This is intended for a particular audience. I have noticed a rise in interest and curiosity about Norse Paganism. This blog covers in part my own learning about my European ancestry (Germanic and Scandinavian) and my interest in the Norse mythology of my ancestors. I have noticed that many people of European ancestry have become curious about Norse Paganism, and in some cases some (not all) of these Norse Pagan groups (or Asatru groups) have argued for a kind of racial mythology and racial identify, and reject Christianity because of its Jewish roots. While I personally reject any form of racist ideology, I can understand that desire to get back in touch with your European roots and identify with your own lineal genetic ancestry and even the indigenous religion of your ancestors. I truly sympathize with those longings and felt something similar for a time. And so it took me a while to overcome those ethnocentric tendencies and find value in Christianity. I came to realize that Christianity is basically a collaboration between Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples; and so I am not abandoning or rejecting my Indo-European roots in finding value in Christianity as a worldview or spiritual practice because as I see it Christianity is a hybrid religion.
In the following blog series, I will make a case for why I, as a European, personally choose to be basically "Christian Adjcent" as a "Jordan Peterson type Christian," rather than becoming a Norse pagan in my worldview or spiritual practice.
The reason I choose to be a kind of cultural Christian of the type like a Jordan Peterson or Tom Holland (author of Dominion), is for basically pragmatic reasons. In my opinion, while I understand that Norse Paganism is the "spiritual way" of my ancient Scandanvian and Germanic ancestors, the fact is the Scandanvian Kings for example chose to convert to Christianity for pragmatic reasons. It's clear to me from history that Christianity was clearly "the winner" in the marketplace of ideas, as the more successful and powerful worldview and useful mythology for organizing and civilizing culture. In other words, I don't think my Germanic ancestors were idiots in converting the Christianity, they had their reasons and I think they were smart ones.
Because Norse Paganism was basically an oral tradition and nothing was written down in the form of "reliable scripture" like we have with the Bible, it is now basically a lost religion for the most part in my opinion. The Norse Pagan sources we do have about the Norse pagan gods were produced by Scadnavian Christians. So there is no way to know with any degree of certainty what in the Norse stories and mythology is of Christian origins. Did Odin really sacrifice himself to himself or was that a Christianization of a former story? Is Ragnarok authentically Norse pagan in how it's told or has it been Chrisrtianized by ideas from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament?
I think that I've actually come to the position that it's actually more respectful to my Norse ancestors to respect their own decisions, as most of the Germanic and Scandinavian Kings chose to convert to Christianity for practical reasons because they saw Christianity as an organizational tool for consolidating power and civilizizing city states. I also think that Christianity in its post-Constantinian form is more of a "Germanic Christianity" anyway as it combines the best of Judaism and the Indo-European mythos into one after Constantine.
As the author of A Vitalist Christianity? Don’t Bet on It, puts it:
The Western tradition is Christianity. Some try to deny this, but they’re wrong. Even if you just want to get rid of Christianity and start all over again, by reconnecting with what you consider to be the West’s pagan roots, you’ll have to go through Christianity to do so. Your opposition to Christianity ties you to it, and it to you.
Our access to the Classical World, and to European paganism of the ancient world more broadly —inasmuch as we can know anything about it at all — is mediated by Christianity. For a thousand years, Christianity guarded vital aspects of the pagan past and carried them forward, not least by preserving much of the institutional structure and the imperial aspirations of the Roman Empire. Christianity preserved the language and learning of the Classical World too; although much was also lost.
T.S. Eliot was right when he said, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that the West would only cease to be Christian when a different positive ideology took its place. By “positive” he meant of course a substantive set of doctrines and beliefs, a worldview that actually has some meaningful content of its own, rather than being just a series of negations and denials. It’s not enough just to say “I don’t go to Church and I don’t believe, so I’m not a Christian.” The air we breathe and the very earth we walk on are Christian. ...
... a vitalist Christianity is possible. The evidence for this position is also based in history, in the brute fact that men like Hernan Cortes and Henry the Navigator existed. Such men were Christians as much as they were explorers, swashbucklers and heroes. Rather than denying the physical side of life, they embraced it with gusto. And if they existed before, so the thinking goes, they can exist again. ...
While it’s true that these men existed and that they were, at least during their own day, numbered among the faithful, this is hardly less shallow a position than the cod-Nietzschean one. For starters, it underestimates the extent to which there is, and always will be, a conflict between priestly and warrior values at the heart of Christan morality. My friend Semmelweis wrote a fantastic essay on the subject in Issue Ten of MAN’S WORLD, using the fourth Rambo film (the one where he goes to Burma – you know, the really gory one) as an illustration. This split between warrior and priest is seen elsewhere, including in the Indo-European tradition – indeed, it may be an “eternal tension between compassion and power”, as Semmelweis puts it – but in Christianity it takes a particularly acute form that seems to offer little hope of a reconciliation.
For every incident like Jesus casting out the moneylenders from the temple or telling his disciples to go and buy swords, there is a myriad of instances that can be interpreted as fundamentally at odds with the warrior spirit championed by vitalism. Turn the other cheek, render unto Caesar, think not of the morrow and the entire message of the Sermon on the Mount… The central drama of Christianity, the Crucifixion, admits no easy answer to the question of Christianity’s attitude to the body and physical life. A pro-vitalist Christianity would always rest on interpretations that are easily disputed from multiple angles at once, not only from the Bible, but also from the works of the Great Church Fathers and events from Church history.
This is true, that the New Testament has many pacifist ideas, but this assumes there is only one consistent version of Christianity. As the book The Human Faces of God and Randel Holmes explains, the Christian tradition is more of an argument with itself, with constant internal power plays rather than a consistent dogma settled by egoless priests directed by deity. My own explanation of the integration and balancing of the "spirit of vitalism" and pacifism is explained by what I call the phases and strategies of God.
The author goes on to admit that Christianity became as powerful and influential throughout the West as it was because of the Indo-European energy, when he writes:
Men like Hernan Cortes and, much earlier, barbarian kings like Alaric who converted to Christianity, appeared during a very particular phase in the history of the Church. For the first 1700 years of its history, certainly up to the Siege of Vienna in 1683, Christianity was at war for its existence in the most literal sense. In short: the Church needed men like Alaric and Cortes to survive.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, an essential part of the continuation of Christianity in its territories was an accommodation with Germanic life. We can see this in the famous letter of Pope Gregory the Great to Abbot Mellitus, who was in the process of converting the Anglo-Saxons in the kingdom of Kent. Instead of destroying their pagan temples, Pope Gregory told Mellitus to reconsecrate them to God, the better to win the Anglo-Saxons over.
The conversion to Christianity of the new barbarian kingdoms of Europe changed the Church as much as it changed the barbarians themselves. Many of these Germanic accruals were later washed away by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, but it’s in this context – of a Church that had to change itself to survive, by cosying up to dangerous men – that we must understand the “vitalist Christians” of yore.
The author goes on to argue that this unification of cultural energies into different roles, the forming of the strong manly knight at the gates with sword alongside with the pious pacifist priest inside the guarded gates, was done out of necessity in order to cause the Christian institution to survive and flourish. He says that we need such strong men of vitalist energy today in Christianity; but then then he goes on to criticize the Christian Churches of the West, both Protestant and Catholic, providing evidence that they are by and large not supporting vitalist men.
I agree with the author and yet he is denying the counterculture within Christianity, like the "Christian Vitalism on the Right who are pushing back, and the Eastern Orthodox Church and "Ortho Bro.s" who are definitely not bending the knee to the radical far-Left.
The author concludes by stating, "The simple truth is that, even if a vitalist Christianity is possible – and I’m not saying it isn’t – there’s no question of the institutional Church [not] accepting it in any regard. ..." I agree but I don't see those espousing a Muscular Christianity caring whether or not the institutional churches support them; and it's not stopping them from moving forward and promoting a more vitalist Christianity.
The Indo-Europeans and ancient Israel both had a warrior philosophy and mythology because that was the environment that generated that particular warrior culture. Ancient Israel evolved culturally into civilized Hellenized Jews and later Rabbinic Judaism; and ancient Indo-Europeans spread out becoming Greco-Romans and new mythologies like the mystery cults and becoming Hindus and Zoroastrians which all influenced Second Temple Judaism and Christianity. Then there was the germanization of Mideval Christianity. So whether it is through the Hindus or through Roman Christianity, the Indo-European peoples eventually developed more sophisticated civilizing mythologies after the origional Proto-Indo-Euopean mythos or religion. So I see it as no big deal that Christianity as a hybrid of Israelite religion and Greek philosophy is the American religion, as a useful tool for to achieving higher states of consciousness and civilizing affects. I don't see why an Indo-European needs to fixate on the pre-Christian Norse mythology rather than seeing all mythology as remix, as maps of meaning, and Christianity is a collorbarion between Jews and Indo-Europeans.
The bottom line is Christianity built our Western culture and is deeply imbedded in our public consciousness as North Americans. I will conclude by quoting from Jordan Paterson's book We Who Wrestle with God, pages xxx to xxxi, because I compleltely agree with what he says below:
For better or worse, the story is the thing—and for better or worse, the story on which our western psyches and cultures are now somewhat fragilely founded—however fragile they’ve become—is most fundamentally the story told in the library that makes up the biblical corpus, the compilation of drama that sits at the base of our culture and through which we look at the world. This is the story on which Western civilization is predicated. It is a collection of characterizations not only of God, whose imitation, worship, or, indeed, embodiment is held to be the highest of all possible aims, but of man and of woman, whose characters are held to exist in relationship to that God, and of society, in relation to the individual and the divine. It is, as well, the revelation of the sacrifice that makes such aim possible, and an examination in dramatic form of the transcendent target that is held to unite all things in the best possible manner. The biblical story, in its totality, is the frame through which the world of facts reveals itself, insofar as the West itself is concerned: it is the description of the hierarchy of value within which even science itself (that is, the science that ultimately pursues the good) is made possible. The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated—the foundation of the West, plain and simple.
The landscape of the fictional is the world of good and evil—the world of value, with its pinnacle ever receding into the promised land itself, and the eternal pit of abysmal and infinite suffering occupying the lowest of possible places. The biblical stories illuminate the eternal path forward up the holy mountain to the heavenly city, while simultaneously warning of the apocalyptic dangers lurking in the deviant, the marginal, the monstrous, the sinful, the unholy, the serpentine, and the positively demonic. God, in this formulation, is the spirit that leads up. Man is the being who struggles with that spirit with every decision, because a decision is a matter of prioritization; with every glance, as every glance is a sacrifice of possibility toward some desired end, and with every action as he moves toward some destination and away from all others. At every moment of consciousness, we are fated to wrestle with God.
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