There’s this notion among some Heathens (even, occasionally, progressive ones) whereby ancestry is reduced to biology. This is unfortunate for a few reasons.
First, it is anachronistic. There are interesting saga references by which an individual’s personal orloeg could be inherited by someone named after them – even if not related, in fact, even if the child of their enemy! So if ancestry can be determined by intentional naming, that’s much more complex and nuanced than the crass rigidity of biological reductionism, which really only emerged as a convenient way of legitimating colonial invasions in the last few hundred years.
Jettisoning biological reductionism opens up the realization that a connection to ancestry is rooted in an ongoing relationship, not mere static membership of a group based on some kind of (possibly quite arbitrary) putative genetic connection. After all, geneticists consistently find that there is more genetic variation within specified racial or ethnic groups than between different groups!
Biological reductionism implies that the work of being connected to the ancestors is done by default. This is a short step from basically ignoring the ancestral currents that might be present. If I recognize that ancestral connection is an ongoing conversation, one in which at best I am an equal partner, well that’s going to have a very different implication for what “ancestor worship” might mean to me.
When we look at traditional cultures we see an emphasis on regular personal and ritual practice aiming at maintaining and strengthening relationships with ancestral figures, be they specific individuals or more nonspecific (and that can include animal spirits, plant spirits, spirits of place, etc.). Ancestral connectedness is rooted in practice, not in labels. There is little room for the cultivation of reverence if we burden ourselves with the blinders of biological reductionism.
Secondly, biological reductionism, particularly in the context of painfully modern (and unscientific) racial categorizations, obscures the fact that ancestor worship is not about abstract categories and groupings (like “white” or “Asian” or whatever). It is about my personal, specific lineages, the specific threads of relationships that bind me to the weave of history.
So when the now openly white supremacist Stephen McNallen says he would never have had children with a Tibetan woman because he would want his descendants to “look like us,” he is missing something really obvious, namely that by having children with our hypothetical Tibetan lady, he would be melding lineages with that woman, and thus the Tibetan ‘them’ and McNallen’s white ‘us’ would be united, woven as one. His Tibetan-European children would look like “us,” because in his marital union his “us” would have expanded from what he had before.
Indeed, this applies even if two people of the same race marry, since as I noted genetic variation within groups is greater than between them. Thus, genetically speaking, McNallen might have actually promoted more uniformity in his genetic descendants precisely by marrying and procreating with someone of a different race! I am sure this nicety would be lost on someone as dim as McNallen, of course.
Thirdly, biological reductionism excludes the possibility of spiritual and philosophical ancestors. Figures such as C. G. Jung, Lao Zi, Sylvia Rivera, Milton Erickson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, and Marie-Louise Von Franz are all philosophical or spiritual ancestors to me, even though I am not biologically related to any of them.
Similarly, I have much deeper connection to the people I choose as family than almost all of my biological family – why should that be devalued in the name of biological reductionism? And that’s before I get to the Heathens I’ve known who are not of European descent yet who have taught me such profound lessons about the old gods and ways, and who are clearly and deeply connected to the Heathen current (much more so, in fact, than many, perhaps most, of the European-descended Heathens I have met).
And now I think about it, I have no Heathen blood relatives, so all of my experience of Heathen ritual and community has been shared with people I am unrelated to. Does our at-best distant ancestral similarity somehow undermine the very real depth and power of our relationships? I should think not.
In our book I write about how ancestor worship ultimately articulates an animistic vision of mutual symbiosis, interconnection, and relationship among all things. If I am really serious about worshipping my ancestors, it is arbitrary to say that they end at the elusive and ever-shifting boundaries of skin color or nationality.
Odin, Vili, and Ve are described as creating the first humans from trees. Those trees are ultimately formed from the remnants of Ymir’s corpse, since that is what the whole cosmos is shaped from. How can Odin be the ancestor of any human, therefore, if ancestry merely means biological relationship? Indeed, how can we call him a god when he is clearly described as being of giant stock? And yet we are assured that he is the Allfather, and the highest of the Aesir; apparently his kind of ancestrality transcends mere blood relatedness.
Thus ancestor worship, once it is freed from biological reductionism, opens an infinity of doors. But when it is burdened by biological reductionism it merely amounts to stagnation, hypocrisy, and denial. It takes fertile possibility and makes a barren waste of them.
Ultimately, reducing ancestry to biology is a move from the miser’s playbook. It’s anachronistic as far as Heathenry goes, and it stifles the free flow of the creative spirit. It reduces living relationships to empty, static formalisms. It violates both the primary sources and the philosophical foundations of Heathenry, assuming we understand the Heathen worldview to be based on a vision of wyrd as the interconnecting matrix of all.
Thus: it is really crucial that we divest the concept of ancestor worship from modern oppressive concepts of biological race. Not only for the above reasons (i.e. that biological reductionism undermines the quality of our Heathenry), but because biological reductionism threatens to reduce Heathenry and/or ancestor worship to being an excuse for hatred and bigotry. No thanks!
I’ve counted you as an influence in my own path and had considered you as someone who, if I recognized you on the street, would be welcoming and open to a level-headed exchange of ideas and a comparing of experiences. After reading this, I would likely steer clear of you as a waste of time, simply because you seem to suck at sticking to the merits of a strong argument rather than regressing into insults and slander. But then again, this piece seems more about preaching to and getting easily won nods of approval from your own in-group. McNallen may very well be wrong, but at least he conducts himself with a code of honor and has the courage and fortitude to make his case without naming names and falling back on petty shit-smearing. I leave this blog with a bad taste in my mouth. You shoot yourself and your position in the foot with this kind of talk. Calling out evil where you perceive it and countering it is (to my understanding) not an invitation to slander and to be nasty and immature against those you disagree with.
I once had what I thought was a good-natured exchange with McNallen on Facebook about the niceties of Jungian thought. When McNallen realized he was out of his depth, he promptly deleted the whole thread in, I assume, a rush to conceal his ignorance from his lackeys. Every time I have encountered the man in person or in text he has been self-absorbed, clumsy, awkward, and born a faint whiff of ridiculousness. I had that impression long before he outed himself as a white supremacist. It isn’t politics or in-group preaching. It is just a question of good taste.
Slander is a very specific thing, namely accusing someone of something untrue. Go watch some of his “red pill” youtube videos and then tell me the guy isn’t a white supremacist. If that isn’t white supremacy, where on earth do you draw the line?
I question also your sincerity since you are so quick to jettison this website the minute I undermine one of your sacred cows. Chaos Heathenry is not comfortable. I find it ironic that, if I undertood correctly, you think that because I do not pander to your perspective, therefore you assume I must be pandering to someone else’s. I am not here for your convenience. If you will not meet the challenge of these words and ideas in good faith…well, that is on your head.
And another thing. Stephen McNallen’s Youtube series, which I sum up as ‘how to covertly “red pill” your friends, loved ones, and co-workers to turn them into white supremacists gradually so they can be sucked in like ants down an ant lion’s pit trap’ is the very opposite of honorable. It is about devious manipulation and having an ulterior motive at all times. That’s not honorable. It’s vile, creepy, cynical, and cowardly.
how is it “white supremacist” to want to preserve Germanic peoples in the face of intense pressure to “abolish” us? “Abolish” being technical academic language, not something I personally made up. Not long ago Huffington Post ran an article headlined, “is it time to abolish the German people?” — is it really “supremacist” to object to this openly genocidal language and intent? Why are European peoples to be denied peoplehood and ultimately “abolished” but no one else? Indeed, at the same time HuffPo is calling for the extermination of the German people, all non-European peoples are being encouraged to take pride in their own ethnic and racial heritages.
Why?
I have asked these questions to so many leftists and not a single one can provide anything resembling a cohesive answer. not one has even tried. I doubt you will try either but I hope you can at least think about the questions rationally.
You know I looked at that article. It is in German so I had to run it through Google Translate. It isn’t advocating for genocide (the author is white!). It appears to be saying that the use of “germanness” as a justification for xenophobia is a hijacking of what the author regards as true German values such as community, integrity, civic pride, passion. So if you think this is a gesture for the destruction of the white race then I think that says more about your anxieties than about the article.
But more to the point, why not respond to my article in your comment? Did you actually bother to read or reflect on it? You sound like you are letting your nervous system be hijacked by the forces of paranoia. I noticed in my Googling that lots of English-language Nazi sites are complaining about that Huffpost article, but seem pretty light on actually quoting it.
So very simply, the answer to your question appears to be a) HuffPo isn’t calling for the extermination of the German people (or anything like that); b) you are so up tight and in the grip of paranoia that you can’t even read my article and respond to it for its own content. But then, if you are the sort of person who patrols neonazi websites and laps them up then your bullshit detector is probably pretty broken. If anything is a threat to the survival of Germanic people, it is people like you. Wake up!