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
Giving the old gods some new prayers is nice. They just need not to be shitty rasicsts about it.
They're not "The old gods". They're pastiches of characters from Medieval Christian fiction, blended in to slop and piped in to molds created by modern Christians alienated from their lives searching for "authenticity" to give them a sense of place and meaning. They are the McChicken McNugget of religion; Where the McNugget was once a living animal it has now been stripped of all resemblance and relation to the creature from which it was derived. In the same way medieval Northern European Religion has only the vaguest, most tenuous connections to modern neo-paganism, and that really only amounts to a handful of names hastily glued to 19th century Prussian militarism.
You have no idea how much this line makes my brain tingle in delight
The shadow of Prussia once again just makes stuff worse.
I would counter that while they might not be the old gods, the old gods weren't the old gods. As unless I am very mistaken about several things gods aren't real. The "old gods" are what we can imagine of life before neoliberalism and unalienated connection to others. Which is still way better than what people would worry about with their time otherwise.
Okay, I have sympathy for that. I understand that people want connection, want meaning. I'm so mad about this because I strongly disagree, both with the choose your own adventure history while claiming authenticity, but also with the violent, crass, and reactionary interpretation of the mythology.
If ancient religious people were anything like modern religious people there were levels of devotion and doctrinal observance. Back when the old gods were just the gods people were all just making it up same as we do now. There were probably malcontents that held to fantastic versions of older gods rituals back then same as now. Even with them having the capacity for real faith we lack today.
It wouldn't be so bad today if people wanted to have an Dionysis orgy to being a good harvest. I'd do my part judt in case. No, the only thing people want to bring back is social violence.