What is a Heathen?

This was originally meant to be a handful of things, first a "Why I'm Heathen" then a "What does Heathenry mean to me," but I realized that both of these require further unpacking. As per usual, I'll never claim to be an expert on anything, but I can explain as I understand it.

So lets start simple:

What is a Heathen?

At it's heart, Heathenry is a general term for a continuation of the pre-christian religion native to the Germanic cultures of Northern Europe. Speaking in the broadest commonalities, it involves some measure of ancestor veneration, and a belief in various forms of spirit: land wights, house wights, etc. It involves certain world-view concepts such as Wyrd, Orlog, and Luck. Of course, what any of that means is up for debate.

If you asked a hundred self-identified Heathens, you'd get as many answers. This is not because Heathenry is a blanket religion like Wicca in which just about anything can be included, but because Heathenry is a folk tradition that varies naturally between groups, regions, and points in time. The modern landscape is little different. Though we share some general precepts, how we relate to those beliefs and what we do with them varies quite a bit.

I am not going to get into the various 'denominations' that have cropped up. I'm not familiar enough with Odinism or Theod to tell you much about it, and while I probably have the most in common with Asatru, I don't like to define myself by it. Instead, I prefer to go by heathen. It's a good term, simple and straightforward - which is, to my mind, what a good heathen term should be. More importantly, it's mercifully devoid of the political implications of some of the other associations. 

There's a history to the term I can appreciate as well. Heathen is itself a dirty word. It comes about after the conversion to Christianity, to designate the people "of the hearth." It refers to the people they thought of as hicks and hillbillies who still practiced their naive, native ways. Heathen was the word for those too backwards and uneducated to realize that they should abandon their cultural heritage in favor of the foreign God and his chosen authority structure on earth, rising up from the south and east. It was meant to be a  pejorative, but for me it evokes the kind of stubborn resistance to outside force and loyalty to one's past that I would expect from Heathens today. 

I'll wear it with pride. 

A Journey Here

To understand where you're going, you've got to know where you're coming from. Hopefully, you'll forgive this brief foray into autobiography, but since the blog is meant to be half-journal, I might as well get it out of the way.

My route here is as long as it is convoluted. I grew up in a household that was nominally Christian. While I remember our family attending with fair regularity when I was very young, by the time I was six or seven we had fallen out of the habit. For most of my childhood then, my experience of religion was mostly as a bar against which I was supposed to measure or an authority to which my parents would appeal. I don't recall a time in which Christianity was an active practice in my home that meant something on a spiritual level.

For the most part, it was the appeal to authority, often for what appeared to be arbitrary reasons. I remember being lectured about having female friends, because it was "improper" for an adolescent male to have female friends. This was mighty inconvenient, given that boys of my age were mostly into sports, pot, and porn for much of my developmental years. Lacking an interest in any of the above, I had a hard time connecting. I remember being lectured against reading the wrong things, because somehow knowing about other cultures or belief systems is how the devil gets you. There may be some truth in this, I suppose given that I am a heathen now. I remember being told that fantasy was dangerous, and being lectured against my interests in anything martial - swords and dragons and violence, these were all things hated by God. The net effect was that I learned to conceal my interests and tastes, and when I did get romantically involved with someone, I kept it quiet.

On the other hand, by the time I hit 14 or 15 years old I had a growing interest in spirituality. By then I was already a history nerd, and my interests expanded into not only who these people were and what they did, but a deep desire to understand what they believed and the culture they lived in. Like many, I first turned back to the bible, but knowing as much as I knew already, I couldn't take any of modern Christianity seriously - not knowing the truth about the pagan origins of this or that, or how much of the Bible was essentially cobbled together by the Council of Nycea to select which stories most fit the political aspirations of a developing state religion. Worse still was actually reading the bible. One cannot get out of genesis without having some serious moral questions. I would carry these with me for a very long time.

I then turned to Gnosticism, but while it developed in me an interest in the esoteric, I found too much of what caused me to resent Christianity in the first place - a denial of the world around you in favor of some promised mythology.

My studies became more obsessive with time. I spent some time in Islam and Judaism, Kabbalah.. I eventually turned to the Western Esoteric tradition and spent a good deal of time studying Hermeticism (something I'm still fond of conceptually, even if I do not identify with or practice it). This was about the time I had my first brush with paganism -- unfortunately, through Wicca.

Wicca is a topic for another blog, but suffice to say that while I was first captivated by the notion of returning to pre-christian religion, so much of it was.. flatly wrong. The "origin story" was highly suspect, the cult of persecution and victimization, and most importantly, the underlying assumptions of how paganism actually worked in a historical context. The new age movement soured me on paganism for a long time, and I eventually returned my search to other cultures and contexts.

Along the way I encountered Stoicism, and next to Heathenry, Stoicism is perhaps my second favorite ideology. It shares many of the core values of Heathenry and ultimately, Stoicism is what freed me from Christianity.

There's a funny thing about growing up as a Christian. Even if you don't intellectually buy the story, there's a part of your brain that will always go "..but what if I'm wrong?" What if there is a God and he is as described by the desert faiths? What if there is a hell, and torment, and all of that. While stumbling through Stoicism, I found a quote that is perhaps one of my favorites of all time.

"If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them." Everything fell into place at that moment. I realized it ultimately didn't matter if the desert god was real, he was not someone I wanted any part of. I was free.

The next few years would see me reading deeply on everything from classical Greek philosophy to Buddhism and Shinto, but I always found myself trying to cobble things together. Pick a bit of this, a bit of that. I briefly wondered if I would have to simply write my own religion and start some minor cult somewhere.

Then one day, on a whim, I downloaded a handful of podcasts from itunes, of all things. Among them was an episode of a pagan podcast called Raven Radio -- specifically, a Heathen podcast. The topic of the episode was "Does Wicca and Asatru speak the same language?" Being somewhat wary of wiccans, I was curious. I was instantly hooked.

Raven Radio was a very reconstructionist oriented heathen podcast. The people were ..normal human beings. Down to earth. They had jobs and lives and lived in the real world. Before that episode was over, I was overwhelmed with the feeling "these are my people." It was an awakening for me, a feeling of home and community I've never known elsewhere. I immediately downloaded everything I could get ahold of, grabbed a couple books I found on the subject, and got to work. It was not a long process to realize not only was Heathenry a kind of coming home -- It was not a conversion. I've always been Heathen. I just didn't know it.

I hope one day to get a hold of those guys - Chuck, Bill and Bob. Maybe even meet them in person. If it hadn't been for the work they put in on that show, I may never have found a place to call home.

God Poles

God poles are an interesting expression of germanic paganism. They seem to be about as old as the culture itself, with some bog finds dating back to the ninth century, references to them in the writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan along the Volga, and descriptions of the statues at Uppsala. Proper god poles can be six or seven feet tall, and more than a foot across and almost always carved of wood. Most often, one would reserve a small area of their land as a kind of sacred space, and erect the pole(s) there.

The function seemed to be some cross between altar, totem and good luck charm. From what I understand, when the pole was erected, the god was invited to inhabit the carving providing a more direct link between the ..erector? ..and the divine. The pole seemed to function primarily as an altar of sorts, with some of them having been described as having hollow mouths to leave offerings in. Finally, there also seemed to be an idea that one would orient the poles in such a way to look over one's land and home, with the notion seemingly that the gods would then be "watching over" your home in a literal way. 

All of this rattling in my head, I decided to sit down and carve a little something for myself. 

My efforts are.. humble.. to say the least, but given that this is my first attempt to actually carve anything, I think it turned out alright. It's not a very large piece, obviously - maybe four inches tall - and would probably qualify more as a good luck charm than a proper god pole, but I'm happy with it. He will be a little desk Thor, for the time being.

After the project was done, I wound up feeling curious and looking up how people who seriously carve as a hobby go about doing it - my effort was mostly "chip at it until it looks like something." Turns out they get super thin, sharp knives and specialized gouges and scoops and then select a nice soft wood like birch, or fir or pine. Then there's me, muscling a K-bar through an old oak branch I got out of the back yard. True to form, I only look up the instructions after they are no longer helpful. Apparently, people tend not to carve oak unless they are using power tools. As sore as my hands are, I can see why.

That said, it was a really nice experience regardless of how the actual statue came out. I feel like I got a lot of value from the experience even outside of any kind of ritual significance of the statue itself. Something about working the wood brings an odd kind of connection, a physical expression of the faith and culture. One can almost imagine an ancestor a thousand years distant, sitting around the fire and carving a little charm of his very own. It's a very satisfying connection.

I think I've got a new hobby. Albeit, next time I may have to invest in proper tools.

Applied Philosophy

There is a concept that I need to discuss that is central to the way in which I understand spirituality. This isn't a concept unique to Heathenry, but one that has developed organically for me as I've studied religions, cultures, and philosophies over the years. I'll warn you ahead of time, it's not a concept that is likely to make me popular.

Simply put, it boils down to: Religion is an applied philosophy.

Depending on where you are at in your life, this may sound obvious, or it may be confusing. What we're talking about is the way in which your beliefs interact with your actions and world-view.

Beliefs are simple enough things. We form thousands of them each day. We change and update these constantly, constantly taking in new information and revising old beliefs. Some of these are changed because the new beliefs seem more correct. On the other hand, some of these never change at all. Human nature makes us very stubborn where beliefs are concerned 

Over time, certain beliefs become important to us and collectively, they form a set of rules for how we view the world. This set of rules and paradigms becomes our philosophy, whether we like it or not. This is the lens through which we view and process the world. 

Religion is another step entirely. It's not enough to simply believe a thing to be true. Religion is the application of philosophy to one's actions and life choices. 

Now the part that will make me unpopular. 

Inherent to every religion is a philosophy and a set of rules and values that go along with it. Agreeing with the beliefs of a religion is not enough to claim it. You must both understand the philosophy of that religion and put it into practice in your daily life. You can claim to be a Christian, you can even "believe in Jesus," but unless you have embraced the philosophy and values of Christianity and applied the rules to your life, you are not a Christian. The same goes for any other faith, whether Buddhism, Islam, Shinto or yes, Heathenry. 

The majority of people in the United States are simply born into their religion. Many will on some level pick up on this concept, even if they don't have a word for it. In simplest terms, it will amount to "being a good Christian." 

For me, Applied Philosophy is a measure of one's spiritual and intellectual integrity. It is the application of philosophy that led me to a home in Heathenry, and it is through applied philosophy that I realized not that I should become Heathen, but that I always have been Heathen... that, however, is a story for another blog.