The Barrow

Something I see a lot among heathens and pagans of various flavors is that the overwhelming majority of them completely miss the point. It only takes a quick sojourn into places like Reddit's r/paganism, r/heathenry, r/asatru etc. to see many absolutely lamentable examples of this. Nature-based spirituality isn't a marketing identity. It isn't just an aesthetic. It isn't something to “geek out” about. (In fact, this is inappropriate for many things frequently thought of as “geek out” material, such as The Lord of the Rings.) It definitely isn't a self-insert fantasy to act out your post-modern political ideologies (Yes, this applies to most right-wing and left-wing pagans alike.) It is a commitment not only to nature and humanity but also to do your absolute best to embody your ideals any way you can.

Frankly, I cringe when I see someone wearing a hammer pendant without doing their best to be their best self. Heathenry is not like Christianity in this aspect. A Christian can basically act in any way he pleases, knowing that all is eventually forgiven. A heathen knows he must deal with the orlay (something like karma) he has wrought in this life and the next. That isn't to say a heathen is a lost cause after one mistake (far from it) but heathens are expected to comport themselves a certain way in this life.

I read once that orlay is like water dripping into a vessel. The best deeds are like pure water and the most evil deeds are like black ink (there is of course a gradient between the two). One drop of ink isn't going to turn a large vessel black, but that drop isn't going away. It must be forever dealt with and made up for. In Christian theology one can basically have a large vessel entirely of ink that can be transmuted into pure water at the pronouncement of a word. In this way Christians are not held to any standard. Yes, I know they are encouraged to comport themselves in certain ways but at the end of the day, one well-placed sincere apology will undo all of it. While I can see the appeal of this, we differ from them here.

I see a lot of people who call themselves heathens simply using their misinterpretations of heathenry to justify their already-existing biases and post-modern ideologies. Isn't it interesting that when you talk to a hard-line right-winger or to a wokie, the ancient heathen past embodied all of their ideals perfectly and reinforces all of their biases? Curious. The truth is that ancient Germanic peoples (really all ancient peoples) were neither a perfectly diverse melting-pot of ethnicities and gender identities as something like a Google AI would imagine them, nor were they a perfectly homogeneous group of perfect right-wing ideologues as lots of internet and pre-internet weirdoes like to imagine them. They were their own people with their own issues of their own time. However, I digress. This is a point for another article.

The point of nature-based spiritualities (paganism, heathenry, etc) is to be truly human. The point is to be the best mortal humans we can be in the here and the now. The point is to excel and be better without infringing on that which makes us human (as transhumanists would advocate for.) This means it is fundamentally incompatible with a lot of post-modern ideology.

So, yesterday was 18 years since my sister and I were originally put in foster care after my family fell apart. That's wild to think about. It (and the events that lead to it) was the defining event of my adolescence and an axis around which I rotated for a long time. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday mostly because the foster care agency could no longer dictate any part of my life. It's a big reason why I stayed pretty straight-laced as a teenager. Now, it's been longer since then, than my entire lifetime was leading up to it.

These past few days I've been thinking a lot about my adolescence and the myriad ways in which it fucked me up. I am motivated to do better as a parent than my parents did. I want my children to have a normal upbringing.

Sometimes I hate myself and the ways in which I have coped with it, ranging from the innocuous to the very unhealthy.

I'm trying to pull myself together for my own family and be someone new. I want the person I was even as recently as a few years ago to be unrecognizable.

It might be too late for me to be normal, really, but my own children deserve that chance.

When one engages in detailed comparative mythology of the Indo-European peoples, one shared element emerges as the clear underlying idea behind the morality espoused by these belief systems: the struggle of life and order against death and chaos. This rings true from Ireland to India.

The principle deities and indeed the most important heroes represent and uphold the sacred order and natural law of the universe, Dharma, while the antagonists of the gods are always some force of chaos or entropy: Adharma.

Entropy, of course, is what drives the arrow of time: it is the breaking down of all things, from objects to institutions and societies. It is the eternal trend from more complex to less complex that can clearly be seen in language, art, culture, and all physical matter and objects. It is a fundamental truth of the universe: all of existence will someday be a uniform and homogenous colorless sludge with no temperature or motion of any kind.

In the Indo-European worldview, life contains the divine spark as the only force in the material world which can resist entropy and especially work against it. Living things and their growth are the only examples in this universe of any sort of reversal of entropy. A stone may resist entropy for some time but never grows or moves against it. A crystal may work against it slightly (and I would argue this means it possesses some form of life indeed) but the stone only breaks down over time after its creation by forces which I would also describe as possessing some form of life. To pagans, life should be held as the most sacred force in nature. In this way, our native spiritualities can be described as a “life cult” as opposed to the Abrahamic “death cults.”

We can extrapolate from this, that as Indo-European pagans, our highest moral duty is the resistance to entropy and chaos. This is in fact represented in myth and Indo-European cosmology. To the Greeks, chaos was the primordial state akin to the Germanic Ginninggap (ON Ginnungagap) and can thus be cyclically inferred to also be the final state of things as well. In addition, in Germanic cosmology, the end times are ushered in by Locke (ON Loki) and his forces of entropy such as the World Serpent and the Wolf. This is also seen in the struggle between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu (also known as Ohrmazd and Ahriman) in Zoroastrianism,

We also know that entropy's victory is inevitable and assured. However, the mortal struggle of the gods against these forces, despite their unavoidable demise, symbolizes our duty to struggle against it wherever and whenever possible, though we always know the outcome. For example, we mortal humans know we will die someday, yet we struggle against this death daily. We do this because it is the primary force that drives all living beings.

Get out there and live! Resist entropy. Embody life and strength and beauty as long as you can!

Hello!

I am Travis the Software Pagan, an internet weirdo who has been present on various platforms, under various names, since 2004.

I mostly blog about philosophy, ethics, spirituality, and sometimes about less important things like software, gaming, and media.

I look forward to writing here. I needed a new place to consolidate my writing: Substack is too noisy and something never clicked for me with BearBlog.

I like that this is federated and simple.

I'll write more soon.

Feel free to drop me a line.