Division and Politics (OR 'Why I'm a Reconstructionist')

I spent quite a while sticking to myself in the whole heathen thing. It's how I do most things, first taking them up in private and fiddling with and figuring it out before I get involved with anyone else or want to participate in a community. I think it's a prideful kind of thing: I want to at least look like I know what I'm doing before I open my mouth. That in itself is kind of a heathen sentiment - don't open your mouth unless you've got something worth saying.

When I finally did begin seeking out other heathens and trying to get a grip on the community, I was unprepared for the politics. Having been weened on Raven Radio, Asatru Lore, and the Recon community, I hadn't realized what a diverse - and divided - group the broader spectrum of heathens actually was. With the group being as small as it is (relative to other religious groups), I would have thought there would be more concern for similarities than differences. In a way, it reminds me of The Life of Brian.

"Judean People's Front? We're the People's Front of Judea!"... "The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front."

Of course, this is perhaps to be expected. Heathenry is a religion that stresses the relationships between people in individual communities, rather than any kind of pan-heathen brotherhood. The notion that we should all be Brothers and Sisters in Christ Odin is leftover baggage from someone else's religion. Innangard is one of the core concepts from the world view and is by definition exclusionary. This is also a religion that encourages someone to stand their ground, and comes from a culture that celebrates independence and personal charisma, so heathens by nature tend to be both opinionated and stubborn, with no divine commandment of subservience or humility to stand in their way.

I'm the first to admit that I fit all of these issues to a T. I'm part of the problem. While I wish that there were a greater consensus on a number of things, I realize that most Heathens do, and like all other heathens I would prefer my version of the story to be the one that is agreed upon.

In my mind, however, there is a difference and here I will present a case for my position.

In the world of Heathenry, there are essentially two categories of declarative statement. The first falls broadly under Reconstruction. Reconstruction is essentially the factual, objective information we can point to the lore itself (sagas, eddas, etc), from outside texts (Tacitus, Saxo Grammaticus, ibn Fadlan), and from archeological and other scholarship. The other half falls under UPG - Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis. Any time someone leads with UPG, what they are talking about is their personal experience and insight that is unsupported by outside sources. This doesn't mean that their UPG is wrong, or even goes against the lore, but any time it is UPG one cannot make the claim "This is true," they can only espouse a personal belief or opinion.

Even if I'm not the most deeply educated of heathens (yet), I tend to lean towards hard recon myself. What this means in practice is that I assume the humble position that the people who actually practiced this faith centuries ago understood their lore, gods, and philosophy better than I do. Thus, what is and isn't "heathen" to me falls squarely on the shoulders of "what did our ancestors believe?" In my view, if you're claiming to be heathen, then you assume that the answer to that question is what you should be incorporating into your religious practice. This is not to say that I'm entirely against UPG, I have some of my own. But it means that I assume UPG is like sexual preference - everyone's got some, yours has nothing to do with mine, and you should assume no one wants to hear about it unless they ask you directly.

So why would anyone ever not push for Recon? Well, there are some pretty common arguments I hear:

Recons live in a fantasy world / are trying to pretend they are vikings
This is a fairly common opening argument, usually because the person at hand doesn't actually understand what recon is. Reconstructionists are not out to put on costume and live in the 10th century, but instead are trying to understand the world view of those that came before and apply it to modern life.

We can never know what they believed, so why bother?
This comes from a simple ignorance of just how much we actually do know, and we know more every year. There are far fewer gaps in the collective scholarship than people would have you believe.. but.. of course, you'd actually have to do the work and study to understand that.

We live in a different world now.
This is also occasionally changed to sound something like "Heathenry is a living religion and it must be updated with the times." I find this claim to be both absurd and kind of misleading. For me, the philosophy is actually what brought me to Heathenry, so claiming that it needs to be updated is a kind of idiocy that could only be represented by idiocy as some kind of platonic ideal. The world itself is full of other religions and other schools of thought that are more "modern." To me, that is the biggest reason to choose heathenry, to get away from the shallow and sickly philosophical notions that permeate modern society and religion. And as stated before, if you don't actually follow the philosophy of a religion, why bother?

The real problem with this claim is the idea that the philosophy needs updating at all. Heathenism is a life-affirming and human-centric, humanistic religion and it's underlying philosophical tenants bear that out. If someone wanted to make a very well-reasoned argument about a specific point that could use changing, I'd be all ears. Unfortunately, this argument only ever really means "I want to import this non-heathen concept from some other religion, call it heathen, and have everyone else accept its validity."

Recons are as dogmatic as christians!
This is one of my favorites, and forms a nice catch-all for the rest of the issues that might come up. Heathenry has no dogma. It has a world-view, as does every culture and every religion. It needs no dogma, and no commandments (don't get me started on the "Nine Noble Virtues") because if you understand the world-view, none of the rest is required.

Generally speaking, this is the retort of someone who has tried to hybridize their heathenry, infusing it with their leftover christian baggage, or tried to import wicca or other new-age influences and presented it as "their" heathenry to other people. Some groups will be fine with that, but this is where pejoratives like "wiccatru" and other less than friendly accusations come in from the recon-crowd. It's not that there's anything wrong with wanting to be High Priestess Silver Odinswolf of the Mjolnir-Bearer's Coven. You are free to do that, but what you are doing is substituting what we factually know about the way heathens organized and worshiped historically with non-heathen sources. You can do it as you please, but what you are doing is not heathenry. Some embrace this openly, referring to themselves as part of "The Northern Tradition" instead. For the most part though, people who fall under these categories seem to be either new heathens who haven't learned any better yet or people who either simply don't care enough to learn what was actually practiced, or actively want to disregard what was practiced in order to craft a religion more suited to their own personal politics and convenience.

Ultimately, that's the best argument I can make for Recon. In many ways it strikes parallels with the role of the role the Constitution is meant to play in US government. Whatever differences in philosophy you might have or UPG or other ideas you might bring to the table, Recon serves as a neutral ground and a boundary line. It is an objective standard by which one can measure ideas and objective middle one can meet at and declare "this is heathenry." You cannot one day make the declaration "This is heathenry, and because I call myself a Gothi, I declare it so" any more than a president can stand up and declare himself king (try as they might).

And the case for those against recon? All I can say is that I've noticed that whenever someone comes out and states that some god or another, or their ancestors, or whatever source decides that they are such a special and remarkable individual that they can speak for the truth of heathenry, that source almost always sounds like "You are perfect just as you are, do what feels good" and almost never sounds like "we gave you this information already, we have been arguing for the same kinds of rites, rituals, and cultural values for thousands of years. Go out there and do the work."

Just a touch too convenient, if you ask me.

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.

Heathen in Progress

First posts are always the hardest. We put so much weight on introductions and opening statements, but perhaps that's the wrong way to do it. Nothing to do but to do it.

Heathen in Progress is meant to be exactly what it says on the tin. A place for me to wax philosophical and record my thoughts as I begin a serious study into the kind of Germanic Paganism that was practiced throughout pre-Christian Northern Europe. I have a suspicion the blog will itself become half-theorycrafting, half-opinion, and half note-taking. I expect to be wrong frequently, and hopefully having my mistakes a matter of public record will keep me humble.

More than anything, I think this is meant to be a record of my journey and beliefs, not just for me but for friends, loved ones, and family members. Its not easy to find out that someone you love is interested in something that can sound so scary or unknown. I hope that through this, I might be able to explain myself and leave something for anyone who might follow.

Wish me luck.