The articles on this site are created out of conversations that occur in the Decolonizing Heathenry facebook group. As such, the authorship credit goes to the people in that group. That being said, this essay was compiled (and narrated) by Kaare Melby.

The way wild space is viewed when you live in the city is nearly opposite from the way you view it when you live in the country.

The city landscape is almost 100% ordered/ not wild. You seek the wild in that case, it’s novel, and very much the other. You have a feeling of wanting to expand wild space. Ordered space seems inevitable.

When you live in a rural area, ordered space is sacred, and very much not the expected, it takes constant maintenance to keep it part of the ordered world.

So, I understand the reason why ordered space is sacred. But, when you live in the country, you realize how important the wild is. The wild is filled with lessons, with dangers, with bounty and resources. Our survival depends on us having both wild and ordered.

Modern people who live in urban environments are experiencing the world in a very new way. Never before has a society been able to so completely avoid the wild. The wild has become almost alien to most people. Something “out there”. Something they have heard about in stories. Something people visit only when it’s been tamed enough to be deemed acceptable: a park, a boardwalk or path through a forest, a way of coming close to the wild without actually being exposed to it. Similar to seeing a lion in a zoo.

We must remember, our tribes came out of the forests in Germany, we were very much part of the wild. As our people moved into more sedentary lives of agriculture, we started to value the ordered more than the wild, and this idea is easy to pick up on and over-emphasize from our modern urbanized and colonized worldview. But even then, as Kershaw shows us, becoming an adult (male at least) required that you spend a period of your life living as an animal (usually a wolf), in the wild. Learning in this way, from wild cultic warriors who have dedicated their lives to live in the liminal space of the forest, outside of the world of the living. This practice is very old, and evidence is found across nearly all of the Indo-European sister cultures: Scandinavia, Saxon, India, Greece, Celtic, etc.