3/25/2019

This article, written by Lee Gregsson, is an effort to share the collective understanding of worldview according to the families that constitute the Nordskogen Stämme. Our Stämme (tribe) feels that there are some important aspects of a traditional and functional heathen worldview that are commonly missed, or even argued against. As such we have decided to write a series of articles to share our view with the world. 

We often find as adults that lessons learned in childhood expand to teach us new things about the world. When I was a boy growing up in that part of the Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin that is a mixture of maple and oak hardwood forests and patchwork family dairy farms, my father and grandfather both taught me the importance of not showing my fear to the large livestock around which we spent time or to the wild animals one could encounter in the forests. Whether a large dog or a steer, a turkey or a black bear, a horse or hog, recoiling and retreating in fear – I was taught – is a sure way to encourage continued aggression. Our behavior signals to these animals whether they should give us space or drive us off, and the importance of being confident and refusing to back down was a lesson learned through the words of the men who taught me to be a man, and through my own experience of not putting this advice into practice. People who have grown up around livestock or wildlife will almost certainly be familiar with this idea.

In recent weeks I have been involved in conversations with several kinsmen in Nordskogen Stämme and with other heathen friends outside of my own tribe about the differences of perspective that rural life, particularly connected to homesteading, agriculture, or wilderness, necessarily bring to conceptions of our worldview. In our experience, these differences are often highlighted in our learning with more urban-dwelling friends we have. We are all products of our own experiences and so it stands to reason that different tribal ecologies will result in different paradigms of understanding regarding reconstruction of heathen worldview in the 21st century. One area in which such paradigmatic variety shows itself is in concepts about wild lands, the spiritual power within them, and our relationship to them as people working to recreate the divine order in our inner yards.

Reconstructionists generally agree on the idea that our inner yard, our innangarðr, constitutes the physical space of our taken property and the people with whom we are united in a frith-web through birth or oath. It is where we experience the “good life” of protection, provision, and where we recreate the order that emulates that created by the gods and goddesses of our peoples. It is where through ritual and cycles of gifting we connect with the húsvættir with whom we share the space, and depending on tribal practice is where we connect with our own ancestors as we can. Our goal is to create this space and increase its strength, health, and vitality, and to spread it as we need. The opposite, the outer yard or útangarðr, is basically everyone and everything that does not fall within. This includes people not bound to us through shared luck and frith, their lands, and also untamed wild places in which the landvættir hold sway. Our decisions in life are made based upon how our inner yard is affected by them, and our concern for the outer yard is mainly limited to its ability to affect our inner yard itself.

While the preference for the inner yard is clearly a foundational concept in pre-conversion Germanic religion it is possible to take that preference to a length that impairs our ability to truly understand how people in pre-conversion societies related to the land and beings outside the fence. It is frequently assumed that they were inherently terrified of it, often horrified by it, at its complete mercy, and so saw their own lives as a perpetual slog toward what could be at best a pyrrhic victory over the outer until death took them and they arrived in the halls of their ancestors. They would live on in the lives and words and actions of their descendants of course, but life was essentially lived in a constant state of war with the outer yard according to this view.

I argue here that it would not have been possible for them to survive if that is how they lived their lives. The creation and growth of the inner yard was their simulacrum of the imposition of order on chaos by the gods, it was an exercise they took seriously and in which they engaged throughout their lives, but they also depended upon the outer. Their lives would not have been possible without the outer yard to provide them wood for building; plants for medicine; animal hides, bones, and meat for clothing and food; rocks and minerals for smelting and forging tools and weapons; and contact with other tribes for common defense, trade, and cultural exchange. They were absolutely dependent upon the outer yard. While home was always best, and the inner yard remained their locus of control and their axis mundi, they needed the outer yard and spent a lot of time there. In the same way it is not possible to be fluent in a language without immersion it would not have been possible for pre-conversion populations to be able to navigate the outer yard well enough to secure the things they needed from it if they were afraid to engage it.

Fear creates a particular way of seeing the world. It can cause us to develop irrational and function-impairing beliefs about our experiences, and it often leads us to interpret the world through those skewed perceptions. As a therapist, I spend a lot of time teaching people to recognize these patterns when they have arisen and caused inhibited proficiency in various domains of life. Over generations separated from dependence on wild lands — and therefore from frequent contact with them — it is possible for people to project upon our pre-conversion forebears and ancestors the fear they themselves feel about being in such places. If we are trying to understand how heathens millennia ago saw the world, we will be critically impaired if we hold a fear of wildness that would have been alien to those who came before. This will be particularly true if we are unconscious of that fear or separation.

A potential side effect of this distance from wildness is that we may begin to assume that the only thing our ancestors held as sacred are those things they made sacred themselves. Hearth, vé, mound, all places that ritual has set apart and which have sacral value because of human effort to create the right conditions for the health of the inner and communication with spirits, ancestors, and the gods, may be seen as the only sorts of places that held holiness for the people who came before us. What may be missed is the possibility for hierophany and sacredness outside of the inner yard. Mircea Eliade noted in his seminal work “The Sacred and the Profane” that Indo-European cultures used a fire ritual to take possession of the land, and some version of this is normative practice in reconstructionist tribes today. However, prior to the discussion of that ritual, Eliade described how divination was used, through turning loose livestock in one example, to find the place in the wild in which the person or group should put down roots and begin the work of creating a new inner. The land was special somehow, appointed for them, prior to any effort on their part to take the land. If this was the case, how much more must it be true that areas outside the fence that held vital resources for the tribe must have been considered something other than fearful other?

Living a life that is dependent upon wild lands directly and not through the abstracting effects of shipping and shopping means being aware that the outer is not a monolith of horrific experiences and beings just waiting to kill you. Those things certainly exist. We have them here without question and most members of Nordskogen Stämme have had close encounters with wolves, bears, moose, the weather, the water, the forests, and the like. But we also regularly have the experiences – the hierophanies – of taking wild game, harvesting wild fish, ricing, collecting mushrooms and berries, gathering medicinal plants, felling trees for building our homes, and hunting for things we use for crafting and creative work. There is sacred in the outer. It is not the same as that which we create in our inner yards, but it is there just the same. Our ancient forebears would not have missed that fact, or the awe that these experiences lend to those who have them.