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A Godless heathenry?

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?

Asatru in the Low Countries

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

Democrazy in Tibet?

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?

from “The New Antaios” : Frans Eduard Farwerck

This text was written for The New Antaios online journal in 2010 or so. The website has been taken down since, so I decided to publish it here for ‘archival reasons’.
Go here for much more information about Farwerck.

Some 8 years ago I met my girl­friend. We were both involved in a short-lived Dutch ‘spir­i­tual mag­a­zine’ that liked to treat con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects. Through the edi­tor of the mag­a­zine my girl­friend got acquinted with a Flem­ish ‘Asatru’ group and later so did I. At the time my inter­est still mainly laid at Renais­sance eso­teri­cism, Medieval magic, etc. This was already a bit closer to home, since before I had an inter­est in more exotic, East­ern sub­jects. In any case, meet­ing Asatru excelled my shift towards even more domes­tic inter­ests, the old reli­gion of North­ern Europe. While becom­ing active in the group I ini­tially sticked to my inter­ests, but I heard a lot of inter­est­ing new paths.Read More »from “The New Antaios” : Frans Eduard Farwerck

Fiskrúnar, suínrúnar, skiprúnar

A while ago I ran into the little book The Icelandic Rune-Poem (1998) by R.I. Page and later I bought his book An Introduction To English Runes (first published 1973, revised and republished in 1999). Page is a rune-scholar. In both books he writes about what he calls “cryptic runes”, runes in code. I have looked around a little and noticed that there is not much information to be found about this subject on the world wide web. There is a very short article about “Cipher Runes on Wikipedia and a handfull of references to it. The article does not say all that much though, nor does the rest of the information that I found on the internet. I do not claim to make a definate article about the subject, but I will at least give a bit more information.Read More »Fiskrúnar, suínrúnar, skiprúnar

Kinship, gift-exchange, honour and feud in Medieval Frisia and Iceland

In this article I want to say a thing or two about a few interrelated ‘processes’ in the Medieval Germanic society. How groups form and how they are maintained and how ‘mechanisms’ such as honour and feud work. These at first sight varied subjects will prove to be interwoven.
For this article I have used a few books that you will find listed at the bottom. All authors more or less treat parts of the whole, but from different perspectives and speaking about different societies. It seems as if all of these kinds of works owe a great deal to Willam Miller’s Bloodtaking and Peacemaking which is one of the books that I used. Miller is mostly concerned with Medieval Iceland. Another author I consulted is Jos Bazelmans who dived deeply into the Beowulf story and therefor Anglo-Saxon culture. Another Dutch author, Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld wrote a book about gift-giving mostly concerning people and the Church in the late-medieval Netherlands, a period in which little empires started to arise and this lord-civilian bond is also very present in Bijsterveld’s book. Further I used two articles and last but not least, the inspiration to start this little investigation came from Han Nijdam’s excellent Lichaam, Eer en Recht which is about Medieval Frisian society, with many references to Medieval Iceland.Read More »Kinship, gift-exchange, honour and feud in Medieval Frisia and Iceland

Arguments against Dumézil

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

On honour

I am currently reading a very interesting book about “Compensation Tariffs” in medieval Frisia. Of course I will review the book when I finish it. The book speaks about the “feuding society” in which honour is of high value. The author explains the ancient idea of honour very well.

Compensation systems, of which the Old Frisian penalty lists are an example, appear in many societies. […] The meganism flourishes in a society without a strong (central) authority – in which the government has the monopoly of violence – and where free men form a constitutional state. Such a society is often typified as being a feuding society. In a feuding society an insult or physical violence (sometimes) leads to revenge and revenge (sometimes) to a feud. The state of enmity that rises between two groups of people can be reconciled, compensation plays an important part.

p. 53 (my translation from Dutch to English)Read More »On honour

Regional religious history

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