Guest

Pagan Mourning: Heidegger on the Passing and Return of the Gods

Regular Elhaz Ablaze readers will be familiar with the name of one of our most consistent commenters: Von den Vielen Raben – meaning Of Many Ravens in English. Von den Vielen Raben is a gifted and rigourous thinker with a deep knowledge of matters philosophical and religious. He recently sent me the text of this article and I was bowled over and immediately asked if we could present it here at Elhaz Ablaze. It was originally presented in 2007 at a university conference.

Enjoy!

~ Heimlich A. Loki

Pagan  Mourning: Heidegger on the Passing and the Return of the Gods

By Von den Vielen Raben

§ 1        Preliminary Reflections

I am a neo-pagan by faith. My scholarly leaning, too, is toward the reaffirmation of the lost pagan meaning of being in Western philosophy, on which my PhD is based by interpreting the difficult works of Martin Heidegger. Fighting the metaphysical oblivion of the gods in philosophy on the one hand, and the oppressive pervasiveness of what Heidegger calls the “onto-theology” of the monotheistic traditions on the other, my self-esteem as a neo-pagan has for many years been bolstered by a sense of being on the progressive side of history, or the “history of being” as Heideggerians would call it. It was only in recent months that I came to realise that this understanding on my part was dangerously conditioned by the relative isolation of my Australian “being-in-the-world”. As Heidegger would have put it, Dasein, as the self-disclosure of individual existence, is nothing more than the inscription of finitude on being. It is the “there” of my mortal span on terra australis – or rather terra australis incognita in the history of philosophy. My Australian paganism appears to be a splinter phenomenon that is cut off from the wholeness of being that a pagan Dasein has always meant for me. In my needful reflection on the question of authenticity that now arises, melancholy comes into play. Can a pagan’s melancholy like mine be used positively to create what Heidegger calls mindful awareness (Besinnung) of the primordiality of being? Or is melancholy always determined by the abyss of loss, in this case the loss of the pagan gods in the modern culture of “universalism”, which Heidegger addresses in his private writings from the 1930s on the question of the “last god”?

It was mainly through my regular intellectual engagements with my German and Scandinavian friends in Sydney, most of whom live here only temporarily and therefore stay decidedly North European, that I came to learn of the complexity of the sheer historicity of being “pagan”. Introduced as a neo-pagan to North Europeans, I was asked on several occasions whether I was a neo-fascist. I am not one. Yet to many Germans who were born after the war, the word “Heidentum”, which can be translated into English as either “paganism” or “heathenry”, is associated with the reappearance of what some academics call “brown esotericism” on terra europa, but is no longer confined there. This kind of esotericism is “brown” because it is Ariosophy: the “folkish” occultism of the Aryan race which characterised the beginnings of pagan revival in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century, and which was eagerly appropriated by the Nazis. Today, riding on the currents of international anti-Semitism that defines the neo-Nazi scene, Ariosophy finds its supporters as far east as the non-Aryan land of Russians and even finds curious resonance in the Islamic heartland of Iran, once Aryan Persia. In postwar Japan and Taiwan, too, neo-fascist groups continue to strive for the never quite complete Dasein of “honourary Aryans”. And the transnational Aryan ties go further still. Christopher Hale’s Himmler’s Crusade, published not so long ago in 1993, educates us about the Nazi obsession with Tibetans as primordial Aryans; and vice versa, the Tibetans’ initial receptivity to the Nazis that was not at all unfavourable. In view of these bewildering lines of current and historical developments, paganism becomes more a question of race rather that of the gods; or that of a racial and racialist religion. If I were in Germany today, calling myself neo-pagan would be to risk becoming identified with the revival of conflict-driven Ariosophy in our strife-torn world. The same applies to scholarly discourse on new religious movements. Academics and students alike will be familiar with the groundbreaking work of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the Exeter professor of Western esotericism who valiantly tackles the question of the rebirth of paganism in this Ariosophical context. His two books, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (2002), are essential readings in any critical appraisal of pagan revivalism. Those who are timid at heart may be fully pursuaded by the didactice anti-paganism of Karla Poewe, the German-born Canadian anthropologist who in New Religions and the Nazis argues that any pagan revival in Europe ncessarily has a fascist agenda, in that it inevitably involves a radical struggle against Christianity, which is Jewish in origin. Published in 2005, Poewe’s book reflects the methodological leaning also of many German academics when it comes to the study of neo-pagans. Carl Gustav Jung’s controversial thesis on Germany’s deep fear of the return of Odin as descent into chaos and destruction may still be relevant today.

Already in 2003, Mattias Gardell from Sweden makes an assessment in his book Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism that nearly half of the Norse and Germanic neo-pagan movements in the USA harbour a racist worldview. In her recent article “The Goddess Eostre: Bede’s Text and Contemporary Pagan Tradition(s)”, Australian academic Carole Cusack makes a less disturbing assessment of the Asatru scene, claiming that only some of its organisations take part in “right-wing politics”, while most are scholars devoted to the study of runes and the Eddas, especially Asatruars who are “folkish”, i.e. those who believe that spirituality and race are interwoven and organise their groups accordingly. Given that countries such as America and Australia are multicultural democracy, such position gives rise to fierce debates in contemporary Norse and Germanic paganism concerning the “folkish” versus the “universalist” approach. The “folkish” Asatruars will insist that Asatru is for whites only, whereas the “universalist” Asatruars will accept members on the basis of spiritual receptivity, independent of someone’s racial and cultural background. The cultural politics of the Asatru Folk Assembly, the first Asatru organisation in America and openly “folkish”, cause some controversy as its leader Stephen McNallen views the increasing Hispanic population in his country in terms of a war between the Norse and the Aztec gods. Another controversy was created when McNallen entered into a publicised dispute with the Native Americans over the remains of the 9300-year-old Kennewick Man, claiming the skeleton, discovered in 1996 on a river bank in Washington State, to be of Norse origin when intitial testings indicated it to be not American Indian. Yet scientists argue that using morphometrics to determine the racial origin of any paleoamerican remains is fraught with uncertainties. To this date the question of verifying the genetic markers of the Kennewick Man remains an open one.

What these two “folkish” controversies certainly reveal is the difficult problem of grounding pagan identity in the biologism of race. The Kennewick Man case has opened up new possibilities in archaeological reflections that question the usefulness of “race” as a scientific concept for archaeologists. The formation of Native American nations, for example, was not determined by race, but by voluntary associations of people over a long period of time, who shared a common notion of sovereignty in a particular topos. If we call Native Americans “pagans” – and many Asatruars do liken themselves to Native Americans -, then they are so by virtue of their history and their culture, not a racial identity that they themselves try to construct and assert. “Folkish” neo-paganism, then, is confronted with the existential problem of the abyss of identity construction, since racial markers are ideological inscriptions on the factical embodiment of Dasein and are therefore readings, not explications. Race explains nothing. Over the Kennewick Man the Asatru Folk Assembly fell into the same methodological quagmire of the type of archaeology practised by Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, a SS institute founded in 1935 to carry out research on Aryan ancestry.

This is not to say that in determining the ontological meaning of neo-paganism, “folkish” ideas do not correspond to a hermeneutic horizon that requires a careful examination and engagement, especially for any Dasein who has a self-understanding to be “pagan”. In this regard, pagan scholars have much to learn from Heidegger’s attempt to wrest the primordial meaning of das Volk away from the contemporary racism and biologism of the Nazi society that he lived in. Heidegger is particularly relevant to a thoughtful approach to pagan revivalism, in that the profound distress caused by what he called the “gigantism” of the Nazi war machine led him to produce the first philosophical writings on the gods in Western modernity. Heidegger was the first pagan thinker in modern Western philosophy, yet his writings – they number over 90 volumes in the Gesamtausgabe – have not even been taken up in neo-paganism.

§ 2        The “Godding” of the Gods

In 1989 the editor of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrman, published Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis (Volume 65). It consists of Heidegger’s writings that were written in secret between the years of 1936 and 1938. It is therefore a sigetic work. Before his death in 1976, Heidegger placed great hope in its eventual publication, believing that it will be revealed to the world as his second magnum opus after Being and Time. The English translation of Beiträge did not appear until 1999, as Contributions to Philosophy: Of Enowning, and its impact on Heidegger scholarship in the English language has only just begun.

In Beiträge Heidegger moves away from the existential resoluteness of Dasein in Being and Time as the promising ground of authenticity in face of the ever-present possibility of death. In its place is the near-mystical appropriation of Dasein by the epochal unfolding of the meaning of being to Dasein qua being itself, which nevertheless stays away from being understood as any kind of being, including God. The ground of being is abyssal; its history, an interplay of nearness and distance, of memory and forgetting. Heidegger uses the emblematic notion of Ereignis – which in ordinary German means “event” but this is carefully avoided by Heidegger – to hint at the interpretive fusion of appropriation, resonance and opening that characterises the history of being and Dasein’s projection upon it. What Heidegger calls “being-historical” thinking, which he attempts to outline in Beiträge, is to be distinguished from historiographical research on the meaning of historical events. However, the disappearance of pagan gods from European life through the Christianisation of the West is one major historical occurrence that reveals a great deal about the nature of the understanding of being in the Dasein of Western men and women. It is the overall appropriation of this understanding by monotheism, which posits God as the creator of all beings, the summum bonum of being itself. To conceive of being outside God is impossible in Christian thought – and similarily in Judaism and Islam. But according to Heidegger, what this divine schema overlooks is the dualism of transcendence and immanence that has its origin in Plato’s doctrine of forms. Earth can never be that good, for it is only an imperfect copy of an original image that is not accessible to mortal perception. Existence on earth is a lack rather than fulfilment.

The attractiveness of paganism for many is the dwelling of the sacred in immanence. Sacred mountains and sacred rivers are existential truths. Seasonal changes and summer and winter solstices generate a yearning for connection with the divine; the same with major stages in human life such as birth, marriage and death. The gods and the goddesses that neo-pagans follow have qualities that humans can relate to, even if they are negative ones, as in the case of the Norse god Loki. While the Aesir deities are far superior to the mortals, their speeches and actions as recorded in the Eddas and the sagas that can enter the hermeneutic circle of Dasein’s understanding, providing a clearing in being that Dasein can project upon in its existential possibilities. Pagan theurgy is temporal, not eternal, but it is no less sacred because of that. For a pagan, no attempt is made to worship perfection. He or she understands the work of time, which is change. Death is embraced as a part of life, as a transition to the other world, or the beginning of a new journey; it is not seen as an imperfection in existence.

In Beiträge, Heidegger describes our fundamental attunement to the gods in terms of our guardianship of the sacred on earth. At the very least, this involves a distressing recognition of the struggle of world against earth in the rage of the “gigantic”, fueled in his time by the Nazis’ ambitions for planetary domination and control. Heidegger is against both political and technological imperialism; the idea of the Aryan “master race” repels him. For Heidegger, the pagan Dasein calls for creating conditions on earth that will see the re-establishment of the fourfold of gods and mortals, sky and earth, which is envisioned in Hölderlin’s poem “Germanien”. Heidegger sees in Hölderlin the finest example of philosophical thinking in the gathering power of poetic language. Unlike his Romantic contemporaries Goethe and Winckelmann, Hölderlin actually believed in the pagan gods as living beings and loved them, and his continued devotion to Christ caused an inner conflict that eventually claimed his sanity. Heidegger never declared himself to be a neo-pagan. Yet through the significance that he places on Hölderlin, it is very possible that the pagan character of Heidegger’s Beiträge was shaped by his reading of this great poet. “Germanien” was important enough for Heidegger to devote a whole lecture course to its interpretation in 1934. In this poem, Germany is depicted as a priestess who serves the gods and provides spiritual hospitability to all those who come to her:

Yet at the centre of time
In peace with hallowed,
With virginal earth lives aether
And gladly, for remembrance, they
The never-needy dwell
Hospitably amid the never-needy,
Amid your holidays,
Germania, where you are priestess and
Defenceless proffers all round
Advice to the kings and the peoples.

By 1934 Heidegger was sufficiently disillusioned by his initial involvement with the National Socialist restructuring of universities to come up with some form of resistance against the Ariosophical madness all around him. Through his lecture on “Germanien”, Heidegger offered an understanding of the German Volk that was radically different from the official Aryan revisionism that saw in the same poem the heralding of a pan-German nationalism. In “Germanien”, Germany is a Volk of the gods and their land is a gateway to the sacred. In another of Hölderlin’s famous poem, “Der Ister”, on which Heidegger also gave a lecture, this time in 1942, the Germanic goddess of earth Hertha is mentioned. Hölderlin describes the Germans as children of Hertha, a Volk with a profound relationship with nature. In this poem, too, Heidegger sees hospitability as essential to Dasein’s attunement to the sacred: Hölderlin describes the secret dwelling of the Greek god Heracles by the Danube – Ister is its Roman name -, to which the German people belong as much as the Rhine. The stranger Heracles has made his home in Germany through the graciousness of Hertha.

Hertha and Ostara are both Germanic goddesses linked to the fertility of earth and of those who dwell upon it. Ostara, unfortunately, was used as the name of the most rabid Ariosophical journal that was circulated in Vienna in the early 1900s. The editor of Ostara was Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who made some name in the “folkish” milieu through the racial dualism of his “theozoology”, which depicts a worldwide struggle between the Aryans and the “inferior” races and the former’s eventual victory and hegemony. Prior to his rise to fame Adolf Hitler was a keen reader of possibly every issue of Ostara. Lanz’s choice of Ostara was based on his vision of Aryan eugenics. Ostara in Ariosophy is the divine mother of the master race to come. Himmler’s Lebensborn program was the later political manifestation of Lanz’s ideals. Both were anti-feminists obsessed with their fear of Aryan women losing control of their lust and producing children of mixed races. This fear has its resurgence in the “folkish” neo-paganism of the Asatru Folk Assembly, which discourages interracial sex and marriages. While not openly racist, this leading Asatru organisation believes in the separation of peoples so that the Norse and the Germanic blood can survive. Such racial politics is also advocated by the Thule Seminar, a rather secretive institute of the German New Right. Its founder Pierre Krebs claims in Im Kampf um das Wesen that multculturalism in Europe is a conspiratorial program of global forces encouraging the “ethno-suicide” of Germans and other Europeans. In this aspect Krebs is supported by Alain de Benoist from the French New Right, whose writings are translated into German by the Thule Seminar. Both men recommend a politics of difference based on “ethno-pluralism”, which in the meaning of the New Right is “folkish” separatism: they see any celebration of diversity on the same soil of Europe as dangerous and misguided. They also advocate neo-paganism as an anti-thesis to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but without actual adherence to any revived or reconstructed pagan tradition. In Krebs’ view especially, paganism is a metapolitical strategy aimed at bringing about a symbolic war between “Greece” and “Jerusalem”, such that Europeans will be reawakened as children of the Iliad and the Eddas, not of the Bible. This is nothing short of a violent rebirth in Christian Europe. In this process, Krebs sees Germany playing the role of the “inner Reich” of all European nations, instead of different European peoples deciding their own destiny. Hence the “folkish” appropriation of the ancient meaning of the “all-father” in the leading god figure of Odin, also known as Wotan in German.

All this is far cry from the paganism of Hölderlin and Heidegger. The biologism prevalent in some neo-pagan circles, potentially fascist, will find its critique in Heidegger’s Beiträge, who nevertheless is not against the notion of Volk as such. Volk for Heidegger is the proximity of Dasein to being, since it is what comes most ready-to-hand in Dasein’s being-in-the-world. It is the proximal access to Dasein’s selfhood. Yet in the present age of what Heidegger calls the abandonment of being, when the abyss beckons at Dasein for going under instead of surpassing and mastery, the existential nearness of the Volk is an illusion that can further distances Dasein from the primordial question of being. This is because the nearness and the distance of the Volk to Dasein is historicised in accordance with Dasein’s own understanding of being, which is highly problematised in modernity. Instead, it is through the uncanny of the stranger, and not the familiarity of the Volk, that Dasein can come to understand its selfhood. The stranger is not necessarily a member of the other Volk or race, as “folkish” thinking would want us to believe, but one who is aware of the daimonios topos of the truth of being, like the warrior Er in Plato’s Republic, who returns from the land of the dead to tell the living about the allotment of destiny to those who are to be born on earth. The stranger is someone who understands, and it can be anybody. For example, a “witch”. Or the ghostly loner that introduces anxiety and trembling into the question of the race (Geschlecht) of humanity in Heidegger’s postwar reading of Trakl. Our question is the encounter of this stranger among our midst and how we relate to him or her. Only then can a Volk be renewed in the clearing of being. Hospitality, however, is the essential condition for the stranger to exist; xenophobia, on the contrary, drives him or her to extinction. It is important for a Volk to be hospitable.

The Hölderlinian-Heideggerian axis of pagan revival is founded upon an understanding of being that has the openness and the reception of hospitability as its essence. And this renewal, which is also remembrance of being, cannot take place without the gods.

Reading Heidegger’s philosophy, then, opens up possibilities in neo-pagan thinking that are vital to the future directions of neo-paganism as a whole. This is a challenge when the philosophy of the New Right is enthusiastically taken up by neo-pagan organisations such as the Asatru Folk Assembly as justification of a pagan traditionalism.

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I Have a Dream

By special guest contributor MichaElf Allson

—

The night I dreamt a dream that altered my mind forever, was a night like any other.

The young’uns were in bed and I had spent the morning at an accountant in the city, processing the contents of a brown shoebox full of my year’s worth of receipts.

Nothing odd, whatsoever. But as the years roll on, I consider it to be one of the weirdest days of my life.

I will describe most of the dream but not in its entirety.

I found myself on a dark strip of road in the bush at night. There were dim yellow lights of homes in the near distance. My daughter Freyja was standing besides me and she was holding an open shoebox with a small hare cuddled up inside on a piece of warm fabric. Its eyes were huge and black. Shining in the darkness. We both looked at it fondly and Freyja replaced the lid of the box as we walked along the path through the bush. As we were walking and talking, my parents drove past us in their sedan. Both of them saw us and acknowledged our presence but kept on driving into the night. I yelled out to them, wondering why they would have left us out here with hours of walking between us and the next township.

We finally came across a tidy brick home that was occupied by a couple in their early seventies. They were very welcoming and very soon we were all enjoying a warm conversation in addition to a light meal and some much needed drink.

Freyja opened the shoe box again to proudly show the couple her pet. The hare was in the process of changing into some kind of sea creature with stumpy tendrils or tentacles perhaps, it was squirming around in the shoebox with the same moist cow eyes staring silently back at us. Before we could utter our surprise, a small opening appeared on its underside and a stream of clear liquid pissed out of the creature, splashing onto the polished white tiles of the old couple’s kitchen floor.

The room then became filled with brightness and a washing machine appeared in full swing vibrating on a spin cycle in the middle of the room. Was it the same room?

On top of the buzzing machine was a light grey bird-like animal. It had the appearance of an owl or a hawk and I noticed that its head was turning from left to right in a kind of happy rhythm. Out of the sides of its head sprang two long feathery horns, like a kind of Muppet monster, and it was shrugging its fuzzy shoulders in a very contented fashion. The animal was vibrating at an incredibly rapid rate, and as it did so, emitted waves of what I could only describe to you as love towards me. More love than I thought I could bear. I remember almost weeping with joy and fear, as the power that this thing possessed obviously was well out of my range of experience and I could do nothing to slow the vibrations running through my heart and soul.

As I concentrated on its face, I could make out three black dots where two eyes and a mouth should have been. The dots were hollow and solid, like black plastic beads. Behind the dots, swirling in the creatures bristling grey fur was an endless streaming of beautiful women’s faces in ecstatic expression. These faces were representative of all ethnicities and they all appeared to be on the brink of orgasmic climax.

It was at this point that I asked the creature its name (standard practice I suppose).

It replied in an English speaking women’s voice with a recognizable Australian tone. Its voice was the loudest sound I had ever heard, or could ever imagine hearing.

She calmly answered my question as I asked it. Her reply completing itself simultaneously in the space of time I spent finishing my shocked enquiry. She said “My name is Chardakiel, and I’ve known you forever!”

She then held out her left hand to me. It was a petite white hand with beautiful tapered fingers. She was reaching out to me with all her love, all at once. I fell away in terror and found myself wide awake in bed with my heart about to leap out of my chest. I was drenched in sweat and very confused indeed.

I had always been in the habit of writing down as many dreams as I could. They always made for good reading at a later date, and this dream was no exception. I began at once to document everything I could recall. I was soon to discover that this dream was totally different to every dream I’d experienced before.

The next morning I made a phone call to my Beastianity band mate Richard Horner. He was a most knowledgeable chap (he still is), and I knew that he had a couple of dictionaries in his possession that listed demonic entities in alphabetical order. He told me that according to his books, the Enochian demon Chardakiel was known to be the ‘Guardian of the South Winds’ and was also described in another dictionary as ‘The spirit of Libra’.

Now I thought to myself…’I haven’t studied anything remotely Enochian since I was a child’, but then I thought…‘Australia is really about as South as it gets’ and even Richard knew that I had been born under the sign of the scales. I continued to “go hmmm”…

I went about my day off as usual, but found it difficult to organize my dream into the back of my mind with any efficacy. I received a telephone call in the late morning from the principal of Freyja’s primary school. She reported that Freyja had injured her shoulder playing silly buggers in the school grounds, and requested that I come and pick her up.

When I arrived at the school sick bay I found Freyja lying on a stretcher bed in the company of her little friend Danielle (Danielle?). She was a little upset and in a great deal of pain. We found out via an X-Ray that Freyja has broken her clavicle or ‘collar bone’.

The shrugging shoulders of the grey and vibrating hawk entity flooded back into my memory as I equated my daughters name with the symbol of the hawk in the knowing that the two were inseparable.

This was just the beginning of the journey that my children and I were to embark on. I remember speaking of this dream to many friends. Some had tears after hearing it.

The years played out in big and dangerous ways. I found myself in the process of planning a brutal homicide close to home. There were scores of sad junkies blasting away in the streets around our inner city home. The insulin syringes would crunch under my boots as I walked Freyja and Otto to their schools each morning. I experienced numerous break-ins to my home. Chasing stray teenagers out of my house in the middle of the day as they were sprung rifling through our kitchen drawers. And without going into too much detail it got much, much worse.

I escaped the city, never to return. I brought with me the kids and the dogs, and returned to my childhood home up North. We settled in a tiny beachside settlement called Blackhead Beach Village. Our daggy little wooden beach house was nestled in a thick rainforest atop a high rocky headland. To walk to the ‘back beach’, we would start down a single lane road that was only partially tarred. The road was covered by a thick canopy of shade trees and at night would silently remind me of the place where ‘the dream’ began.

We met some amazing folk in Blackhead. Wise women taught Freyja and Otto about the animals that lived in the surrounding bush.

There were Possums, Gliders, and Goannas that stretched as long as my two ton truck. There were also families of hares living there. We now dwelled within a community that knew us and respected us and would look out for Freyja and Otto at all times. The spirit of place extended it’s peace and it’s freedom to us. There were no fences dividing properties, no letter boxes and plenty of kindly couples in their 70’s (or so I guessed). No more danger, no more needles for us.

Four years passed before I met my Melinda. We found ourselves at a pact meeting for many of Australia’s underground magic groups held in a bush camp on the outskirts of Sydney. Sweyn and Kara Plowright of the Rune Net were the organizers every year I attended. It was always a very special event, and I thank my man Mark Morte for introducing me into it so many years ago. Melinda attended due to her deep knowledge of the Runes, and hoped to meet someone there who could share her magical life. When she first put her hands on my naked chest it was like receiving a shock from a defibrillator attached to a power station that had been attached to two more power stations. To me it was an unmistakable sign that I’d found a girl who truly knew about magic and that my painful wait was over.

I asked Melinda to be my bride six months down the track and Lokily for me she said “yes”.

Our first ‘date’ was on ‘Imbolg’, or The Feast of St Brigit and we though it would be a grand idea to go out dressed as the elderly. I had my grandfather’s deerstalker hat, a walking cane and a crappy old tweed jacket with fawn elbow pads. The ensemble was topped off with a pair of horn rimmed spectacles. As we discussed our ideas to surprise our friends with our ingenious disguises, we researched the feast of Imbolg only to discover that it was the ancient custom to wear old clothes for the entire day and beg for alms. Melinda donned a huge woolen cardigan that came down to her mid-calf and it was made of a mohair blend. It was light grey in colour and was shaggy and furry and reminded me again of my beautiful and terrible female guardian. We were smitten and married to each other in a beautiful private ceremony on a quiet grassy headland near the ‘back beach’ in Blackhead Beach Village not long after that.

The love I receive from Melinda is comparable to that of the spirit in my dream. The same can be said of the love and patience that my Freyja bestows on me.

I can also say that the love and support that I have received from practically all of the women in my forty odd years of living is unconditionally astonishing.

My dream continues to unfold in beautiful ways throughout my life and may it continue to do so…

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Hammer Forged

I was fortunate to meet Tony a few years ago and I must say his deep wisdom has had a huge influence on my heathenism. Hammer Forged, along with its companion essay Asatru/Asafalse by Sweyn Plowright, represents a shining clarion for heathens and Asatruar worldwide.

– Heimlich A. Loki

Hammer Forged: Fabricating a Tradition

© Copyright Anthony Looker, March 2001

Mission Impossible

It is presumed that many of the readers are concerned with the revival and restoration of Odinism, also known as Asatru, or the northern tradition. This refers to the practice of the religious and magical system of beliefs found in Northern Europe and Scandinavia before the onset of Christianity. Clearly, some feel that they have a vocation or mission to fulfil in this respect. Undoubtedly, it is a deeply challenging exercise, which is occasionally rewarding, but is it worthwhile too? All those who are genuinely and honestly engaged in this endeavour deserve our wholehearted support and appreciation. However, it is a task that is doomed to uncertainty at best and contains numerous pitfalls for the unwary at worst. For most this will probably amount to no more than wasted time and effort. However, for a few it may lead to psychological problems, or recruitment into New Age cults masquerading as Odinist organizations, or possibly both.

The Underlying Problem

There is considerable uncertainty involved with recovering our ancestral beliefs and wisdom, assuming it is viable at all. It is not how far we can go in our efforts, nor even should we attempt to do so. Quite simply, it is knowing if we have succeeded to any extent. The underlying problem, facing those striving to reconstruct the lost pagan religion of the North, is that it disappeared long ago and no comprehensive record of it remains. There is, of course, a wealth of material in the form of the Eddas and Sagas, as well as contemporary accounts by Christian clerics and so forth, which provide us with a glimpse into the lost world of the North. Unfortunately, regardless of how much we may be able to glean from these sources we cannot know for certain that we have arrived at an accurate understanding of the tradition, as it once was. The reason for this is that none of them represent personal accounts or testimonies by actual exponents of the elder faith; they were all written up either by rank outsiders or else hundreds of years after the people and events which they describe. For example, no matter how sympathetic and sincere Snorri Sturlusson may have been with his rendering and melding of oral tradition we cannot be certain of its accuracy; indeed, we may wonder if Snorri himself was entirely sure of his facts. Even runestones, although primary source material in some cases, turn out to be of limited help to us here. The vast majority of these inscriptions are either very simple or banal statements, such as: “So and so put up this stone in memory of his father”, or else they contain information so obfuscated and cryptic as to be quite unfathomable or meaningless. This may all be very fascinating and certainly helps to fuel our imagination but is useless as far as providing us with any clear information.

The Living Dead

Supposedly, a careful examination and interpretation of runic inscriptions and early texts underpins the present-day northern tradition. The impression conveyed is that Odinism is authentic and historically accurate; when it has in fact been cobbled together from a variety of sources, both ancient and modem. History is after all more of an art than a science, no matter how well crafted. It is subjective by nature and in the absence of a transcendent, overarching, objective viewpoint that we can refer to – with the possible exception of that contained within the allegory of myth – there is only the version according to individual historians. And, unless you happen to be Adolf Hitler standing on trial, there is no eternal court of history we can make an appeal to, either. Incidentally, it is worth recalling that the German messiah considered the ancient Germanic gods unsuitable objects of worship for the modem age, as related by Hermann Rauschning. The wonderful tapestry of make-believe history conjured up by the image-makers of the Third Reich was, it seems, intended to herald the advent of a new spiritual order and not the triumphant return of the old heathen gods. Essentially, all history is reconstruction no matter how truthfully it may relate the story of past events. History cannot bring back the past, it can only convey an impression of it for us. Just as marshalling the facts in sequential order, alone, does not constitute history; so, methodically exhuming elements of past practice is not enough to reanimate a dead tradition. Unfortunately, some Odinists’ own forensic analysis has come to resemble pathology: more concerned with the fate of the dead than that of the living. They may learn a lot about the nature and world of the deceased but that does not necessarily help us to gain an understanding and mastery over our own lives. In answer to those who might say that the dead are worth more than the living – on the basis that most of the living are worthless – that may be so but alas for us their tradition died with them.

Restoration Project

We may well ask why anyone would want to revive a dead religion, in the same way we might question the merit of restoring an old car. Drawing on this analogy, the response might be that just as mass-produced vehicles do not appeal to everyone, so established religion has failed to satisfy all spiritual needs. Accordingly, many of us profoundly alienated and dissatisfied with what is available have sought solace elsewhere. A few have turned to the venerable faith of our Anglo-Saxon and Norse ancestors for inspiration. However, in the case of Asatru, there is no book of heathen common prayer, no manual of shamanistic practice, no magical grimoire even – at least not until several centuries later – to guide the modem adherent. Likewise, for anyone attempting to forge a ‘Philosophy of the Hammer’ there is no ‘Treatise or Reflections on the Nature of Asatru’ to provide them with a lead. Unlike ancient Greece, the northern world never made the transition from mythology to philosophy. Anyway, who is qualified to lead such a project and what authorization have they to do so?

False Prophets?

There is no monopoly on the truth and no individual or group is the fount of all wisdom where the (northern) tradition is concerned. Although some seem to suggest just that and others appear to be gullible enough to believe it. Anyone conceited enough to argue that his is the definitive version of Odinism will soon find that he has made a rod for his own back. This will invariably tend to be controversial and divisive, especially amongst the Odinist community which is notorious for its endless feuds, rifts and schisms. Ironically, those same hierophants who have forged ahead with reinstating the northern tradition, scornful of Christian dogma, have ended up propounding an equally hidebound and dirigiste creed of their own. A few vainglorious characters have added insult to injury by arbitrarily arrogating authority to themselves. But, they face a constant struggle to convince even their own followers, let alone anyone else, of the legitimacy of their usurpation. Further, their claim looks hollow and threadbare in the absence of the sanction that an unbroken, living, tradition could confer upon them. In any case, the self-appointed prophets and cult leaders of neo-Germanic paganism do not know, any more than the rest of us, exactly what constituted this lost faith.

A Hidden Agenda

Some might say that it does not matter if certain people have appropriated the tradition for their own ends and that it is not really suitable for modem man anyway. Further, does it really matter if we don’t relate to the runes in exactly the same way as the runemasters of old? After all, people consult the I Ching quite happily without having to abide strictly by the method used during the Sung dynasty. Ralph Blum has managed to do very nicely indeed out of (mis)casting the runes, having tossed aside the time-honoured fashion of doing so! We may regard him, in our own opinion, as a charlatan and his system as being completely bogus but – unlike certain others – he has never made any pretence to authenticity. Since traditions constantly mutate and renew themselves anyway, a conscious reconstruction may turn out to be little different from the product of spontaneous and natural evolution. The concern is not that certain individuals have hatched up Odinism but that they have exploited their knowledge and skills in order to establish something akin to a personality cult, with all the dubious qualities which that term implies. It seems that no matter how much they try to deny it, those who take on the trappings and status of a guru or grand master – either by accident or design – almost inevitably will come to be regarded, and come to regard themselves, as such. The more that people claim they are specially gifted with some unique spiritual insight and occult powers, the greater the suspicion grows that they are merely false claimants operating a hidden agenda. They can end up as complete characatures of themselves, negating any genuine abilities and spiritual qualities they may have once possessed.

Reconstruction or Fiction?

A number of so-called revivals of Odinism have been started in recent years. Undoubtedly some of them have been carefully and tirelessly researched with apparent skill and dedication but no matter how great the effort expended and the resources deployed, they are all flawed in one important and fundamental sense. In order to reconstruct something, anything in fact, there has to be an accurate model or original design to work with. For instance, to enable an engineer, architect or archaeologist to effect a valid reconstruction of something they must have a clear and complete example of the original artifact, blueprint or plan, ideally. Failing this there can be no accurate reconstruction, an exact replica true in every detail. What there will be in its place is either an approximation or else an artist’s impression – in other words a construct or fiction. This also applies to any reworking of Odinism. Whatever else they may have left to us, what we do not possess is a full and complete exposition – a mission statement – with regard to our forebears’ worldview.

Stone gods

There is a distinction between dreaming the myths onward and attempting to duplicate a vanished tradition. The key to unlocking the secrets of our pagan past rests with our mythopoeic imagination, where the archetypal currents, which generate the myths are constantly at work deep within the psyche. The myths ebb and flow through individual lives and the lifetime of nations like the changing seasons. Traditions follow the same pattern, sometimes undergoing a dormant phase whilst at other times enjoying a high summer after a prolonged absence and winter hibernation. However, their mysterious reappearance is seldom if ever in quite the same form as before. As with any organic system, a degree of metamorphosis accompanies their life cycle. The outer trappings may have faded beyond immediate recognition but the framework remains the same, embedded in the northern psyche like the molecular structure of a crystal. In this uncertain and haphazard way a tradition may survive indefinitely with greater or lesser degrees of continuity. The challenge for us is to find a way to integrate these potent archetypal elements and symbols, without being psychologically overwhelmed by them in the process. This paradigm has been outlined before: Jung’s essay on Wotan likens the Odinic stream to a dry riverbed awaiting the waters of irrigation; a century earlier the poet Heinrich Heine alluded to the old stone gods slumbering in the dust of history, awaiting their moment to reawaken and cast off the slough of a millennium of Christianity.

An Insurmountable Obstacle

Despite these various seemingly insurmountable obstacles one or two pioneers have forged ahead with a revamped northern tradition based upon a vague and speculative notion of the past. It is a heroic attempt to satisfy a deepseated desire; as clearly there is considerable nostalgia for the old Germanic faith and a yearning to regain a symbolic cosmos based on the Norse myths. Curiously, the absence of the restraint and check that a prevailing, extant tradition might otherwise impose affords us boundless freedom of opportunity: the scope to innovate and experiment to our hearts’ content. In this way, we may arrive at something close to the lost tradition; equally, we may end up inventing an entirely new one. We will never know. In the end, short of abandoning this particular path altogether, we are left with no choice other than to follow something that is largely unsubstantiated and of questionable validity.

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