My thing about Heathenry

I've been meaning to write for some time, as a member of one Neo-Pagan tradition, about the fascination I have with another, very different, one. Members of one tradition very rarely actually 'get' what another tradition is about, for example my Kemetic friend has a habit of losing me in mid-stream, l despite having read books about it, I still can't tell how Druidry substantially differs from Wicca, except in the one crucial aspect of its public image.

Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to understand the various forms of heathenry, the modern forms of what Paganism was like in northern Europe before those Christians came along. I can get some of the concepts vaguely, but a stumbling-block is that I feel I can never pronounce the words. I don't really understand their pantheon or world view. Their mythology just doesn't do it for me.

Probably just as well since the day a pre-Greek death Goddess demanded me for her own, the Heathen Gods wouldn't like her, & vice-versa, so in that sense the exploration of heathenry is more or less permanently ruled out for me.

But there are things I love about it. I've only met one in person & she more than fulfilled my expectations: I can always respect feisty, because feisty makes n good magical people who intervene when no-one else will. This is borne out by what I've seen of them interacting with each other & outsiders: there's no room for namby-pamby fluffiness with Heathens. Nor is there any of the agonising that witches sometimes put themselves through, since aspects of our tradition contrive to freeze us when we should be acting.

One of those is the difference in ethical principle. Many Wiccans and witches subscribe to the Wiccan Rede, which is widely badly thought about & understood & properly the subject of another post, but suffice to say it is a negative ethic. Heathens operate on a more positive ethic of doing something: I will fight to defend my kith, kin, folk, what have you.  Another ethical system they have is a virtues system. I much prefer these systems as more grown up ethics necessitating mature thought by the practitioner. 'Don't do X' places no necessity for deep thought or judgement on anyone.

What prevents me permanently adopting the ethical system of heathenry for myself is...I suppose you would call it its milieu. This is an aspect of heathenry that doesn't speak to me personally at all. It ought to. The pre-Christian Paganism of my native Britain would have been more like Northern Tradition than the imagined past of witchcraft. Even the names of the Heathen Gods are perpetuated in place names around here: things move slowly in the Black Country, many idioms in local speech are still Anglo-Saxon, & place names named after Odin also remain. But Heathenism is too attached to the idea of volk for me, since after all I have spent much of my adult life trying to get away from my family in one way or another.

That said, I can relate the Heathens' attachment to volk to the concept of the hedge that I'm always banging on about. If I'm so keen on making the point that ones witchery has to be something created in ones own personal hedge, & must therefore be unique for everyone, I can hardly criticise people for aspiring to draw solely on their own racial or ethnic memory.

But this of course is Heathenism's strength & raison d'etre, but also provides it with its main problem & public relations issue. It attracts the wrong class of punter. It is perfectly possible to worship your ancestral Gods without involving hate for other groups, but Heathenism's use of only one ethnic tradition attracts racists & even neo-Nazis. The attached picture is of a heathen's tattoo, using an ancient symbol - I suspect it mau even be Indo-European as it appears in Hinduism as well - which since its use by the Nazis is very much open to misinterpetation.

I'm guessing here, but if someone were to ask me how to 'become' a witch, I would advise them to a better acquaintance with their own hedge first, & I would think that if a person of non-European ancestry asked for admission to Asatru they may be encouraged to explore their own roots. This is a guess, since it would seem to me not to be a compleyte rebuttal but to further the basic principle of Heathenism. I'm finding even writing this it is making me very uncomfortable, since while I want to pay due attention to & respect differences, it is unfortunate when respectables groups in a religion have to put on their websites that they are not racist. The loony fringe's websites are plainly racist. It's doubly unfortunate because this problem arises from the core beliefs & values of the group, so isn't really one that can be dealt with easily any time soon.

It also doesn't help that I have such a thing for skinheads, which in itself is making me feel rather incoherent as I'm writing this.

Public relations problems notwithstanding, I'm sure the warrior spirit I value so much would rise to the occasion when the true Asatruar sees their religion being misrepresented as an excuse for violence towards other ethnicities. They have a saying that reputation is what other people know about you & honour is what you know about yourself, & honour can include defending your reputation from those who would defile it. 'I will fight to defend my religion from those who would misconstrue it as racist' is an interesting ethical statement, but one that many witches could learn from. 'I will act to stop it when I see harm being done' is very different to 'an it harm none, do what you will.' As it happens my will is for harm not to be done, & I will fight by magical means & otherwise, to stop it.

We are not a missionary religion, but I think as magical people we have a mission & this is it. My Goddess mother says that as witches we exist to allow people to rectify karma by giving them the consequences of their actions, consequences they could usually well avoid. It is time we borrowed from the Asatruar a bit more & visualised the sort of people we want to be rather than concentrating on what we think we shouldn't be doing.

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