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A. McNallen In Defense of the Folkish View
Biology, culture, and spirituality are all intimately connected, and any attempt to separate them is doomed to frustration. The ancestry of the group, what the group does, and the spiritual perception of the group are not three different things, but only aspects of a greater whole. This Folk-centered essence of Asatru often comes under attack from those who are new to our ancestral ways, or who have not shaken off the conditioning of modern culture. The idea that religion, culture, and biology are intertwined runs against the political dogma of our day, and is sometimes labeled "racist" by those who do not understand the deeper truths involved. Sometimes, those who consider themselves Asatru are the first to criticize the Folkish view. Since these are people who, like us, follow the Aesir and Vanir it is all the more important to respond fully to their objections.
Their criticisms take several fairly predictable forms. I have summed up some of their arguments in the paragraphs that follow, and provided some possible answers. 1.
"The Vikings spread their seed far and wide on an equal First
of all, this is not really true. The Viking colony in Greenland left many
skeletons which have been exhaustively studied by scientists who marveled
that the Greenlanders seem not to have intermarried with the natives. Back
home in Northern Europe, it is true, Nordics and Celts married and
intermingled rather freely, and the genetics of Iceland shows very strong
Irish intermixture. However, the Scandinavians and the Celts are two very
closely related branches of the Indo-European family. Biologically and
culturally, they are very much kin. Secondly,
the Vikings are hardly ideal role models for Asatru. The Viking Age is very
late in the history of the Germanic people. It was a time when our
traditional culture was being eroded by outside forces, a time of change and
cosmopolitanism. To judge Asatru by the behavior of a Viking adventurer in
Byzantium, for example, makes as much sense as judging Christianity by the
actions of an American 2. "All men and women
are descendants from Ask and Embla, the This
is part of the lore of the Northern people. There are thousands of such
stories told by cultures both ancient and modern, from the Old Testament to
the interior of the Amazon today. Humans
in their tribal state were extremely ethnocentric, and often their various
groupings bear names that mean something like "the true people" or
"the real human beings" to distinguish themselves from their
neighbors. Likewise, their creation myths tend to be ethnocentric and to
pertain only to themselves - not to all of humankind, with which they are
not particularly concerned. To
argue that all humans are descended of Ask and Embla is to say that the
myths of every other native culture are wrong, and that only ours is right.
From the Australian Outback to the depths of Africa, groups have their own
explanations for how they came to be. It is the height of arrogance to
assume that our stories apply to them, and that the sacred tales of their
own people are false. Unless we assume that their lore is inferior and
inaccurate, we are forced to the logical conclusion that each group is right
- so long as it speaks to its own people, and no other. Indeed,
to say that our creation story is the only true one is to deny the existence
and validity of other peoples' Gods - for it imposes Odin, Hoenir, and Lodur
upon these other folk, shoving their Gods rudely out of the picture and
negating their own religious explanations for the nature of things. Most
Asatruar would not support such religious imperialism. To say that ours is
the "one, true" story of human origin smacks not only of religious
intolerance but...well, racism! 3.
"The Gods and Goddesses have sex with all sorts of beings - The
stories of our Gods and Goddesses are written down in the Prose Edda and the
Poetic Edda. The Eddas are valuable resources, but they are symbolic, not
historical. Their contents were subject to all Nothing
in our lore suggests that the Eddas are meant to be taken literally, and to
do so puts us in the same category as those fundamentalist Christians who
take the Bible, word for word, as the exact and infallible word of their
God. To take the tales of our Gods and Goddesses as lessons urging us to
mate outside our kind (or outside our species!) is as wrong as the Christian
who argues that the Genesis creation story should be taken as scientific
truth. Myth is bigger than that. 4.
"Asatru is a religion, and joining it is no different than This
is a modern fantasy. No indigenous group really believes that its religion
is just a set of practices and abstract concepts, separate from membership
in the community, to be adopted or set aside at will by outsiders. People
may decide to become a Baptist or a Lutheran, but no one looks in the mirror
while brushing their teeth in the morning, and thinks "Hey, I'm tired
of being a Catholic. I think I'll become a Lakota Sioux." Native
religion is not something apart from the life of the tribe. Religion,
politics, economics, values and customs are all part of one thing. There is
no real separation among them. Taken as a whole, this Some
religions, in contrast, are not based on the experience of a particular
group, but on abstract philosophy or a revelation divorced from any tribal
or national group. The monotheistic religions are the best examples of
these. One can drift from Methodism to Mormonism, or from Catholicism to
Islam, based on abstract reasoning or emotional attachment. It is here, not
in indigenous belief, that the Shedding
the Psychic Remnants of Christianity Most of the lore-based arguments against our Folkish worldview are based on the four presented above. In general, they show a common thread - namely, Christian thinking! First, the idea that all humans spring from Ask and Embla may be appealing from a simplistic viewpoint, but it implies the non-existence of other peoples' Gods and thus reflects the same religious imperialism we find in historical Christianity. Likewise, to propose that the Aesir and Vanir have sex outside their "race" (species?) is to use the Eddic texts in the literal way that fundamentalist Christian uses the Bible. Finally, to suggest that religions can be chosen in the same way one chooses a hat or a new car is to divorce the group of people from their Way, which is characteristic of the monotheistic religions. Those
who reject the Folkish viewpoint often accuse us of not really being true to
the Aesir and Vanir. Ironically, though, a closer look shows their arguments
against us to be much more in line with Reproduced with permission from Stephen A. McNallen and the AFA web site |