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| The ultimate goal of The
Norroena Society is to rebuild the Asatru faith in a way that will cleanse it of
Christian influence and bias. From the work that we have done, combined with our
plans for the future, we are confident that we will achieve this goal. It is
important for everyone to know the process that will be used in this
re-creation, so we all can understand the work as it progresses, the sources of
our finds, and why certain elements are introduced. Hopefully with such a
revealing system of ideas incorporated into our network we may be able to unite
our people in accepting the validity of this work. After all, in the end the
power is in your hands, whether or not we can establish our conclusions
as part of the living culture of our faith is up to our folk. Obviously we won't
be able to please everyone; all we can do is strive for the best possible
results, managing each step forward as best we can for a common
purpose.
The following ideas are meant to
act as a general outline of the tools we plan to use in our "reformation". Not
every fundamental will need all of them, though some will. We feel that by
utilizing each of these we will have generated enough material to realize our
goals in all of The Twelve Fundamentals.
Nordic Traditions: There is a wealth of
information from Northern Europe for us to use, which will allow us to put many
of the pieces of our religious heritage together. However, this is going to
require a lot of work and ultimately there will be gaps left that we will need
to fill. We will not look to any other tool until we have completely exhausted
those customs that we know are native to our lands. Much has already been done
towards this end, but we still have much to do.
Christian Traditions: Most of the
information handed down to us was preserved by the Church, so it si not without
the taint left by the clergy. Don't think that we are contradicting ourselves
here. We will use these traditions in reconstructing our faith by reversing what
has been done to them. Consider this: when Church writers collected lore and
customs from the religion of their forefathers they were allowed to establish
the results of their works as "authorities" on ancient Europe simple because of
their status within their lands. These men were not 'divine emissaries', they
were not heathen lorekeepers, they were not even witnesses to the lives and
beliefs of the ancients. They were simply Christians feeding nationalist
tendencies to maintain the dominance of Catholicism. The ability to have their
writings established in such a way was solely based on the power of the church,
and these texts remain valid in the eyes of mainstream academia because of this
and this alone.
In order for us to overcome the
obstacles that stand in the way of our reformation we must be able to let go of
the "established" documents in favor of a new hierology. We then would need a
system that would allow us to substantiate our cultural renewal. Obviously we
cannot allow the development of any sort of hierarchy like that of the church,
nor would we want to create a dogma for which some can claim to be the
"authority" of. Such ecclesiastic concepts have no place in our ancient
religion, which thrives on independence of thought and free
expression.
Scholarship: As much as we need a new
paradigm for the re-creation of our faith, one which separates us from the
restraints of the elitist academia, their work does have its place. A number of
scholars have provided us with the guidelines that can act as the framework for
the renewal, giving us ideas and even new material to add to the work. Through
scholarship of our own we can collect this data, then use it when we can.
Gathered traditions, cultural theories, poems, anything of value to us can and
will be found and used to maximum benefit.
Comparative Ethnology: This will be a
tricky, and possibly controversial tool. I want to make one thing perfectly
clear- we have no intention of ever disrespecting cultural lines;
nor we do plan to use correlations between the Indo-European faiths to create
some sort of hybrid religious culture. We respect the heritage of all peoples,
as we expect to have ours respected
What we can do is use
comparisons between the five Indo-European nature-religions (those of the
Teutons, Celts, Slavs, Mediterraneans and Hindus) as guides to create original
ideas for our faith. It is a well known fact that these five ethnic groups once
formed a single race, with a single culture known as "proto-Aryan". As they
branched off certain elements were retained within each individual group, that
remained in common with certain elements of the others. Such a commonality may
help us in filling certain gaps that could prove vital to the understanding of
our ancient ways.
To ease the minds of our
hard-core purists I would like to point out that our ancestors used similar
methods of establishing new traditions. Consider the most popular and widely
used custom originated from our religion, that of the names of the days of the
week, which come from those of our highest gods and goddesses. This was
originally a Roman tradition, but the ancient Teutons corresponded their deities
to this and established a new way for them to count the dys while honoring
their deities. Sunday and Monday kept their designations for the Sun and
Moon (Latin Sol and Luna); Tuesday was devoted to Mars, their god of war and
equivalent to our Tyr or Tiw; Wednesday was in honor of Mercury, equated with
our Odin or or Woden; Thursday was the day of Jupiter, in some ways paralelling
Thor as the lightning hurler; Friday was attributed to Venus, the Roman goddess
of love, like our Freya. Saturday kept itds original association with the Roman
god Saturn, but we have reason to assume that a new correspondence could be made
in which Saturn and Njord are connected to make an entirely Odinic system of
naming the weekdays.
Also, there are certain prayers
that have been passed down to us which closely correspond, almost word for word,
with those in other faths, namely the ancient Hindu texts, such as the Vedas. In
Viktor Rydberg's "Investigations Into Germanic Mythology" vol. 2 he makes a
clear comparison between the following verses from Atharvaveda IV, 12 and the
second Merseberg Charm:
Atharvaveda
"It is you, you Rohani that causes the broken bone to heal. Arundhati, cause this to heal! That which is injured, that which is broken, that bone of yours, Dhatar shall kindly knit it together again, joint with joint. Thy marrow with the marrow, thy joint with the joint; the skin with the skin, the flesh grows together with the flesh!" Merseberg Charm "Fol (Balder) and Wodan rode into the woods, there the foot of Balder's foal went out of joint. It was charmed by Sinhtgunt, Sunna her sister; It was charmed by Frigg, Fulla her sister; It was charmed by Wodan, as he well knew how: Thus bone-sprain, like blood-sprain: [Like limb-sprain] Bone to bone, blood to blood; Limb to limb, as if they were glued." Folk Contributions: Earlier I mentioned the
need for a system that we could use to establish new texts as valid for the
study and practice of our faith, but the independent nature of Asatru forbids us
from adopting Christian methods of doing this. We cannot and will not compromise
our independence for any idea, now matter how alluring. We wouldn't have it any
other way. However, besides freedom of mind, another concept our religion
thrives on is folk, our community or nation. So it is through the folk that we
will substantiate our work.
The first and foremost method of
doing this will be called "Open Forum Research", where we will present the basis
of our texts on our website, then we will ask all of the men and women of Asatru
to review it, consider its contents, possibly debate our conclusions, or even
just offer support. New ideas and materials will be welcomed and considered int
he final draft of each book by our top scholars. So, in the end, these "Open
Forum Texts" will be by the Asatru nation, for the Asatru nation.
Nothing is more powerful, nothing more sacred to us than the folk-will, what
some may call "the collective unconscious", and it is through this that we will
herald in our revival. Simply giving a good word on our efforts will empower
what we are doing and will be treated as active participation in the creation of
these books. A list will then be made of all those who contributed to each
fundamentals project, which could be seen on our website at any
time.
Also, we will occasionally call
on the folk to make actual contributions to some of these works, meaning that we
will need them to make the actual text. Our book of prayers, our hymnal,
our cookbook, several of these documents
will require additions initiated by our people and used well through experience.
By this we will show that our faith is alive and always evolving through the
creative minds of its adherents.
I am going to tell you right now that we can do this, we can rebuild all of our sacred path from the ground up. We can and we will, for we have both the means and the motivation. Once it is done we will never have to look back, and our religion could begin a new era that we all opened the door for. This may make our list of supporters an heirloom in its own right! Hail the gods! |
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