articles

Believe it or not, but I am actually still writing fairly actively. As I have said elsewhere, I have been working on other websites for several years now. They are aimed at another audiences or at least, I hope to present some subjects to readers that would not read Gangleri.nl because of the rest of the content.

I suppose you know about Farwerck.nl, which is all about Franz Farwerck. That information used to be on Gangleri.nl, but it became too much and too hard to present properly. When I just launched that website there was a lot of work to be done to it. Now my new sources of information start to dry up and the website is getting more static.

Quite a couple of years ago, 2014, I started two websites about mixed gender Freemasonry. I joined a lodge, was looking for information and found out that there is not all that much information about the subject. Plenty of sites about ‘normal’ Freemasonry and also some about the mixed gender version, but all very scattered. I figured I would bring the information together. There is a world-wide and a Dutch/Flemish one.

Then there are two more Masonic sites about very specific approaches. I made these with the hope that people with similar subjects may bump into each other. One website is about about a subject you will also find on Gangleri.nl, the heathen approach to Freemasonry, the other is in Dutch (and is quite new) and about esoteric Freemasonry.

Just as Gangleri.nl the audiences to all websites are limited. The international co-Masonic website may have 1000+ Facebook “likers”, but very inactive (the website is static too). The other websites have even more limited audiences.

Several websites, hundreds of reviews of books, films and music releases, 100+ shorter and longer articles. In almost 20 years of website making I have quite an output and all that just for a handful of people. It is what it is. Hopefully my scribblings may every now and then help somebody looking for information.

Besides writing, I also manage other websites such as that of my Grand Lodge and some of its lodges. I also used to manage Militia.be but the website suddenly disappeared. The band apparently stopped. I did not hear a thing about that. Then there is this inactive website of my girlfriend that needs an occasional update…

Man, I should think of hobbies that do not require a computer screen! My hobbies and my work are too much alike, but of course my hobbies are more interesting, so I guess that is it.

In 2014 I experimented a little with the way the website looks. In most “sections” I added double sidebars to give a bit more attention to ‘other types of content’, such as “blogs” and the quotes in the book reviews section. This articles section is the only one where I did not add the extra sidebar. I do not write a whole lot of articles, but I have even less inspiration to write “blog” entries. It is not like I stopped reading and thinking and even have some new ‘spiritual experiments’, but there are a few reasons to hold back.

First, not everything that lays within my field of interest, is fitting for Gangleri.nl, even though this website is pretty wide in content. Also I do not want this to be a website about me, I just want to share information that some people may find of interest. Then there is the point that the internet keeps growing and I have no interest in presenting information that can also be found elsewhere. Sure, when I think I can do better I will, but that does happen all that often. Or it does not happen here!

But do not worry. I did not become a materialistic carreer hunter. I still read a load of books (some reviewed here) and other material. I attend ‘heathen’ gatherings (but not as many as I used to) and other things of ‘spiritual interest’. I have had a website for 15 years in 2016 (!). Reviewing books, music and films has become more of a habbit in comparison to the drive there was in the early days, but I have no intention of stopping. Even with just one article a year, I still hope to be able to present something read-worthy every once in a while. Perhaps with the growing of the years some youthfull enthousiasm got lost. I sometimes read discussions of fora with younger people and I no longer feel like joining in and the topics under discussion do not kindle my interest. It is also odd to see that even after 15 years of (predecessors of) Gangleri.nl I appear to be (about) alone with my strange ideas. I do sometimes wonder if I ever inspired someone to look at things from another perspecive. If there are people who read these pages and found something they had been looking for. I very rarely hear something of my readers (or so I have none?). Somehow Gangleri.nl seems to have never been invitational for interaction. Looking at my stats, people do find their digital ways to Gangleri.nl, so I can just hope that found what they were looking for.

I am sure that at some point I will think of something to write about again. Until that time, there are other sections that are more active than this one.

There was a time that I wrote articles frequently, actually, this was one of the main reaons to start a website in 2001. Around the year 2000 I was running towards the ends of my ‘theosophist’ period and set out to find new material to study. I did run into those new subjects, got involved in a Dutch publication and started to write more seriously. In 2002 I met my girlfriend (who was involved in the same project) who at the time studied German and philosophy, but had a broader interest in esoteric matters. Together we ran into a Flemish Asatru group, the founder of which is a genuine esotericist and I ran into tons of subjects to delve into. 2000 To about 2006 were my most fruitfull years when it comes to writing articles. Serious projects such as my investigations of the Christian Cabala (2003), Mithraism (2004), Hermetica (2004), rune calendars (2005) and Johannes Bureus (2005) resulted in the most popular articles that you can find on this website. After that, things ended up pretty much dead. I still read quite a bit (but not like I used to) and about a wide variety of subjects, but almost nothing inspires me to investigate something nowadays and little is worth writing about (the subjects mentioned earlier were all subjects about which little information could be found on the internet at the time). What happened that took away my inspiration?

I am, indeed, circling around the same subjects a lot, nothing much new comes out of it, but naturally I do not read anything I am not interested in. Two things that I can think of occured around the time. In 2005 or 2006 me and my girlfriend were allowed into a group for esoteric studies. After a thrilling few years the leader of that group left both the mother organisation and the smaller study groups (2008) leaving a void. Another thing that strikes me when adding a bit of chronology to the matter is that I notice that I changed jobs around the time that I almost entirely stopped writing: July 2007. No, it is not a high-responsibility stressfull job that I work 60 hours a week in. Quite on the contrary actually. My job tends to be rather mindkilling. When I switched it was high time for me to do something else and the opportunity occured. I ran into an interesting new field of work and got the opportunity to switch without switching employers. I still think I am in an interesting field, both work-wise and regarding the organisation that I work for (that split off of the organisation that I used to work for), but as the least-ambitious person on my department everybody seems to be taking triple-jumps in carreer leaving crumbs of even more mindkilling work for me. The problem is: I honestly do not know what I want. Is my vocational standstill cause of my ‘spiritual standstill’? The other way around perhaps? Did I arrive at that 30-something midlife crisis (called “quarterlife crisis”)? I guess I need something to break the circle so you might have something to read again…

Boy do I have little inspiration to write articles! I have a longer text submitted to a periodical, but things are quiet from their part, so in between I decided to reread the great book “De Graal” of Koenraad Logghe which I was sure would bring me some ideas, but not really… I did not come any further than making quotes from the book so far. Is there anything that you would like me to write about? Something that needs clarification or something that you think I know something about?

In The Journal Of Contemporary Heathen Thought there is an article of Alain de Benoist called Intolerance and Religion. In this article De Benoist argues that religion is one of the major sources of the world’s conflicts, especially monotheistic religions.

Indeed, what is most striking, when studying Europe’s ancient religions -the pagan ones- is precisely the fact that they do not know any form of intolerance which is, properly speaking, religious in nature. These are polytheistic religions to which peoples adhere without thinking for one instant that they must criticize other people’s needs to sacrifice to other deities. These religons are strangers to fanaticism. They know neither religious presecution, crucades against “infidels” or “non-believers,” nor war in the name of God. More orthopractic in nature than orthodox, they equally know nothing about notions of dogma, schism or heresy.

So how comes that the author of On Being A Pagan gets six pages in a pagan journal to rant about the “Abrahamistic faiths”, a hobby of many heathens? Sure, more than a few followers of the “Abrahamistic faiths” do not give a very good example of ‘religious tolerance’, but when ‘we’ claim to be ‘better’ because we are ‘polytheistic’, would it not be logical to start giving a proper example instead of continuously rant against Christianity in particular? Sure, we can go on quoting the Bibles’ and Qur’an’s bloody passages, keep telling about the bloody pasts and the fanatics of our own time, but to what end?

Personally I prefer to look at the bright side. If Christianity did not incorporate so much ‘heathen’ elements in our parts, who knows what would have come from them? Also, I prefer genuine religious people over the larger part of our contemporaries who care for nothing but their career, house, car and prestige. I have had better discussions with Muslims and Christians alike, then with people calling themself “pagan” while they are actually atheistic politicians. I do not say that we have to tolerate anything that is done under a guide of religion. Surely not, much of what happens under a pretended religious banner is nothing but the lowest level of fanaticism. A person who is truely religious understands that another person with perhaps another faith, is truely his brother or sister. The fact that abominations are executed with religion as excuse, does nothing about the religion itself, or what it should be. And to close this little flow of thought, we should not tolerate, meaning, seeing things through the fingers that we disapprove of, but respect what is to be respected and that because we are religious.

It seems that I finally found a more ‘elegant’ way for the ‘blog’ parts of all sections, a way to keep the blog posts away from the articles. The fact that I ‘do not blog’ here very much, was the reason to start my tests here, there were only a few ‘blogs’ to transfer. Unfortunately this ‘blog’ gets excerpted just like the rest (which I of course did because articles are usually quite long), but after two years, I think this is a step forward.

I have added “blogs” to every section in order to be able to write down some things that might be about the section, but not part of it, in this case meaning: not an article.

I know nothing much happens in this section. I have hardly time to read book, let alone make an article. I do have an idea for an article about fire rituals, but that will require some more investigation.

For the rest, I actually have to work out a ‘lecture’ that I gave a couple of months ago, but that will definately take some time and I am afraid that before that is finished, this section will remain slumbering.