Tag Archives: Farwerck

Franz Farwerck on remnants of Männerbünde

I wrote this article in 2013/4 for an upcoming issue of Northern Traditions that I doubt will ever appear after all these years, so I decided to publish it here.

When the Christianisation, at least the external, of the German tribes was completed, the proceedings of the men-bonds were initially continued. They could be divided into two groups, rites of initiation, which were more or less secret and the public proceedings, which sprang from views that were grounded in the initiations. Of these initiations, […] we find only traces in later periods, enough though to determine their existence. We mostly know the public proceedings because of ecclesiastic prohibitions, but also from many remnants that have survived in folkways. (2)
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Franz Eduard Farwerck, a biography

The man Franz Eduard Farwerck (1889-1969) somehow fascinates me. His first name is often spelled Frans, but his obituary has “Franz”, as do records in online genealogy websites. Before I had heard of the man I ‘accidentally’ ran into his major work Noord-Europese Mysteriën en Hun Sporen Tot Heden (‘Northern European Mysteries and their Traces to the Present’ 1970) at the perfect moment (2002/3). The amount of information, details and photos in this book is staggering and the red thread thought-provoking: In the Teutonic past there have been mystery-religions in Northern Europe just like there were mysteries around the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere in the world. However they changed in form, especially when Christianity came to those parts, they survived to our present day as one of the origins of Masonic symbolism. Elsewhere on this website you can read more about this and how this idea fits into ‘my own scheme’. I am not going to talk about that now, since Farwerck himself is the topic of this article (mostly see Traditionalistic Asatru) . read more

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 a much larger text 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.