Disconnected

I find I've been struggling with heathenry lately. Not a struggle in terms of comprehension, or spiritual turmoil, but in waning energy for the subject. I'm not reading as much as I should. I'm not putting in the work I should. I'm not connecting with it in the way I have previously been. I know this is a temporary lull, but I feel like I should address it, particularly as it has meant I haven't been posting here like I should.


I think a lot of it is a community issue. I'm an introvert by nature, so I'm naturally inclined to hermit up and keep to myself. On top of that, I haven't really made many connections to fellow heathens. I did manage to track down a group of locals via facebook, but thus far haven't been able to attend any of their events. Of course, this may be at least in part for the best, as certain comments made within their group are troubling. Of particular note, one announcement bothered me a good deal: 

"Types of ceremonies/rituals will be Asatru with some Druidic peppered in. We want to have them for the holidays (on the Druidic and Asatru calender)" 

This is troubling for a number of reasons. The first and foremost being that I'm a reconstructionist heathen. By definition, the goal is to condition one's practice to emulate the religion of our ancestors as closely as possible. Why you would intentionally dillute this practice with outside elements, I don't know. 

The second issue is closely related to the first, and that is the idea that Druidism has any kind of place at a heathen ritual or ceremony. There is this weird kind of assumption out there that european pagan traditions can be mix-and-matched without any issue, and that is not only not the case - it's also kind of insulting. Not just to me, but to the other side as well. It ignores the fact that there are specific cultural values and an entire world-view built around those traditions. To lump them in together with a kind of broad strokes "pagan is as pagan does" is cheapening both religions and cultures. One would not say "we're going to be practicing catholic mass, with some Vedic tantra and Shinto mixed in."

But I think my biggest bugbear is that Druidism is such a sketchy subject in general. We know almost nothing about druids. At all. We have nothing surviving about what they actually did, or what they believed. We know nothing of their practices whatsoever. The only historical sources we have for druids are what greeks and roman writers thought about them (pro tip: it wasn't kind), some archeologial findings (implements and the like), and whatever tidbits can be gleaned from study of irish folklore. Nothing we have comes even close to a working religious or philosophical system. In my experience (and one could make a case for this by necessity being universally true) anyone claiming to have knowledge of Druidic traditions is full of new-age bullshit. Things billed as Druidic can almost always be traced back to the same strains of neopaganism that came out of Gardnarian Wicca. 

Why on earth would I want that anywhere near my religious traditions?

Ranting aside, I think a secondary issue has simply come the fact that the circles in which we travel shape who we become. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately on the subject of innangard, and forming of a tribe, and I realize that the people with whom I am closest are not heathen. With the standards I hold for company I keep, I begin to wonder if I will find fellow heathens that would measure up. Or if they do, how will they deal with the fact that my closest tribe members are not themselves heathen? 

It's a perplexing thing, and I think I've stuck things on the back burner while I chew on it. 

Stay tuned. 

Heathenry and Atheism

As so many of these posts begin, I had a conversation with someone the other day. This party made the statement that they used to study heathenry to some extent, and liked it.. but they ultimately became an atheist instead. "I've never much believed in 'belief.'"

I find a single quote to come up for me again and again when having this kind of conversation. My man, Socrates.

Before we can analyze a thing, we have to agree on what it means. Disbelief in "Belief" is exactly as contradictory as it sounds. A belief is, at its simplest, a statement that you accept a thing is true. Literally every assumption you make about the world around you - the very assumptions you must make in order to function in physical reality (the sun will rise, things fall down rather than up, etc) - is some form of belief. These beliefs collectively make up your world view. One can argue that we "know" certain things, but because of the way our brains work, we cannot arrive at absolute objective knowledge simply because we as fallible humans have to process that information.

What the person is actually discussing - and what atheism boils down to - is a rejection of faith. Faith is a complete trust or confidence in something apart from empirical evidence to support it. Indeed, Faith is generally glorified as being more important because of the lack of evidence to support it. The ability to believe in something that either is not known, or cannot be known is considered by many as a kind of spiritual strength.

The thing about Heathenry, which I will here and always define as the authentic, historical religion practiced in pre-christian northern Europe which is pursued by Recons, is that it doesn't actually require Faith. You absolutely can have faith, but it isn't a required part of the world-view, certainly not where the gods are concerned.

Heathenry is a votive religion. It works on the notion that one is obliged to do certain actions, and in turn, the gods / spirits / etc hold up their end of the deal. It is not a religion concerned about one's personal beliefs or relationships with the divine. Indeed, the root of the word piety is from the Roman pietas, which is literally translated not as any kind of faith, but as honor and duty. To be a pious man in the pagan sense is to fulfill one's duties to the gods - not to "have faith" in them.

I've often said I "felt at home" when I started into heathenry. It had nothing to do with gods or mythology. I've said before, I come to it from a purely philosophical angle and a love of the culture. My arrival in heathenry was almost purely secular.

Personally? I'm undecided on the literal existence of a god or gods, but I certainly don't have "faith" in them. Given how fond I am of Marcus Aurelius, I don't suspect it actually matters. It doesn't effect my day-to-day actions. Instead, Heathenry requires that I observe the proper rituals and traditions, that I make offerings, that I pay proper due to my ancestors, and so on. Heathenry is not a religion that is interested in your intentions or your faith. It isn't about what you think, it's about what you do.

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.