Heathen Community Sans Belief

How on earth can a Heathen group function if it is not built on the basis of shared belief? Sounds insane, right? Let me tell you two stories.

Nightmare Heathen Group Experience

When I was a mere sapling I joined my first Heathen group. It felt thrilling and exciting, like we were creating something magical and important. Gradually, however, it went sour. Unspoken rules began to creep in. There were accepted and non-accepted beliefs and outlooks. The wrong thoughts were verboten. If you didn’t agree with the party line about what theory of the gods was right, or what the meaning of this or that symbol was, or whatever – well, that was trouble. It was a moral failing, a reason to be ashamed.

There was no room for disagreement, or even for variety of opinions. In-group dynamics started to flare up, and a race began: who could be the ‘most right,’ the ‘most TRU?’ As the tension mounted, people started leaving. Paranoia set in – perhaps there were secret traitors trying to break the group down? Individuals started sowing dissent between others: “don’t tell anyone but so-and-so said this about you and can you believe he would do that?”

The final climax? In the rush to achieve a perfected group ideology, racist politics started to creep in, along with vicious, dogmatic attacks on anyone who unwittingly said the wrong thing or expressed the wrong opinion (be it related to politics, history, religion, ritual, whatever). Everyone had to start spying on each other, so our fearless leaders said, to be vigilant that there was a uniform opinion on any and everything.

I left the group, and it took a long time to recover from the trauma of the experience. I heard the whole thing fell apart a few months later. It was very sad.

There were a lot of toxic things going on in that group, to be sure. Something that facilitated, fueled, and legitimated them was the insistence on a party line. That is to say, group orthodoxy was strongly emphasized. The group was also very practical and did a lot of activities, but they were always conditioned by the obsession with right belief. And actually, I haven’t shared the half of what went on, but we honestly just don’t need to go there.

Wonderful Heathen Group Experience

Many years later, my other half and I knew a couple of local people who were into Heathenry, and we wanted to have a group where we could enjoy sharing mutual love for things Heathenish. We both also had prior traumatizing group experiences (like the account I provided above), and we were cagey.

We talked a lot before we made the initial plunge to start a group. We weren’t sure whether there was enough sense of shared beliefs among the people we wanted to start the group with. Then we realized that belief was a poor basis for group cohesion. So we got everyone together and we said: let’s start a group with the following principles:

1. No particular beliefs or points of faith are required of group members. Each person is free to have their own personal interpretation of the gods, the myths, whatever.
2. We agreed to have no formalized group structure as such, but rather to run things on a volunteer basis, that is, if you want to see something happen it is up to you to make it happen.
3. Group to be based on engaging in shared activities, whether explicitly spiritual or not, with the understanding that spiritual practices will focus specifically on Heathen myth and practice, i.e., generally avoiding syncretism.

You can see how these three principles de-emphasize orthodoxy and operationalize orthopraxy. We discovered that this worked really well, and in fact our group continues to be a lovely thing indeed. We don’t meet up these days as often as we’d like, and we have lost some people and had some new people join us, but the group is basically solid. And wonderful, nourishing, joyous, flowing.

There has never been any group conflict around opinions, ideology, or ‘correct’ interpretation of the lore. Some members of the group believe in the gods as literal beings, some as metaphors for natural forces; some members see the group as primarily meeting their spiritual needs, others their social and community needs; some members of the group see Heathenry as their primary and fundamental path; others see it as being part of a larger tapestry. We’ve been lucky to avoid any shitty politics.

Some of the best conversations we have had were supporting group members to get comfortable with the realization that they would not be criticized for being, say, agnostic. We just didn’t waste time on all that sort of thing. Love for Heathen myth and ritual doesn’t always correlate to faith in the metaphysical. Everyone participates in a sincere and joyous way and we have woven a rich web of mutual care and love around the Irminsul of Heathen praxis.

Sometimes we realize that there’s better historical evidence on which to base our rituals, and because we have no attachment to ‘right belief’ we readily just shift our language or practice, and it always feels deeper and more special with those shifts. Occasionally someone brings in a new idea, and we feel it out together, both practically and in terms of lore-coherent symbolism.

It remains important for group structure to keep our focus on Heathen spirituality, even though some of us might have other interests too (alchemy, ceremonial magic, chaos magic, whatever, we don’t care, we just try to keep clarity around our practice as being Heathen). And at the same time, on the very rare occasion when it has been personally important for someone to acknowledge, say, a Greek god, they have been able to do so and we’ve been able to make space for that. Pantheons crossed over between cultures in the old days, too…

Because there is no pressure for any kind of orthodoxy, there is room for group members to grow, to question, to revise their spiritual concepts. This freedom to learn and to change and to expand is very nourishing.

In more recent times we invited our next door neighbor to attend our Heathen gatherings. Is he Heathen? Nope. Is he an important part of our immediate community? Yep. So should he be a part of our gatherings if he would like? Definitely! He typically avoids the more formal ritual activities, but as far as we are concerned he is part of the group because relationships should be privileged over professions of orthodoxy. And you know, he fits right in.

We are generally very slow to bring new members into the group. We might really like someone and they might be an amazing fit for the group but we keep it glacial. We do try to make sure that everyone is ok with us not needing rules about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ spiritual belief. Sometimes it is hard because we don’t want to introduce someone to the group until everyone already in the group has had a chance to get to know them, which can be logistically difficult. Sometimes that just doesn’t ever work out practically, but we do our best. A larger group is not necessarily a better group, and we could never fit all the people we like anyway (plus geographical distance is tricky, etc.).

After the trauma of my first Heathen group experience I never thought I could have a positive experience of Heathen community. By keeping our focus away from controversies of belief and firmly focused on practice and relationships, we have created a group with no ridiculous power politics (when the stakes are low the politics are vicious, as they say!). We’ve been doing ritual together for so long that now we have deep unspoken bonds and a creative joy that infuses every part of the process.

Writing about these experiences makes me realize how much I look forward to stepping our group up a little more in terms of regularity of gathering. It also makes me realize how much group safety is created when you set belief aside as a criterion of participation and focus on a) fellow-feeling; b) praxis. Unlike a pre-modern tribal community we are not interdependent for material survival, but if we were I imagine that would provide an even more compelling alternative to obsession with dogma or uniformity of thought.

Is this orthopraxic orientation a magic bullet for all the possible problems a Heathen group could encounter? Absolutely not. Has it been an important part of facilitating a lovely group culture for us? Absolutely yes.

But wait…isn’t there some kind of sleight of hand going on here? Isn’t it a shared belief that it is better not to obsess about shared belief?

Well yes, but the point of having a critical stance on belief isn’t to pretend that belief isn’t a ubiquitous part of human life. It is just to be able to step back and have a sense of productive irony about it. The minute I mistake my words about reality for reality, I am lost, and so is my community. Premodern paganisms don’t seem to have made that kind of mistake, but in modernity we do all the time, and that’s a major obstacle to building a healthy modern Heathenry. Thankfully it is also avoidable with an orthopraxic orientation.

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(Don’t forget, our first ever book is out and available!)
Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712
Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK