No True Pagan

Seen on "The Barbarian Clergyman" Telegram channel on February 9, 2024:

This kind of shit is ultimately malicious. The person repeating it might be doing so in good faith, but the original idea was disseminated maliciously by bad actors.

"You're not really pagan unless ______" is rapidly becoming a purity spiral, and we know who promotes purity spirals.

It ain't self-respecting white people whose principles are more nuanced than "white good, everyone else bad."

Here's what I define as "true paganism" in 2024:

Religion, spirituality, culture, society, and politics are all intertwined in an eternal, complex dance. One does not produce the others; all are equally the product of the people.

Paganism doesn't exist in a vacuum, where the gods are only ever literal supernatural entities, and the myths are only ever meant to be taken literally. This is impossible under paganism's thesis, that ethnic groups are real and have a divine obligation to survive and preserve their existence.

Every single tribe of humans who have ever existed have perpetuated myths about not only their origins as a tribe, but the origins of the world they inhabit. This does not mean that every tribe's world-origin myths are a literal representation of how the world was physically created. This would require the same physical space to have been created in multiple ways by multiple creator gods, which in turn suggests a weird sort of multiverse where every universe is operating within the single physical plane inhabited by humans.

It goes to follow that our understanding of our gods, their myths, and our reasons for revering them should extend beyond hyperliteralism.

The world was not created by Ymir, or any other ethnic group's creator gods. The world was created, with the rest of the universe, by something (or someone) so vastly superior to us that its most fundamental nature and motives will be eternally opaque and inaccessible. Our planet was then populated with humans (or whatever humanoids you believe are your ancestors), perhaps by tribe-creating gods, perhaps by humanoids who were escaping another planet.

The real, objective story behind our origin doesn't actually matter. What matters is that our existence is intentional, and that is what gives us the right to exist and preserve our existence. This belief doesn't really apply exclusively to non-Christian ethnic spirituality: Abrahamism first says our existence is intentional (one of very few truly universal statements about humanity), but then says that intentional existence is at the pleasure of the almighty Abrahamic god (an obvious lie).

So paganism is not about attempting to present a literal explanation for that which cannot be explained. It's not about putting forth unfalsifiable and unverifiable claims as absolute truth. It's about understanding that our gods put us here for a reason, and the most primal, fundamental reason for our existence is to survive. Our survival, regardless of tribe or people, depends on collective unity, which is best obtained through the holistic homogeneity offered by preserving ethnic groups - populations of people with shared genetic heritage, and therefore shared instincts, predispositions, and tendencies.

Myths and spiritual practice exist not for self-enlightenment, but for the unity and preservation of the people and their unique, distinct way-of-life. The words in Hávamál are not the revealed and recorded words of a supernatural deity named Odin. Those stanzas are eternal wisdom for the Germanic people and their many nations. The words could easily be ascribed to any other Germanic deity, because the point isn't that it's revealed wisdom and therefore uncorrupted, perfect, and universal. The wisdom is eternal because it has withstood the test of time in its continued practice over many generations.

That is the heart of paganism. If you're denying people their pagan spiritual identity because they don't take the myths literally enough, you're still trapped in the Abrahamic mindset.

The only accurate, truthful claim found in Abrahamism is that both material reality and humanity are the result of intentional actions. Everything Abrahamism claims about human nature, the nature of the universe's creator, the nature of humanity's creator, and the purpose of religion itself are wrong. Not just "sort-of wrong". Not "wrong, but with a kernel of truth in the middle." Just plain, outright wrong.

Once you figure this out, it's a lot easier to push past the laundry list of theories and ideas that, when distilled down to their abstract arguments, serve to reinforce the very ideology you're trying to excise from your homeland, wherever that may be.

If you're more worried about your piety than the survival of your clan, you are precisely that which you claim to hate. Give it up. There is no True Pagan. Paganism is not a monolithic spiritual framework, religious practice, or doctrine. Paganism should be centered on our divine obligation to survive. We must survive ethically, responsibly, morally, honestly, righteously...but we must survive. It's that simple.

Survival is our highest calling.

Read more essays here.