Fortunately I didn’t have to wait for this summer solstice issue of the Traditie magazine as I had for the last one. This is the second issue with the ‘new style’: different writers, less scholarly and with more focus on the present and ‘living Asatru’. Herman Vanhove still opens the magazine as he has done for years and he speaks a little about his Chinese friend who has passed away… 2500 years ago: Confucius. As always a humerous article about daily life. Next up is an interview with Vanhove and his family. This marks the start of inviews with “sibbes”, an old-fashioned term which means roughly something like “household” or in a larger context “family”. The Vanhove sibbe is questioned about their pagan past, their raising children, heathendom in daily life, etc. Next up is founder Koenraad Logghe who uses the allegory of an old car to explain why Traditie keeps away from politics, a subject that has brought many problems with outsiders in the past. “W. Heydens” wrote an article about “the holy book of the pagans”. Alwin Goethals wrote something about “Sacred War, traditonal grounds and elements of struggle”, a lengthy article that gives the current state of the man’s lifelong investigation (both literary as practical) of Western martial arts. After a poem “Elcmar Bölverkr” says that we don’t become pagan, but we are pagan and then “Mummelaar Vandenhangzak” presents a ‘light version’ of the lengthy series of articles of Jurgen Vandenbotermet that could be found in the ‘old style’ issues of the magazine. Benny Vangelder wrote a text about goddesses and the last text is a story about a man’s obsession with fire.
As always the magazine is written in Dutch, it is well-printed and available only from Werkgroep Traditie vzw. For information or a sample copy go to the website and click “tijdschrift”.