By Trevor Swoverland

There have been several threads on the Facebook group associated with this website recently in which the idea of reconstituting tribal relationships in the effort to reconstruct Germanic tribal spiritualities that existed prior to colonization and conversion has been looked at as unnecessary or even toxic by some participants. While most of the confusion on this seems to come from what is a very colonized understanding of just what tribal identity means – it being far too often given a negative connotation through such modern references as political tribalism – we feel it is absolutely imperative for people interested in the project of decolonizing the reconstruction of Heathen lifeways to understand the necessity of reconstitution of tribal relationships to that effort. This reconstitution has nothing whatever to do with race or with blood. It has everything to do with relationship and shared future, and it is of critical importance.

Prior to their own colonization and conversion, the Germanic peoples, like the Celtic and Slavic peoples who also moved through continental Europe, organized themselves in tribes and clans. This is apparent from the very earliest recorded observations made by imperial leaders and thinkers. Tacitus, in his work “Germania,” refers to the land east of the Rhine and north of the Alps as dark and mysterious. From their earliest memory, the peoples of this area were organized into several different tribal groups that branched into multiple descendant tribes by the time Tacitus was gathering information on them. We know the names of many of these tribes today and they have followed Germanic peoples through the centuries; my own family surname is a direct reference to the names of one of those tribal groups. The Germanic peoples prior to conversion related to the world from a perspective of ingroup and outgroup, of tribe being identity. While this will come up later in this piece it is worth recognizing that even back in the time being referred to here, tribe had nothing to do with race. It had to do with shared ethnos, a common language, worldview, set of lifeways, and shared fate and destiny.

Vilhelm Grønbech, in his masterwork The Culture of the Teutons, wrote about the importance of tribal relationships to heathen Germanic tribes.

Lack of frith is in its innermost essence a sickness, and identical with a lack of honour. Such a condition is called by the Northmen nidinghood, the state of being a niding, whereby they understand the dissolution of that inner quality which makes the individual at once a man and a kinsman.

In another section of that work he noted simply that “the niding is a wolf-man.” He is a beast, he has no distinction from anything else that is outside at least some community that shares bonds of frith, luck, and future. A person without a tribe was still a person but one without identity, who was adrift in a dangerous world where goodwill could be counted on from no one unless an individual was not just an individual, but part of the body and soul of a tribe.

Reconstruction of pre-conversion heathen lifeways is not possible to do accurately or effectively without the recreation of tribal relationships. The religions of the Germanic tribes were organized around the frithweb shared by members of the tribe and clan, and the men and women who led the tribes ritually did so not as leaders of individuals, but as the embodiments of the soul of the tribe itself. Sacrifices were offered by the chieftain on behalf of the people as a collective body. As the gods and goddesses of the tribes were organized into tribes themselves (any newly-interested heathen has heard of the Aesir and Vanir, for example), human social organization was as well, and through ritual the tribe recreated the works of the gods, each ritual moment being a simulacrum of the mythic actions of divinity.

Most readers will recall several years ago when the movie Avatar was released. In a science fiction context that movie depicted the Na’vi, a humanoid species that was indigenous to the planet humans called Pandora. The Na’vi were organized in several tribal societies inhabiting different parts of the land of their home world, and all of their tribes lived in deep relationship with the land and with one another. The movie was a spectacular portrayal of tribal life versus colonization. Within a few weeks of the movie’s debut, mental health professionals began noticing a recurrent theme of people becoming very depressed after seeing the movie. One only needs to do a search for “Avatar blues” online to find scores of articles and threads about this phenomenon. People talked to therapists and even became suicidal at the realization that their lives suddenly seemed hollow and meaningless when contrasted with the spiritually and culturally powerful lives of the Na’vi.

To modern people who live in the context of tribal relationships and live close to the land, this is not a big mystery. There is a profound sense of fulfillment that comes from living in a frithweb in tribe, with your life and future wound together with those of your people (not some artificial connection supposedly shared due to common ancestral origins, but real connection rooted in human relationship now). Rebuilding tribal social structures provides this deep sense of relationship and mutual responsibility. It ties us to people and place. It provides identity. For example, I am an individual, but my identity is as a member of my people, Nordskogen Stamme. We farm together, hunt and fish and forage together, we build together, face enemies together, work with allies together, and in the context of our tribal identity we connect to other tribes in our region. We live in deep relationship with one another and with the land upon which we depend, building friendships in our community and weaving our frithweb as we go, our luck growing collectively and all of us benefiting from it.

Reconstruction of heathen religion depends on reconstituting tribal relationships, but so does the decolonization of that effort. Far from being a dividing and ostracizing thing, tribal identity serves to improve relationships with people outside one’s in-group. While tribalism is often used as a pejorative in the media and especially in the context of what can only be described as toxic political life, nobody who has actually spent time living and working with tribal communities around the world believes that tribal identity is an inherently bad thing. It gives people strength, purpose, security, and a sense of belonging that makes it very difficult for outside forces to control them. This is clearly why efforts at colonization always include the destruction of tribal identity through the eradication of languages, social structures, spiritualities, and rootedness to particular land. This has been the case for as long as colonization has been a reality. It occurred in Iron Age and medieval Europe, it occurred in European colonial efforts in Africa and Asia, and it occurred in the Americas at the hands of the same European powers and, afterward, at the hands of the new independent and colonizing governments here. If tribal identity was not a source of strength for people that allowed them to withstand hardship and to join with other tribes to confront common threats, colonizers would never have bothered destroying it.

Our strong belief based on our cross-disciplinary study and our own applied anthropological experimentation is that it is not possible to reconstruct a decolonized heathenry without rebuilding and emphasizing tribal structures and relationships at the core of that effort. In these relationships and the ingroups they create, race is irrelevant, just as it was for our pre-conversion ancestors. We are talking here about ethnogenesis; the recreation of peoplehood based on shared values and relationship. From this foundation can emerge renewed expressions of pre-conversion religion, with lifeways rooted in the land tying people to one another in deep and meaningful ways.