lwood http://lwood.livejournal.com/ mentioned writing an Idunna article about how awesome Samurai movies are in a heathen context.  Heathen Shinto Japanese Bushido being awesome in a Heathen Asatru Germanic warrior ethic culture - It's one of those ideas that when you hear it you slap your hand to your forehead and shout "Now why didn't I think of that?"

Anyways, the parallels are a lot more than American reworks of Space Racer and Astro Boy.  Or photos of the annual penis festival - We get more symbolic and call that Freyfaxi.

So insert outline here.  Topic is bushido and warrior ethic drawing on movies both black and white and color.  Images whorl.  I hope they coalese after a while into an actual outline and/or article.

Modern Asatru has a reputation for male members, stress on gods over goddesses.  Yet my own kindred has a majority of female members.  I've pondered this for a while and I've started to wonder about the nature of gender roles in Germanic society and how it impacts the popularity of gods versus goddesses in the why modern Asatru is viewed by outsiders and because of that converts.  How much is the retained lore effected by gender roles current at the time the Eddas, Sagas, Saxo and so on were written down?

At a comic book level consider the comic strip "Hagar the Horrible" and the gender roles depicted in it.  The warrior Hagar is depicted as intimidated by is wife Helga.  In the outside world Hagar views himself as a mighty warrior.  At home Hagar views himself as a hen pecked husband.

In the sagas the wives are often in charge at home while the husbands are in charge while traveling.  In the early chapters of the Saga of Burnt Njal a blood feud that lasts generations is triggered by jealous wives.  This suggests gender roles nearly as extreme as that depicted in the comic book.  The marriage ceremony of giving the house keys to the new wife and the sword to the new husband implies this division in a milder form as a cultural norm.

I wonder how many families of Germanic extraction continue to have a tradition that the wife is in charge at home and the husband is in charge while outside the home.  As the eastern Gothic branch is now extinct, none of them have the tradition.

Here's what I've concluded about gender roles effecting the lore -

The lore is intended for travel so it reflects a masculine gender role.  To the extent that we follow this gender role pattern I think our kindreds need to deal with the goddesses a lot more while at home.

Note to self - Time to deal with goddesses more.  I remember beloved Frigga of the good advice more than the other goddesses.  Time for me to balance it out more!

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger Linden Oak Kindred

In the lore there are a lot of references to trees and forests, to people and countries, to wolves and packs, to warriors and armies.  There are lots of kennings that point among the ideas.

I like the parallel between a person and a tree that starts with the story of Ask and Embla in the Volspa and ends with the two human survivors of Ragnarok.  The roots of a tree symbolize the family tree of a person's ancestors extending into the past.  The branches of a tree symbolize the family tree of a person's descendants into the future.  The trunk of the tree symbolizes how alone a person often feels.  The occasional dual trunk even symbolizes the wonderful and rare folks who are the happiest of married couples.

When looking up in a forest one comes to realize that the branches of trees combine above to shade the forest.  To me this symbolically equates a future of interacting people.   When digging in the ground to make a garden one comes to realize that the roots of many trees overlap under the ground.  To me this symbolically equates a forest as a history of the people in the city.  When walking in a forest one sees some distance and then the trunks and branches fill the field of view even though any one individual trunk stands alone.  To me this symbolizes the fact that people are individuals but that we are also social creatures with many levels of groups - Couple, family, clan, tribe, nation, continent, world plus many other ways of viewing groups of humans.

This is how I view the stories of Ask, Embla, Leif, Leifa and the parallels of trees and forests with persons and societies.

Viewing the World Tree as all of human society leads to a lot of other puzzles - When Odin hung from Yggdrazil to seek wisdom he could have been drawing on all of human wisdom past and present as much as hanging in space on the structure of the universe.

Moving on to adding wolves and packs into this viewpoint.

I have not seen wolves in person.  I have walked in forests and seen solitary hunting foxes.  I have walked in mountains and seen pack hunting coyotes.  I have seen pack hunting wolves in movies.

I've read that before steam ships, planes, trains and automobiles most people stayed within 20 miles of their birthplace their entire lives.  A small fraction of people would travel much farther.  Sailors might see many ports and soldiers might see many provences.

If I think of those people who stay within 20 miles of their birthplace as trees, then I can think of farming provences as forest.  Since wolves and coyotes travel quickly through forests hunting in packs, I can think of armies on the march as wolf packs on the hunt.

Thinking of wolves running through a forest and armies marching through agrarian provences I better understand those kennings that equate the groups.  Soldier as shield-oak.  Hermit as lone-pine.  Even Fenris Wolf prowling the edge of the universe as harrying attacks by enemy troops wearing down the border patrol of a country.

Sometimes there are events that do not involve deities but that bring up the topic of deity in a way that makes me go "Hmmm".  This is about one such time.

Back when I lived in Los Angeles metro occasionally I'd drop off my car at the shop for the day, take the bus to work, and pick up the car on the way home.  One time the shop needed a second day working on the car so on the way home I stayed on the bus long enough to arrive a couple of blocks new lodge and near the pub I frequented at the time.

On the bus that evening where the usual mixture of folks speking English, Spanish and Armenian.  On guy said his name was Thor.  He spoke English with an accent I couldn't place and he was fluent enough to crack jokes that were pretty funny.  He spoke Spanish with an accent that I couldn't place (not surprising given my poor Spanish skills) and he was fluent enough to crack jokes that the Spanish speakers thought were pretty funny.  I don't knoiw enough Armenian to be able to tell accents, but he was also fluent enough in Armenian that the Armenian speakers laughed at his jokes.

Thor is an unusual name but not unheard of.  Speaking the three languages most common in that part of the metro area wasn't unusual but being fluent enough to crack jokes was unusual but not impossible.  A point of pride I had in accomplishment is that after 3 years of studying German in high school I could understand a couple of jokes and I managed to tell one after the 4th year.  Being able to switch among 3 tongues cracking jokes is very rare in the US but not inhumanly rare.

This human guy named Thor joked about a car dealership named Thorsson as we passed it that it was obviously a family business and a few jokes about well know stories in the lore.  Other than extraordinary language proficiency there wasn't any reason I would think he was anything other than an ordinary human.  A few blocks before I got off the bus he exitted at a mall and disappeared into the crowd of pedestrians.

There isn't any one thing about the experience that made me wonder, but there were enough oddities that I started to ponder.  He really was just some human person, right?  As far as I know he was.  I sure have no reason to think that Thor rides around on buses on a regular basis.  Before that it had never occured to me that members of the Aesir would be able to speak in plenty of languages but once the topic came up I felt it was natural they would - Anyone who's ever reported a dream or vision with a deity speaking has always reported it was in their own language.

Can Thor make a human body at need to walk among us?  At one point I figured the Aesir can but I think that less and less across the years.  Was this event one of those times?  I sure could not tell the need so I don't think so.  Can Thor take over a person's body at need to walk among us?  I guess so.  Was this event one of those times?  There was no need so I wouldn't get the point.  I never saw that person again, but in a large metro area that's nothing unusual.

So I figure I could make extreme conclusions but I decline to.  Still, I can see how an event like this might get told to a group and get repeated.  The tale could grow over the years.  It could end up getting conflated into the other tales of the lore.

Thing is, for the life of me I can't figure out if such an event would end up being taken as evidence that deities exist, or as evidence that deities don't exist, or that wierd stuff just happens in the real world.  And so I go "hmmm" when I remember the event.

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger

Scientific American magazine recently ran an article that discusses what I believe to address my earlier topics that all religious experiences are subjective, yet I and many other religious people have had enough of them that to us the existence of deity is an observation not an act of faith.


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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns

Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise
Why the brain believes something is real when it is not

By Michael Shermer  

Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it "patternicity", or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern, call it "apatternicity"). In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning, and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens ...
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On the one hand I have discussed how all of science is a history of finding patterns, quantifying them, then using the quantification to make predictions and enable technologies.

On the other hand I now quote an article that calls the finding of patterns "an error in cognition" until such a time as those patterns are quantified.

Interesting conflict, isn't it, that a writer on the philosophy of science would not notice this contradiction and deal with it in his article.  Clearly he doesn't view scientific discovery the way I do.  He does know how many false starts happen in science for every confirmed discovery so maybe he's just going with the numbers.  Let the future figure out which patterns had value.

What if recognition of deity is "an error in cognition" and it will never be figured out?

1) At least it's a feature I share with the rest of humanity.  If I'm making an error that deity exists it's an error in brain evolution that gave me a tendency to it.

2) I continue to believe that I am the better man for living a life of faith.  If it's an error that motivated that betterment then so be it.

3) I feel better about my life with the Aesir.  If it's an error that motivated that feeling then so be it.

I have no plans to convert anyone from agnosticism to religion in these posts.  They are about my own pondering out why I decided to become who I am.  There is the conundrum of choosing deity, the points for and against it, the history of philosophy and science that parallels the topic.  There is my own choice.  This is what I have decided knowing both sides of the story.  I ponder topics and make decisions and this was one of my topics and what my decision was.

In the past I've felt that the Aesir exist (what "exist" means in this context I tried and failed to address in one of these postings) and that if I ever decided they don't exist I would probably leave Asatru.  The more I ponder issues like patternicity, the scientific conversion of subjectivity to objectivity by dipping into the mystical well of all knowledge, the ambiguity of deities as people that remind us of natural forces versus deities symolizing natural forces and so on, the more I wonder if I might remain Asatru even if I eventually decide the Aesir are a feature of my own mind.  Looking back on my life I feel I'm the better man for having chosen a life of fate, and isn't that reason enough?  I think it is.

This posting is a counter-point to the one on my conversion experience.  Would I have ended up pagan/heathen if I had not had that dream?  Probably.  Would I have ended up Asatru?  More likely I would have settled into local ADF groves and ended up a Celtic reconstructionist.  As you read it might sound like the events contradict my conversion experience, but I view it as both sides of the same coin - I was drifting finding a path that held my interest long enough to settle into.  I knew I would end up some sort of pagan.  My dream told me what sort of pagan.

Before my teens - My parents raised me with clarity that I had a choice in my faith.  They sent me to each type of church one by one.  Given their knowledge and the time and place those were all JCI, actually just J/C.  I went to Synogogue with the Jewish family across the street, and to their Bat Mitzvahs.  I went to Catholic church with the Catholic family a few doors down.  I went to a bunch of Protestant churches and never got any notion of how they were different.  Before my teens I knew I'd pick my own religion.

In my teens - Dad didn't realize it but I think he gave me my best religious instruction when we were out hunting in the woods.  He'd say "This is God's country" and I'd feel his extra peace with Nature.  He'd been raised in families Christian for many generations so I don't think it had ever occured to him that other faiths might teach better what he felt in the woods.  In time I've found a way inside myself to feel that peace with Nature even in the downtown districts of large metropolises like Chicago or Manhattan.  In my teens I knew I wanted to address the spirits in nature in a way more direct than rifle hunting (as spiritual in my family as bow hunting is in some families) but not in the neolithic bow hunting style.

I've long felt the existance of spirits so I knew I wasn't an atheist.  I did have a lengthy phase when it didn't occur to me that deities are actually just spirits that are larger in size but not different in nature than the local spirits, but eventually that occured to me and I came to understand that I wasn't an agnostic either.

In my 20s - I started studying major religions one by one to consider which one I should join.  For Christianity I simply can't accept the injustice and pointless incompetence of deity implied by Original Sin.  While Christianity has its good points to me it fell with Original Sin.  For Islam there's too much stress on submission for this bull headed heathen, and they are very iffy on dealing with the smaller local spirits.  I have always been comfortable with Judaism because the family across the street treated me much as their own from infancy, but I wasn't born to it and I didn't get their focus on putting one diety in front of the others.  I liked their stress on setting a personal example day in and day out, though.  I liked Hindu enough that I took a couple of college courses on the topic, but it was a bit too foreign and I didn't feel the motivation to find out a conversion process.  I sure loved the Bhagavat Gita though.  It's one of the best scriptures humanity has produced.  I studied Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto.  Eventually, thanks to a comment by a college professor who mentioned western mystical ways, I looked at Neo-Platonism and started looking into the ancient European pagan ways.  At the time I had no idea there were practicing pagans in the modern world.

One day I was in a bar hanging out with friends and I mentioned that I was a pagan.  I didn't know what activity was involved but I'd moved through neo-Platonism and was looking for a path that addressed spirits and deity more.  Turns out the group of friends I mentioned it to were together in an eclectic circle.  They were sorta Wiccan, sorta Celtic, definitely pagan.  I joined their circle and started regular attendence.  Eclectic pagandom is nice, but the Celtic bit was only a phase for the other members of the circle.  They moved on to Cherokee ways.  That was okay by me but it wasn't interesting to me.  All along I'd been interested in Celtic and Germanic ways more than the other branches of European classical pagandom and in European pagandom more than traditions from other continents.  Nearing the end of my 20s I knew I was a pagan, hadn't heard of heathens, and was drifting towards a Celtic focus though Germanic themes kept popping up.

That's my background when Odin came into a dream shortly before my 30th birthday.  I wasn't following him, was heading towards an allied pantheon, had not commited to that allied pantheon.  After a year of hesitation rather than locating an ADF grove and joining the Celtic reconstruction I started following the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights without knowing the word Asatru or knowing that Asatru organizations existed.

My 30s and on - It turns out practicing Asatru has increased my appreciation of both Hindu and Judaism.  Even though I know Shinto is as close as it comes to an ancient heathen faith mapped into a large industrial modern society I have studied it far less than I would like.  My Shinto studies wouldn't fill an upper division undergrad course.  And while it looked for a while like I would drift into Celtic reconstructionist I have studied Celtic lore much less than I would have liked.  Strange how that turned out.  I wouldn't hesitate to attend an ADF or Shinto event but I have yet to go out of my way to do so to either.

Some folks think personal experiences of deity are only to be kept personal.  Some folks think any such experience that isn't shared is sure to die with you so it's only value is through the sharing.  I've had a pair of life changing personal experiences of diety where one fits in each category so I end up agreeing with both sides of that issue in some way.  There's one I keep personal.  This posting is about the one I am willing to share with the public.  I've had other experiences of the devine over the years but the rest of them have been far less critical.  Most have been feelings of presence and acceptance at Blot and Sumbl.  Some have been experiences in real life that onyl my own interpretation made them applicable to Asatru.  Some have been experiences where I focused on a question for months before getting a response.  This one that I do discuss is my conversion experience.  It's why I am Asatru today.

Somewhere around late 1986 or early 1987 I was at an emotional low ebb.  I felt under attack by some Christian groups praying for my conversion, was still on the rebound from being dropped (I ended up marrying still on the rebound a bit over a year later) and so on.

One night in a dream Odin showed up while I was being attacked by something.  I was not Asatru at the time and wouldn't encounter the word Asatru for well over a year but my recognition of Odin was instant and without any doubt whatsoever.  This certainty was key to me in how the dream was to effect me over the years.

He pointed Gungnir past me in a way that felt like I could touch it.  The meaning was clear to me somehow even though there were no words exchanged - I could now handle my problems on my own from this point forth.  From this point forward my life started to turn for the better.  I've never known if this was an energy infusion or simply a reminder that I should look to the strength og my human soul and start acting like it.

Then he gave me a nod and disintegrated.  Then I awoke with a start.  The meaning of the nod was clear to me somehow even though there were no words exchanged.  Maybe it was telepahic.  It meant "follow".  Uhm thanks, but could I have a bit more detail please?  Follow who, what, when, where, how?  Old One Eye is welcome to show up again any time and clarify, but no, ever since I've been on my own to decide what it meant and to decide whether I should follow the suggestion.

I've known as far back as I can remember that I'm not an atheist.  Throughout my 20s I had looked into a new major religion one per year and had eventually pondered some sort of European pagandom.  I'd attended an eclectic circle for a while but when they started focusing on Native American ways I had lost interest.  It was nice enough, but their path among traditions was not for me.  And then there I was with this dream.

I also understood that in most or nearly all cases dreams come from inside our own minds and they are not mythical visions.  Lot's of folks go through life with none or few mythical visions (I've had one I don't discuss and may at some point post about a few others that are far more ambiguous in nature).  Folks who have them constantly aren't often taken seriously.  How could I tell the difference between a dream that had come up out of my own subconscious and a mythical vision?  Does small number of such visions really matter in taking them seriously?  Joining a religion where I didn't know anyone else in the world followed and I've since discovered there's well under a million adherents worldwide certainly qualified me as a kook if I decided to taken action on it.

Over the next year I pondered in two main threads - Had I made it up and what did follow mean?

I eventually decided that it doesn't matter if I made it up.  What mattered is 1) if it would have lasting impression (over 20 years so far), and 2) would I be the better man for deciding to follow (I think so but that's a separate write-up of its own).  So I decided to follow and more than 20 years later I'm still following so I've long since passed the threshold of having no doubt that it was a vision.  So I have a religion rare enough that mere membership means I'm a kook.  I'm not convinced that's worse than a part of a flock in a large population faith or somehow who declined to participate as an agnostic.  At least I took my own stance on religions.

I eventually decided to go with the most common ancient way as how I would follow - In the sagas people who did not sacrifice and trusted in their own might and main (agnostics or atheists) were thought as odd enough to remark upon but not so rare as to be thought freaks.  In the sagas people who focused on a single deity were also thought of as odd enough to remark upon but also not so rare as to be thought freaks.  The way the sagas mention agnostics and single deity devotees makes it clear that the vast majority followed all of the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights as a whole.  The sagas do not discuss any level of devotion among the majority so there's no way of telling how much of the majority's public action was devotion and how much going through the actions out of tradition.  So I decided to follow the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights as a whole.  If Odin isn't happy with that and he wants me to follow him in specific he's quite welcome to show up again and tell me otherwise.  So far he's a no-show on that.  Come on back any time you like.

Over the years I've narrowed my focus from all of the spirits to those of Asgard.  Ancient Asatru included ancestor veneration.  My ancestors were church going Christians so that discontiguity seemed pointless to me.  I revere my ancestors but it just doesn't seem relevant.  Ancient Asatru included veneration of the land spirits.  I like the local land spirits well enough but I've moved around enough in my life that I'm a visitor to them not a life long friend.  Ancient Asatru included the Vanir but they haven't held my interest.  I've not focused on a single deity and none have insisted so even though I've paid a lot of attention to Thor lately it's clear I'm not specifically a Thorian.  So I've ended up gradually focusing on those of Asgard whether Aesir or Vanir by birth all Aesir in practice.  Adoption is real family to them.  For folks who've seen me sign off with "Hail Asgard!" since the mid-1990s that's why I do so.

Have I been Asatru since the dream or since a year later when I decided to follow the invitation?  I have no idea when to start that clock.  Somewhere between late 1986 for the earliest the dream might have been through early 1988 for a year after the latest the dream might have been.  Since it's now been over 20 years the exact timing isn't important.  The longevity matters more.

To folks who think they've been Asatru all along and they just finally discovered others, that's nice.  I converted.  There was a time before my dream and there was a time after my dream.  I held the values all along so maybe someone who doesn't like to admit conversion can identify in me features to satisfy a conclusion that I just finally discovered.  I'm quiet happy with having converted.  It's something I decided on.

What if the Aesir don't exist in a way that I've discussed?  Then at least my following them has given me focus, helped me contribute, given me an active spiritual life.  It almost doesn't matter if they actually exist.  Hmmm - That's a topic I continue to ponder.

One statement I often repeat is "I've had enough subjective experiences that I know the Aesir exist, even though I don't know what exist means in this context."

I do know some things I don't mean by exist -

I do not think the Aesir are archetypes in the collective subconscious.  I do think they tap into archetypes so we can understand parts of their personalities.  Tyr as judge, Odin as general, Thor as protector and so on.  They do have these personality traits but they also have as many other personality traits and you and I.  If humanity went extinct and so did the Aesir because they are a part of us, that's not what I mean by deity or by exist.  I think if humanity does extinct and squid evolve into intelligent land life, then they will see the Aesir as big squids in the merged sea and sky.

I do not think they are allegorical tools used to weave meaningful tapes.  I do think the tales about them draw on real personality traits and those tales also have many layers of allegorical meaning.  A tale like Thor's fishing trip does describe many aspects of the world, but it's also an adventure by a person.  While I don't think any of the tales in the Eddas are to be taken as actual events I do think the tales depict the personalities of the Aesir.  I think the Aesir use allegory but I don't think they are allegory.

I do not think they are mythical memories of historical figures, though I do suspect that in some cases mythical memories of historical figures have merged into their tales.  I do not think the Aesir are demi-gods in the style of Caesar Augustus Marcus Aurelius Antonius who got hailed a deity when he died and folks built home altars to him.  The Eddas mention Alti as the historical person Attila so I see how a historical person can drift into myth and eventually be viewed as deities.  It that's what happened with the Aesir then I'd just as soon follow modern heroes like Darwin, Archimedes, Patton, Rommel, Jefferson, Lincoln, Marcus Aurelius, Armanius, Newton and so on.  With heroes from Homer to Hawkings, Pliny to Shakespeare - The only reason I have to follow deities is if they aren't actually humans.

I do not think they have material bodies in their natural form.  There's never been objective evidence for the existance of deity and there has to be a reason for that.  In a previous posting I've referred to events in the history of science and to the book "Human Acheivement" for why subjective evidence is not to be dismissed, but why it isn't also to be accepted literally.  There are tales of the Aesir becoming human - I take these tales as maybe saying the Aesir can manifest physical bodies or maybe they can possess people.

So what I do mean by exist is a matter of speculation and consists of references to myth and fiction -

I think the Aesir are living spirits.  I think they came to inhabit the Solar nebula as it started forming planets.  I think they have done some amount of guidance in evolution to result in intelligence that can perceive them.  I don't have any way of testing any of this and it doesn't particularly appear in the Lore.

I think tales of the Aesir being children and parents, siblings and step parents, hostages and adoptive kin, married or just having children together, all of these have to be symbolic in some way.  Whatever generations mean to the Aesir it isn't like it is for us.

Fictional depictions that I like range from the Babylon 5 Vorlons, Shadows and Walkers to the Star Trek Organians and Q.

A friend from high school said "I can't believe in a God, but I can believe in a Gandalf".  Since Gandalf had a physical body I move farther along that spectrum - If God created the universe then God is outside the universe so he doesn't "exist" by various other shades of meaning of the word, so I follow ancient beings within this world that have some sort of "exist" that is at least on the inside not on the outside.

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger Linden Oak Kindred

I haven't read graphic novels.  They started coming out as my interest in comics declined.

I started to watch Sin City but didn't sit through it.  It wasn't the graphical nature that I disliked but the degree of violence.  This from a fan of many war movies.

I watched The 300 and mostly liked it, but I thought The 300 Spartans from the late 50s early 60s was far better even with the wooden acting.  It wasn't the graphical nature that failed to wow me but the depiction of individual drama in what was supposed to be the finest team-work example in history.  I am just too much a fan of real history too appreciate the mangled story line in The 300.

So we watched The Watchmen this weekend without having read the graphic novel.  Very disappointed.  Long and cliche.

I get that the paper version was done before Babylon 5 back in a time when "So what IS a good guy or bad guy after all?" was still a new issue.  But now in today's context the issue was handled so much better in Babylon 5 that it just seemed yesterday's news.

I like that the superheroes were mostly just really buff martial arts students with expensive armor, but I've seen most of the Batman movies already.

I get that Hollywood likes anti-nuke movies but I've seen a ton of them already.  And if I want a movie that depicts intellectuals in a bad light give me Real Genius or Good Will Hunting.

It was long.  It was loud.  It had lots of stuff blowing up.  It fit the classic Star Wars Star Trek model that the more stuff blows up the less the plot.

One amusing thing - At one point a mother walked her approximately kindergarten age daughter out of the movie.  Gotta say I was tempted by then but I wanted to see it through.  The amusing part is *when* they walked out.  They stayed through scenes of soldiers getting blasted to bits and burned with flame throwers.  They stayed through lots of people getting shot or killed/maimed in other ways.  They left during a love making scene that was toned down enough to get an R rating.  I thought of the classic John Lennon statement that he'd rather show a child people making love than killing each other.  I don't think the movie would have benefited from allowing the scene to earn it a NC17 rating but that way that mother woudn't have had her daughter in there to amuse me with her timing.  I guess that worked out as well as it could.

Okay, if the movie had been released in 1985 I probably would have loved it.  Like so many time sensitive movies today I might be able to look back at it and think it was good for its era.  But today it's a new movie and I'm not looking back at it like that.  I wish I would have picked a different movie to watch.

If you can't measure it you can't influence it.  If you can't influence it you can't control it.  If you can't control it you can't improve it.

A saying to this effect hangs on the cubicle walls of tons of engineers.  It's about achieving a good end result anywhere from abridge that says up for centuries through a computerized billing process that doesn't send out bills for zero.

It's what Odin has been doing ever since he spoke to the Volva.

I recently mentioned it on one of my mailing lists and folks had a negative reaction to it.  I have been puzzling over way for a while now.  It's pretty clear none saw it as the Odinic Quest.

This I will ponder for a while.  Not sure how to respond in a way that makes sense.

Is religion psychology?  To the extent it is it's a science therefore the method applies to it.

Is religion theology?  Theology is philosophy but science is also philosophy.  My bias is the method should apply to it but who ever thinks in those terms.

There are the Jarnsaxa scale and the Pensler scale to measure stances held by heathens.  There need to be more and better ones.  Okay, there are at least two scales having to do with heritage.  It's not like that's the only interesting dimension in Asatru.

In the lore Skadhi and Njord are described as divorced based on comments that they can't live for long in each others' houses.  Is the story enough to justify divorce?

1) Among the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights there are all sorts of examples of step-sons/daughters, hald-siblings and so on.  Our elder kin didn't much stay monogamous and they have plenty of examples of extended travel apart.  Being able to live in each others' house for a sort period of time could just mean visits for a while that cycle regularly.

2) In junior high school I was taught that the ancients created the Aesir to explain natural phenomena.  When static electricity was understood, Thor dissappeared in a puff of logic.  The times I've asked Thor what he feels about this school lesson he thought it was hilarious and wanted me to share another mug of coffee.  So much for dissappearing in a puff of logic.  Thor is a "person" who *reminds* people of thunder, not the thunder itself.  In human history consider that Aud the Deep Minded isn't the only deep minded person in history.  Hmm, very limited example.

3) The symbolism of Njord is the shoreline.  Giantesses piss in his mouth - River delta.  He has the most beautiful feet of the Aesir - Sandy beaches.

4) The symbolism of Skadhi is the mountains.  Arrows - Sharp icicles.  Skis - Snowy slopes that drain in the spring.  Forrests - Not many mountains in the ancient north are above the tree line and not too many ancient humans went that far in their travels.

5) Njord comes from the Vanir - Ocean organics.  Skadhi comes from the ice giants - Mountains above the tree line.

What binds them together is more than the story of how they meet.

A) It's the cycle of clouds going from the shore to the mountains, falling as rain or snow, flowing to streams and rivers, returning to the shoreline, flowing to the ocean.  The ancients knew the cycle of precipitation and symbolized it in this story!

B) More than just that the ancients knew of the fertility of river silt and that it came from errosion of the mountains.  The ancients may not have known about the formation of sedimentary rocks but they definitely knew about the cycle of erosion and how it ties into the fertility of the fields!  They also knew that more fish are near the mouths of rivers than off shores that don't drain and they knew to correlate this with fertility of the soil.

C) What's interesting to me is the genders are reversed in the symbolism.  Skadhi flows her fertility into his shorelines.

D) I very much like who she storms Asgard and ends up chosing the most beautiful feet.  Being an ice giantess this is a tale of the spring thaw and torents for streams flowing from the mountains to the sea.  It might even be a tale of a mountain glacier calving at the shore as that would be impressive enough to storm Asgard.

This topic still needs a thesis, introduction and conclusion.  It needs references to where the parts of the tales appear in the lore.  But the basic points are present.

Njord and Skadhi aren't the glacier and the sandy beach meeting in the abundance of the spring thaw, but they sure reminded people of that.  Very cool how this ends up telling the same symbolc story and Frey and Gerd and very cool how they too are Van and Thurs adopted into the Aesir same as Njord and Skadhi.  The tale of spring told by the fisherman versus the tale of spring told by the ploughman?

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger Linden Oak Kindred

In this post I will attempt to address why I follow the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights rather than other pantheons.


Deities exist

In a previous article I wrote why I think it's not irrational to think that deities exist.  In this article I base most of my discussion on an assumption that deities do in fact exist, though I don't attempt to define what "exist" means in this context.  I'm aware that they can't have material bodies in their natural forms since there only subjective no objective proof of their existence.  I also offer no opinion on the theory that different pantheons are views of the same deities seen through differing cultural filters - I believe pursuing this theory to lead to competitive reactions not towards allegiances.


Evolutionary commentary

Humans have had agriculture for about 10-20 thousand years.  Eating mostly starch from grain for enough years causes diabetes in susceptible populations (check out studies of tribes living both sides of the US/Mexico border, their relative diets and their relative diabetes rates).  Ever since the advent of agriculture the lower classes who are the majority of the population have eaten mostly grain because that's what food has been available.  Since diabetes reduces life expectancy and causes sterility there is extremely intense evolutionary pressure on grain eating humans to adapt to a grain based diet, yet to this day many turn diabetic when they are elderly.

Why do I mention grain and diabetes in an article about following a specific pantheon?  Because I wish to address the theory that northern Europeans have it in their genes to follow the Aesir.  Ancient heathens did not have a tradition of killing anyone who did not follow their ways so the evolutionary pressure to be Asatru was less intense than the evolutionary pressure to not develop diabetes from eating bread.  Yet ancient Asatru has recognizable roots going back roughly half as far back as agriculture.  Families that develop diabetes are still common so there is no way Asatru could possibly be genetic.  There has not been time and there has not been the evolutionary pressure for it to happen.

I do think there's a genetic predisposition to be religious and also a predisposition to want to deal with deities.  If you consider all pantheons and the shamanic prehistory of humanity, we've been at it for not just millennia but millions of years.  Paleontologists have found signs of religious practice that go back at least hundreds of thousands of years and that are likely to go back millions of years.  That is long enough for small population pressures to exert a significant impact.  It's enough for humans to have evolved a preference for polytheism.  Sure enough, exactly that can be seen in religious histories.  I understand that this is a weak argument for a genetic basis for wanting to follow some pantheon but in this commentary I want to address preference among pantheons not preference for pantheons.

Western Europeans can't have a genetic preference for the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights, but western Europeans like any other humans can and do have a genetic preference for broadly heathen/pagan religious practice IMO.  We can also have cultural reasons for preferring the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights as I will discuss below.  If it sounds like I'm not Folkish at this point, that's a correct observation.  If the Folkish stance were purely cultural with no genetic consideration I might consider it, but that's what I want Folkish Asatru to be not what it actually practices.


Being called to follow and being called on it

The most basic reason that I follow the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights is some time in late 1986 or early 1987 I had a dream in which Odin appeared and told me to follow.  I pondered the dream for a while and decided to follow the call.  I read about the ancients and learned that the majority followed the pantheon as a whole so I decided to follow Odin's clan rather than Odin in specific.  He's welcome to show up again any time and give me corrections or more specific instructions.

One objection is that calls by deity may have happened in the ancient past but they don't happen now, that all who claim to be called are deceiving themselves.  This objection boils down to an assertion that deities don't exist or have retreated from the world.  It may be true that more claim to have been called than have been called.  It may also be true that those not called don't believe it because it hasn't happened to them.  There are discussions on how to judge mystical visions that are outside of the scope of this article.  I will point out that it's now been 20 years and that dream still has a major impact on my life; it has not led me to make assertions changing the ancient lore, and it command only includes myself.

If you think it's a romantic notion to be told to follow, try getting a draft notice in the mail some time.  It's not romantic.  If you think a call to Asatru has to be in the blood so none are called, understand that carries with it the implication that the Aesir don't exist or don't have the wherewithal to contact humans uninvited.  If you think you've met some flakes who've claimed they've been called, yeah well there's no living down that it's a life changing event so the best I can offer is try to hold judgement 5-10 years and see if the person is still telling it the same way.

To me the strangest thing isn't that Odin exists to be able to call me.  I wrote an article on the existence of deity.  To me the strangest thing isn't that he isn't the only one going around telling people to follow.  I wrote an article on deity being many.  To me the strangest thing isn't even that he told me to follow.  At least I know others who've been told to follow so I'm one of many not a unique one.  Don't get me wrong, I have no idea why I ended up in that list it's just that there is something stranger than that sort of random lottery hit.  To me the strangest thing is at the time of the dream I did not already follow the Aesir yet I recognized Odin immediately without any doubt whatsoever.  Why should my recognition be that certain and why shouldn't I call myself crazy for it?

It is my opinion that all or almost all lore has its origin in this sort of uninvited unexpected contact between a human and one or more deities.  The stories of lore evolve generation to generation and they change over time.  They also go through a brutal culling generation to generation based on Sturgeon's Law that "Ninety percent of anything is crap".  But over time there's a slowly evolving body of lore and what survives is what has the greatest and most enduring symbolic and poetic value.


How many pantheons I might have followed

I once read a claim that a person's family had lived for generations near a runestone in Europe so of course he is Asatru.  If that followed, then my ancestors have spent at least a millennium living near stones with Latin inscriptions so of course I'm Nova Roma pagan.  While it's hilarious that the inscriptions I refer to are on the fronts of government buildings and churches across Europe, the point isn't as hilarious in its heart as it is on the surface.  Being deeply steeped from birth in a tradition makes that tradition one of your ancestral heritages.  Following that tradition makes sense in a way that has nothing to do with genetics and even nothing to do with regular church attendance by most of your relatives.  Heritages are out there aplenty and the one that calls to us is going to be among the ones each of us has in our family.

I am an American of known extraction.  I was born in the US.  Both of my parents were born in the US.  Three of my grandparents were born in the US and one was born in Vienna in 1909 and emigrated to the US as a toddler.  Of my 8 great grandparents 6 were from the Black Forest region of Alsace, Saarland, Bayern, 1 was from points south of Vienna in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and 1 was born in the US.  The branch in the US the longest includes at least one who fought in each of the US Civil and Revolutionary wars.  The majority of that branch was from Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere on that side of the channel.  I know what clan tartans to wear.  What this says is more than a genetic statement.  It says I know my origins without a need for amalgam constructs like "white".  It says I know what my ancestral heritages are.  It also says that my family has been settled in the US long enough that native ways are among my ancestral heritages by generational immigration and assimilation.

I was raised in Iroquois territory near Niagara Falls.  I spent many years in Shoshone territory in Los Angeles metro and that's where I was when Odin told me to follow.  I now live in Illini territory in Chicago metro.  At least the first of those is my ancestral heritage from birth and for differing numbers of generations on differing branches of my family tree.  When I read of Americans whose families have been here for generations going to reservations to find an ancestral heritage to have a heathen/pagan way to follow, I get that what they are doing is what immigrants have been doing ever since humans figured out how to travel a long ways and then settle among the natives.  That's been happening ever since the invention of the foot so let's call it 5 million years.  It's a natural and ancient tradition to follow.  Had I started out with a choice to find a practiced heathen/pagan way and join it, I might well have done the same.

In addition to my American native heritages (deliberately not capitalized but taking the above into account) I have European heritages that include Germanic and Celtic from most of my ancestors, Slavic/Balkan from the southern branch, Roman and Greek from the histories of the lands of my ancestors.

Should I have been the one to chose a pantheon to follow I could have drawn from a list that contained at least one American and five European pantheons.


Many chose, but some are chosen

I have no objection to someone deciding to follow a specific pantheon and then doing that.  Ever since the invention of the foot people have been relocating to foreign lands, settling in, and starting to practice the local traditions so there's 5 million years of precedent for it.

Since I think deities exist, and I think them capable of calling new followers, I think they can and do that.  Why I got called I don't think I'll ever know.

If all pantheons are one pantheon, why did I recognize Odin so immediately and with so much certainty?  If all pantheons are different so there's an unlimited number of deities, why would I bother answering the call of a being that ends up not really bigger in scale than myself?


My own heritage and the non-Norse status of Asatru

So I ended up Asatru.  At first I thought of Odin as Wodan or maybe Votan but it didn't take long for me to settle on the Norse origin name Odin.  If I have any Norse blood in my genetics it's from the Scotch and Irish branches of my family tree.  If I'm more Norse than a local Native American at the nearest reservation the amount of the difference is still so tiny as to be ignored.  The large majority of my genetic heritage is from a place where the ancients would have practiced some ancient Germanic proto-Asatru, some ancient Celtic proto-Druidry, some ancient Roma by way of occupying soldiers and so on.  The large majority of my cultural heritage is deliberate Americanization to be an amalgamated "white" but with enough modern German from near the time of the unification that I could be Austrian or Bavarian or similar.  Even with a deliberate over-lay of amalgamated American by mostly German heritage wasn't forgotten and untaught, just not stressed much.  I had to go to school to learn to speak German, but I could speak it with my grandmother.  I didn't need to go to school to learn about a lot of German ethnic recipes because I grew up in them.

So how does this jive with a Norse vision of Asatru?  Just because the Norse wrote down the Eddas and the Sagas doesn't mean the Germans (Jakob Grimm) didn't write down the Teutonic Mythology and the Danes (Saxo) didn't user Latin to write down the History of the Danes.  The Norse vision of Asatru is an easy to make newbie error.  I use the Norse names because they are the common ones in English.

But is there any reason for me to focus on ancient mainland proto-Asatru just because my ancestors came from there?  Nope.  The Aesir live and they are who I follow.  Ancient roots are nice, but following the tree metaphor young and healthy leaves are every bit as important.  I am one of those young leaves.

And yet, and yet.  I look at photographs of kindred meetings and I almost never tell a Folkish kindred from a (progressive?  mainstream? religious?  I won't use univeralist because it's not an accurate description) kindred.  I don't know what there is to this view of picking one of your own heritages and following it, but when I did that I joined a crowd who have done that and that are doing that.  I may never be Folkish, but I appreciate their point and if they were to drop the metagentic stuff and take more care in their associations it wouldn't be outside of the realm of the possible.


To any readers who've made it this far through my tome, thank you for reading.  What other topics should I address.  I may address what I believe to be the nature of deity but if anyone offers a suggestion I'm likely to go for it. Until then ...

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger

In this post I will attempt to address why I think established pantheons have an advantage over either ad hoc or monotheist lore systems.


One problem with using the word "religion" is folks will look the word up in the dictionary, see a woefully inadequate definition, and proceed to deny their faith is a religion.  The problem I have with that is I tend to think of groups like Stormfront who use claims of religion as a front for political activity and so I suspect the religious sincerity of anyone making such a denial.  If the problem is the definition of religion then try to say that.  A real definition of religion has to encompass shamanistic ways, every polytheist tradition from Shinto and Hindu to Asatru and Nova Roma, every monotheist tradition, and every spiritual path that fails to address deity like Zen Buddhism, Confucianism or Taoism.  If I've misrepresented any of these faiths please excuse my ignorance of them.  No matter, they are all religions.


Pantheon versus pantheon

I explicitly will not address the possibility that all pantheons are the same set of beings filtered through a specific cultural filter.  That's a topic for its own discussion.  I don't care if Zeus, Jupiter and Tyr are the same being viewed differently.  I don't care if Thor and Perun are the same being viewed differently.  I don't care if Thor, Thunor, Vingthor and Donnar are different beings or the same being.  Well, okay I care about the topic.  It's just not a topic I am willing to discuss.  I think discussion of the topic tends to put followers of other pantheons against each other and I think favoring one pantheon ends up looking too much like dismissing other pantheons.  It's not a slippery slope I want to step on.  I'm happy to participate in ceremonies to other pantheons as my deities aren't jealous, but I am unambiguously happy following the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights and I'm sticking with them.


Polytheism versus monotheism

In my previous commentary I described why polytheism better satisfies Occam's Razor than monotheism.  Throughout history some mystics have reported that deity is many, others that deity is one.  The mystics who have reported that deity is one do not have good agreement.  The simplest explanation for this is that the mystics who reported that deity is one only encountered one of many, not that a certain apparently random sampling of mystics were right and all of the others wrong or that they were all wrong and deities don't exist (whatever "exist" means).  Since a single deity is not generally considered a pantheon this is one of the things I mean when I think that there are advantages to pantheons.

There's a further problem with two specific monotheist faiths that they teach that all other faiths are wrong, and they also teach are request for symmetrical treatment - Treat others the way you wish others would treat you.  When a Christian says that polytheist faiths are wrong, a respectful polytheist whose faith does not teach that Christianity is wrong can end up generous and accommodating by pointing out to a Christian why his faith is wrong.  It's a very bizarre approach to assert that other faiths are wrong and then invite response.  I understand that it is an effective PR method when applied to weak minded members born to the faith as a hurdle against leaving, but to an outsider it's mostly just pitifully transparent.

Also note that minor deities tend to creep into otherwise monotheistic faiths.  The ancient Hebrews kept converting to follow other deities.  The modern Catholics keep adding saints to their pantheon.  Members of Islam manage to keep this trend limited to arguments about lineal descent from Mohammed and what the differences imply about religious authority.  If there were only one deity, why would the family of his prophet have more authority than other humans?  There's a constant tendency to creep towards a pantheon within monotheist faiths with one fighting the constant trend, one syncretizing it, and another trying to view it as a reversion to be cured.


Moral systems versus polytheism

Building on the reports over the ages that mystics have encountered deities, I also think pantheons have an advantage over the theoretically atheistic faiths.  While Zen Buddhism may not address deity, Tibetan Buddhism does address deity.  If even Buddhism ends up with sects that have a pantheon that shows that addressing deity through a pantheon ends up creeping into faiths over time.

When Buddhism, Confucius and Lao Tse died, they had spent years trying to keep their followers from viewing them as divine humans.  Gautama Buddha failed in his efforts and statues of him are now used much like the statues of the Aesir in my own personal shrine.  Confucius tried to teach respect for the ancient heathen ways of his heritage.  Lao Tse founded mystical Taoism with its spirits in the form of animals.

These examples show that both monotheistic systems and systems of spiritual morality that don't address deity tend to have forms of polytheism work themselves in over time.  Polytheism with a pantheon is the stable end point of such trends.  In a world where there is strength in unity, monotheistic religions show that strength breaks down when taken to a limit.


Individual traditions versus polytheism

Moving back further in time before pantheons we come to the native faith of humanity.  Go back far enough in time and every faith was a shamanic one.  The exact name of shamanism points to a specific shamanic practice if you wish to use word origins as the exclusive domain for word meanings, but anyone who's been through the fifth grade as a native English speaker knows that isn't how the language treats word adoption.  Shamanism is the English word for the entire spectrum of what religions looked like before they got codified into pantheons.

Each shamanistic lineage has its own traditions, its own verbal lore.  They are fluid per each shaman.  In a world where there is strength in diversity it might be easy to think that the shamanistic way would offer the best strength because it was the most diverse.  In actual prehistory, what happened again and again throughout the world was as peoples settled into agricultural stability the local ways of the shaman coalesced into pantheon systems with more widely repeated lore systems.

The larger, older and more stable the ancient culture, the more the local shamanistic systems formed into shared pantheons with shared myths.  The unity of a large but shared set of myths out competed the diversity of the small single lineage traditions.  Across the world the myths told varied from place to place, but closer locations had similar sets of tales and large differences in lore were determined by ancient migrations.  While the difference between Germanic and Celtic was small near their boundaries, even though the distinction was coined by the Romans to describe language differences it retains its own validity still in the myths of each tradition.

This pattern repeats across the globe - Mythical systems with pantheons do overlap near the boundaries between cultures and there is sharing and blending.  Detailed lore varies from family to family, village to village, tribe to tribe and so on up the organizational structure.  But with all these differences ensuring evolution and cross pollination the result fit a pantheon model.  Where monotheistic traditions tend to evolve into pantheon systems, shamanistic traditions evolved into pantheon systems across the world.

Pantheons have the advantage of winning the survival of the fittest in Darwinian evolution.  Societies sufficiently stable for long enough all developed pantheons and efforts to drop a pantheon all see pantheons creeping back in as people practice their faith.  Humans clearly want to have a pantheon.


Following a pantheon versus following an individual deity

In our current era nearly all heathens and pagans in the western world are converts.  There are plenty of immigrants who practice Hindu, some who practice Shinto, but of the western heathen and pagan systems there are very few members so far who are born into them.  While there are claims of family traditions extending far into the past, no one making such claims ever agrees to sending a team of anthologists from a local university to do individual interviews with members of their extended family to confirm those families have raised their children in the specified religion across the generations.  Family traditions exist in ancient traditions and they would be nice in our modern traditions, but they better be optional because time and again assertions of family traditions fail to pan out.  If you want to claim to me that you have an existing family tradition, let me know when we can contact an anthropology class at a nearby university to confirm and document your claim.  Until then I need to go with the model that nearly every pagan in the western world of a western lineage is a convert.  Yes, I am extremely hard core about what is and isn't a valid claim about family traditions, but so far no one has volunteered and that's that.  It is my stance that family traditions are not mandatory.  There are practicing heathens and pagans now and they got that why in spite of families at least nominally Christian.

As converts it is very easy to want to follow an individual deity.  We weren't raised immersed in a heathen lore and we don't have a family tradition of following an entire pantheon so we don't have that as the expected standard.  The gods and goddesses are out and about calling people.  The ones who get called tend to want to follow the caller.  The ones who arrive for other reasons tend to want to latch onto a specific deity, maybe because they were raised following a specific deity.

The majority in ancient traditions followed the pantheon as a whole.  Those who followed a specific deity were always in a minority.  In the sagas one can find mention of people who followed no deity but trusted in their own might and main - These people were not thought crazy for being atheists but they were rare enough to be remarked upon.  In the sagas one can also find individuals who only followed one deity - Again these people were not thought crazy for being (monotheist isn't the word here, maybe dedicants?) but they were rare enough to be remarked upon.

Following the entire pantheon has apparently been the majority stance for any time a polytheist religion has had a majority born to it.  In spite of the cliche' "Many are called, few are chosen" it has not been the case in polytheist religions as far as I can tell.  What I can tell of the practices in Hindu and Shinto, based on woefully inadequate personal discussions, following the entire pantheon seems the majority practice in those faiths as well.

When it comes to having a patron deity, it needs to be the patrons choice.  The gods and goddesses are the ones making the choice or "patron/patroness" is a poor word to describe the associations.  While I don't know what the word "exist" means in this context I am positive that the gods and goddesses "exist".  They get to pick and they get to insist.

In recent years I have felt more drawn to Thor than to others among the Aesir.  Because this preference is based on my own decisions on who to pay attention to, and/or because Thor has never insisted that I follow him in particular, I can definitely say that I do not have a Patron/Client relationship with Thor.  I like to follow him and he doesn't mind followers and that's the limit of it.  One year in my first decade or Asatru I spent some time studying and following Aesir.  After several months of no contact she finally gave me a brief response to not bother her.  I didn't need any more directions at that point and I shifted my studies.

The gods and goddesses are quite capable of insisting who should be dedicated to them.  If you don't get insisted, you don't have a Patron/Patroness.  Not to worry, consider that having a Patron/Patroness has always been out of the ordinary but not so strange to be viewed as crazy.  Well, except for Egil maybe.  Or maybe he was crazy quite independent of following The Wanderer his whole life.

Don't think you should be following a specific deity because it looks like others are.  That has never been the majority stance and as our heathen/pagan religions progress across the generations it will once again be unusual.  If it looks like a lot do it now, it's because we are all converts who don't know any better.


To any readers who've made it this far through my tome, thank you for reading.  I wonder if my next commentary should be on why I should have chosen the Aesir among the pantheons available to me.  I've long pondered why I should have chosen Asatru and having a dream where Odin told me to follow, even though it triggered a major life change in me, doesn't seem a sufficient reason.  Why shouldn't I be an atheist?  Why should I follow a pantheon rather than being a pantheist or a shaman who creates his own lore?  Why should I, with ancestors who followed the Celtic and Germanic pantheons who grew up in Iroquois territory and who lives in Illini territory pick the Germanic pantheon over those other 3 equally obvious choices?  At this point I have now been Asatru for two decades and I still ponder these questions.  Maybe I'll have the focus to address the other questions in my list in other posts. Until then ...

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger

In this post I will attempt to address why it's not irrational to believe the existence of deity.

First I would like to discuss a common atheist approach to the argument.

Far too many atheist denials of deity are denials of monotheism in general of Christianity in specific.  Maybe you can recall the classic cover of "New Yorker" magazine that showed a map of the world with Manhattan taking up approximately half of the land mass of the entire world.  I think the atheist objection to monotheism is like that.  The arguments are really anti-Christian so they could even be categorized as satanic in one of the less common meanings of that word or opposing Christianity.  Being Asatru any proof that the Bible is false is a pointless proof to me.  I've read the book and know it to be false.  All it took was its comments on the nature of idols for me to tell that, though I found plenty of errors and made up stories long before I got to mentions of idols.  Being Asatru any proof that God can't exist because he's outside of the universe are equally pointless to me.  The Aesir are in the "universe" in some sense as much as I am.  I don't know what the Nine Worlds are, but if electricity waves can phase into the imaginary realm, not have any amplitude at one point in a cable, then phase back into existence and have measurable current then the Aesir can do something like that among the Nine Worlds.  Not all of religion is Christianity so arguments against Christianity aren't valid arguments for atheism to me.  Not all deities are supposed to exist only outside of the universe so arguments that God doesn't exist aren't valid arguments for atheism to me.

Next I would like to discuss a common arguments that the ancient gods and goddesses were nothing but explanations of natural phenomena.

In elementary and junior high school I was taught that the ancient gods and goddesses were invented to explain nature.  Once static electricity was understood then lightning was understood so Thor didn't need to exist.  As soon as Thor didn't need to exist he vanished in a puff of logic.  Go through any ancient pantheon and lather-rinse-repeat until all ancient deities disappear.  The earliest problem with this theory is folks started following the deity of a new faith long before science existed.  The biggest problem with this theory is folks who call on Thor get clear cut messages that he exists.  Thor likes coffee but not Mountain Dew.  Find a follower of any ancient pantheon and you'll get the same experience.  The gods and goddesses may have been used in tales to explain the universe, but the tale of George Washington and the cherry tree is still used to explain duty and tales of Abraham Lincoln are still used to explain freedom.  If I come up with better tales would you like to bet that those two historical figures would cease to exist?  They would just as much as the gods and goddesses of the ancient pantheons have ceased to exist.  They are all still here.

The most convincing theory that claims that deities don't exist is the scientific one - There has never been any objective proof that deities don't exist and people have been trying therefore they don't exist.

The problem with this theory has to do with the nature of human progress, the history of genius, and the historical transition of many subjective phenomena to objective phenomena as progress has happened.  At the moment all personal evidence for the existence of deity is subjective.  That is to say anyone who has the experience is the only one having it.  All claims in all religious literature are built one these experiences when you dig back to the origins of any religious practice.  Is it really true that trying to prove the existence of deity for so long and failing means they don't exist?

Consider fire.  Fire exists, so the history might not seem to apply at first but please bear with me.  Ever since humans learned to make fire on demand humans have pondered over the nature of fire.  It's been in use roughly two million years so the use of fire predates our species.  Our ancestors who first harnessed fire might or might not have been recognizable as human but they were obviously different from modern humans.  For our entire existence as humans, pick anywhere from 2,000,000 to 50,000 years ago, people have striven to understand fire.  It's only with the discovery of the atomic theory of chemistry that humans have been able to understand the nature of fire.

Consider mathematics.  Mathematics doesn't exist as any physical entity, so the history might not seem to apply at first but please bear with me.  Over time more and more mathematical theorems are devised.  While the general advance of mathematics is certain because of the work of many mathematicians, is the introduction of any one future advance in mathematics assured?  Mathematical problems have been worked ever since language developed numbers yet many problems remain obdurate.  We can know in general that unknown mathematics will exist in the future but we can't know its details yet.

Consider consciousness.  There's debate what human consciousness actually is, as to this day there isn't a good definition of it.  Yet human consciousness most definitely exists in an subjective form in spite of the lack of definition.  Psychologists struggle working on this issue and at times it looks like they might never reach a conclusion.  Consider how many theories there have been in psychology.  Consider that it took humans two million years to understand fire so why should anyone think the problem of consciousness will be understood soon.

Now let's consider the problem that all experiences of deity up until this point have been subjective not objective.  It's the keystone of the agnostic approach - Get back to me on the topic when you have objective proof.  The hard atheist approach that deity does not exist is addressed by my examples above.  Humans used fire for two million years before we understood it.  Humans have been building on mathematics for tens of thousands of years and we use mathematics even though it doesn't have a physical really.  Humans have understood that consciousness exists even though lacking a good definition it remains subjective.  Just because evidence is subjective doesn't mean it's false and just because science has answered other problems there's no expectation when, if ever, it will answer this one.  Maybe in a century science will invent the "Star Trek life signs detector" device and when we point it at an Asatru Blot it will detect the humans and the visiting deity.  Or maybe two million years will pass and we'll still be struggling with the questions of deity and consciousness.  Being certain consciousness exists suggests that thinking deity exists is not irrational.

So what about the subjective nature of evidence for the existence of deity?  Doesn't Occam's Razor say the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true and the nonexistence of deity is the simplest explanation?

For millenia mystics have reported contact with deities.  For millenia mystics have worked with mathematics and fire as well.  For millenia mystics have worked with magic that eventually got replaced by science and technology.  Which parallel is the most valid one?  It's easy to say that so many mystics can't be wrong, but they were definitely wrong about all sorts of magic that eventually got replaced by science and technology.  What if science eventually discovers life signs that aren't the way mystics have been reporting them for so long?  That will end up being proof of the existence of deity *and* proof that all of the mystics were wrong.  Shrug.  Based on the subjective evidence I'm not prepared to state that so many mystics across so many centuries were all wrong.  Even if their details were all wrong it won't matter.  I get that the agnostic choice remains rational, but the hard atheist choice is no less irrational than the religious choice.

I'll close with a simple Occam's Razor argument that polytheism makes more sense than polytheism.  Across the millenia there have been mystics who have reported that deity is many, and there have been mystics who have reported that deity is one.  The mystics who have reported that deity is one have not agreed among themselves as to the traits of the one.  Two simple explanations come to mind - One is that every mystic reporting the existence of deity has been uniformly wrong, the agnostic of hard atheist stance depending on how the interpret it.  The other is that those mystics who have reported the deity is one only had contact with one of the many, thus the mystics have all been as right as their own experiences allowed them to be.  I'm not prepared to state that so many mystics have all been wrong so my conclusion is that deity is many.

To any readers who've made it this far through my tome, thank you for reading.  I wonder if my next commentary should be on the advantage of pantheons, followed by a commentary on why I should have chosen the Aesir among the pantheons available to me.  I've long pondered why I should have chosen Asatru and having a dream where Odin told me to follow, even though it triggered a major life change in me, doesn't seem a sufficient reason.  Why shouldn't I be an atheist?  Why should I follow a pantheon rather than being a pantheist or a shaman who creates his own lore?  Why should I, with ancestors who followed the Keltic and Germanic pantheons who grew up in Iriqious territory and who lives in Illini territory pick the Germanic pantheon over those other 3 equally obvious choices?  At this point I have now been Asatru for two decades and I still ponder these questions.  Maybe I'll have the focus to address the other questions in my list in other posts.  Until then ...

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger

Winter Finding is the day of the Autumnal Equinox so I'm two days late.

Apparently to some of the ancients there were two seasons - Summer and Winter.  They started at the equinoxes with the solstices being the middle of the seasons.

Let's see if I remember the ancient tradition right - To celebrate the sun going below the equator wheels were covered with straw and oil, lit on fire and rolled down a hill to symbolize what happened in the sky.  Cool but I've never done that ceremony.  Not sure it would be worth all of the paperwork to get a religious exception fire permit to do it.  It's one of those things more fun in the abstract than in the actual doing I guess.

I shared a glass of mead with my son in law who was visiting with my older daughter and that was that.

It is my stance that any good scripture/lore will contain layer after layer of symbolic and poetic truth.  Viewing it as literal depiction of events that actually happened loses all of that truth and beauty and exposes it to being picked apart for errors - The obviously false path towards biblical inerrancy.  This posting is about a similarity that I have noticed between human behavior patterns and a major topic of the lore - The distinction between Ase and Van.

Anyone who has been in the military with a lot of folks who have served overseas has probably noticed a pair of contradictory trends in who military men marry.  Some can't wait to get back home to marry a woman like them.  I take this "like attracts like" as an instinctive urge that contributes to tribal unity.  Some are eager to marry a foreign woman very different from them.  I take this "opposites attract" as an instinctive urge to bring new blood into the tribe to prevent genetic problems from inbreeding.  At times these women have been called "war brides".  A trip to the Exchange or Commissary will show lots of women of extremely mixed ethnic origin and also lots of women who look like the locals.  I've never tried to gather statistic on these to conflicting trends but both have been clear to me every time I've been on a large military base.  My Honorable Discharge is now decades old so I have needed to confirm this by recent trips to bases.  Yup, with one daughter out of the Navy a few years and the other daughter recently switched from active Air Force to an Air Force civilian dependent I have sen that this trend continues to this day.  I've also read about it in plenty of books of military history so I suspect this trend is as old as armies and marching.

My view of Asatru is that we follow a specific team, Odin's tribe, and we oppose a specific team, Surt's tribe.  Both groups are deities or Ettins or giants or spirits or world spanning wights or however you might want to categorize them.  There are also plenty of Ettins who are not allied to either side like Sunna and Mani.  There are Ettins of uncertain or ambiguous alliegance like Loki who may have shifted allegiance back and forth a few times.  There are also elves, dwarves and various spirits large and small.

The strange thing about our Gods and Goddesses is they come in two tribes not one.  The little we know about Surt's team is it started out with both fire giants and ice giants so he seems to have the same sort of diversity on his team.

In the Volspa the Aesir and Vanir fought some wars that ended up ties and eventually they declared peace and offered members be adopted into each other's tribe an exchange similar to the fosterage system of ancient royalty.  It's called "hostage" exchange but didn't work anything like our modern notion of that word.  It was adoption or fosterage not hostage taking or prisoner exchange.  In the end the two tribes merged even though they have separate history before that point.  Now Frey and Freya are definitely listed among the Aesir though it's clear they are adoptive kin.  Incidentally this seems to be the weak link in the folkish theory that tribe is determined by blood not emotional bonds.

When we read of the mating traditions of the Aesir and Vanir they sound a lot like the way I described mating traditions in the military.

The Aesir marry either among themselves and among all other types of Ettin.  Odin and Frigga may both have been listed among the Aesir as far back as any list, but Odin fathered Thor with Jordh who appears to be among the unallied wights like Sunna and Mani.  Frey married Gerd directly from Surt's tribe, and Njordr married Skadhi directly from Surt's tribe.  I take this to be the wanderlust side and sure enough it's the Goddesses who move the most in alignment rather like war brides.

The Vanir married and bred so tightly among themselves they paired off with siblings.  Frey and Freya were a pair until the peace agreement with the Aesir.  I take this to be the homelust side I've seen in the military.

In human nature these two contradictory urges happen - Wanting to mate inside the group, wanting to mate outside the group.  For any one person one or the other can dominate and I don't know the percentages.  There has been a great deal of controversy over the centuries about these contradictory urges and no matter parental pressure or racist accusations some end up going to each side of the contradiction.

In Odin's team there are these same two contradictory urges happening - Wanting to mate inside the group, wanting the mate inside the group.  For any one diety one or the other can be done, Van and Ase.

I know I see the war between the Aesir as a metaphor for the same conflict that happens within our human species and within our human history.  Isolationist versus interventionist politics is this same pair of contradictory urges writ large in society.  As within, so too without.  While some like to say As Above So Too Below saying the gods and goddesses take the lead but in this case it seems to be a shared trait not a directional one.

It's good to know that in the end its the mixing Aesir that became the leaders after merging with the non-mixers.  In a world with migration by airplane it had better have ended up that way.

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger the poetic lore blithering analyst

One more of the papers I wrote over the years.  I lived in Los Angleles metro at the time and the flora and fauna mentioned reflect that location.

Hailsa good Folk and True!

Several folk have asked me to write up the lesions I learned when I studied under Ull.

One of the Gods I studied under for a year in my first decade in Asatru was Ull.  Unlike Odhinn and Loki, what I learned does not fill books.  After all, the Silent Hunter would hardly lead to such.  After focusing on ethics and the NNV studying under Odhinn, Tyr, and Thor, I was in need of a different topic.  Ull supplied it well.

The Lore of Ull in “the usual suspects” is scant.  Below is a summary of the Lore with a couple of my own additions to it.

Among the Aesir, Ull, is the son of Sif, and a step-son of Thor.  His name means “shining” or “glorious”.  His one surviving story, according to Saxo, was to sit Hjaldstafr, the High Seat, for ten years when Odhinn was cast out temporarily for becoming a woman to bear a child to avenge Balder.  Ull’s annual duty, according to MY own lore, is that, being the most recent holder of the High Seat other than Odhinn, he is kept on reserve status for that duty, and is called on to sit the duty during the twelve days of Yule when Odhinn is out on the Wild Hunt.  I have a song from the 1996 CE Yule sumble that claims he isn’t really interested in the task and is glad when it is over every year.

On Midgard, Ull’s favored environment is the mountains and the forests.  He is often reported to be in the company of Skadhi there, and it is not known whether they are a couple, or just like to hang out in the same neighborhoods.  He is the ultimate archer, skier, and skater.  His name is used as a kenning for shield, which I will discuss below.  He is known as a sorcerer because he carves runes into bones to fashion them into his skates, with which he can skate over ice or over water like a self-propelled water-skier.

Among us humans, Ull has two main duties and a corollary of those two.  He administers oaths.  This is not a unique duty among the Gods since Var, Thor and some others do this as well.  He also witnesses duels and judges and determines the outcome of sacred single combat duels.  The specific oaths Ull administers are civic or official ones, as evidenced that when it was proposed that officers of the Ring of Troth should swear an oath of loyalty to the organization, it was phrased as an oath to Wuldor, a version of the name Ull.  The corollary of these two duties, adding in Ull’s status as the greatest of all hunters, is to hunt down and kill those who lie in court, or as witnesses at Thing trials.  This corollary is MY OWN idea, and not to be found in the Lore.

So much for the Lore, which took up the first couple of days of my studies for the year, and on to my own work and conclusions.

On a practical note, why would the name of a SKIER be a kenning for a SHIELD?  Broaden your meaning of skiing, and think of shields at the same time.  Then think of kids.  Sure enough, I believe that the use of Ull’s name as a kenning for shield is from sleds and toboggans.  Anyone for starting to call those “flying saucer” sleds “Ull’s gifts”?

When it comes to ethics, Ull has a blessedly simple approach.  He watches over sacred single combat duels, judges as to which combatant is in the right, and grants them victory.  The rules he leaves to Tyr, and long-term issues he leaves to Odhinn.

Ull’s most important lesion to me is his silence and his love of the woods, though.  We claim that Asatru is an earth-oriented pagan religion, but I live in the big city and rarely venture from my urban haunts.  I can hear sirens and traffic as I sit here typing, and Ull’s presence in the wilds is vital to have an experiential knowledge of Asatru as an earth oriented religion.  Ull is the silent spokesman for the Landvaettir and for environmentalism in Asatru.  As a city dweller, I need to keep Ull in my heart.

In the woods with my father when I was a kid, when we were out of sight of any of the signs of humanity, he would remark “THIS is God’s country,” and sit on a stump to enjoy the experience.  We would sit and enjoy listening to the wind in the trees, and he would point out any animals that would come by.  That is the gist of Ull’s lesion, neither complex nor verbal.

Shut up and listen.  Be mindful of all that happens around you.  Take that mindfulness back with you when you return to the city.  Ull’s critters are there as well, but it takes extra attention to find them.  Where I live, we have possums, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, lizards, and an assortment of wild birds that are Ull’s charges from the wild that have found ecological niches in this city.  We have sage and assorted herbs; aloe, cactus and assorted succulents; manzanita, live-oak, and assorted trees that are Ull’s charges from the wild that have found ecological niches in this city.

Ull’s wild ones are there in our cities if we pay close enough attention.  So too is Ull’s silence in our hearts if we pay close enough attention, as it is in the woods.  Ull’s arrows fly quietly to the heart of his prey, and carries that silence at the core of our hearts.  Ull’s skies carry him quietly across the snow, ice and water, and they do it quietly and mindfully.  This is what Ull taught me, and what took the full year to learn.

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger

The Moral of the Story - Lessons from the Tales of Balder

Invited presentation by Doug Freyburger, Mid-Summer 2002



If scripture is taken as a literal depiction of events that actually happened, most of the poetic beauty and symbolism in its stories is lost.  For a tale to have survived long enough to become a myth it must have layer after layer of symbolic meaning.  This paper is an attempt to explore the symbolic lessons contained in the tales of Balder found in the Poetic and Prose Eddas.  See the Volspa, Balders Drauma and Gylfaginning for them.  Here is a brief summary of the tales of Balder.

Balder had dreams that he would die.  In response Odin went to the gates of Niflhel to receive the prophecies in the Volspa to learn how to handle the situation.  Frigga traveled the nine worlds and got everyone and everything qualified to swear an oath to swear not to harm Balder in an attempt to protect him.  Only items to young to swear an oath was exempted. After the oaths were sworn, the gods took up a sport called Balder baiting.  They would throw items at Balder and watch the items deflect to avoid hurting Balder.  Loki discovered that mistletoe was too young to be allowed to swear an oath and he made a missile from it.  Loki urged the blind god Hod/Hoth to join the game of Balder baiting and offered to guide Hod's hand in the throw.  Balder was killed.  Odin fathered a child named Vali specifically for vengence.  When Balder's wife Nanna saw his body on the pyre, she died of grief.  So Balder, Nanna and Hod went to reside in Helheim.  Odin asked Hel for Balder back.  Hel's condition was that every being weep for Balder.  One would not and the three stayed in Helheim.  In Helheim Balder and Nanna hear the stories of each person's like in an effort to learn the workings of wyrde.

How many layered meanings and lessons are to be found in this tale?  I offer lessons appropriate on average to people of assorted ages.  There are numerous other meanings to be found in the tale.


Lesson for 5 year olds -

Don't throw sticks at people.  They can get hurt.  When Hod threw the stick, Balder was killed.  Hod did not mean to kill Balder, but it happened anyways.  Sticks hurt people whether you want it to happen or not.  Sticks and stones can break my bones ...

Lesson for 10 year olds -

When people die, they are gone until the end of the world.  They never come back, not even the gods and goddesses.  When Balder died, he went to the afterlife and he stayed there.  When Frigga asked what it would take to get Balder back, the price was impossible even for the powerful gods and goddesses.  Everyone dies eventually and they never come back, not even the gods and goddesses.

Lesson for 15 year olds -

If you do what your friends are doing just because "everyone is doing it" you are blind and you will get into trouble.  Hod is the blind god.  There is no tale of why, but the tale of Balder gives it meaning.  He is blind to allow peer pressure to get him into trouble.  Teens often succumb to peer pressure and they need to be constantly reminded of its risks.  If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?  A blind person would.

Lesson for 20 year olds -

People conceive children for strange reasons but no matter the reason children are the next generation.  Having children leads to responsibility whether conceiving them was responsible not not.  Odin conceived Vali specifically to avenge Balder's death yet Vali is listed among the Aesir from then on.

Lesson for 25 year olds -

Protect your children to the very best of your abilities.  Even if something seems harmless check it carefully for danger anyways.  There are more ways to die than anyone cam imagine and children expose themselves to danger without any thought.

When Frigga learned that Balder was in danger she went out of her way to get everything capable of an oath to swear that Balder would not be harmed.  The mistletoe was judged too young to swear an oath so getting it to swear was beyond even her means.

Lesson for 30 year olds -

When you make a promise, do not depend on the promises of others to keep yours.  Keep on the straight and narrow.  Hod swore the oath not to harm Balder, but he depended on the oaths of others and ended up killing him.  The game of Balder baiting took the oaths lightly.  All of the Aesir should have declined to play the game.

Lesson for 35 year olds -

There is great honor in being devoted to your husband or wife.  Nanna is at Balder's side and the two will reign in the next cycle of the Multiverse after Ragnarok.  When she learned that Balder had died she earned it by voluntarily dying herself.  While most people never have the chance to die voluntarily married couples are constantly faced with chances to prove or disprove their loyalty.  The way to attract and keep Miss Right is to be Mister Right day in and day out.

Lesson for 40 year olds -

Hod is with Balder and Nanna is Helheim preparing for the next cycle of the Multiverse.  Former opponents do not remain opponent forever.  People sometimes change sides in a battle like professional athletes traded to another team.  Young men can fight a battle against each other and then when they are old men they can meet on the same battlefield and be comrades.  Former opponents can make good allies if the cause is right because they know your weaknesses.

Lesson for 45 year old -

War is blind.  It strikes down the just along with the unjust.  According to Lee Hollander's translation the name "Hod" means "war".  Treaties and oaths are not enough to keep wars away.  No matter how prepared you are it isn't always enough to avoid a war.  Once war arrives, the battles strike down people at random.

Lesson for 50 year olds -

Dreams have meaning.  No one is ever sure actually what that meaning is, but it is worth the effort to examine your dreams and to do something about them.  Balder had a dream that he would die and the actions taken in response to that dream set the scale for much of the world.

Lesson for 55 year olds -

The afterlife is a preparation for what comes next.  Death is not a complete ending.  While there is no general general agreement on what the afterlife *is*, but the Lore is clear that there *is* an afterlife.  While Asatru teaches that we should live our lives well and let the afterlife take care of itself, having an afterlife in the first place is a source of great solace to many people.

Lesson for 60 year olds -

The Multiverse works in cycles, and everything in the worlds work in cycles.  From the Ginnnungagap to Ragnarok is the cycle of the worlds.  Some survived from the previous cycle and Balder will be among those who survive into the next.  Centuries form a cycle, peoples' lives form cycles.  Years, seasons, months and days form cycles.  Cycles reach all of the way down to heartbeats.  Our lives fit into place in the system.

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger

Over the years I've met one black heathen so far.  Generally when looking at a photo of a kindred no one can tell the difference between a progressive of folkish kindred by appearance.  Even though folks with obvious non-European ancestry are welcome in many kindreds, few show up.  In time this has led to me appreciating the folkish viewpoint though I don't believe I hold that viewpoint.  The fact that I was surprised to meet a black heathen is why I have grown to appreciate the folkish viewpoint.  The fact that I was pleasantly surprised rather than unpleasantly surprised and that I even think some will be unpleasantly surprised may be a matter of my initial exposure to the folkish which I'll describe in a minute.

My primary disagreement with what I normally hear as the folkish viewpoint is I think when it comes to heritage, the usual nature versus nurture that always has "both" as its answer is dominated by culture not blood.  Adopted children are very, very real children.  Step children are very, very real children.  In the Eddas this is shown by the Vanir getting listed as Aesir once the fosterage (easier to understand than "hostage"), peace and merging of the tribes happened.  Frey whose name is part of the family name on my passport and birth certificate was born among the Vanir but is clearly listed among the Aesir.  Thor is of mixed blood.  In the sagas one easily found example was Bard the Welshmen in Egils saga Skalgrimsson but historical raid and trade expeditions went at least as far as Baghdad.  Thralls and/or wives would have been brought home and assimilated into the tribes.  In my own life I have step-daughters who I do my best to simply be daughters and my grand-daughter is in no manner of treatment step.  In modern time I have attended Blot and Sumbl with both Keltic and Slavic heathens who are similar enough that they just fit in.  So there are lists of reasons ranging from the Eddas through my own life why I think culture must dominate in the nature versus nurture debate of heritage and how to call someone folk.

Part of my objection to what I normally hear as the folkish viewpoint may come from the extremity of my experience of it.  For three years I attended Thors Hammer Kindred in the Los Angeles metro area.  They had monthly events like clockwork so I went with better frequency than most of the voting members.  Just before I started attending they accepted their first skinhead neo-Nazi*  Over time more joined and each one who joined saw one of the good members resign or stop paying dues.  They grew like a cancer and eventually killed the kindred.  Thors Hammer Kindred is long since not a member of the Asatru Alliance and I think that is good news but old news for the Alliance.  I've since met far milder folkish heathens since but that remains the worst case scenario and it's not something I have any wish to repeat.  While I don't think extremism inherent in the folkish viewpoint I have seen with my own eyes that the folkish are easily invaded by extremists who follow their own political agenda and only follow the Aesir, Vanir and allied wights as a part of their rhetoric.  The best result of the entire Thors Hammer  Kindred history is Raven kindred in Los Angeles who maintain the URL asatru.org.

* When I asked the kindred founder why he was admitting bad people his response was like this "What am I going to do, Doug?  If I don't take them in they'll end up in jail or worse.  So I take them in and try to teach them to live a spiritual life, raise babies and not being like the people they complain about."  It was a good sentiment and it was his kindred, so I watched and learned.  The result was a destroyed kindred.  Decades of devotion and work down the drain.

Since I'm in a pattern of posting my old materials, this used to be archived on Selv's Ragnarok.Org web page but that isn't active any more.  Has anyone heard from him recently, like in the last 5 years?

Looks like it's time to repeat an old post.  A quick look shows I've
posted  it in 1998, 2000, 2002, maybe some other years.

> From: Doug Freyburger <dfrey...@colltech.com>
> Date: 2000/05/18
> Subject: Ten ways you can tell an Old-Timer Heathen
> ...

I've gotten some requests offline for this, and a
lot of newer posters have not gotten it yet, so
it is time to repost my tongue-in-cheek yet
serious "ten ways" list.  Last posted last
July.

You can tell an old-timer Heathen because they...

1)
Are not focused on Vallhalla - There are MANY other
halls in Asgard, at least one for each of the Aesir.
Those Dedicated to gods other than Odhinn probably
should not even be interested in Vallhalla.  Besides,
Vallhalla's for warriors, and old-timers...

2)
Understand that there are FEW warriors - Claiming to
be a warrior doesn't make it so.  Wanting to be a
warrior doesn't make it so.  If you can't name a
current or former Commanding Officer that will confirm
that you actually ARE a warrior, drop the pretensions.
We have members that CAN satisfy such criteria, so we
don't need to coddle to wannabees.  There's plenty of
honor available in other occupations!  If you REALLY
want to be a warrior, start out by enlisting in the
military, not by talking about it.

3)
Don't worry any more about ending up in Hel's halls -
The food is good and you get a chance to be born
again, either into Midgard or as a colonist in the
next cycle of the Universe/Multiverse.  It is
honorable to be assigned to Hel: don't confuse it
with Niflhel.  Besides, the judgement is up to the
Aesir when you die, so worrying doesn't help anyways.
Live well and let the Afterlife handle itself!

4)
Expect newbies to have strange notions - They sure
had enough when they were new.  It isn't something
to get upset about; it's an opportunity for teaching.
Besides, newbies often think up pretty interesting
stuff.

Also, there are many types of newbie-ness.  Anyone
online for less than several years is a newbie on
the net, and that means they can confuse stuff that
is standard on many groups by thinking it is
peculiar to news:alt.religion.asatru.  Anyone not
practicing Asatru for several years is bound to go
through phases, and to think we are in their phase.
Anyone who has practiced solitary for a while is
once again a newbie when they start group practice.
That can be quite an experience, because group
practice works so well, but it is generally not
what solitary practitioners picture.

5)
Accept that other old-timers believe differently -
They follow the Aesir, and that's good enough.  We
value individual freedom enough to understand that
that means that people will believe and act
differently than we do, and that that's good.
Disagreement is GOOD!  Even the ones we debate the
most vigorously with generally make excellent
company in person.

6)
Don't think that Thor is a big guy with a beard -
Just because it is a good image doesn't make it
actually TRUE.  Perhaps the Aesir can take on human
bodies when needed, but it certainly isn't their
standard form.  Just WHAT that form is is beyond the
kenn of old-timers far more than it is beyond the
kenn of newbies.  This is important to stress:
folks who have been around for a long time are less
certain what forms the Aesir take, because they have
had a longer time to experience them.

7)
Understand that the Eddas were written by some drunk
guys and can't be expected to be taken literally,
but they tell them again anyways - Claims that
scripture is infallible, or even claims that it
tells of events that actually occured, are for other
religions.  Our members from other continents can't
even agree as to WHICH tales form Asatru's primary
Lore.  Trying to impose literal truth on scripture
loses its REAL meaning and beauty, its symbolism and
its rich multi-level allegorical meaning.

Still, the Eddas contain much useful information,
and debating about the details in them does lead to
greater understanding of the ancients' understanding
of Asatru.  Some newbies confuse this with taking
the Eddas literally and call it "Edda bashing".
They generally get over it after a while.

8)
Have been told that they're "just doing a
reenactment" - and have come to realize that the
main problem is a lack of spirituality on the part
of the person making the accusation.  This happens
from and to outsiders as well as among heathens.

9)
Have earned the ire of members of at least one
heathen group - and figures it's a part of the deal.
It's not like they need the approval of every group
they encounter.

10)
Have seen national, regional, state and local groups
grow, splinter, bicker, dissolve and come back into
existance -  We don't make good followers.  We're a
grassroots movement without leaders.  Sure, we have
folks who would LIKE to be leaders, but most of us
would rather only follow someone who had to be
drafted into any office.

This means that Oldtimers are rarely interested in
calls to unite all heathens under one banner.

Bonus points: "Odin Lives," "No Thor, No Honor; Know
Thor, Know Honor," "Give me MEAD and no one gets
hurt," "Take a Liking to a Viking," "Freya can herd
cats, can you?," "Brisingamin bring's'em in, every
time," or similar bumper stickers.

Bonus points: Your own handicrafts as ritual objects,
and your mundane tools as well.

Bonus points: No longer interested in debating about
some other religion.  No longer upset that related
Pagan religions don't see things the way we do.  No
longer worried about using other religions for
comparison purposes, even those other religions are
different.

Hail Asgard!
Doug Freyburger