Western Martial Arts Part One

I love Martial Arts.

Learning any true Martial Art is a cathartic experience. Realistic training is, by necessity, brutally hard and un-avoidably somewhat dangerous. It takes Courage to keep coming back to the gym day after day, week after week and year after year. It takes Discipline to maintain your composure while being punched in the face or crushed into the mat.

The Virtues that you develop through Martial Arts tend to spill over into other areas of your life. To endure the training you need to stay in shape, watch what you eat and control your drinking. The physical confidence that you develop begins to show through in your speech and posture and bearing.

Martial Arts training is the ideal form of Yoga for Heathenism.

The only problem is that most people think of Martial Arts as being something Oriental. This update has been planned as the first in a series celebrating the value of the misunderstood and often forgotten Western Martial Arts, a group of disciplines every bit as profound, transformative and as combat-effective as their oriental cousins.

Clint

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The Expanded Pantheon

I believe in all the Gods.

Odin, Loki, Freya, Thor, Hercules, Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus, Shiva, Shakti, Xango, Exu, Pomba Gira…the Gods are infinite in their manifestation.

But, it is the Norse Gods that I love most. It is they who speak to me most clearly, they who have led and guided me. I wish I could tell you why, whether it’s something in the blood or something else…I don’t know. The truth is, we rarely get to choose our Gods. Our Gods choose us.

Clint.

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Heathen Imaginings

I wrote this paper a few years ago, and my views may have since changed…

The first great challenge to modern Heathenism has come. Will we dare to overcome ourselves, or will we fall into the death of stasis? Will we dare to overcome ourselves, or will we let our weaknesses, our fears, our baseness, overwhelm us? This is the question I see, more and more, facing us.

The time has come that we begin to imagine ourselves. We need to ask, “Who are we?” No longer are terms like ‘universalist’ or ‘folkist’ appropriate – these have come out of grasping at particulars. At best, they refer to people who believe fundamentally the same things – the terms thus virtually lose their relevance. At worst, they are reactive, fearful stances that choke upon themselves. Therefore, the time has come to do something radical. The time has come for us as Heathens to take the radical step of imagining ourselves. *

Our ancestors were not the isolationist hicks that extremist folkish Ásatrúar want them to be. They were profoundly in tune with the ‘outer world’. From the earliest times, they travelled vast distances. They aggressively incorporated ideas from other cultures that were in essential conformity with their own.

The Elder Futhark is itself a product of this eager syncretisation, a syncretisation that came when a Northern
magician recognised the power of Roman/Etruscan alphabetic language and combined it with the Germanic grasp of pictographic symbolism. In this one move, Rune magic came into its own – too syncretistic for the extreme folkish understanding, yet too true to its inner essence for extreme eclecticism to grasp. No surprise that both of these ‘camps’ in modern times think of the origin of the runes in hobbled and politically circumscribed ways.

Our ancestors did not see the world in the fear-laden terms of separation, the terms that extremist folkists deal in. Our ancestors understood that a thing’s essence is not the sum of its particulars. They understood that their own essence was not the sum of their particularity.

Ásatrú has in modern times been intensely insular, and with good reason, for she was weak for many years. But now she has stabilised. She has regained her grounding. It is time to break open the protective armour of Ingwaz and step back into the world. It is time to cease bickering over academic minutiae. It is time to accept that we are REVIVING, not accurately reconstructing, a tradition. It is time to activate our mytho-poetic imaginations, as much wiser souls than myself have put it.

Ásatrú in modern times has never been ‘pure’. Its major magickal exponents have always brought their influences, usually of the western esoteric tradition, with them. Politically, it has always had elements of its number infected by the contempt-worthy fear that is racism. It has always been infected with those who argue for the ahistorical notion that “each people should be locked away by itself”, a notion which was and will always be the position of apologists for totalitarianism.

This alone reveals the bankruptcy of those who want modern Heathenism to be culturally isolated, or who think that all cultural exchange equates to new age eclecticism. As it happens, these people have already accepted many ahistorical additions to Ásatrú – the foremost being the notion of our ancestors being insular. Sadly, these people have also often accepted the infantile fears of right-wing extremism.

Our ancestors revelled in the wide tapestry of the world, and yet managed to maintain a multitude of distinct and coherent religions and cultures (for truly it is fair to say that the dark age Norse were significantly different in culture and religion to their Bronze Age forebears). Cultural integrity and coherence is not maintained by cultural isolation – history seems to prove this a thousand times over.

We must remove the pedestals we have placed our ancestors upon, and critically engage with them. We must understand that they too made mistakes. In saying this, I mean to say that criticism is the highest form of praise. He that cannot question turns the object of questioning into a sacred cow. May Loki lay low all stodgy spirits of seriousness! Nietzsche was right – we need gay scientists, not dour pharisees.

Our ancestors eagerly innovated. All-too-often we moderns cling to the record of the past. In doing this we obey their example to the letter, not to the spirit. It is time to release a little of Tyr’s academic hold and abandon ourselves to the exhilaration and dread of Woðanaz. The fruits of research need to be interpreted, developed, explored, not taken as pronunciations ex cathedra. If we imprison ourselves within the woefully limited picture we have of the past, we will doom ourselves to stagnation, psychological illness and devolution.

Will we become a tradition of fear, insularity, pettiness, backwardness? This is the danger that now faces us. The challenge is no longer survival. The challenge is to become a living, breathing, evolving – yet still coherent – life tradition.

The time has come to imagine ourselves, to cease pretending that Need impels us to reactivity. We are long overdue in ending our tolerance of the Christian-born instincts of racism and right wing extremism. The time has come to become a living religion, in a modern world.

As Heathens, we are inherently atavistic. We must trust the deep taproots of our ancestors and our gods to protect us as we grow and evolve, and cease clinging to fear. The struggle for the Heathen imagination has begun, and the very survival of our tradition as something other than a series of pseudo-political parties or isolated cults is at stake.

Let us take up this challenge with ecstasy.

(* For more on the idea of Imagination, I can only refer my reader to John Ralston Saul’s masterpiece, On Equilibrium.)

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Odin has a Light Sabre

This article was written a few years ago… so my views have probably evolved since then.

I recently had a strange insight into the profundity of the first three Star Wars films (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). They have some deep parallels with the Heathen mythos, and some truly special psychological insights about the paths of Tyr/Teiwaz, and more especially, of Odin/Wodan. Then Othrerir roared, and out came this essay. I ask readers who are sceptical of the substance of the Stars Wars trilogy to consider this essay before they dismiss it for superficial reasons.

I will not comment on the new Star Wars films because 1) the third doesn’t exist yet; 2) I’m note sure that there is anything profound in them. And as a final note of slightly indulgent clarification, when I use words like ‘human’ below, the reader should infer that I mean all of the sentient alien species in the Star Wars films, not just the humans specifically.

At the end of The Return of the Jedi (which I will refer to as Return from here on in), Luke Skywalker, the Jedi knight, finds himself confronting his dark Jedi father (Darth Vader) and Vader’s malignant master, Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine tries to defeat Luke by exhorting him to “give into the hate” that dwells within him. Here we see the fundamental conflict of the Odinnic magician, of the child of Wodanaz. The struggle for Jedi (magicians) like Luke and his father is to find equilibrium between light and darkness, between Asgard and Hel. Each has an important place in the whole, but when one dominates disaster results.

The Jedi or magician struggles to resist the impulse to give into the hate. They feel keenly their own power and strength, and it is easy to forget that this strength has only come because they have surrendered their ego to The Force (the fundamental life energy of the universe that underpins the metaphysics of the Star Wars films). They risk beginning to feel that they have some innate power, and this is when the darkness, the hate, threatens to overwhelm everything and bring disaster upon the Jedi’s head.

Hate stems from fear and objectification. When the Jedi (or magician) denies that her power flows from The Force (or wyrd, or the Way), they are denying the fundamental subjectivity of the universe, treating it as dead matter onto which they may impose their will. Compounding the danger of falling into this attitude is the fact that the Jedi IS powerful, and so they feel that they have external or objective evidence of their personal greatness whenever they successfully act with purpose.

The Jedi, in their attempt to avoid the trap of being consumed in hatred and egotism, must not repress the darkness. Either they will go mad, or else it will grow out of all proportion and overwhelm them, turning them into a cancerous monster. They will become a beast, become even less than a Jedi that chooses to be totally consumed by hatred. All hope of redemption is then gone.

They must not indulge the darkness within, but they do have a responsibility to use it. They must turn it towards positive ends. They must use their resources as the outsider, the killer, the critic, the artist, the mystic, to contribute to higher ends – to help bring about a less tormented world, to help heal it. They can use the strength and independence that their darkness can  give them both to combat those who have indulged it (though they must have care, as the magnitude of Luke’s temptation shows), and to destabilise trends around them that are causing or allowing injustice or needless suffering. An incredible amount of art and creation, things that enrich so many lives, stems from the transformation of darkness into beauty. I am not criticising darkness, I am criticising those who abuse it.

On the surface, the ‘light side’ of The Force is much weaker than the ‘dark side’. This is for two reasons. One, it is non-linear – it is diffuse, it works in subtle ways throughout the whole fabric of the world. Two, the dark side is bound up with egotism – it is concentrated densely within the dark Jedi’s personality. The upshot is that in most situations the dark Jedi is able to bring more power to bear more rapidly than the light Jedi. He is more responsive in crisis situations. This is part of why the Jedi must learn to become comfortable and at peace with his darkness – it has its place and is valuable, so long as it is not allowed to rule.

Regardless, the light side is infinitely more powerful, because the Jedi who works with the light becomes a conduit for all of Being. They become a vortex of creativity and life, and in the moments when they is able to move with the tide of the world, they move with the momentum of the universe. The dark Jedi, conversely, must expend endless energy forcing circumstances, twisting patterns, manipulating, maintaining a constant sense of drama and crisis. They can never relax, because their power can only manifest when brought to bear on resistance – difficult circumstances, enemies, etc. And because they can feed only on their own energy, on their victims, and on the negative energy generated by the conflicts they orchestrate, they end up burning away into a hollow, monstrous shell. They become a living draug, a walking corpse. A sociopath.

When we follow Luke through from Star Wars through to Return of the Jedi, we see how he evolves, and we see the critical impact that other archetypes have on his own Odinnic one. He is raised as a farm boy, in touch with natural cycles, and raised in a spirit of humanism and passion. This sets him on the right path, and we must acknowledge that dark Jedi may have had a very big handicap in early life, though not always (some are just self-indulgent brats).

And yet his passion, which wells from the dark of the unconscious, makes him dissatisfied with his simple Vanic life (the Vanir are the Heathen nature and agriculture gods). This is the curse of the Aesir (the Heathen gods of nobility, magic, art, and war). Luke was raised by his uncle, a very Vanic man, they struggle constantly. Luke’s uncle is perpetually worried about Luke because he sees the trouble and suffering that this same passion brought Luke’s father, Darth Vader. This is an example of ancestral orlog, the process by which each generation must assume responsibility for retaking the tests failed by the previous one (orlog is a Norse word meaning ‘primal layers’ and refers to the past as a force that pushes the present towards a partly determined future).

Luke’s uncle does not understand the passion that Luke and his father share, and believes that he can keep Luke safe by stifling, dismissing and ignoring Luke’s sense of adventure and lust for mystery. This actually intensifies Luke’s tendencies, and also makes him idealise the only person he knows who allows a place for this aspect of his personality – Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Kenobi is a light Jedi, and his archetype is Tyr/Teiwaz, not Odinn/Wodan. He was Darth Vader’s master, but he failed to help Vader find equilibrium between darkness and light because he could not understand just how powerful the darkness is.

Although Kenobi is easily capable of killing, and is pragmatic about the means he uses to achieve his ends, his ‘dark’ acts are not motivated by passion or desire. Rather, he commits them because he accepts the flow of wyrd (a concept from Heathen belief similar to The Force). He has enough faith in wyrd that he does not question or argue with the courses of action that are Needful for the success of his quest to help promote empathy and equilibrium in the world.

Therefore, Kenobi does not struggle with the dark as Luke does. He is a child of Teiwaz, he has utterly offered himself to the Force as an agent for healing (of course sometimes healing requires the controlled destructiveness of the rune Kenaz, hence Kenobi’s warrior aspect). His burden is that he is doomed to self-sacrifice and will never truly know the rewards of his right action. In contrast, those who are Odinic must struggle endlessly with tides of shadow that threaten to drown them and turn them into the very monsters they fear and despise.

In the first film, Kenobi helps his friends escape from the Death Star by willingly going into battle with Darth Vader, despite knowing that he will be killed. He is comfortable with sacrificing himself for the good of his friends and for the bigger picture.

And yet he empathises with Luke’s hot-headedness, and sees that if it is repressed it will still manifest in the long run, but twisted and hideous. He has learned from his mistake with Vader, and so eases Luke into the Jedi path. Although he can see that potentially Luke may become an even worse agent of hatred and suffering than Vader, he has faith in wyrd, The Force, in The Way, and is willing to take his chances in mentoring Luke. He realises that to not try is to fail, and moreso, it is to fail to take responsibility for the need that he has been called on to fulfil. The way of Tyr/Teiwaz is the path of absolute responsibility, whereas the Odinic/Wodennic Jedi (e.g. Luke or Vader) must work hard to resist abandoning the path of right action and falling into hatred, into rampant, uncaring darkness.

To be absorbed by the dark of ego is to refuse to take responsibility for one’s own capacity to destroy and bring suffering. It is to refuse to take responsibility for the innate empathic bond with others and with Nature that all people must accept and move with. Hatred, therefore, is cowardice. It is for this reason that racism, elitism, sexism, homophobia, totalitarianism, etc, are contemptible. People with these attitudes pride themselves on being more powerful or better than those they victimise or demonise. But in truth they are the weakest of the lot, because they lack the strength of character to acknowledge even the most basic essence of being human – empathy.

Because of his total openness to the world, Obi-Wan Kenobi does not truly die when he is slain, but lives on as a spirit and guide to those he loves. Dark side egotism tries to live forever by seizing up and sealing itself from the world. Ironically it is Kenobi’s embracing of totality and surrendering of ego that lets him live on.

Luke is bonded to his friends Han Solo and Princess Leia through trust, empathy and love. He understands their flaws, and vice versa, but is able to love them anyway. They may not be able to understand the conflicts and responsibility that his nature entails, but they have faith in him and love him for his compassion and his determination. They also help to counterpoint his self-indulgence, bringing him back to earth when he becomes too lost in the ego-dangers of mysticism (the atheist Han especially plays this role).

Luke also helps his friends to have faith in themselves and find themselves – for this is the kind of healing that Wodanaz may bring. He helps Han take responsibility for his own life and begin working for the Rebellion to help create the chance for a society based on compassion and empathy. He helps Leia to have faith in her role as a leader, somebody who brings out the best in others. They help each other to come to terms with their conflicted and pain-riddled childhood. As it turns out, Luke really IS the brother that Leia never knew she had.

Luke’s next teacher is Yoda, who long ago attained equilibrium between light and dark, but who then chose to become a hermit. When we meet first meet him we find that he has gone into solitude so that he might maintain his stability until he is again needed.. For him, there is none of the false pretence of ‘try’, which really reflects insecurity and the low self-esteem that leads to the grating parade of egotism. There is merely do or not do. He is totally comfortable with the responsibility that he bears to all things, and therefore when there is Need for action, he acts. At first this mystifies Luke, whose lack of self-belief clouds his judgment and his connection to The Force.

The critical moment of Luke’s training with Yoda is when he goes into the dark valley. Yoda tells him that the only thing in this valley of darkness is “what you take with you”. In youthful ego and fear, Luke straps on his lightsabre and other weapons and heads into the dark.

There he confronts an imaginary Darth Vader. They fight and Luke beheads his foe. To his horror, the imaginary Vader’s helmet flies off to reveal that it is actually Luke. This is an important lesson for Luke – it forces him to confront his own darkness and realise that if he does not take responsibility for it and use it for the benefit of the whole he will become what he fears and despises. It also teaches him that he cannot indulge the temptation of objectifying his enemies, of reducing the world to simple dichotomies of good and evil. He must learn to empathise with everything, even those things that he hates and fears, if he is to avoid becoming those things.

Luke’s response to these revelations is something of a classic. Soon after the battle with his dark self in the valley, his enhanced clairvoyance reveals that Han, Leia and their friends are travelling to the Cloud City of Bespin, seeking refuge from Darth Vader and his Imperial space fleet. Luke realises that Vader is one step ahead, that his friends will be betrayed, and that Han will be turned over to his old enemy, Jabba the Hutt. Although Yoda warns him that his presence will not help and that he is not yet ready to face Vader, Luke attempts to take on TOO MUCH responsibility too soon, adopting a Tyrric role that he, as Odinic, cannot truly see through. If you pay careful attention to these parts of the film, you will notice that his arrival at Bespin does not contribute to his friends escape (they do it of their own initiative), and Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and shipped off to the court of his revenge-hungry foe.

Instread, Luke battles Darth Vader, who manipulates him into doubting both Obi-Wan Kenobi’s honesty and his own worth, before humiliating Luke in battle. Vader tries to corrupt Luke into joining forces with him, into making the same mistake that Vader did. Thus Vader becomes a direct agent of his own corrupted orlog, trying to propagate it in his son through unfulfillable offers of love. This dynamic is similar to an addict trying to encourage others to use drugs. In his sense of loss and betrayal, Luke reacts by denying Vader, who in anger severs Luke’s hand and leaves him for dead. The parallel with Tyr sacrificing his hand to Fenris in an ultimately futile attempt to save the Aesir from Ragnarok (the death of the gods) is clear.

Again it is the love and empathy of his friends that saves Luke after this disastrous initiation. Although this mainly occurs off-screen (between the second and third films), it is implied in the closing scene of The Empire Strikes Back (the second film). There we see a recovering Luke holding hands with Leia as their star ship flies away with the still-determined tatters of the Rebel Alliance to fight another day.

We then find ourselves at the beginning of the third film, Return of the Jedi. In the opening, Luke works to save Han Solo. By this stage he is almost totally in equilibrium with dark and light. He plays the role of Woden as wanderer and manipulator to gain entry to Jabba’s court, and becomes the catalyst for the rescue of his friends – Han, Leia, Lando Calrissian, Chewbacca, and the droids. He also pays back with blood the debt owed to Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who helped Vader capture Han and who took Han back to Jabba.

Although the Rebellion needs him to assist in battling the new Death Star, Luke realises he has yet to fully let go of his fear and egotism. He returns to Yoda, who before passing away tells him his last test is to kill Vader. Luke thinks that Yoda means that if he cannot murder Vader then he will never come to terms with his darkness and find equilibrium. In fact the test that Yoda foresees is that if Luke DOES kill his father then he will fail and be consume by hate. This is the dreadful manipulation that the Emperor tries on Luke when he and Vader fight as the battle over the Death Star rages at the end of Return.

When Luke confronts Vader and the Emperor, the Emperor sense Luke’s darkness, that he is not yet at peace with it, and tries to make him commit to hatred. If Luke were to slay his father in anger, then there would be no turning back, and the Emperor sees that he has even more ‘potential’ than Vader.

Vader has been so consumed by hate and ego that be has become more machine than man, “twisted and evil” as Kenobi describes him. The Emperor, the darkest of the lot, is not exactly an image of vitality, wholeness or happiness either.

As Luke and Vader duel, it becomes clear that Luke’s hatred is more overwhelming than Darth Vader’s, who finds himself in an emotional conflict because the fragment of light still left in him empathises with his son’s struggle. He cannot truly bring himself to slay his own son, and in a curious reversal, it is now Luke who severs Vader’s hand. Luke prepares himself for the killing blow, but empathy returns. When he sees how helpless and wounded he has made Vader he throws his weapon aside. With this act, he lets go of the hatred, the egotism. He ceases letting it have a chance to dominate him. He allows it no more than its rightful due, and would rather be killed by the Emperor than compromise. This is a mighty evolution of the Skywalker family’s orlog, for the son has overcome the temptation that consumed the father and, as I am about to discuss, this act also helps the father to atone for his own failure.

As the Emperor slowly kills Luke with his lightning hands, Vader in turn recovers his empathy. For the first time the awful consequences of indulging the dark side of the force are revealed to him in a way that he can permit himself to empathise with – in the attempted murder of his son. Inspired by the example that Luke has set by sparing him, Vader finally take responsibility for his actions and for his own darkness. With his final strength, he hurls the Emperor off a precipice, turning his capacity for darkness and destruction to a good end. Father and son lay together, exhausted and hurting, but finally whole and finally able to love one another. Soon after Vader dies, but he is reborn as Kenobi and Yoda were. With his final breath he lets go of the leaden burden of egotistical hatred. He becomes a son of Wodanaz who is able to find equilibrium and take responsibility for the empathic duty that rests on the shoulders of all human beings – love.

Luke is left to continue the ancestral path of the family of Jedi, a family bonded sometimes by blood, but more generally by common experience, harmonised (though sometimes different) perspectives, empathy, and fellowship. Interestingly, some semi-official written ‘sequel’s to the films have Luke later succumb to the darkness, and this is an important message. ‘Enlightenment’ is not forever, equilibrium is a responsibility to maintain, and initiations are not final. One must undergo initiations again and again in the process of growth, for an initiation is not just a ceremony (though ceremonies can be used to cause initiatory experiences). An initiation is some kind of challenging or traumatic life experience that helps you let go of repression and delusion and opens you to the central core of things that matter.

Hopefully by now my reader can see why I believe that the first three Star Wars films are essentially as profound as any mythology, be it Heathen or otherwise.

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Heathenism and the Pre-Modern Worldview

This essay was written some five years ago. Obviously my views have evolved since then…

It occurs to me that this paper may seem anti-science. I assure my reader that I do not have a problem with science per se. My issue is with the way it has been interpreted and the troubling ideas that it has been used to excuse.

As such, my issue is primarily with scientific culture. The basic idea of using controlled experiments as a device for interpreting the manner by which things operate is unimpeachable. In any case, it far predates our modern scientific establishment.

Perhaps we should also consider whether the rise of modern technology is perhaps more to blame for the problems I see than science. Not because technology is in-itself bad, but because it happens to have allowed the mistaken assumptions of scientific culture to penetrate almost every part of our existence.

I am at risk of starting in the middle and charging feet-first into the beginning. Without further ado, let me unfurl my ideas.

Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, first published in the 17th century, brought about a revolution in our world. It marked a turning point in our basic understanding of our place in the world, of the character of the world, of our relationship to the world.

Unfortunately, it seems this change was largely for the worse.

For Descartes, the world was simply an impersonal, life-less, three-dimensional grid. The only conscious beings were humans, and they were but flickers of soul, locked away in inescapable subjective cages. Descartes believed that there was an unbridgeable gap between subjective and objective worlds, making absolute doubt about the external world a serious problem (never mind the absurd character this doubt has to us in our everyday context).

Descartes tried to solve this schizoid relationship between the fundamentally quantitative external world and the fundamentally qualitative internal world by invoking God. God, he felt, would always assure that we are more or less connected to our world, even if for some reason he also permits us to get it wrong now and then.

The problem is that none of Descartes’ arguments to this effect actually work. Every one of them has a flaw that renders it invalid. The idea of ‘proving’ that god exists by the mere exercise of logic seems to miss the point anyway.

No one in the western philosophical tradition since Descartes has been able to fix his metaphysics. Officially at least, nobody takes his views seriously any more.

But ideas have a way of transforming the playing field in ways the players are not aware of. Even though no one believes in Descartes’ metaphysics, his ideas subtly determined the direction of philosophy, science, and broader Western culture in damaging ways.

Descartes believed that humans were unique in having souls. Indeed, he performed the most monstrous experiments on animals, believing that they were but complex machines with no sense of pain. But, because his philosophy started by making an impossible cleavage between the subjective world and the impersonal external world, he could never situate humans in that world.

The history of science and philosophy shows that most theorists subsequent to Descartes have unconsciously internalised this view of the world as an impersonal matrix with neither absolute nor relative meaningfulness. As such, they have tried to get out of Descartes’ fix by deciding that there is no soul.

The ‘no soul’ view has turned out to be about as unprovable as Descartes’ view that soul exists. Although it rejects Descartes’ dualism, it retains the flawed thinking that first led to Descartes’ dilemma, and as such it collapses under its own problems.

Nevertheless, many scientists and philosophers seem to operate on the pre-empirical assumption that the world can be treated as though it were but a huge deterministic matrix, a giant machine. While recent work in physics may have shown that this machine works much more subtly than once thought, the basic continuity from Descartes to quantum physics remains (but see below, where I sort of contradict this claim). Of course, this way of thinking assumes that humans are meaningless machines like everything else.

God – by which I mean anything that is mystical, holy, meaningful, or conscious – is locked away from this reality, or else does not exist. This way of thinking has deeply affected the popular mindset, even if its rejection of the soul has not done so to the same extent.

Sadly, the fact that science works has given currency in broader society to scientific culture’s unconsciously held Cartesian preconceptions – despite their falsity.

The 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche railed against this nihilistic worldview. In his estimation, science and philosophy had killed God. They no longer permit it a place in the world. The religious instinct, which Nietzsche took as being a strong aspect of human nature (contrary to the usual misreadings), was being denied more and more. As such, he felt that the west was clinging ever more desperately to Christianity, political extremism, etc., in a desperate attempt to hold at bay the meaninglessness of the Descartes-inspired world.

He was convinced that new values and beliefs needed to be erected, and part of that project was to question the nihilistic spin that scientific culture had come to put upon the world via Descartes and company. In the same fashion, he felt scorn for modern politics, seeing it as being little more than a forum for hypocrites, degenerates, petty-souled anti-Semites (remember his context of 1880’s Germany), and absurdly idealistic revolutionary communists. All of these political ‘solutions’ he saw as being firmly grounded in nihilism.

The sociologist Max Weber spoke of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ – that our experience and understanding of the world has been deeply shaped by the view that reality is just a huge, impersonal machine, best understood by numbers. After untold thousands of years living in the world, as a part of it, we came to feel that things are just bits of impersonal stuff, and that we were barely better. The widespread acceptance of this view was brought to completion through the emergence of the industrial revolution.

I refer to Descartes’ way of understanding things as the modern worldview, and I contrast it with the premodern worldview. If Heathenism is to be what I believe it should be, it must grasp the premodern worldview and act accordingly.

The modern mentality has played a major role in driving the overbalancing greed of modern capitalism. Nor would we rape the environment so viciously if we did not see it as a mere resource to be exploited. Once, we saw it as a huge and all-inclusive system, which we were an integral part of.

I believe the simple-minded mentality of “us versus them” begins to get a foothold once we lose sight of this holistic perspective. This leads to xenophobia, violence, the manipulation of many by a few, and the paranoid sense that all cultural exchange is destructive.

Sadly, some Heathen groups have fallen into this mentality. In doing so they come to have far more in common with fundamentalist Christians or right wing extremists than they do with the historical Heathens of old.

Cross-cultural interaction does not automatically equate to conflict or in one culture being subverted and dissolved by the other. It does, however, potentially bring mutual respect and friendship. Being friendly and open does not make you a target for destruction by some epic culture-hating force.

Historical Heathenism was definitely premodern in its view of things. Heathens of old saw the whole world as filled with spirits, wights, disir, elves, dwarves, trolls and giants. These beings are part of the folk appreciation that each thing and place has a unique character and presence. All things have some form of subjectivity – it is just that humans have a very elaborate form of subjectivity. All things are ‘spirited’, even if we moderns may not choose to literally believe in little bearded men running about the roots of mountains.

The world itself had a being and spirit, expressed for example in the world tree Yggrdrasil and the fact that it was held to be made from the body of the proto-god Ymir.

Heathens of old felt themselves a part of the cycles of the seasons, the crops, the weather, the cycles of night and day. They felt a kinship with the natural world to the extent that one of the most frequent poetic kennings for ‘human’ was ‘tree’, and their myths claim that humans were made out of trees. They saw the universe itself as the tree Yggrdrasil.

They knew Nature, the world, as being whole, one grand being, not some nihilistic matrix of numbers populated by schizophrenic human robots. By the same token, they recognised each individual place and thing to be unique and worthy of honour.

Our forebears’ basic worldview had much in common with the indigenous beliefs of cultures worldwide, as well as with the intuitions that guide Taoism, Shinto, and other eastern traditions. Truth is found only in the synthesis of all extremes, in the whole – an intuition that Hegel and a small number of other western philosophers also possessed, thought most often too infected with academic pedantry to understand what sat in their laps.

There are many paths that travel from the premodern worldview. They each have unique elements that cannot be easily ‘translated’ to other roads, but nevertheless they stem from similar root intuitions.

What draws us to Heathenism? I believe that one force that draws us back to the elder troth is that we feel the nihilism that has infected our world. And we feel that our very being as human knows, at some inarticulate level, that the world is a whole, that all things have an inherent Being or spirit, that humans are not locked out of the world – that they are integral to it.

It is difficult to hold onto this sense when we live in modern, industrialised cities. We are alienated from Nature both psychologically and geographically. If the western world was still primarily agrarian in basis, you can bet that pre-modern philosophies would have a lot more currency.

In the same way, our sense of family and community is becoming more and more dissolved. The ‘nuclear family’, an absurd caricature of family relations, is touted as an admirable norm. Every problem we see, we see as ‘someone else’s’. ‘Community’ is not something that can be created out of nothing, in the way that political parties attempt. It takes time, experience, mutual affection, the shared experience of good and ill. We would do well to attempt to recover the extended family patterns we once had.

For thousands of years our ancestors experienced the world in the premodern way, and I believe that our collective unconscious remembers and pines for this understanding, this real understanding, not the superficial misunderstanding of Descartes. For the premodern understanding is a healthy way of relating to oneself as well as to the rest of the world.

The premodern worldview sees mystery as central to everything. It has a deep appreciation for ambiguity, for not-knowing. It recognises that the world escapes our finite human grasp. This stands in distinction to the ‘control freak’ mentality that modern technology has in some respects lead to. Modern science tends toward the view that we can know everything. The pre-modern view sees that this is both impossible and undesirable.

It is an arrogant conceit to think that Nature would be so obliging that a bunch of experiments performed by vastly fallible creatures can lay open her every pore for ogling.

Although science is an accurate describer of the world, it is not a true one. Truth is more than just accuracy. Truth is a reciprocal relationship, which scientific culture struggles with by virtue of its Cartesian birth certificate.

That said, quantum physics is making inroads to resisting Descartes’ worldview. But whether it will ultimately succeed remains uncertain. It is heartening that its holistic approach is having a major impact on the thinking of all kinds of academics, decision makers, etc.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to appreciate the other, more qualitative, aspect of the premodern perspective – that each thing has its own character or being, by virtue of its place within the grand structures of Being.

The Tao of Physics< is probably the best attempt to elucidate the holistic thinking of quantum physics. Martin Heidegger’s essays “The Question Concerning Technology” and “Building Dwelling Thinking” are the most powerful illustrations of the Being of each place and thing that I have encountered. John Ralston Saul’s On Equilibrium is the most complete statement of this way of thinking I have yet encountered.

In the last few centuries, then, we have sought to impose our understanding on the world. We have come to believe that the world is but a collection of stuff, of things, mere things, sitting uneasily side-by-side.

But the world is so much more than this. In Heathen ceremonies, we honour the being of gods, wights, Nature, one other, our selves. We again give respect and love to the very world around us, as all balanced cultures seem to do. We recognise that we have a place in the world, and that the world has a place in us.

By living ‘true to the gods’ – Ásatrú – we live true to ourselves and to our world. That said, we would do well to remember that merely calling ourselves Ásatrú or Heathen – indeed, even acting out the practical and cultural aspects of Heathenism, is insufficient. We must strive to act in accordance with the holistic perspective as well. The trappings of tradition are vital, but they are no substitute for the values of that tradition. If one does not appreciate the meaning of one’s actions, then one is merely a self parody.

On reflection, I realise that modern Heathenism has a definite bias towards the Aesir – the gods of consciousness, wisdom, human society, war, and nobility. But it is the Vanir who are the nature pantheon, the gods of agriculture and farm folk. They are perhaps more deeply connected to the premodern worldview. This is not to say that the Aesir, Odin in particular, do not appreciate the premodern perspective.

But it is to say that Heathenism must reconnect with its Vanic roots if it is to become a serious spiritual philosophy and meaningful cultural perspective. I challenge all Heathens to dwell deeply on the nature of the premodern worldview.

Further Reading:

Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (25th Anniversary Edition). Flamingo, London, 1992.

Hedeigger, M., “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell. Second edition. Routledge, London, 1993.

Hedeigger, M., “The Question Concerning Technology”, in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell. Second edition. Routledge, London, 1993.

Saul, John Ralston, On Equilibrium. Penguin, Camberwell, 2002.

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What the Hell is Heathenism?

I’m a Heathen.

OK…So what the hell is that supposed to mean?

Well, for starters, it means exactly what it says. I am not a Christian, not a Moslem, not a Jew. But, I’m not exactly an Atheist, either.

In some ways, being a Heathen is a lot like being a Hindu. The difference is that Heathenism is a distinctly Western, specifically Northern European variation of Sanatana Dharma.

If you really want to know what a Heathen is, try to imagine some kind of beef eating, beer swilling, bareknuckle Tantric Buddhist. Then maybe you’ll start to get an idea of what a Heathen might be.

Picture a Viking Berserker Warrior, born a thousand years too late and trying hard to make some sense out of life in the twenty-first century. Then maybe you’ll begin to understand.

Clint.

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