I do not remember what exactly I read and when, but it did start making me think about “escapism”. There is this track of Das Ding with the constantly repeating sample/vocals: “why is my life so boring, why is my internet so slow?” Obviously a reference to a futile ‘importance’ of a certain element in the life of the young. If happiness in life depends on the speed of your internet connection, something must be wrong.
Read More »EscapismIn late summer 2012 me and my girlfriend spent our holidays in the very South of France. I had never really been to France save for Paris when I was a teenager and passing through on my way to the UK. ‘Cathar country’ had been on my wishlist for quite a while. Why? Perhaps that romantic view on the Cathars, being curious about what is left and of course the environment over there. We found a place to stay quite near to the most famous castle of the Cathars, Montségur and had found a few other things that we wanted to see. I must say, a week of visiting Cathar sites (and some other things) has put the subject into some perspective.
What I did not really expect is that the Cathars are actually the main tourist feature of the region and many, many tourists set off to southern France for that, too many! There are Cathar car-tours, every ruin has to be paid for to get in, you are never alone when you visit a site, there is some sort of Cathar passport that you can use to collect stamps when you visit a site, but this includes sites that I have not found the Cathar connection with. It is a craze actually. Visiting some sites, buying books, reading the information provided to tourists, etc. has mostly flattened my (slumbering) ideas of before. A few thoughts.Read More »Land of the Cathars
Last week during holidays we visited the German city of Halle where the Nebra skydisc is presented in the “Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte” (“national prehistoric museum”) along with the other items that were found with it and much more prehistoric artifacts. We also visited the Arche Nebra visitors centre in Nebra, where the disc was found, but that was not too interesting. Nearby there is a ‘sun observatory’ (like Stonehenge) in Goseck, the two are in some ways connected. The Nebra disc is 3600 years old. It depicts what appear to be a sun and a moon and stars. Later the strips on both sides were added (and the left one again lost) and the bow at the botton of the disc. There is a lot to say about the disc, things that you can probably find elsewhere on the world wide web. The crescent would be a ‘third phase’ crescent and when this phase appears together with the Pleiades in the morning sky at the summer solstice, this means that the current year is a leap year (every third year is one) and a month has to be added in order to have the moon-months and sun-years correct again. The arcs on both sides refer to the solstices and the arc on the bottom could be a bark floating between both solstices. This is not what I wanted to write about though.Read More »A Godless heathenry?
There seems to be a tendency among scholars to investigate temporary paganism. There are people who say that paganism is the world’s fastest growing religion. I am currently reading Michael Strmiska’s Modern Paganism In World Cultures with essays about Romuva (Lithuanian heathenry), pagans in the US military, Irish modern druids and Asatru in Northern America and Iceland (among other essays). I also know of books about current German paganism (but not like Strmiska’s book) and I know about an anthropology student who investigated the Flemish group that I am involved in (but I never saw the result). Since there seems to be nothing (but information of antifa groups) available about Dutch and Belgium Asatru, I thought to write a little introduction for investigators who may be unfamiliar with nowadays heathenry in the Dutch-speaking part of Northern Europe.Read More »Asatru in the Low Countries
I was unpleasently surprised when I heard the news yesterday. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (since 1940), announced that he will lay down a part of his function in favour of a chosen successor. A few things went through my head. I had the (Theosophistic mistaken?) assumption that Tibet was ruled by a pair of Lamas, the Dalai Lama who is the worldly leader and the Panchen Lama (also Pänchen, Teshu or Tashi Lama), the spiritual leader. According to the Dutch news, the Dalai Lama was both the spiritual and worldly leader of the Tibetans and from now on, he will only be the spiritual leader. The current Panchen Lama (Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the 11th Panchen Lama since 1995) was born in 1989 and he disappeared. According the Chinese occupier the 11th Panchen Lama is Qoigyijabu (Gyancain Norbu), but even the Tibetans themselves do not agree on who is the actual 11th Panchen Lama. Perhaps because all of this controversy, the Dalai Lama took both tasks, but when you read (Western) information about the Lamas, it looks like the Panchen Lama has always been on the second plane.Read More »Democrazy in Tibet?
Our aim is to encourage the expansion of Heathen thought into the domains of theology, philosophy, sociology, psychology and other discplines that have yet to be examined by Heathenry or any other form of European polytheism.
Thus say the editors of the Journal Of Contemporary Heathen Thought. I have said it before, I am no fond of describing heathenism as polytheistic, mine not for sure!Read More »Polytheism?
I have said on countless occasions that Dumézil and his theories are not very popular among scholars nowadays. I have read arguments against his tripartite system that were sometimes convincing, sometimes not, but no scholar who disgards the hypthesis of Dumézil presents a workable alternative. Currently I am reading the book The War Of The Gods by Jarich Oosten. The book is of 1985 so the criticism is not just of today. The book is subtitled The Social Code in Indo-European Mythology. Some of you might now know what sort of book this is, but only when I started reading it, I learned that this book is written from the (cultural) anthropological viewpoint. Not completely my thing it seems, but the author writes fairly clearly and he takes a couple of pages to say something about Dumézil and his tripartite system which is worthy to think over. I will quote the mentioned book extensively.Read More »Arguments against Dumézil
Many times I have thought about the subject and recently there has been discussions about it: does the focus of many European “pagans” not lie too much on the North? Does the term “Asatru” not refer to much to the god of the ancient Scandinavians? Why do we refer to “Odin” and “Thor” and not to the same gods in our own tongue? What actually do we really know about these local versions of the old faith? I have tried to to make some sort of inventarisation and initial investigation into a subject that proves to be quite difficult.Read More »Regional religious history
Last week I ran into the “blog” of Mark Sedgewick, the author of Against The Modern World, a scholarly investigation of Traditionalism that I haven’t read. On his “blog” Sedgewick puts novelties, thoughts, new leads, etc. One of these new leads is what he calls “music scene Traditionalism”, of which he writes “It is one of the most important and fastest growing forms of Traditionalism in the West today.” In the course of his investigation, he ran into an article with a similar subject in a new periodical called Journal for the study of radicalism (see volume 1, issue 2) which is published by Michigan State University. Apparently it is under editorship of Arthur Versluis who is also one of the editors of the esoteric publication of the same university (some university!). In the second volume of the Journal for the study of radicalism is an article by Stéphane François… Read More »“Music scene Traditionalism”
Today I ran into the review of the Tyr Journal on Northvegr. In quite strong words the reviewer Ári Óðinssen takes distance from the content of this journal. we should not be allowing the voices we hear in this publication to be the only voices pushing the edge of philosophy in this age. They are, by our silence, representing us. I repeat this to make it clear: they are, by our silence, representing us… Óðinssen seems to think that Tyr stands for a radical traditionalist form of “Asatru”, while in my own idea, Tyr is a “radical traditionalist” publication (as an umbrella term) with here and there a ‘pagan edge’. Óðinssen fears that Tyr tries to make some kind of extremist system of the ancestral faith. I doubt that this is the aim of the authors and I personally never saw the publication that way. The interest of the editors… Read More »Heithni