I’ve blogged exhaustively in the past about Neopagans, particularly the woke form of it, which I believe accounts for a good portion of Neopagans who use their “religion” is a shallow front for the expression of their political beliefs and overall worldview that’s mostly rooted in modern-day pop culture. Since I’ve more than put that issue to bed, I won’t drone on about it any further.
Starting several months ago, out of curiosity, I took to social media (ugh, I know..), read a few books, and a listened to few podcasts, in order to check out the right-wing side of the Neopagan scene. You see, I have been something of an amateur anthropologist since I can remember. I’ve always had a blazing curiosity about whatever this or that “scene” is up to. Anyway, back on topic; I had already been aware of the so-called “Folkish vs. Universalist” ideological war within Heathenry, (Germanic Neopaganism) and in my investigations I learned that this has spilled over into some of the other Neopagan ethnic ice cream flavors. Below, I’m mostly going to be talking about American right-wing Neopagans. I believe that Europeans (who tend to live in countries with mostly-homogeneous ethnic ancestry) have a lot more of a legitimate claim on the things I will be talking about.
All in all, I found the American iteration to be ruled by an incoherent mob mentality and a very pronounced disdain for philosophy and intellectualism (no, Frederich Nietzsche quote-memes don’t count). Instead, I found plenty of the following:
*Pseudo-masculine sentimentalism
*Shallow collectivist yearnings
*The copious use of reheated 19th century romanticist leftovers
*Repetitive yapping about “ethnic gods”
*The shrill insistence that ideas and beliefs derive their validity from the ethnic pedigree of each respective idea (as opposed to inherent truth value)
*Lots and lots of grievance politics (sound familiar?)
As far as I can tell, the lion’s share of right-wing Neopagans are Heathens and their common themes I’ve seen coloring their paganism are:
*”The Folk” (that is, the yearning for ethnic collectivism as form of social organization)
*The idolization of their claimed ancestry; typically revolving around ethnic groups (ex: the Old Norse culture) that ceased to exist many centuries ago, or have evolved into modern day ethnicities that have very little in common culturally with their pre-Christian forebears, despite maybe a few preserved vestiges of the older folk culture.
*The notion that a person's blood content determines which gods they should worship.
*Appeals to “might makes right” morality
*”Blood and Soil” nationalist tropes claimed as spiritual teachings
*Hard Polytheism taken to absurd extremes
*A literal interpretation of myths and other literary source materials
And these themes are what we see before even getting into the political side of this particular niche subculture.
By “folk” they are referring to their attempt, as European Americans (i.e. Whites), to create a modern-day collectivist, neo-tribal identity based on this-or-that European ancestral stock the group in question claims descent from. The main issue I see with this is that they are appealing specifically to pre-Christian ancestry; which in practice means appealing to ancestry from so far back in time that it’s nearly impossible to know much of anything about such ancestors. So this “ancestry” they talk about all the time is little more than an abstraction, in practical terms. This abstraction fails to correspond with any modern day lived experience. On the contrary, virtually all of their knowable ancestors are Christians, for better or worse. There’s a huge gaping historical void between the Christianized present and the very distant pagan past these people are hearkening back towards. I’ve come across more than a few right-wing Heathens with very mixed European ancestry (i.e. “Amerimutts”) acting like whatever Germanic ancestry they might have as being their only spiritually-significant ancestry. One of the leaders of a sizable East Coast Folkish group has an Italian surname. The founding father of American Folkish Heathenry (Asatru Folk Assembly is his organization) is a man by the name of Stephen McNallen; yeah, I’ve seen no shortage of Irish and Scottish surnames among the followers of these groups. Yet, the Germanic deities are the only ones they seem find relevant based on ancestral appeals.
An Instant Coffee ReligionIf I am going to take a wild guess here, I’d say that most participants in these groups aren’t exactly genealogy aficionados, nor are they history buffs. Rather, the guiding ideology is White Nationalism, which is a form of identitarian grievance politics based on White American racial identity. Because of this we see bizarre claims like that the specifically-Germanic deities are somehow the “folk gods” of all white people. It really just means their main criteria for letting people in their groups is that they are passably-white. I doubt anyone is being subjected to a DNA ancestry test. Really though, I think the folkist adoption of the Germanic/Norse pantheon and folklore originally came about as an arbitrary decision based on the fact that the collection of medieval Icelandic sources (Eddas, Sagas, ect.) is the closest thing we have to any detailed documentation of pre-Christian Northern European religion. So those materials are simply “good enough” to appropriate and claim as an instant pan-White, non-Abrahamic religion to latch onto for identity purposes. Don’t let the contradictory appeals to ancestry get in the way of that! Also, on the resurgence of Germanic Neopaganism in general, we should remember this first came about in the wake of the 1960s counterculture. The hippies were big on the whole “noble savage” thing. From the Summer of Love onward, it was high time to get back to nature and simpler times! Neopagans could have just as easily adopted the Greco-Roman pantheon as a basis for a Western pagan identity, but no, that whole thing was all about High Civilization, cosmopolitanism, multi-ethnic empires, cultural and religious syncretism, and other complicating factors. You see, this is all about feelings and aesthetics. Spirituality whaaaaat?
One last word on ancestry. I, myself have done a DNA ancestry test, and later on I built myself a dandy little family tree. Actually, it’s quite elaborate and detailed. I’ve been able to trace many ancestors on the British Isles side of my family back to the 1500s. These ancestors hail from every single British Isles ethnic group. This raises an important question in my view; why are my Highland Scot ancestors (Campbells, represent!) any more special or meaningful than my English ancestors? What about my Welsh and Irish ancestors? Why would any one of these ancestral ethnicities have any special bearing on what form of spirituality I study or practice today?
You are more than your physical body's moleculesI guess what I’m getting at is that I think that for Americans, appealing to ancestry is a rather shallow way of deciding on which spiritual path or pantheon of gods to follow. In a recent Magic Monday response, John Michael Greer explains this quite well from an Occult perspective:
“Yes, I'm familiar with [the belief that ancestry should define one’s sprituality], but I consider it mistaken. The genetics of your present material body simply don't have that much to do with your spiritual and occult practices. Past life connections tend to be considerably more important, and it's fairly rare these days for anyone to have an unbroken series of lives in one and only one ethnic group -- far more often, it's a complete jumble, and appropriately so, since one point of reincarnation is that it gives you the chance to explore many different ways of being human.”
I’ve seen some rather entertaining “Twitter battles” between pagans who utilize elaborate systems of thought like Platonism, Hindu philosophy, or Buddhism to guide their pagan practice, versus the kinds of ethno-cosplayers I’ve describe above. The usual retort from the latter tends to be the assertion that the philosophical belief in question is DEAD WRONG because those ideas happened to have originated from the “wrong” ethnic group. For example, Platonists were Greeks, so to mix in Platonism with Germanic paganism is outright heresy! Yes, the absurdity reveals itself immediately. Not only is this crude materialism masquerading as spirituality, but according to them, ideas have no independent merit; ideas just means to an end for some mundane concern or agenda. Ideas are nothing more than a reflection of some group’s will-to-power dynamics. Sound familiar? Yes, such utterances are a direct product of the postmodernist paradigm. Like their leftist Neopagan counterparts, right-wing Neopagans are very often atheists who use their “playganism” as a perma-Halloween costume to gallop around in.
Anything to bring back a sense of enchantmentHonestly, I can understand what motivates this kind of cosplay act. In today’s postmodern industrial Western world, there is a crushing level of anomie which has been brought about by mass social atomization and the rise of rampant consumerism, “dog-eat-dog” rat race economics replacing most forms of community cohesion, ubiqutous and hegemonic materialism, the loss of a coherent civilizational identity, the steep demographic decline of the core Western ethnic stock (i.e. White Europeans), and the overall uglification and vulgarization of nearly everything in the physical environment. So yeah, I get it. Turning back the clock and retreating into a “noble savage” fantasy world might seem like a rather appealing alternative to those who aren’t especially gifted in the imagination department.
On a more charitable note, the sort of ideas and behaviors I pointed out in the above sections are mostly associated with a handful of social media personalities who are vocal proponents of said ideas (in addition to their followers who frequently post comments). As many of us know quite well, loud people on social media don’t necessarily define the whole or majority of whatever groups they associate with or claim to represent.
I did look into a few Folkish Heathen organizations, and for the most part these seem like very wholesome, family-oriented groups. Their events are centered around weekend camping activities and outdoor worship of the gods. In other words, very cool stuff! The members appear for the most part to be working class people who work in the trades and other honest occupations that are closely connected to the physical economy. This stands in stark contrast to the leftist/woke/universalist camp, which (as far as I can tell) is populated by people associated with the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), who are generally-affluent, university-educated people and very often employed in salaried office jobs, i.e. work that deals with abstractions and tends to be rather disconnected from the physical economy. Leftist neopagans see the folkish types as being evil incarnate and hurl the usual angry slurs (racist!!, sexist!!, bigot!! nazeeeeeeee, ___phobe!!, ect.) in their general direction. What I think is really going on is the usual class bigotry we see from PMCs toward white working class people; of course very thinly clad with moralistic pretense. From what I’ve observed though, Folkish pagans tend to be rather egalitarian on most issues; for example, the men treat women as equals in terms of worth and intelligence, which seems to be a healthy balance with their very positive attitude toward masculinity. But of course that doesn’t at all stop the hysterical accusations and incendiary invective woke Neopagans keep spitting in their general direction.
Left-wing heathens are extremely paranoid and hyper-reactive when it comes to past associations of Germanic pagan elements with National Socialism. In many ways I don't fault them for this. The reactions are quite predictable though when any form of not-leftist neopaganism is even hinted at in their online spaces. The moment the leftist pagan group begins to suspect even an ounce of sympathy (or even tepid non-denouncement) toward the Folkish side of things from a newcomer, that newcomer is immediately dogpiled and then very quickly ejected from the group. Worse, if the newcomer was unfortunate enough to share photos and personal details about themselves, they just might become an immediate target of doxxing and harassment. But yes, the Woke Neopagans have now become the witch-burners and heresy-hunters that just prior generations of Neopagans would vehemently decry. The hunter becomes the hunted, and the hunted becomes the hunter; this is human nature in a nutshell.
It seems I have digressed much and that I’ve only touched on one particular subculture within the fold of Right-wing Neopaganism. In the next installment, I’ll explore the Hellenic quarter of this post-liberal counterculture that has a thing for dressing up in historical pagan garb.
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