I want to try a new book club. We begin with this documentary featuring Tom Rowsell that pairs nicely with our recent "true religion of the coming civilization" thread: https://sofiechan.com/p/3110
That thread asked: what does Christianity have to teach us, even if we do not believe in Christ?
So I open this thread with a similar question. What does paganism have to teach us? The documentary focuses on Germanic paganism, which we discuss less often than the Greek pagan world.
Explicitly identifying as any kind of pagan, celebrating solstice festivals and whatnot, is most likely a dead end. But is there something in the aesthetics, narratives, and practices of paganism that we can usefully draw from?
This is a cool provocation. I actually like festivals and stuff, but I find the whole concept of reconstructive heathenry to be stupid. Really the answer to post-Christian moral insanity is to revert to pre-philosophic superstition? I'll admit though there is something closer between my own philosophical worldview and the pre-abrahamic shinto-style of "faith". Something like "the gods are to be honored, but not taken seriously".
The abrahamic traditions, including our modern progressive universalism, have this overwhelming ponderous demand for total submission to their infinite codes of moralistic-legalistic bullshit that amount to "you must give up your soul, your integrity, and all earthly hopes and physical existence (we're going to wipe out your whole civilization and you're going to thank us for it) in exchange for the abstract contentless fiat of what we call God or Progress or Justice". No thanks I'd rather take my mortal doom straight up.
The hardass max-autism skeptical philosophy that admits no superstition appeals to me. Truth and wisdom are masters I feel the pull of. Likewise the project of the ubermensch. There is something worth living and dying for. There is a deep rhyming with the Way of nature there, at least. And where I must take a leap of faith to connect the higher truths to practical action, the gods are there to give me courage. I don't mind all the little spirits and gods that live in the mysterious places at the edge of the map and don't ask much but to be honored, and don't claim to be much more than our own overactive imaginations. I think there is a formal duality between skeptical philosophy and animism. One deals in the serious rational realities, the other in the rationally inaccessible mysteries. They complement and don't threaten each other, like different ways of seeing the same thing, "dual" in mathematical terms.
But there's something I can't take seriously about crossing the streams. The Christians obviously make these enormous claims about reality against natural reason on the basis of faith. The modern progressives do the same on even flimsier grounds. The occultists take the mysteries far too seriously if they had their own rational reality, and end up huffing their own farts. And the heathens just seem to be larping or missing the point, having psyopped themselves into something that doesn't make sense on the basis of bad arguments they have since forgotten.
But I'll watch this documentary and see how Rowsell handles these matters.
>>3504 >pre-philosophic superstition That's a very Whiggish view of human ideas. It's also wrong (to an extent) since there were plenty of pre-Christian pagan philosophers. Hellenist polytheists invented philosophy as a concept, although many of the ancient Greek influential philosophers did have a heterodox view of their native faith, granted.
Rowsell himself has cited Platonist philosophers in his discussions of heathenry and I think he offers some of the most complete theological and philosophical justifications for his faith out there.
>>3509 By “pre-philosophic superstition” i obviously did not mean platonic philosophy. I mean the other parts of christianity, like God being a flesh and blood man, rising from the dead, miracles, legalistic morality that grounds itself in tribal prophecies, and placing supernatural authority in the riddles of jesus. As for whiggishness, i’m no whig but that’s also not an argument.
>>3498 The tenor of this OP is great. Questions of the form 'what does X have to teach us?' where X is a religious tradition have been floating around here for quite a while, e.g. >>1748>>881 and >>1181. Unfortunately this slopumentary that I had to watch on 5x speed to not self-immolate mostly amounts to a rehashing of the same shit we've heard thousands of times. There is almost zero discussion of what Germanic paganism is or what a Germanic pagan believes. I don't want to throw Rowsell under the bus because he seems like serious guy, but I also only want the real stuff. We must limit ourselves to actually reading Beowulf, Snorri Sturlson, and Saxo Grammaticus.
On a meta level, I think that answers to OP's question should be of the form shown in the first of those referenced posts: > My general strategy amounts to using This Idea plus the unity of God with the transcendentals (h/t CCC) to OODA. In other words, pursuit of Beauty, Truth, or Goodness will result in Abrahamic rewards. If you try for a while and you're not getting any, you're either (a) misunderstanding whatever transcendental you're focused on or (b) caught up in some small turbulence in the order of things and 'this too shall pass'.
We need this level of explicit synthesis and syllogistic reasoning-with-hammer. The lack of such seriousness in the slopumentary is what I think >>3504 is frustrated by. I note that the inclusion of OODA in the quote as a conceptual tool probably should be thought of as an inclusion of Baconian Magic as X, so that post is really like {Christianity OR Baconian Magic} as X. In the limit, our project here is to OR in everything that has ever existed. For the sake of giving this thread some life, I will hazard a guess about 'Germanic paganism as X', but heavily caveated by the fact that I have not read the sagas.
It seems a core belief of Germanic pagans is the valuation of one's ethnos above others. This is done by encoding virtue through stories about people who are 'like us'. Christianity notoriously struggles with ethnic narrowing, despite it being set out in no uncertain terms in the commandments. This is especially apparent with actually existing Unitarianism, One World, One Love. The literary virtue approach of Germanic paganism perhaps offers a way to combat that inherent tendency of monism to be interpreted in an 'inclusive' way. Make it about the in-group.
>>3524 Well I have read a bit of germanic mythology and I don't think it's about "us". The jewish bible is about "us". The greek stuff is about winning eternal fame by being the best. The germanic stuff is about character. The stories are all about the inner struggle of staying true, doing duty, keeping honor and integrity, taking death before dishonor. This is the conclusion of both actual nazis like Rosenberg, and more "broadly minded" serious readers of the germanic literature like Tolkien.
So I think you have it backwards. What's notable about aryan literature outside the vedas is the lack of ethnic self-awareness. (The rig veda is about blond invaders slaughtering the dusky "dasyu", but even there it is justified in transcendental terms having to do with their lack of piety). It's rather the jewish tradition that right from exodus is all jews jews jews. The aryan traditions are more about transcendental virtues outside the self.
That's to be contrasted with the motivations of guys like Rowsell, which are explicitly ethnic. Its on contact with and in reaction to jewish thought (in this case christianity) that aryan paganism takes on ethnic self-awareness. Likewise Rosenberg's myth of the blood is about becoming self aware about how our transcendental commitments actually come from the blood-soul, again in reactionary contrast to what he characterizes as the actually-ethnic faux-universalism of jewish and catholic thought. But note that's a bit different from Rowsell, who notices his germanic race and takes that as ground for being interested in germanic paganism, thinking which Rosenberg rejects (though Rowsell does mention that something like a polytheist faith came from inside himself).
This along with other arguments is part of the reason I am not so interested in reconstructive paganism. Its original context is gone and even the modern motivation for it is alien to it. I find the Nietzschean approach of BAP to be more interesting: focus on the transcendentals and philosophy of value, clear out the logocentric arguments that obscure your inner sense of transcendental value. Whatever gods are still relevant, if we believe in such things, will show themselves in new forms when the souls of the philosophers are thus prepared. I would amend BAP's interpretation with Rosenberg's observation that the transcendental values we find in our hearts when we stop listening to the verbcel moralists come ultimately from the blood. (Even libs like Nick Land and the people who write those "being on time is white supreemist" articles acknowledge this these days).
More constructively, I am very interested in germanic mythology as well as others like greek and jewish mythology as a repository of great reflections on the transcendentals. It's in bad taste to get all "we wuz vikings/greks/hebrews" about it, but there's a lot of really great stuff there if you read it as just mythopoetic pseudo-history.
>>3498 This thread inspires me to read the opinion of actual pagan philosophers on the subject, not just modern reconstructionists. Therefore here are the thoughts of the emperor Julian "against the Galileans":
Rowsell is a reconstructionist and I believe leans Platonist in his theology, for what it's worth. Reconstructionism, at least in a British context, inevitably feels at least somewhat like LARPing because ancient Anglo-Saxon culture does not have much in common with modern English culture, and ancient Anglo-Saxon paganism doesn't resonate with modern Brits as much as it might. Indeed, Greco-Roman gods are actually more familiar, due to the Classical Tradition. Tolkien helps, of course, presenting (for example) a vision of the elves as beautiful magical beings with deep connection to the land along Anglo-Saxon lines rather than the diminished spirits of Shakespeare and the Victorians, but ultimately Tolkien was Christian and so is his legendarium.
I can understand not wanting to spend your weekends dancing in a spiral in a park with the dyed-hair brigade. It's cringe, because it seems to lack any path to authenticity. Rowsell instead seeks a historical form of authenticity, a more sensible approach but at least for the time being that doesn't quite get you to the kind of present authenticity that inspires the average citizen.
The revival "native faith" movements in Central and Eastern Europe are more credible, in my opinion, no doubt in part because Christianisation came late to those lands. For example, while only a very small fraction of Estonians directly engage in Maausk, the Estonian native faith movement, it is nevertheless recognised more widely in Estonia as a continuation of "their native religion". This kind of wider cultural buy-in is what I mean by "present authenticity". Maausk is not cringe in the eyes of the average Estonian even if they don't do it themselves, rather it is part of national folklore. Perhaps similar things can be said about Romuva (Lithuania), Dievturiba (Latvia), and maybe movements in Nordic & Slavic countries, etc.
Anyway, the book to read on the topic of "What does paganism have to teach us?" is On Being a Pagan, by Alain de Benoist, from 1981. He leans very Nietzschean in his analysis of Christianity vs. Paganism, and I've heard he takes it in a Heideggerian direction in other works, though not yet translated. A couple of quotes of his that have affected me deeply: "It's not a matter of believing in the existence of Gods, it's a matter of awareness of presence of Gods." "The doctrine of the partially and, especially, potentially divine character of human nature is in fact the basis for all man’s existential meaning."