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26 Dec 2024 07:10

“The favor of Heerfather seek we to find, To his followers gold he gladly gives; To Hermoth gave he helm and mail-coat, And to Sigmund he gave a sword as gift.

Triumph to some, and treasure to others,
To many wisdom and skill in words, Fair winds to the sailor, to the singer his art, And a manly heart to many a hero.”

~Hyndluljóð 2-3, Bellows
These stanzas reveal the matters in which Odin’s followers often sought His intercession.
𐃏

“Biðjum Herjaföðr í hugum sitja, hann geldr ok gefr gull verðungu; gaf hann Hermóði hjalm ok brynju, en Sigmundi sverð at þiggja.

Gefr hann sigr sumum, en sumum aura, mælsku mörgum ok mannvit firum; byri gefr hann brögnum, en brag skaldum, gefr hann mannsemi mörgum rekki.”

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25 Dec 2024 13:15

Intimidating fashion statement from this man of the Khvalynsk related Ekaterinovka site. These people were like Yamnaya but with higher levels of EHG.

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22 Dec 2024 16:37

The sun set behind the Heathen Iron Age barrow on Selaön, Sweden this afternoon. Marcus and I performed a blot in the stone ship of the sacred grave field

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22 Dec 2024 09:13

WHG migrated to Maghreb

Ancient DNA from the Mediterranean region has revealed long-range connections and population transformations associated with the spread of food producing economies. However, in contrast to Europe, genetic data from this key transition in northern Africa are limited, and have only been available from the far western Maghreb (Morocco). Here, we present genome-wide data for nine individuals from the Later Stone Age (LSA) through the Neolithic in Algeria and Tunisia. The earliest individuals cluster with pre-Neolithic people of the western Maghreb (~15000-7600 BP), showing that this "Maghrebi" ancestry profile had a substantial geographic and temporal extent. At least one individual from Djebba (Tunisia), dating to ~8000 BP, harbored ancestry from European hunter-gatherers, likely reflecting early Holocene movement across the Strait of Sicily. Later Neolithic people from the eastern Maghreb retained largely local forager ancestry together with smaller contributions from European farmers (by ~7000 BP) and Levantine groups (by ~6800 BP), and were thus far less impacted by external gene flow than were populations in other parts of the Neolithic Mediterranean.

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB83667

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20 Dec 2024 19:08

Fun fact: someone carved a swastika inside newgrange with words “heil hitler” and it was probably one of dublin’s hitler youth inspired by a visiting Nazi archaeologist in the forties

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20 Dec 2024 11:51

Here's a short video explaining Mōdraniht, the Matres / Matronae and the Dísablót for those who are wondering about Mothers' night. Includes archaeological depictions in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon contexts.

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20 Dec 2024 11:51

the Matres aka the Ancestral Mothers - celebrated on the night before Yule feast. Art by Ryan Murray for Survive the Jive

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20 Dec 2024 11:50

The Anglo-Saxon MODRANIHT “Mothers’ Night” was not a sacrifice to the Earth Mother goddess (her name in English was Erce) but rather seems to have been equivalent to the Norse Disablot. Disir is a broad category of female beings which includes the goddess Freyja and the Valkyries. I suspect it also included clan Mothers and hence this is the focus of the Anglo-Saxon festival. It may also have been influenced by the NW European Celtic cult of the Matres although this didn’t exist in Britain by the time of the Anglo-Saxon colonisation of Britain.

Bede tells us it was celebrated on Xmas eve but he also makes it clear that the pagans didn’t celebrate Xmas or use the Julian calendar like Christians so obviously it isn’t really on 24th December on the Julian or Gregorian calendar. Therefore it must either have been on the night before the shortest day (their equivalent of solstice) or on the night before the Yule feast which was on the full moon of the second Yule month.

Most pagans seem to prefer the former date. That would place Modraniht on the night of Thursday 21st December this year (2023).

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19 Dec 2024 17:48

Victorian Christmas cards with the Yule log

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18 Dec 2024 18:59

This is how pagan Germanic women dressed (Anglo-Saxon in this case). All of the dangling keys and amulets have symbolic meanings. The necklaces with glass and amber beads are a sign of wealth and status.

The women of most European pagan cultures from Greece to Scandinavia covered their heads, just as many in my grandmother's generation still did. It is not, as some think, a Middle Eastern custom.

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17 Dec 2024 15:38

'Elf arrows and elfshot’
Sir Hans Sloane recorded the popular belief that these small, stone implements were 'elfs arrows', said to be shott into cattle by witches or elves. In fact he and other antiquaries realised that these tiny flints and other larger shaped stones were not natural or supernatural phenomena but the tools and weapons of ancient peoples. Even they did not dream of their true age - in this case between 2500 and 6000 years old.

Anglo-Saxons believed that such missiles could cause sickness and referred to them as elfshot. Belief in elf bolts or elf shot continued right into the 19th century.

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16 Dec 2024 09:12

Even more worthy of note is the hart Eikthyrni, which stands in Valhall and bites from the limbs of the tree; and from his horns distils such abundant exudation that it comes down into Hvergelmir, and from thence fall those rivers called thus: Síd, Víd, Søkin, Eikin, Svöl, Gunnthrá, Fjörm, Fimbulthul, Gípul, Göpul, Gömul, Geirvimul

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15 Dec 2024 19:24

The Folkton Drums
These three carved chalk cylinders were found placed behind the head and hips of a child's skeleton in a round barrow (burial mound).
The elaborate designs are similar to the decoration on some Late Neolithic and Beaker pottery, as well as with the engraved patterns on Early Bronze Age sheet goldwork. The 'drums' are unique, and their use unknown.
Later Neolithic/Copper Age, about 2500-2000 BC
Folkton, North Yorkshire, England

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15 Dec 2024 18:52

More examples of the Odinic double raven motif - this time 3rd and 4th century Ostrogothic artefacts from Crimea

Seen at the British Museum today

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15 Dec 2024 18:45

6th c. Frankish Zierscheibe at the British museum. The curators seem to think this is a Christian artefact for some reason.

“The horseman on the circular girdle-hanger may be St. Martin of Tours.”

I doubt it

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26 Dec 2024 06:47

𝖄uletide and New Year’s Eve divination was and still is a practice in Scandinavia, especially in Finland . Probably because it’s one of the times of the year when the veil is as thinnest between the world of the living and the other side.

Today it’s common to practice molybdomancy, and that’s a complicated word I would assume as good as no one that practices it knows it by that name. But it’s to melt lead or tin and let it drop into water and then you try to interpret what you see in the formations it has created that is the answer to your questions is.
It’s essentially like reading in tea or something of that effect and is seen by most like a funny little tradition or game.

An other more daring method is called Årsgång (Year-Walk).
There are thousands of records that describe the tradition or retell stories about it. The core area of ​​divination seems to be in Småland, in southern Sweden, where the tradition is mentioned in writing as early as the 17th century and then in several writings from the 18th and 19th centuries. Today it’s probably very rare that anyone attempts it.

Usually it was during specific holidays like, during the Christmas nights, at Christmas Day, St. Stephen's Day or New Year - sometimes even at Midsummer - that a person who wanted to get a glimpse of the future could perform the ritual. The person who would preform it would secretly isolated themselves in the dark and abstainfrom food and drink for about 24 hours. At midnight the person would go to one or more parish churches, walk around these counterclockwise, often three or seven times (that is, the magic numbers). When that was done, the person became sensitive to the supernatural powers and found out through visions and hearing what would happen in the village in the coming year. Usually by looking into the key hole of to the church door. It differs from other forms of folk divination, as it was glimpses of the future of the entire settlement, not just of an individual or a family, that were of importance. Those who did this could see processions of corpses, and thus got to know who would die in the area, hear cannon shots or see fires which heralded war and accidents, or hear how scythes hit the fields or how they hit stones, which was a signs of good or bad harvest. In the cabins, people could be seen sitting headless if they were condemned to die during the year, but if they sat with crowns on their heads, they were married instead.

During this walk to and fro the church all sorts of supernatural benevolent beings could try to scare or try to kill the walker. One of them as a ghastly boar with fire and brimstone in its glowing eyes or snout that could carry away the walker or split him in half by running through the person. This boar was called Gloson (The Glowing Sow).

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22 Dec 2024 16:40

@thegoldenone and I do not soyface but the epic power of this barrow brought us close to it!

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22 Dec 2024 10:30

From the Askr Svarte notebooks. “What the gods have left”

“The best Yule will be the one after which Sunna won't ascend back into the heavens.”

He is impatient for the Fimbulvinter

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20 Dec 2024 23:43

Thor lifts the Midgard serpent. Niels Hansen Jacobsen (Danish sculptor, 1861-1941)

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20 Dec 2024 17:53

A talk on the use of the swastika in medieval Irish Christian contexts which first shows the varied uses of the swastika in continental and British Halstatt and La Tene Celtic contexts as well as Greco-Roman ones

https://youtu.be/GHKqYjFWwLI?feature=shared

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20 Dec 2024 11:51

The Anglo-Saxon holy day of Mōdraniht "Mother's night" was said by Bede to have been a pagan holiday on the night before Xmas, but since pagans didn't keep a Christian calendar, most interpret that to mean on the night before winter solstice, which this year falls on Sunday night.
Rudolf Simek says that Mōdraniht "as a Germanic sacrificial festival should be associated with the Matron cult of the West Germanic peoples on the one hand, and to the dísablót and the Disting already known from medieval Scandinavia on the other hand and is chronologically to be seen as a connecting link between these Germanic forms of cult."
Dísablót was a Norse blot held for female deities called disir. Mōdraniht was not a celebration of women or mothers in general, but rather of primordial clan mothers, that is divinised progenitors who all the kinsmen held in common. Celebrating these clan mothers brings the community together and recognises our common blood. A similar practice existed among the North West European Celts in thei

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20 Dec 2024 11:51

This is an atmospheric black metal song by Æthelruna about Modraniht. This version is from 2018 but I was permitted to use an earlier version in 2016 as well as other compositions by Matthew Kay.
https://youtu.be/jfgFgzBFlRI

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19 Dec 2024 17:49

Druids gather mistletoe

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19 Dec 2024 17:48

Yuletide Victorian cards depicting the Yule goat

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17 Dec 2024 22:10

4th century depiction of the adoration of the Magi on a Christian sarcophagus from Rome. This is dated to around the time Rome officially became Christian. The Magi are depicted, like the Thracian Orpheus or the Persian Mithras, in barbarian attire with trousers and Phrygian caps. The multiracial version of the three kings was an invention of the Middle Ages.

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16 Dec 2024 09:31

A new study of a pit of massacred people from a Bronze age British site at Charterhouse Warren, Somerset reveals evidence of butchery.

“At least 37 men, women and children were killed and butchered, their disarticulated remains thrown into a 15m-deep natural shaft in what is, most plausibly, interpreted as a single event.”

The victims in the pit, which is part of a natural cave system in the Mendips, had been killed by blunt force trauma. There are butchery cut marks on bones and even marks on finger bones consistent with human nibbling. It looks like a cannibal ritual, previously undocumented. The victims were half teens and all were locals. At least 2 of them had plague.

The cave pit may have been seen as a portal to the underworld. The slaughter may have been in retaliation for something like cattle raiding.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/darker-angels-of-our-nature-early-bronze-age-butchered-human-remains-from-charterhouse-warren-somerset-uk/93EBB135C857C7B7992FC80A4ED927AF

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15 Dec 2024 20:51

Do you know the true meaning of Shakin' Stevens?
https://survivethejive.blogspot.com/2018/12/shakin-stevens-as-odinic-archetype-in.html?m=1

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15 Dec 2024 18:54

A 5th century Ostrogothic double raven brooch of red garnets from Italy.

In the AD 490s, the Ostrogoths established a kingdom in Italy

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15 Dec 2024 18:51

Frankish jewllery, AD 500-550
This jewellery was found in a Frankish woman's grave in Artres, France. The richness and fine craftsmanship of each item suggests she may have been the wife of a local leader, and reveal the increasing wealth and power of the Frankish ruling classes.

The jewellery includes a pair of gold and garnet raven-brooches of the Odin-cult

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14 Dec 2024 20:00

This short film recounts a handful of the Icelandic settlers recorded in the Landnámabók. Most notably a deal which was made by one of them with a land spirit.

Narration by Þórr Siðr
Music by Glen Bokay