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I was wondering when somebody would notice this: the Caucasus is the Indo-European homeland, and heartland. And the folks who are still there are just the w=ones that stayed at home during the migration age. The only thing the Ossetians are missing is that, of course, they are related to the Georgians (and the Russians) as well as the Scots, the Franks and the English.

Heathenry does a lot of toponymy, the study of place names, to ascertain the extent and nature of various god-cults in the Viking Age and before. So it's no surprise to me that there are placenames all over Western Europe that can be traced back to the Caucasus.

Hundreds of years ago, Ossetians roamed all over Western Europe, from the Caucasus to Scotland. As Tim Whewell reveals, the folk memories of these wanderings have lingered down the centuries, so that it can be hard to tell where myth ends and history begins.

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:22 /Asatru | 2 writebacks | permanent link

You have to comdemn forced conversion, of course, but I also wonder about the how and why of this particular situation:

Behind the clashes are long-simmering tensions between equally impoverished groups: the Panas and Kandhas. Both original inhabitants of the land, the two groups for ages worshiped the same gods. Over the past several decades, the Panas for the most part became Christian, as Roman Catholic and Baptist missionaries arrived here more than 60 years ago, followed more recently by Pentecostals, who have proselytized more aggressively.

Hinduism doesn't proselytize - you're either born Hindu or you're not. Perhaps a better choice of headline would have been "Unconvert or Flee". I have to wonder how much else the foreign missionaries have given their converts - there were reports after the 2004 tsunami of Christians giving Muslim survivors the choice of "Convert or starv". See the same page for the plans to replace seaside Hindu villages in India with intentional Christian communities.

Without blessing this violence, I nonetheless have to wonder how the situation would've evolved without the interference of foreign missionaries.

The forced conversions come amid widening attacks on Christians, who say they are being forced to abandon their faith in exchange for their safety.

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:13 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

The working definition of a superstition they use is "the tendency to falsely link cause to effect". They go on to include not only such things as religions and "lucky rabbit's feet" but alternative and homeopathic medical remedies as well. The capstone is trying to explain this as "evolutionary" behavior - claiming that even bacteria have "superstitions". Eventually they end up at "scientific superstition"!

It makes an interesting read, but I'm not sure that superstition is as "evolutionary" as described. It seems to me that for these behaviors to become a factor in biological evolution that they'd have to be pretty well reproducible, and hence have a real cause and effect relationship. The fake ones would be weeded out pretty quickly in this case.

Cultural evolution is another matter entirely, and I think that it's here that "superstition" joins myth as acts of remembrance and worship. And I think a plausible case could be made that with most superstitions, such as avoiding black cats crossing the road and not walking under ladders, the modern world is simply missing the context of the superstitious action.

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

(link) [New Scientist]

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:50 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

IMHO this woman deserves a high place of honor with all pagans and heathens: how many others of us can claim to have have stood up to the missionaries (both Christian and Muslim, in this case) and saved a whole native culture from destruction?

Hail Susanne Wenger!

Bent double by age, the high-priestess of Nigeria's Yoruba spirit-world shuffles forward from under the trees, reaching out a white, blotchy hand in welcome.

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:08 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

and in Zionsville, Indiana, at the Kindred of Ravenswood.

Stonehenge, England (AP) -- Thousands of partygoers, pagans and self-styled druids cheered and banged drums Saturday to greet the dawn at Stonehenge on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice.

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:15 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars Ed Brayton passes out a sort of "Idiot of the Month" award - and lo! before June had reached it's midpoint he'd found a winner for the month!

The winner had written a truly bizarro rant proposing that atheists (and presumably non-Christians and anyone else who didn't believe that the Bible was the inerrant word of the one true god) be denied the vote and then violently expelled from civil society. That's pretty idiotic, all right. But what really caught my eye was Ed's claim that the fellow was also a geocentrist: he believed that Copernicus Was Wrong, and had written another rant defending geocentrism:

...all experiments to demonstrate that the earth moves at all have failed. All seem to indicate the earth does not move at all. There is much evidence that the earth is young and cannot possibly be millions, much less billions of years old but we will not treat that herein.... The Bible does not say that the earth is at the center of the universe. But, anyone looking up can see that the sun, planets and stars are moving. Galileo argued that this motion was relative, that really the earth was spinning and it only looks like these other objects move. But, both the observations and the Bible indicate quite strongly that the earth does not move.

It must suck to be trapped inside a faith that demands you believe the absurd.

Of course, Heathens have a mythology, too, but we understand that it is a mythology - not a completely, literally true account of ancient times and cosmic events. I don't know a single heathen today who actually believes that the world was literally licked into existence out of the rime by the cosmic cow... we understand the myth to show the importance of bovines to our ancestors, and the cow as the basis for the herding culture that arose with the first Indo-European peoples.

My "faith" that Thor and Freyr supply the rains and bless my fields and flocks does not demand that I literally believe humanity was created from ash and oak, or that the sky is a dead giant's skull.

But how do Christians (and others with inerrant books) get around the obvious? Their whole faith is based on the myth that Jesus rose from the dead, which is, on the surface, as patently nonsensical as cosmic cows and giant brainpans. How can you claim that the resurrection is fact, and at yet wiggle out of the Biblical definition of pi:

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it - ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths. (NIV) I Kings 7:23-26

If you acknowledge that Copernicus was right, and that pi is not equal to 3, and yet claim that the JC bounced out of his grave on the third day because the Bible says so, isn't that just a bit inconsistent? How do you decide which parts of the Good Book™ are literally true, and which parts are "approximations" and "understandings"?

Heathens have no such conflicts: we know our mythology is all symbolic, not literal, and we look for the deeper meaning of the tales, not their literal truth.

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:05 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

OK, but which one?

A psychology researcher has controversially claimed that stupidity is causally linked to how likely people are to believe in God.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:57 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

A link to this wonderful article detailing some of the practices associated with Vanic deities in the Viking Age (and before) came in from an email list the other day. It seems as though Tacitus was pretty dead on. Enjoy!

The cult site of Rösaring is located high on a glacial ridge some 40 kilometres northwest of Stockholm, in the municipality of Upplands-Bro. It has ancient cairns and a stone labyrinth, together with what makes this site like no other in Sweden - a well-made roadway running north south along the ridge for over half a kilometre. A single carbon dating at one end of the road points to the Viking Age. The site provides the best setting yet discovered for fertility rites and wagon ceremonies as described by the Roman writer Tacitus for the goddess Nerthus.

(link) [Gotland University]

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:45 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

What a bunch of morons. Going to their website, which I refuse to link, brings up the worst of the "black helicopters are on their way with UN troops to enslave our children" idiocy.

As for the evolution of the logo in question, see for yourself. I did find it interesting that it was baed on a Nordic design with allegedly pagan connections...

US coffee chain Starbucks comes under fire for a new logo that critics say is offensive and overly graphic.

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:39 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Well, the Catholics may be upset, but a cyclic universe fits pretty well into heathen cosmology. Turok certainly isn't the first to have this thought, and it's always struck me as both more intuitive and more satisfying than any of the other options.

Physicist Neil Turok discusses his theory that the Big Bang is just one in an endless series of universal expansions and contractions -- a theory that has provoked the ire of many physicists, as well as the Catholic Church.

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:06 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Well, she's proved once again that the "Dark Ages" weren't really all that dark at all. And added some interesting speculation about the reason for the fashion changes in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Vivid colors, flowing silk ribbons and glittering bits of mirrors -- the Vikings dressed with considerably more panache than we previously thought. The men were especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively, but with the advent of Christianity, fashions changed, according to Swedish archeologist Annika Larsson.

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:24 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

I gotta wonder about this - I've seen this sort of thing before. I know nothing of the origins of the Tamils, but the resemblance between this and ancient Indo-European rituals is quite striking.

And just for the record, I don't think that activities like this constitute animal "cruelty" in any way, shape or form. To be an effective ritual the animal has to be completely free - and that's hardly cruel.

The Indian Supreme Court bans a bull-taming sport popular in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:49 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Don't believe that our culture is infused with heathen values? Compare this secular list to the Nine Noble Virtues. Nary a difference.

If, on the other hand, you believe that we're more inspired by the "Judeo-Christian" ethic, I invite you to compare these to the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes or other Christian teachings. A few similarities, but lots of differences.

I'm just sayin'...

I use the term, "code of the west," a lot to signify all those things that are so great about our industry but are kind of unspoken intangibles. Of course, there never was a formal code truly defined, and I've read that Zane Gray first actually used the term, which has nothing to do with geography but rather a mindset.

(link) [Beef Magazine]

via Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:41 /Asatru | 1 writeback | permanent link

How many other early churches were built in such places? Nearly all of them ...

And as for religious holidays, well, except for Easter, where the Christians stole only the name, all of them were originally pagan/heathen as well. And even in the case of Ostara (Easter) the bunnies and eggs managed to slide through - I remember wondering as a kid what chickens and rabbits had to do with some dude being crucified by the Romans.

AP - The church where the tradition of celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 may have begun was built near a pagan shrine as part of an effort to spread Christianity, a leading Italian scholar says.

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:53 /Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

These things are really starting to annoy me. You need nothing but your heart and mind to be Tru to the gods. You don't need hammers, horns, drums, staves or swords(!). These material trappings may be pretty, interesting and useful, to be sure, but they are not necessary.

If this fellow was really interested in following the path, he'd have asked for a copy of the Eddas and sagas, and forgone the rest of the paraphernalia.

AP - An inmate is suing the Utah Department of Corrections for denying him his right to practice an ancient Nordic religion while behind bars.

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:07 /Asatru | 1 writeback | permanent link