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.

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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.

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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.

Revised Nov. 4, 2019 to add link.

Weaving Wyrd

The energy of certain places is a real thing.

“Sometimes, whether created intentionally or not, certain locations can exude a ‘bad’ or malicious energy imprint within the wyrd fabric of a location or place.

“These energies can be human or wight generated, and can be so strong, its bad Hamingja can actually attach to unsuspecting visitors, especially if they happen to be Wyrd workers, and more so if they happen to be doing seiðr or ritual work in the negatively impacted location.“

  • Ivy Mulligan, “Wyrd weaving”, The Germanic/Teutonic Center of Northern Cultural Arts (Aug. 6, 2019).

Edited July 11, 2020 to remove dead link.

Cowboy Paganism

For American Westerners like me it’s going to be cowboy paganism. Nothing else makes sense. Everywhere else in the world neo-paganism is linked to place. Only Americans seem to think it can be heritage only.

Now and then I get flashes of what cowboy paganism would look like. Here’s one glimpse:

But really, it’s going to take several generations of thought, debate, and development.

Tribal Heathenry

“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.

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Seidh is for Women

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.”

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Revised January 27, 2021

Neo-Shamanism

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.

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Updated o add link.

Frigg is Freyja

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.

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Revised to add links.