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Aodhan MacMhaolain's avatar

Man, I really thought I was the only person writing about spheres in that way. His interpretation is much more rounded (kek) and well-thought out than mine, but I've taken this concept of spheres and domains more in a religious than a social sense.

This is a great article, and one that I have been wanting to write but it is hard to find the words for this. It's hard because I have already experienced a level of hierophany that made me convert to folkism. Secondly, I know many people with bona fide faith in the Norse Gods and even have moving accounts which compel me to believe certain things. For example, a story about an infertile woman married to a devout pagan, she was given a fertility ritual and I believe passed through a stone (unsure) and later she had a dream where two ravens told her she would have a girl and to give her a specific name. This woman probably heard about Odin's ravens some time beforehand, but she really had no idea what anything meant and just mentioned the dream offhand to her husband because she was more interested in the name and didn't get the possible significance. Now, things like this are proof only to those who already have experienced something of this regard. How often does this truly happen in the pagan revival? How often do people have bona fide hierophany? I don't know if it can be quantified.

Kind of what I am getting at is this: there are already men and women who feel or perceive the Old Gods as being active in our lives. The Weave of Wyrd, no matter what men call it, still exists and is still being woven. I do often wonder if there has already been a Ragnarok, and the Norse Gods are dead, and if the Gaelic Gods are truly just secured away on an island beneath the western sea waiting for some divine erdathe. I just don't know.

But I am compelled to believe that the Gods *are* still active, and that new powers *are* being identified. The tapestry is tattered and torn, yet we are still adding to the threads with each successive generation. Who is Columbia if not the manifestation of the American folkish spirit? She should be supplicated to by folkish Americans. Who is Adolf Hitler if not another Germanic hero akin to Arminius? He should be revered by folkish Germans.

This is a damn fine article, and I like how you navigate this controversy. In my eyes, the story is not over. It never ended. Instead of thinking about the death of the old world and its resurrection (reconstructionism) - we should instead focus on our lived experiences and ancestry (continuism). My 2 cents, at least.

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wmj's avatar

“they don’t believe in their gods, they merely believe in believing them” is a good summary of the problem. Without the supernatural, it’s all just kind of a LARP. Once established, religions can run on fumes for quite a while - you get a lot of “cultural Catholics” and “cultural Jews” etc that way - but without the miracles, eventually they run out of gas, as has happened across much of Christendom.

fwiw, the same is true even of Russian Orthodoxy, which I agree does have more vitality than many western churches. Russians do consider it part of the Russian identity and as Russia itself has risen from the nadir, so too the Church has felt more alive… but monthly church attendance is somewhere in the mid-single digit percentage of population. It too smacks of “believing in belief”.

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Jim's avatar

After reading Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man," it seems clear all the old pagan mythologies were preparing the way for Christ. It's why the Norse mass converted to Christianity as they had remembrances of stories of the garden of Eden and a tree that would bring salvation from Japeth's line.

See how in Scandinavia they realized all those pagan stories weren't just made up myths, but it was talking about Eden and the promise of God coming to bring restoration.

Scandinavia's Christianization: A FORGOTTEN Story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TcJFDed6nM

The evergreen ash (ash people, aka Ashkunjas, Japeth's grandson) that man was created from by the all-Father. These stories all come from a single source that survived the cataclysm as Europeans started out again from the Caucuses mountains. This thread was good on it - https://files.catbox.moe/16stay.jpg

Jesus is God and came into His own creation, and it's a big reason the apostate jews and the demons they worship hate us, we spread Christianity around the world setting nations free from 4000 years of demonic enslavement. - https://files.catbox.moe/wc1jqn.png

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Dumb Pollock's avatar

There is nothing new about this religious confusion as similar phenomena happened at the end of the Golden Age of Greece and after Augustus achieved Pax Roman over the Empire. They were a very fertile times as new shoots spout out of the dung-stamped soil.

Despite what both believers and non-believers think, Christianity itself wasn’t a monolithic force from the start, a conspiracy of a certain people. There were many Christianities peppering the eastern part of Empire swarmed with Syrians and Punics since Alexander’s time. It was a time of prophets and prophetesses, supported by the rich widows, who really expected the world to end in their lifetimes. Competition perfected faith as each group borrowed the attractive aspects from each other., gaining strength as the ill-formed cults died away.

All religions begin with a father in his household, a mustard seed forming a “home church”.

Those who build institutions that enabled the members to meet, to have fellowship in high trust, to marry, to support new families, and to aid in building a new farm or business, they will be the remembered ones, the heroes of a future cult.

It’s a VERY messy process, no different from splashing some paint onto the canvas before the confused audience. Then the process takes over as the artist and the Muse fused in a marriage of mind, heart, and soul. Each partner push and obey in turn in a dance of action and correction until something magical emerges before the astonished eyes.

There will be many, many false starts. The end of a semester in the art school always witnessed the students throwing out hundreds of their efforts into the giant trash cans, saving only 5-10 pretty good works. Only 1-20% will be saved. This is the same result everywhere we looked, and will be the same in religions.

Instead of merely reviving the storied forms, it’s better to analyze what made Christianity work and didn’t work and to adapt them to our worship much as Michelangelo did with his fusion of Hellenistic and Christian forms. Three things come to mind. One, the Church was an adaptation of the Greek polis, which was always a religious as well as civil system. Two, tilth did away with dependency on a rich patron. And three, they adapted the literacy forms for the popular audience rather than for the elite, making transition of ideas and virtues possible to a wider audience.

That’s a start. Future will be a surprising one.

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Ben Mordecai's avatar

You are addressing a problem similar to what I address in a Christian setting in my article "We Need a Futuristic Church" https://mordestack.substack.com/p/we-need-a-futuristic-church

The difference, I think, is that the problem is irreconcilable for pagans but solvable for Christians. Christians have our own Trad-LARPs but Neopaganism is the ultimate Trad-LARP.

Demoralized people have a tendency to either harken back to the glory days or construct something to be a giant middle finger to the big battle they lost.

I see the irony of this with the metal band Stormwarrior. They are worshipers of Odin and musically they are incredible. The lyrics on the other hand are a window into the mind of a 1000 old Scandinavian, not a modern guy from Germany. They sing about slaughtering Saxons while speaking English, playing electric guitars, and using buses and airplanes to perform throughout Europe. Its not possible to really believe this stuff deep down. You can only mythologize and celebrate what you think were glory days.

All of this is retreatism and a failure to recognize it is possible to be human, to know God, have a vibrant spirituality, masculinity, and culture in a modern world of highways and cubicles. Its a failure of imagination and a resolution to defeat.

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Solar Judaism's avatar

It astonishes me that people will just blithely enter the spirit world and blunder about blindly as if the things they find there do not exist. A castrophically naive approach by insensitive people to something very real and very dangerous. If you've ever met a demon, you don't want to see one again.

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