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A place for Aryan (European) Folkish Pagans
The significance of this type of band of young warriors in Srubnaya culture is particularly interesting since it may provide clues about early Indo-European migration and expansion processes across Eurasia.
Initial raids led by young warriors could have led to the establishment of new settlements in foreign lands. These ‘riders’ (perhaps in the literal sense of the word) may have prepared the ground for a greater migration of other sections of the population, including whole tribes with women, children and elderly people.
A.Kaliff & T.Oestigaard
But myth, so we are told, is only poetry. What have we said when we say that? Do we mean that it rose out of an arbitrary act of the imagination? Nobody seriously believes that. Genuine poetry is never arbitrary. The philologist knows quite well that the poets of antiquity asked the gods to fill them with the spirit of truth.
Whatever we may think about the nature of poetic creativity, and no matter how demonstrable or probable it is that many individual poets wrote and continued to write poetry around myth, it should be quite clear that all of this poetry from individuals has as its basic premise the existence of the world of myth; and that this original myth can not, in turn, be explained away by that which we call "the poetic process."
W.F.Otto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obQVaHUV3m0
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Though fragmented and obscure Xenophanes’ heretical teachings did effect one man, a man who is heralded for centuries first by christian and then by atheistic (both anti-Pagan) academics as the philosopher. I’m talking about Aristocles of Athens aka Plato. In fact, many scholars would agree with me saying that Xenophanes’ universalistic doctrine is proto-platonism. To name a few:
If we look closely, however, some of the leading themes and topics of Plato's Republic, dating from roughly a century and a quarter after Xenophanes, appear already in Xenophanes' fragments.
H.S. Long, Xenophanes' Concern with Ultimate Reality and Meaning
In the Republic, Plato shows himself the spiritual heir of Xenophanes when he states that the guardians of his ideal state are more deserving of honors and public support than the victors at Olympia, criticizes the stories told about the gods by the poets…
L.James, Xenophanes The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Atheism has sporadically appeared in pre-Socratic philosophy, but due to prompt action failed to cause long-term effect. As Nilsson states:
A very severe criticism of the gods and of their cult had been made by Xenophanes and Heraclitus without doing much harm.
The reason why Xenophanes’ teachings were not as influential as those of later atheists is because the man was quickly exiled after he, according to Diogenes, wrote poetry “attacking Hesiod and Homer and denouncing what they said about the gods”. Thus showing great hubris considering himself a moral authority above the Gods themselves. For this the heretic was exiled and lived the rest of his life a wandering outcast.
“Any one who shall have eaten or drank with him, or who shall have touched him,” said the law, “should purify himself.”
Ancient Greeks considered all forms of impiety atheism. To quote M.Nilsson:
"The contention that the sun was a glowing lump and the moon another inhabited world could hardly be counted as atheism."
Yet no real distinction was made between those who outright denied the existence of the Gods like Critias (a student of Socrates and Plato’s cousin who considered Gods an invention of rulers to control the masses) and naturalists like Prodicus (a friend of Socrates who saw Gods as personifications of nature).
To Greeks all of the above were equally guilty of atheism, despite their differences.
I’m almost done with the big analysis of late Greek occultism and atheism and it’s consequences. It may end up longer than expected, since I found another good author who wrote on the topic and am now blitz reading his work. Hope you can wait a bit.
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Nonbelief does matter; it remains a real concern for our modern revivalism.
From the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity, and even earlier, the entire folk community's relationship with the Immortal Pantheon depended on their recognition of their powers, their very reality. Community participation was vital. If someone's lack of faith or lack of ritual action arose, it threatened the whole community's relationship with the divine. Translated into English today, we would levy this charge of "impiety" against those who failed to maintain sincerity in both belief and ritual performance. In some societies, you had no choice but to participate, lest you be exiled, at the least. An example of this was demonstrated when Thervingi king Athanaric would test those Visigoths' loyalty to the Almighty by requiring them to partake in ritualized meals. Those who refused could be charged with impiety. According to the historic record, the king had approximately some 300 Goths prosecuted – and executed – for apostasizing their former convictions. They had also converted to Arian Christianity, something that Athanaric personally had declared an enemy to the very Gothic way of life.
For those who say, "You can believe whatever you want as a Pagan," they are simply wrong. Lack of theism, lack of acknowledgement of the sacred was not just unconventional, but a capital crime. We should be just as worried about it today as our ancestors were then in their time.
Don’t forget that tomorrow there will be a live panel discussion on loki at 6:00 PM EST
Featured Speakers:
Mark Puryear, Author and Researcher
William Reaves, Author and Researcher
Keith Osgood, Author and Researcher
It will take place on Dave Martel's YouTube channel
An old axe of mine. More part of the decor, than a tool at this point.
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Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christian theology throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the East, and sometimes in the West as well. In the East, major Greek Fathers like Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus were influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism, but also Stoicism often leading towards asceticism and harsh treatment of the body, for example stylite asceticism. In the West, St. Augustine of Hippo was influenced by the early Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. Later on, in the East, the works of the Christian writer Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who was influenced by later Neoplatonists such as Proclus and Damascius, became a critical work on which Greek church fathers based their theology, like Maximus believing it was an original work of Dionysius the Areopagite.
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I do not claim that this forest worship exhausted all the ideas our ancestors had about the deity and its abode; it was only the most important. Individual gods may dwell on mountain peaks, in rocky caves, in rivers, but the solemn, general worship of the people has its seat in the grove; nowhere could it have found a more worthy home.
Jakob Grimm
One of my favorite heroes Mykyta the Tanner drawn by B.Michailov
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Leave a pic in the comments which best fits your ideology. Here's a good one.
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Wayland the Smith statuette from Germany
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An individual is a link in the family chain which ultimately stems from the Gods themselves forever tying one to his ancestors
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Religion was the sole factor in the evolution of ancient Greece and Rome, the bonding of family and state was the work of religion, that because of ancestor worship the family, drawn together by the need to engage in the ancestral cults, became the basic unit of ancient societies, expanding to the gens, the Greek phratry, the Roman tribe, to the patrician city state, and that decline in religious belief and authority in the moral crisis provoked by Roman wealth and expansion doomed the republic and resulted in the triumph of Christianity and the death of the ancient city-state.
Joseph M.McCarthy
If you want to read a detailed analysis of how Xenophanes was a proto-platonist you can read the authors above.
In short, both Xenophanes and Plato considered Gods (traditional, literal interpretation) to be imperfect and too human-like (even though Gods created men in their own image, not vice versa).
Both came up with a God above all. Though this may sound reasonable as Gods do have chieftain(s), one who reads further soon sees that this deity is completely unlike the ones in the myth. It is neither male nor female, has no race and ethnicity, it does not exist in real world, being seated above and beyond reality. It’s as ganz andere as it gets, just like christians got to see their god (remember that many influential ones were neoplatonists).
Meanwhile Heraclitus was known as an arrogant misanthrope and an outcast, just like Xenophanes. As Diogenes writes:
"Finally, he became a hater of his kind and wandered on the mountains, and there he continued to live, making his diet of grass and herbs"
And like most ancient heretics he hated the Greek tradition. Again, according to Diogenes Heraclitus used to say that "Homer deserved to be chased out of the lists and beaten with rods…"
Early christian apologist Justin Martyr considered both Socrates and Heraclitus christians before christ. Ancient heretics like them were generally well-liked by christians since they too opposed traditional belief. Remember that many church fathers were platonists.
Honestly the ancient approach was correct. One does not need to claim that Gods don’t exist and never had to be an atheist.
Euheremists claim that Gods did exist, but were mortals.
Naturalists say that Gods do exist, but are just natural phenomena like rain or sunlight.
There is also a metaphysic interpretation which claim that Gods exist, yet not here and now but in some mythical realm beyond.
In the end it’s all the same. Literal existence of the Gods is denied by all of them and it was enough to be charged with atheism.
We know that atheism began in Ancient Greece. Late Antiquity deserves to be dressed as the most subversive pre-christian civilization out there, a Weimar Republic of it’s time.
All of the above is no secret to academia, but the latter being run by the usual suspects, we rarely (if ever) see any deep dives into the topic as well as proper treatment of the many heretical teachings of that period. It’s usually the opposite, with literal heretic Socrates being considered the first true philosopher and a wiseman. Battling this very intentionally subversive status quo is imperative.
What's happening in the debate over mythic realism vs. anti-realism is the heathen equivalent of the lead up to the council of Nicaea. The basic shape of heathenry is being hammered out.
It's not going to look quite like the council of Nicaea because heathenry is not and cannot be ecumenical. But nor is it "do what you feel like". There are certain things that are and are not legitimate heathenry. It's not Protestantism, it's not sola scriptura. This is folk religion, and you have to defer to the folk.
Mythic realism is going to win because folk religion has always been mythically realist, it believes straightforwardly in the myths. Once heathens run up against serious Christian and Muslim theologians we are going to get smoked unless we have a solid basis for belief, and Neoplatonist metaphor-worship can't offer that. All of philosophy and metaphysics needs to be re-thought from the ground up. We can't retrofit a vitalist and folkish worldview with one on the other side of a civilizational cycle, when paganism was dying.
@folkishworldview
There is nothing more jewish than rejecting Paganism.
Far and wide of all the hebrew/jewish scriptures of Old Testament (which christians take as sacred texts) we see that they condemn all other religions, specially pagan/gentile ones, openly inciting their destruction:
Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. (Deuteronomy 12: 2-3).
This crystal-obsession, by my educated guess, is neither an attested Germanic nor non-Germanic spiritual tradition. Where there are exceptions to the rule, I can ascertain through further research. But this fixiation on crystal-healing, crystal-collecting, and crystal in-generalism that people often have appears none other than a New-Age concoction.
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If you ever need proof of platonists being anti-Pagan and atheistic all you have to do is talk to them.
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Scandinavian Bronze Age swastika
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What we think of as a built, walled house dissolves, the earlier we go back, into the concept of a sacred place untouched by human hands, tended and enclosed by self-grown trees. There the deity dwells and hides its image in the rustling leaves of the branches…
J.Grimm
An unfinished work of K.Vasiliev depicting the struggle of Paganism and christianity in Europe
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Gotthard Sonnenfeld’s masterpiece "Defeated" reminds me of the legend of Penthesilea and Achilles, an Amazon queen and a Greek hero. The tale is one of the most tragic in Hellenic tradition as Achilles fell in love with Penthesilea the moment he killed her.
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