The Development of Contemporary Heathen Culture – Part I.

Imagine yourself standing in a grove of trees on a warm, sunny June day. The sun is almost directly overhead and there is a buzz of excitement in the air belying the growing warmth of the day. All around you men and women stand gathered, nearly all dressed in puzzling garb. The men wear hand crafted tunics and trousers, many carefully embroidered with odd knot work designs and many have empty sheaths belted to their waists. The weapons lie carefully outside of the grove, and upon being asked about this oddity, one gentleman explains that iron weapons are tabooed on holy ground on this solstice day because of the pending sacrifice to Frey, God of the earth. Some of the women wear sheaths at their waists too but many more have donned the traditional “apron dresses” of a late Viking era Norse matron complete with turtle brooches adorned with a remarkable array of hanging strands of polished amber. Everyone’s attention is directed to the center of the field where a small pen containing a healthy white pig lies.

Soon the priest enters the field, carrying a lit torch and chanting softly in Anglo Saxon while circling the ritual site. She too is dressed in Viking era clothing but in her case, a substantial single edged knife remains belted to her waist and the long sleeves of her dress are tied carefully back. The prayers begin, some in modern English, some in Anglo Saxon, each hailing the God Frey as Lord of the land, thanking Him for His bounty. A large carved drinking horn is passed around the gathered folk and each person praises one of the Gods or Goddesses of the Norse pantheon and takes a drink. Folk are invited to go up and touch the pig, giving it messages to carry to the otherworld. Finally, at a sign from the priestess, two strong men bring the animal forward.

With spoken invocation to Frey, the priestess crouches down knife in hand. With a single, quick confident stroke, she slits the animal’s throat and captures the blood in a large wooden bowl. The animal dies without a sound, carrying the collected blessings of the people to their Gods and honored dead. Eventually the men take the animal away to begin the process of butchering it for the feast to follow. The priestess takes an evergreen branch and walking about the circle of her congregants, gently aspersing each person with the collected blood of the sacrificial swine…

Thus is the reader introduced to one of the defining moments of Heathen religious culture: the sacrificial blót. Out of all the varying cultural and religious practices that are slowly coming to define this emergent faith, none highlight the differences between Heathenry and contemporary American cultures quite so glaringly as this particular rite, which admittedly is performed by only a very small minority of adherents(See note 1). It is for this reason that I have chosen to begin this article in the style of Bronislaw Malinowski to highlight the strange cognitive disconnect that underlies the slow development of Heathen culture within the United States, a culture that is torn between normative social and religious practices of ancient Scandinavia and the pressing pull of the modern world.  This chapter will address the issues and controversies inherent in the development of a normative religiously based culture, and the intersection of both the sacred and secular within a modern American Heathen social context.

Heathenry is a body of religious denominations sharing both a common pantheon and core cultural cosmology. Practitioners are polytheists who worship (fairly exclusively) the Norse Gods and Goddesses. They are also Reconstructionists or, in some cases along the liberal end of the ideological spectrum, Reconstructionist derived. The former believe in reconstructing religious and cultural practices of pre-Christian Scandinavia, Germany and/or England as accurately as possible making as few concessions as possible to the needs of modernity where belief and religious practice are concerned. The latter use the existing historical and literary material as a springboard for personal gnosis and grant such personal gnosis far greater weight in the development of religious and cultural norms. This is one of the primary ideological fault lines between varying denominations.

In writing about the people that he studied, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski occasionally chose to introduce his readers to the topic at hand with vignettes designed to draw the reader into direct experience of the culture itself. By doing so, he provided a context for the explanation and analysis that would follow.  Malinowski was a functionalist, meaning that he conceived of culture as being an inter-related series of practices, each of which in some way contributed to the stability of the society in which they developed. Such practices were, no matter how strange they might appear to outsiders’ eyes, organic, functioning pieces of a greater cultural whole. In other words, within their culture of origin, specific practices and customs make sense. Nothing expresses cultural values more intrinsically than common religious practices. Emile Durkheim, in his seminal work “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” points out that:

Religion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rituals are ways of acting that are generated only within assembled groups and are meant to stimulate and sustain or recreate certain mental states in these groups. (Durkheim, p. 11).

Where this all comes into play within Heathenry, is that Heathen culture is fundamentally focused around consciously creating a culture of the sacred that utilizes those commonly shared religious concepts to define their social identity.

This ongoing process of religio-cultural synthesis presents the researcher with several unique difficulties the most pressing of which perhaps is that there is no clear agreement amongst Heathens about what precisely constitutes the clear boundaries of their community or the culture they seek to create. Indeed many would argue that there is not any such thing as “Heathen culture;” only to follow that statement by describing several clearly defined cultural markers by which they recognize themselves and others as Heathen.

Realistically, when examining the growth and development of a Heathen culture (or cultures, given the often extreme denominational differences) it is also necessary to study the dominant cultural paradigm from which the majority of modern Heathens are coming, in other words, 20^th century North American culture – specifically North American religious culture. It is a reality for contemporary American Heathenry that not only is it still a religion predominantly of converts but the overwhelming majority of those converts come from working to middle class Protestantism.  This latter fact is particularly important when one examines the expectations the majority of Heathens have regarding their religious culture and the rituals that define it.

In her study of modern Neo Paganism, “Witching Culture,” anthropologist Sabina Magliocco discusses this particular aspect of Heathen culture. In an interview with priest Laurel Olson, one of the women responsible for helping to begin the reconstruction of Heathen oracular and magico-religious practices in the United States, this exact issue comes to light. Dr. Magliocco, in speaking of Ms. Olson notes:

She believes that Heathenism appeals to them [Heathens] because of its textual basis in the Norse and Icelandic sagas and the Eddas – a textual focus that recalls the biblical literalism already familiar to them through their birth religions. She also remarked on the formal, rather staid nature of many Heathen rituals, relating it to their general discomfort with loss of control and expression of emotion. (Magliocco, p. 77).

This, perhaps more than any other factor, has dramatically impacted the development of this religious culture and the expectations of its adherents, as evidenced by the growing schism within the religion between the majority who accept the textually based orthodoxy and those who seek to grant moral supremacy or at the very least equal weight to mystical gnosis, moving beyond the normative authority of a written body of lore.(note 2) It is nearly impossible to study Heathen culture without also examining this earlier, formative influence.

Additionally, the definition of something so nebulous as “culture” or “religion” can be problematic in and of itself. Raymond Williams notes that “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” largely because it has come to mean distinctly different things within the broad expanse of several distinctly different academic disciplines. (Williams, p. 87). Religion of course, is no easier to define, particularly when we are examining the interstices between the two.

Part two will examine contemporary Heathen Weltanschauung through the lens of specific cultural markers.

Notes:

1. As of 2006, 1/6 of 1% of modern Asatruar practiced animal sacrifice, largely due to constraints of land, space and access to humanely raised livestock. (Krasskova, “Animal Sacrifice and the Ritual of Blót in Modern Heathenry: An Ethnographic Exploration.” Presented May 5, 2007 at Harvard University’s  Forging Folklore Colloquium).
2. It should be noted that these written materials constituting Heathen ‘lore’: the Poetic and Prose Eddas, Icelandic sagas, Anglo Saxon histories and legal codes, Icelandic legal codes, historical, anthropological and linguistic work were never intended to be utilized as religious material.

Bibliography

1. Arnal, William, (2000). “Definition” in Guide to the Study of Religion. London: Cassell.
2. Buckley, Joshua, (2002). Tyr: Myth, Culture, Tradition vol. 1. Atlanta: Ultra Press.
3. Durkheim, Emile, (2001). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4. Fabian, Johannes, (2002). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
5. Krasskova, Galina, (2005). Exploring the Northern Tradition. New Jersey: New Page Books.
6. Magliocco, Sabina, (2004). Witching Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
7. Williams, Raymond, (1983). Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press.

This article is part of a forthcoming work titled ‘Essays in Modern Heathenry,” forthcoming in Fall 2010 through Asphodel Press.