laws of the Twelve Tables were made perpetual, was frequently one of the reasons for a childless person adopting a son. In case of intestacy, the adopted child would be the heres of his adoptive father. He became the brother of his adoptive father’s daughter, and therefore could not marry her; but he did not become the son of the adoptive father’s wife, for adoption only gave to the adopted son the jura agnationis” (Smith 1875).

This last is an important point. It is a common mistake of amateur genealogists working to flesh out their data on Ancient Rome. Not understanding the history of adoption, they include the mother as an adoptive parent, But beyond that, I would expect to find somewhere an argument in favor of a cognatic system that depends on this seemingly minor point. Why, after all, should a woman’s family have kinship ties established on their behalf for no more reason than her husband’s need for an heir>

Norse Fostering

In Norse society the father had absolute control over whether an infant would live or die. If the father accepted the child and gave it a name, it became a member of his family. If he rejected it, it was exposed. Someone might take pity on the child and rescue it–such is the stuff of fairy tales–but more often it would die.

As far as I can discover the Norse did not have a custom or procedure where one man might be replaced by another as the legal father of a child. In other words, once accepted by the father, a child did not leave the family.

I find one reference to Aetleidung, but haven’t been able to discover what it was. From the context is seems to be relevant in a discussion about whether the child belongs only to the adoptive father or also to his family: “The adopted child would thus be received into the whole family connection; as was the case, for instance, in the Aetleidung of the Old Norse law” (Kocourek & Wigmore, 342).

The Norse did, however, have the custom of fostering. In effect, this can be counted as a form of incomplete adoption.

“The general custom was first to have the child knee-seated (knésetja), or put on the knees of him who was to be fosterer; the child was then called the knee-seated (knésetjningr) of his foster-father, who bestowed upon him as much care as if he had been his own child” (Du Chaillu, 43).

Fostering was a hall-mark of upper class child rearing. The foster parents were always of a lower class than the biological parents.

The tie to ones’ foster parents was extraordinarily strong, but it did not affect the child’s standing or inheritance rights in his biological family. King Haakon Magnusson of Norway (1068-1095) kept the patronymic surname (Magnusson) he got from his father but had the nickname Toresfostre because he was fostered by Tore på Steig.

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Proto-Indo-European Deities

I know I wrote about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) gods and goddesses, some time, some where, but I can’t find it now, so I’m going to throw up this quick sketch while I try to remember what I might have said.

I have a post “Spread of the Indo-Europeans” (2015) over at HauriDNA, but that’s not what I’m remembering. At one of the predecessor sites to this site I had a fairly lengthy post about the main deities, and their analogs in Roman and Norse cultures.

Here, for now, I’m just going to link Ceisiwr Serith’s video about the deities. He covers them in more detail than I would have.

One caution here–because it’s so often a source of misunderstanding–this whole thing is an academic construction. European adventurers in the 16th century noticed similarities between widely spread languages. Different cultures across Europe, Iran, and India used similar words for the same thing.

Scholars working in the field of linguistics (really “philology“) eventually lumped these languages into a group they called “Indo-European“. Indo-European is a language family, not a race. It’s the ancestral Indo-Europeans, the group we call Proto-Indo-Europeans, who were a tribe or culture. Modern cultures and individuals who speak an Indo-European language might or might not be descended from the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

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Revised to add link.

Home As Cult Place

I’ve been meaning to blog about this presentation by Luke Murphy for quite a while. It shifts the emphasis away from the grand public cults toward the localized household cult. I wish I could find a better link, but this seems to be the only option.

If you prefer reading, here is another of his papers on the same topic, but in written form.

“I believe we now have enough information to propose a working model of pre-Christian household religion in the Nordic Late Iron Age: on the basis of the evidence examined in this article, such cult is best regarded as expressing the religiosity of a particular small-scale, localised social unit – the household (see Figure 2). It was typically, but not always, performed in or near the dwelling of this household; appears to have been dedicated more often to localised supranatural beings (including ancestral spirits) than to more widely-known deities; seems to have offered more significant roles for women as cult specialists and leaders than other pre-Christian Nordic religion\s; and seems to have been more common in the autumn and winter than during the spring and summer.“

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Pagan Priesthoods

How do neo-pagans create priesthoods from nothing (ex nihilo)?

I often talk to people who see this as an issue facing modern pagans. We don’t have an “apostolic succession” going back to the ancient priests. The interrupted transmission is a barrier to the legitimacy and credibility of pagan priests in modern times.

Elsewhere, in some Indo-European cultures we see hereditary priests, but we don’t have that either, not in Norse history and not as a survival in our modern world.

Everyone’s answer seems to be self-initiation. Someone studies up, initiates themself, then initiates others, founding a new priestly line. I’m not sure whether the missing element is thought to be some kind of laying on of hands or some kind of training, but this seems to be the only thing anyone knows that can fix it.

But why is this even a problem? It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding. When I reached a point where I was beginning to struggle with this issue, my mother brought me back to earth. She pointed out that we’re all born pagans. That’s the whole point of being baptized into Christianity. If you never get baptized, you’re yet another heathen soul.

Not only that, we’re all born into the particular paganism(s) of our ancestors. There wouldn’t be a way to be born into any other paganism, now would there?

Along the same lines, it’s a minority opinion but some Indians tell me that everyone on earth is born into the Sanatama Dharma. By definition it’s the eternal truth. There cannot be any other. Each child is born to it, and every religion on earth is some form of it. Or so goes this line of thinking.

Finding Priests

It becomes much easier to think about the question of authentic priesthood after we’re clear about our natural status as pagans. Bear with me for a minute while I digress into some Christian theology. I think the point will become clear.

There is a Protestant idea about the priesthood of all believers. The way I learned it as a kid in the Lutheran church, all Christians hold the priesthood by virtue of their baptism. Martin Luther wrote in The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude: Preached and Explained that “this word priest should become as common as the word Christian” because all Christians are priests.

The thing that sets apart the professional clergy among Protestants is that they have been trained to exercise priesthood, and called by the congregation they serve to exercise priestly functions on behalf of the congregation. Any baptized Christian could, say, perform a baptism or officiate at a wedding or funeral but for the sake of good order it’s better if we let a professional do it.

Roman Catholics have a similar idea bout a priesthood of the faithful but nevertheless they set off ordained priests as a higher order. “The ministerial priesthood differs in essence from the common priesthood of the faithful because it confers a sacred power for the service of the faithful” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1592). “The sacrament of Holy Orders communicates a ‘sacred power’ which is none other than that of Christ” (Catechism, 1551). “‘In the name of the whole Church’ does not mean that priests are the delegates of the community. . . . It is because the ministerial priesthood represents Christ that it can represent the Church” (Catechism, 1553).

These differing ideas about priesthood between Protestants and Catholics are exactly on point for the debate about pagan priesthoods.

The Protestant idea of priests being called by a community and authorized by them to act in a priestly capacity is perfectly adaptable to the situation of modern pagans. It is also fully consistent with a traditional pagan world where the head of household is responsible for its ritual observances, as being consistent with the mingling of priestly and magisterial functions in societies as far apart as Rome and Iceland.

There is also an interesting footnote here. One of the boasts of the 19th German nationalists was that the Protestant Reformation was specifically successful in northern Europe because the Germanic soul had traditions of freedom and brotherhood that southern Europeans lacked. One of the proofs advanced for this idea was that the Protestants rejected the notion of priests as a higher order in favor of a model that emphasized the essential equality of believers.

There is much more to be unpacked here. For example, whether Roman Catholic ideas of priesthood correspond to something important in the traditional pagan world, and whether there would be any reason for trying to attach modern priesthoods to a Brahman caste.

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Tribal Religions

One of the fundamental difficulties faced by neo-pagans is that one cannot reconstruct the homogeneous cultural experience in a diverse modern world. Where most of our pagan ancestors lived in communities so uniform they did not need words for race and religion, nor were their communities large enough to created notions of nationalism. They simply belonged to a particular culture.

Efforts to create a new, pagan identity in the modern world–even if founded on ethnicity–cannot overcome actual cultural experience created by a shared national identity inculcated by a uniform educational system.

Further, the chance thread of an ethnic identity nested within a national identity (or even regional identity), is not often available in the ethnically mixed culture of North American.

I might occasionally call myself Swedish-American, but that is only one identity available to me, and the immediate problem I would encounter is that the Swedish gods belong more clearly and strongly to my cousins in Sweden. I participate much more weakly when they are only ancestral gods, and only one possible set of ancestral gods, at that.

“The tribal religions had one great benefit other religions did not have and could not have. They had no religious controversy within their communities because everyone shared a common historical experience and cultural identity was not separated into religions, economic, sociological, political, and military spheres. It was never a case, therefore of having to believe in certain things to sustain a tribal religion. One simply believed the stories of the elders and these stories had significance as defining the people’s identity. Today we can say the have specific themes, but that is our interpretation and not the way the people understood them. No tribe, however, asserted its history as having primacy over the accounts of any other tribe. As we have seen, the recitation of stories by different people was regarded as a social event embodying civility. Differing tribal accounts were given credence because it was not a matter of trying to establish power over others to claim absolute truth.“

We Did It to Ourselves

One of the most transparent lies white supremacists tell themselves is that Christians forced their religion on Europe. No. No, they didn’t.

Everywhere across northern Europe, people looked at Rome, so rich and sophisticated, and decided they wanted some of that for themselves. Back then, if anyone was forcing you to become Christian, it was your own leaders.

#PaganSoyBoys

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.

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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.“

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.