This is the second and long overdue installment of my writing on The Heathen Gods for RA. All information that follows is my own opinion, of course, and though well read I am not a historian. Please post a reply to correct any mistakes you find egregious, helping to make this resource better rather than slagging me off to your friends and leaving me to wallow in my ignorance and mislead others who don’t know any better…
Context.
What is the state of Heathenry as I write this? How did it get this way? Where is it going? Where did it even come from?
I have read online some people referring to the heathens of old as the Elder Heathens, and presumably we today are the Younger Heathens. I think this probably comes from both the large Christian gap in Euro history, as well as a clever allusion to the so-called Elder and Younger Futhark runic alphabets. In this understanding I like it, and will from here out use that as my own convention. Having said that, I’ll define them a little more so that people will better understand what I’m on about when I’m referring to them.
Before Christianity the tribes of Europe held various polytheistic and animistic beliefs. There are broad similarities across the landscape and time, and historians and poets have inevitably distilled these into a couple of forms that many people will think of as “the Celtic pantheon” or “the Norse gods” or whatever, but this is very misleading. Even strong religious centers like Uppsala that certainly must have had organized dogmas, traditions and professional priesthoods are limited not just geographically but also in time. There is no monolithic organized religion that we can point to that accounts for all of “Germanic religion”. Some gods were honored in some places but completely unknown in others. Different gods appear to be conflated over time into the same entity. Then there is the fact that all Indo-European pantheons backwards through time and toward the Asian steppes that we originated from tend to be startlingly similar.
All the pagan harmony and joy (read this with irony) began to come to an end when Christianity began to take root in Europe. And it was a slow process, because parts of Europe were Christian well before the orthodoxy of the Roman Christians came to be. The sect known as Arianism was popular amongst certain Germanic tribes, a set of beliefs about this Jesus fellow that identified him as something divine, but not the same as Yahweh.
This is another convention I’m going to follow in my writing, that of naming the Christian god. It’s not intended to be insulting. This business of simply calling him “God” doesn’t make sense at all to a polytheist, and is in fact more than a little insulting to us.
These people I will refer to as Elder Heathens were not any kind of unified group with consistent beliefs. Simply put, the Elder Heathens were any Germanic pre-Christian polytheistic group adhering to ancestral folk gods ultimately derived from the same Proto Indo-European pantheon of gods. This is a geographical group chosen because it produced the peoples of Northern and Western Europe from whom my own ethnic group is a derived of. And since that concerns me, it is what I write about.
Christianity was used as a politically unifying force by the Romans first, then the Frankish empire that succeeded it. The Elder Heathens existed increasingly on the fringes of the Romanesque civilization, only really making a resurgence in what is popularly called “the Viking Age”. The last non-Christian kingdom in the West was Iceland, who officially cast their idols down for economic reasons about the year 1000 CE. The religion of the Elder Heathens lived on in some strange ways, coexisting with Christianity as a parallel set of folk beliefs and customs, some gods and heroes being unfortunate enough to become Catholic saints.
That’s something we’ll get to in a different entry all of its own.
So these were the Elder Heathens and their circumstances, briefly. Who are the Younger Heathens then? Well, pleased to meet you. Your humble author is among this group of people, and proudly so. Where did the Younger Heathens come from? Post-Modernism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism are three unlikely partners in the reestablishment of Heathenry as a valid social and religious phenomenon.
The Enlightenment resulted in an increased sense of individualism among Westerners. The absolutism of monarchies and state supported churches was challenged or broken, increasing the variety of Christian sects. The religious tolerance of different sects encouraged free thinkers to push the boundaries of tradition and religion. Romanticism arose as a reaction to the industrialization of the West, and freed from strict religious censure admired and promoted ancient mythology and culture. This valuable for reviving interest in the Elder Heathens and their belies, and at the same time damaging, because many Romantic writers and thinkers misunderstood or fabricated much of the antique belief they espoused or admired. The Modern world of the 20th Century instituted a second wave of industrialization that disrupted and challenged the patterns of life and belief with scientific advances, mass communication, and easy travel. The disillusionment in the wake of the failures of the modern world following two world wars combined with an exploding Western educated middle class led to a riot of social, philosophical, and religious movements seeking alternative answers to the modern condition. More or less concurrently in different areas of North America and Europe religious movements reaching toward the Elder Heathens about the 1960s. Norse paganism had largely coalesced into a movement known as Asatru by the 1990s which was struggling to distance itself from the hedge wizards, insecure psychedelics, and lodge magicians of the New Age and Wiccan movements. As I write this in the year 2011, there exists a variety of distinctly post-New Age polytheistic groups adhering to ancestral folk gods ultimately derived from the same Northern Indo-European pantheon of gods.
We are the Younger Heathens by whatever other name we might call ourselves, and we are not Wiccans, New Agers, flower children, satanists, or yippies. Some will call themselves Asatru, a neologism meaning “loyal to the gods”. Some will say they are Forn Sed, meaning “the old way”. Some prefer simply to be called Heathen, embracing the pejorative originally applied by Christians to diminish them. Some will call themselves Theodish, an insular breed of heathen organizing themselves along strict hierarchies of interpersonal oaths. It’s quite likely that any Heathen group will have all kinds of accented letters and spelling variations in their name or title. This is normal. Just go with it.
However we call ourselves or otherwise present our beliefs, there is something vitally important for outsiders, and even insiders, to keep in mind: just like there were a wild variety of beliefs, traditions, and customs across the landscape and time among the Elder Heathens, the Younger Heathens cannot be reduced to an sort of orthodox understanding outside the very loose “polytheistic groups adhering to ancestral folk gods ultimately derived from the same Northern Indo-European pantheon of gods.”
Enjoy trying to herd those cats into a bag.
Where is Younger Heathenry headed? Nobody knows. It definitely seems to be growing, from where I sit. The internet has allowed people to communicate and coordinate across the world like never before. There are several groups which purport to operate on the national level, but the main activities seem to be regional, at least in the United States, where I live. I believe that lasting growth will arise from these regional grassroots free associations. It’s definitely an exciting time, and I am pleased to have my limited part in the conversation. And in case you’re curious, I do more than hunker at my laptop publishing long winded screeds on the internet, I sumble and sacrifice, tell stories and share gifts with other Heathens, as well as maintaining my household and personal cults, things which are integral to being Heathen rather than just opining on the subject. More on that in a later entry, to be sure.
That’s it for a bit. This was a bit of necessary fluff to establish some terms and context, the likes of which can be found in virtually any generic discussion of Heathenry. The controversial stuff will begin anon.
Reviresco!
