"Hail to the day! Hail to the sons of day!
Hail to the night and her kin!
With gracious eyes may you look upon us...
 
Hail to the gods! Hail to the goddesses!
Hail to the mighty, fecund earth!
Eloquence and native wit may you give us...”

—Sigdrifumal (Lay of Sigdrifa)

"Culture has led us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption." 
— John Zerzan

We live in an age of endemic alienation.  As dwellers of the so-called first world, we are largely estranged from the Land we exist (and ultimately depend utterly) upon.  For much of the populace, food is what comes wrapped in plastic and stamped with a nearly indecipherable ingredient list of chemical constituents.  Water is what comes out when we turn a knob at our sinks.  Cold is what we banish at the turn of a thermostatic dial.  Rain is what we try our best to avoid lest it muss our hair or muddy our clothing as we dash through it in attendance to matters more important.  

Of course, we may take occasional breaks from such, and experience the pleasure of a Sunday drive on a winding country road, or “roughing it” while we camp for a weekend with synthetic gear made on the other side of the globe, or occasionally drop a fishing pole into a nearby creek on a lazy Saturday afternoon.  

Some of us may even make a habit of these practices, and that’s a fine thing.  But ultimately its back to the “real world”, that Monday thru Friday eight plus hour grind of “yes, sir” and e-mail and fast food.  Where entertainment comes not from story and song and the flickering of an open fire, but from a flashing box of lights we engage with to distract us from the tedium and emptiness of such routines.  And of course, we always have community, even when it manifests through dislocated e-mail lists on online chat forums, where facial features and voice tone are replaced by cartoon avatars and emoticons.

I never would have thought it an act of controversy to acknowledge the above, and yet, time and time again, clear eyed discussion focused on our estrangement from the natural world does indeed seem to generate controversy and derision on many fronts, regardless of one’s political or social worldview.  Clearly it pushes a nerve that many find uncomfortable.  

So I ask you to bear with me, throughout this article, as my goal is not to offend or incite, but simply to speak clearly.  And to do that I may need to put a few cracks in the rose colored glasses so many of us use to view the world, our place within it, and the elder ways of our ancestors we long so desperately to reconstruct. 

As many well know, Heathen derives from the Old English hæðen "not Christian or Jewish", (c.f. Old Norse heiðinn).  Historically, the term was probably influenced by the Gothic haiþi "dweller on the heath", a heath being an open area of barren or otherwise uncultivated land.  In modern parlance it has come to reference Germanic neo-paganisms.  I use the term specifically in the context of the pre-Christian tribal folk ways of North Western Europe from their origins to the establishment of Christianity, and/or the reestablishment/revival of said worldviews and understanding, today.
 
Encompassing such a large array of tribal peoples, who each saw themselves as distinct and unique, it should be clear that historical Heathenry was never one thing but rather a broad schema of similar customs and world views. 

So I see it with the modern Heathen revival.  And whether the folk dwelt in lands we now think of as Scandinavia, or England, or Ireland, or Germany what they all held at their core was a total dependence upon the land.

Even amidst ardent reconstructionists this simple truth seems to be largely ignored.  That it is ignored, or at best given short shrift in modern Heathenry, seems to me a given.  Why it is ignored on the other hand, is the much more complex and problematic question.

“The ancient Germanic peoples viewed their lives on this earth, which they called Midgard, differently than modern man. Their interaction with the environment was straight forward, more simple, and direct. The primary economic base was agrarian (farming and animal husbandry), fishing, and hunting and gathering as needed.  Industries were mainly home based and involved (usually) very low impact technology. Even though, by 21st century standards, these people were relatively simplistic and primitive in their lifestyles, looking into their production of art forms such as poetry/ prose, carvings, and weavings reveal some about the depth and breadth of their spiritual life and something of the complexity and sophistication behind their thought processes…”
—Bil Linzie

Native, according to the Miriam Webster online dictionary, “implies birth or origin in a place or region and may suggest compatibility with it.”1  And so it inevitably was with the folk from whom we are descended; the folk to which very particular and unique Powers gave shape in a very particular place; the folk who sustained themselves upon that particular place for countless generations; the folk, who, even when circumstances demanded their migration, carried with them their oral histories and the power of the deities from whom they were descended as well as the foresight to forge anew alliances with the powers of place to which they came to dwell.  

The alienation of human beings from the larger biosphere that is the hallmark of our current life way stems not from the Heathen faith and world view, but rather is the result of its destruction at the hands of a foreign ideology introduced from afar and adopted by the powerful as an expedient means of increasing power and control, and eventually by the common folk as a comfort in times of uncertainty.  

Emerging from realms of desert and baking sun in the Middle East, a peculiar form of monotheism escaped its own indigenous boundaries, replicating itself wherever its controlling and proselytizing doctrines could find a foothold (and as means of cosmological coercion and control by those who would justify their own expansion of power, they found footholds quite easily throughout the known world).  

“The creed of Sinai tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots,” writes George Steiner 2, for the followers of the one God did not value their desert homeland as the source and sustainer of their folk, but knew it instead, as Paul Shepard writes, as “a vacuum, an idealized state of disengagement and alienation, a symbol of the condition of the human spirit.”3  For the adherents of this creed, the uniqueness of people and place did not matter at all.  How foreign this concept must have been to the animistic peoples of Northwestern Europe cannot be emphasized enough.

Yet as generations were forwarded in this new life way, and social complexity increased, the vitality of the land—still the means, of course, through which the folk owed their existence—became, as it had become for the progenitors of Middle Eastern monotheism, a burden to be conquered and soon overtook when the One True God of the book returned to Earth to shatter his creation for all time. 

This is not to say that monotheism itself demands alienation from the Land a people dwell upon.  It is to say that the particular, transcendental monotheism of the Abrahamic traditions demands it.  And this is the unfortunate tradition that has engulfed the globe.   It is not merely the belief in one god, but rather a belief in one god who transcends the Earth completely yet demands that all who live upon it grovel at his feet and subdue the Land in his name.

It is the this combination of one god and one true way that assured the diversity, complexity, and earthy rootedness of the universe inherent to the Northern European Heathen worldview be given over to the uniformity and sterility of the Abrahamic doctrine, just as the tribal social system itself eventually gave way to the monarchical nation state.  One High God and One High King, both who wielded ultimate control over the life and death of the masses.

Paul Shepard writes:

"...What is it about the human psychology that finds monotheism intolerable?  David Miller believes that polytheistic religious experience means being gripped by a story in which the diversity of the many characters is ‘the symbolic expression of a lively process.’  The gods and goddesses ‘teach us an acceptance of the variousness of ourselves and others.’  The monotheistic search for a single sense of identity makes us feel guilty for not getting it all together, which is impossible in a plural universe.  Thinking is polytheistic,  ‘a reality in which truth and falsity, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil are forever and intextricably mixed together.’ The powers and forces are dramatically revealed in an acceptable way.  The story form keeps what James Hillman calls ‘the feeling function’ alive, harmonizing the “in here” with the “out there.” 3

Like the human psyche, the Land itself is animated with varied uniqueness.  Bursting into the seen realms from the timeless depths of the underworld—plants, stones, rivers and trees are nourished in the flow of wyrd.  The tribes of the ecosystem, the animal folk, the grass folk, the flying folk, the swimming folk, the human folk, all derive their existence from, live fully upon, and ultimately return to the Land. Thus it is anything but an inert mass of soil and stone.  It is a mysterious entity unto itself—the tapestry upon which wyrd crafted its uncanny art—in all places, the source of life, knowledge, health and sustenance.  

This is what we lost when we traded in the animistic and polytheistic richness of life in the world for the sterile comforting security in a belief of transcendence from it.  Rigidity and alienation are the twins birthed from the Western monotheistic traditions, a result that points to the organizing power of weltanschauung—worldview—and how the cosmology of a people comes to reflect those people utterly.  

“We live in a mythical era, a time that surpasses legend.  We’re witnessing a dazzling triumph of technology, an archetypal summoning of powers that are indistinguishable from true magic.  But that triumph is hollow and destructive to much of what we value.  The more we humans use our powers to impose order on the world, the more disorder there is.  There are wars and premonitory shadows of wars to come, as the world economy becomes ever more leveraged and dependent on scare and finite resources.  In the background there’s a steady slippage toward irreversible climate change and ecological collapse.  And the astounding material success of the human endeavor hasn’t brought happiness, wisdom or enlightenment; instead there’s a profound disturbance in our collective human psyche.  The best evidence of that disturbance is to be found in our suicidal abuse of nature, but we can also see its effects in the narcissism and desperation that are endemic in our society.  Something is wrong at a very fundamental level.”
—Richard Bruce Anderson  

Author Derrick Jensen notes, “If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them.”4

What is your experience?  Will we fully align with our ancestors who dwelt upon the heath?  Or we will allow ourselves to continue to fall prey to the machinations of the Abrahamic worldview?  The Land was the foundation of all pagan lifeways.  If Germanic reconstructionism is to have any long term viability in the modern era it must be so again.  

Walk the Land.  Plunge your hands into its soil.  Tune your ear to the song of the whispering grasses and the call of birds.  And give pause to ponder how far we have wondered from the foundational worldview of our ancestors.  What might it look like for you and yours to come into greater contact with the Land and how might it influence your experience of our ancestral traditions?  I challenge you, as a modern Heathen, to craft a way of living as if the Land truly mattered, not just on isolated “holy days” but on everyday.  The Earth, and all life upon it, is waiting for our return.

1 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/native

2 In Bluebeards’ Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)

3 Nature and Madness (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982)

4 Tearing Down the Master’s House: An Interview with Derrick Jensen

(http://www.counterpunch.org/engel08122006.html)