I'm not even trying to be fair, impartial, or unbiased. This is a rant about people whose ahistorical bullshit and blood and soil appropriation of ancient cultures they have no relation to beyond living in vaguely the same place to make themselves feel better about working in cubicals pisses me off.
This shit just pisses me off. I did Viking larping for years, studied some Archeology, read a lot of very boring site reports. These guys are a bunch of neo-pagans, emphasis on neo, making shit up to fit modern white-supremacist notions of a mythical golden age because Romans and Christians showed up and turned everyone in to [misogyny noises].
There's just so much that pisses me off. The droning, and throat singing, and all that shit? Has nothing to do with Europe at any period in the last 10,000 years. Thoraboos just grabbed it from other parts of the world because they think it's dark and scary or something. What we actually have attested of viking, ei early medieval Northern European, entertainment consisted of what were basically rap battles, with people getting up to show off by dissing each other using an elaborate poetic language of word games, metaphors, allusions, and references that was, by design, hard to follow; Being clever and inventive was part of the game.
They're dressed like shit - Apparently the antlers are based on some artifacts found at Starr Carr, England. The Starr Carr site in 9,000 years old. It has nothing, at all, what so ever, to do with vikings, germans, or any people or culture recognizably related to Europeans.
idk what's with the dull colors. Vikings were kind of famous for wearing brightly colored clothes in clashing colors.
And the obsessive focus about droning on and on about Odin this and Odin that. For one, the Odin cult is fairly recent. I think after like 500ad, at best guess, with Thor and Freyr probably pre-dating that. And who knows what was going on prior to that. The people living in Europe at the time were almost entirely illiterate. They didn't write things down so we don't know what their pictures depict or what any of it meant.
My point is, mostly - "Norse Neo-Paganism" was invented in the 90s in Europe, and in the 60s in the US. In the US it was dreamed up by a white Neo-Nazi who was bored in Prison. It's totally, utterly, utterly ahistorical. It's just a mish-mash of neo-ager shit from the 60s, random Victorian esoteric-ism, terrible pop-history, and German romantic nationalism. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, the entire point of Germanic romantic nationalism was to create a unifying national mythology to convince all the German speaking people that they were part of the nation ethnic nation, which was flagrantly ridiculous and completely ahistorical. And it formed most of the basis for Nazi nationalism.
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with history or archeology. It's all about building a mythical golden age that conforms to modern nationalist and racial mythology. Europeans alienated by modernity and unsatisfied by Christianity are appropriating the practices of Indigenous people in order to try to create an indigenousness for themselves. It's pure what no theory does to a motherfucker. They don't like modern society, so instead of doing something about it they form a reactionary nationalist, racialized, and mythic rejection of it. And they don't even go for the cool parts, like dressing really pretty and combing your hair and singing poetry, that are actually attested; They make up this stupid militaristic grunting and growling bullshit while mashing together cultures thousands of years distant, spread across huge areas, all trying to create on through-going nationalist myth. They congratulate themselves about owning the Romans in Teutonberg forest, ignoring that Arminius was a Roman Equestrian, a Citizen, and that pretty much everyone at the time thought Rome was awesome since that's where the wine, engineers, bathes, and all the other cool shit came from. This nationalist "Romans vs. Germans" shit would have been completely bizarre to people of the time who didn't consider Romans an ethnicist (which they were not) and didn't consider themselves "Germans".
And then they jump 800 years forward to claim they're all vikings, a completely different culture with a different religion, different language, different economy, different everything. And then, without missing a single fucking beat, they start drawing medieval Icelandic Christian magic signs from the 1600s on themselves while reciting Snorri's 13th century Icelandic Christian fan-fic, in which the Norse gods are actually survivors of the Trojan war.
It's so fucking frustrating. Just jumping back and forth in history, snatching things from disparate periods, languages, and cultures, mixing in absolutely nonsense new-ager mysticism, flat out making things up that sound cool, dressing the whole thing up with hyper-masculine toxic dudebro bullshit, and, AND, fucking things up for the rest of us because now if I wear a thor's hammer or something people think I'm either a racist or a choose your own adventure idiot or both. Like if I hear one more asshole going on about how cool and germanic it was that his ancestors blew scary lur horns at the Germans and that makes him proud as a viking and would I like to see his authentic slavic pagan tattoos I'm going to throw my shield at his head. Some dipshit was like "Oh yeah the we know about the Germans because ibn Fadlan blah blah blah" and it's like you absolute fucking shithead, ibn Fadlan was hanging out with Rus on the fucking Volga!
I legit had an argument with some jackasses who were "reclaiming" the black sun, the SS one, and I could not hammer throught their fucking heads that Himmler made the fucking thing up and there was nothing to reclaim.
This ahistorical made up bullshit drives me absolutely fucking bonkers. Modern people trying to project their modern noias and alienation back on to ancient cultures we barely know anything about and coming up with weird fashy nationalist shit. Just absolutely infuriating at every level. And god forbid you tell any of these dipshits that there's lots of evidence that the adoption of Christianity across Europe was gradual and voluntary. Many of them are very strongly latched on to having a colonialism narrative of their very own so they can cry about the big mean christians who destroyed their manly natural magical authentic pan-european pagan golden age! Never mind that pretty much all of their fucking written sources ARE CHRISTIANS. Their whole conception of these cultures is mostly uncritically based on Christian fiction written for entertainment! Often hundreds of years after any of the cultural or religious practices described would have actually occured, if they were real at all!
Also apparently there are no drums to be found in "viking age" sites in Scandanavia?!?!?!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I know a few (left wing) Astaru practitioners and they're all very, very clear that they're appropriating symbology to make something entirely new and that there's way less continuity even compared to say Egyptian neopagans (And we're pretty clear on what Egyptians believed and how it developed, unfortunately much of the practice violates whatever the equivalent of the human remains act is in your country.)
Pretty sure if they saw someone with a black sun they'd have a black eye to go with it.
Yeah, Norse neopagans are either rad as fuck, or literal Nazis, with no in between
I unfortunately know a number of turbolib and centrist "neopagans" who basically practice the grab-bag version that our comrade is ranting about in the opener, and they practice it due to being white but wanting to be "interesting".
As a pagan myself, I know exactly the kind of person your talking about. People who put zero research or thought into their practice and just treat everything like a spiritual mad lib.
They tend to be the more new-agey types who's beliefs are unknowingly and uncritically parroting Helena Blavatsky and her fascist nonsense.
What I think of as the Paradox, paradox.
There is an entirely legitimate left-wing queer af reading of Norse mythology and I greatly support it. Like I am so angry about this because I actually believe in and try to live by a lot of the ideas presented in Norse mythology. Ideas like stoic endurance in the face of an undeniable fate, Integrity in the face of great hardship, being a lying cheating bastard, and transing your gender to do magic (Odin is trans deal with it). It all pisses me off so much. They create Odin as this great Teutonic Wagnerian war god when he's actually the god of being a lying cheating sneaky bastard who trans's his gender to do magic, always believes the ends justifies the means, back-stabs everyone, and does it all with a clear goal of pursuing a greater good by postponing Ragnarok.
All these dorks want to go to Valhalla. In Valhalla you wake up every morning, eat breakfast, and then spend the whole day being murdered by the most vicious psychopaths who ever lived. It's a warrior afterlife. Something pursued by people who had a fatalistic monomaniacal love of death and slaughter and wanted to do that forever. All these modern dipshits have never even swung a sword in anger, never killed anyone, have probably never tasted their own blood. They go out in to the woods wearing entire hides they bought from a thrift store and grunting and smearing themselves with shit pretending to be warriors when they've never fought for anything in their lives.
And it's misogynist as hell. Odin get's HALF OF THE VALOROUS DEAD. FREYJA HOSTS THE OTHER HALF IN FOLKVANGR! If you die in battle you've only got a 50/50 chance of chilling with Odin. You're just as likely to end up in Freyja's halls having to hang out with icky women. We all remember Freyja, right? One of the Norse gods of war? Rides around on a chariot pulled by cats, goddess of hunting, everyone is terrified of her? Odin this, Odin that, so much fucking wanking abut Odin when Freyja is his co-equal Goddess of war, equally sharing the valorous dead with him. Frankly, if I get shot by the cops, I hope I end up in Folkvangr because I don't want to deal with all these Odin worshiping dipshits.
God and so much of Norse mythology is literally just Thor and Loki going on road-trips and getting in to trouble. Where do they get all this chest beating hyper-masculine warrior stuff? Like Thor's hammer gets stolen one time and the Aesir blame it on Loki because they blame everything on Loki so Loki makes it right by getting Thor gay-married to a giant and theres a whole sequence at the wedding feast where the Giants are just in awe of Thor's feminine ability to eat the whole feast and drink everyone under the table. And yeah, when Thor gets Mjolnir back he flies in to a rage and kills all the giants, but up until that point it's a silly comedy about gender and masculinity where Thor, the mightiest and most loved of the gods, is humiliated and made to look foolish.
And where does the racism come from? The Aesir have a big fucking war with the Vanir and how do they settle things? Genocide? No, they make peace and start fucking. The Jotnar are the mortal enemies of the Aesir, except half the Aesir are married to Jotunn or banging Jotunn on the side! Loki fucked a horse for fuck's sake, and then Odin was like "Damn Loki your horse son is cool as hell I'm going to hang out with him all the time and ride him in to battle and we're going to be best buds." SLEIPNIR IS HALF-HORSE HALF JOTUNN. ODIN HAS NO PROBLEM WITH THAT AT ALL. It's all total bullshit. If anything the core message of Norse Religion isn't racism and "blood and soil" and "muh proud European ancestry". It's "Fuck everyone you meet, especially if you were just at war with them". The Aesir would solve the European refugee crisis by having a phenomenal amount of sex, not by "defending their bloody soil" or whatever the fuck Nazis think.
Did I mention that in some times and places in medieval Northern Europe men were thought to be too dumb to do math and handle property so women ran all the houseland logistics and finances, often owned the property, and gave their husbands allowances so they wouldn't have to worry their silly little heads with doing sums?
Or that there were pretty robust divorce laws where women retained their independence and property at some points?
Or a bunch of other shit that would be considered progressive today? Mixed in with plenty of horrible shit, and this was only some jurisdictions at some times, but "My wife owns our house and gives me an allowance because I'm dumb and irresponsible" doesn't really line up with all the viking tradwife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen bullshit. z
And like all the warrior stuff is for warriors. The Eddas and all the Sagas are basically about comic book heroes, not normal people. They were written as exciting adventure tales about revenge and violence to be told (probably sung) in the hall in the middle of winter when everyone was bored out of their minds. They probably don't depict the normal lives of normal people. I am convinced there were plenty of people who were perfectly satisfied to go to Hel's hall when they died and skip the whole death and glory operation that Frejya and Odin were running. It's not like people were rushing off to get themselves killed; There are plenty of stories of old people being buried with swords in their hands to try to trick the gods!
BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH
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There's a large overlap between the two. To my understanding Odin is a more aristocratic war god, being also the god associated with royalty. The association with deceit, sorcery, wisdom and runic writing also sets him apart from Tyr who is more like a "noble warrior" kind of god. Odin have up his eye to gain wisdom, Tyr gave up his arm to chain the wolf Fenrir.
Notably, Tyr gave up his arm because he gave Fenrir his arm as a pledge that the Aesir were being honest. The Aesir, as we know, were not being honest, and Tyr sacrificed his hand to Fenrir. I think that's a really important example of honor; Tyr sacrificed horribly for the good of his people and was also scrupulously honest and principled in dealing with his enemies. He didn't say the Aesir weren't up to something; He said that if they were he'd give up his hand. Details details!
Aren't those at odds with each other?
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I guess, but when I hear integrity it doesn't just conjure institutional/societal norms like don't steal from a supermarket or don't lie on government forms (EDIT: or don't ever lie to your boss), it also implies don't lie to individual people. Lying to your SO reflects on integrity, unless we're going off different definitions.
I agree that "integrity" as in being an honest leader reflects differently if the system is inherently corrupt though, versus like a country in a higher level of socialist development, if that's what you mean.
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Most egyptian practices weren't around corpses, those are just the ones we have the greatest insight into. It's the mother of all preservation biases because they made sure their dead will be there forever and actually wrote down what they did with the dead. They had many other festivals and practices we just don't know as much about because the books written on them were either used until they weren't usable anymore and recycled or discarded, or intentionally destroyed by later religious movements. Only the books intentionally left out of use and in a safe space made it to modern times.