I was into Norse Paganism for a while but it lacked firmament and did not answer most questions properly and borrowed too heavily from Christianity. And morally it relied on Christian ethics and philosophy so what's the point of assatruism?
At this point I view pagan revival nonsense as larping and don't take it seriously. I'm a blood and soil guy, but view pgan stories as fun and a great source to mine for my stories. That said they are a cloak for Catholic philosophy and morality play.
It is also why I don't discuss apologetics with Pagans. I need not prove or apologize foe anything. It is them who ought to prove their 'faith' or lack thereof to me and others. They also are terrible at apologetics.
The Thing I learned, as a serious pagan , was that in reading the Gospels( John really got me!) in an effort to be able to address an Apologetics type discussion with my daughter, I was confronted with, the Gospel... There are only two honest choices then, acknowledge CHRIST, or acknowledge Christ and consciously reject Him.
Every "question" raised by Pagan European philosophers was, is, addressed in John. The who,what, where, when,why and how of ALL the big questions laid out clearly.
Actual study of the Culture, Archeology, language, myths is not actually present.
For example, Reincarnation, is NOT an Western European concept, it does Not exist in ANY context of ANY pre Christian Western European Myths.
The Celtic Tir Na Nagogh, or the Teutonic Hel/Valhalla/Freys hall, and the Greek Hades are clear in that.
Try and discuss that fact with them... Or the roots in Ancestor worship.
What I did find was, deliberately misrepresented history, ignorance of and denial of Archeology, History and the surviving myths. Along with abject ignorance of the cultural context of the larping.
I would estimate that 90% of "Theology" discussion revolved around;
(3) Completely distorted, deliberately misrepresented history.
(4) Christians murdered Pagans
(5) Christians are evil
(6) Did we mention Christians are bad lately?
I should point out, Pretty much everything the Pagans held as "Good, Moral, Ethical" is derived entirely from the last 1500 years of Western European Christian Civilization.
Heavily influenced by the Romantic revival of the 1800s.
Try talking to a Celtic Pagan about Brehon law, or the Actual myths, or the Archeological evidence, or contemporary Greek and Roman references...
9 out of 10 are abjectly clueless.
One of my favorites is" they never wrote anything down"
Funny all those folded lead prayers and curses found in sacred wells written in Greek, Roman, Ligurian, Tartessian, Etruscan, Alphabets, in Brythonic, Gaulish, Galatian, Celt-Iberian...
Funny all those ruins, pre Roman in Celt-Iberian regions with inscriptions written in Celtic Languages, using Tartessian script....
You would think those things, prayers especially, and Altar inscriptions, would be important to Reconstructionists.
There is no active actual revival of pre Christian Western European Religion occurring.
There is a rebellion against corruption, Abuse, on one side, and general rebellion for rebellion on the other.
The current practices are based entirely on misunderstanding, pure invention, and a great deal of anger.
The ODDEST thing is, to me, all that anger, hate, is never about personal experience, it's always framed in the classic Marxist dichotomy, and is exactly the same as shown by Marxist vs Capitalism, and the far left obsession with being offended for others sake.
Regarding Marxism,
There is a very small conservative/Libertarian element among the neo Pagans, however the majority of neopagans fall inline with the Marxist socialist beliefs.
I had a couple of prominent, international Celtic "Scholars" in the movement tell me I could not worship The Irish Battle Goddess because I am a Cis White Male and not a Marxist.
I have to wonder how old these guys are. I say that in the sense that when I was younger (in my early 20s to late), I was in a similar boat.
I was disillusioned with current society. I saw the “church” as a failure. Every church leader I had ever met was some weak, effeminate man. Nothing spoke to me in the church.
Enter “Paganism” and “The Norse Gods”. I saw picture of brave warriors, gods and goddesses that interacted and impacted their followers lives. There was an energy to it. Something that was lacking in my Christian upbringing.
But despite all that. I could never “believe it”. I knew deep down that Christ was the truth, and that all this was escapism. Something akin to “Marvel movies” for the soul. It was fascinating on a surface layer but empty and lacking any depth.
It was only after I really committed to Christianity that I realized there is a depth of history and knowledge that rivals any sense of “Paganism” out there.
All that to say, I understand where they are coming from.
I also understand where they are coming from. Also your experience isn't anything new, half of Paul's letters are about early Christians being fake and gay or too jewy.
A good reflection on Paganism. I'm sympathetic to the pagan desire to have a faith tradition, but I think their usual justification of it being the tradition of their "ancestors" is incredibly weak. They point to a hypothetical, abstract Ancestor and never grapple with the fact that most of our actual ancestors were Christians. I don't care about some hypothetical Master Ancestor, I care about my actual, flesh and blood father (Catholic), my grandfather (Catholic), my great-grandfather (Catholic), and all my other ancestors whom I can actually name.
I find cultural paganism to be more potent than any literal version. It allows people to reject Judaic morality without having to write up (or read) the reasons for doing so. They can simply say, "my ancestors did this and I should be allowed to honor them." But by the nature of these religions being conquered, left behind, and expunged, any reconstruction of them is a LARP and always will be.
But as a secular Enlightenment atheist, I find the aesthetic to be helpful my own ends. It's a net-positive for Nietszcheans, glorifying strength, nobility, and nature. The difficulty is then in getting the adherents to stop worshiping grass and trying to cast magical spells.
Here is an intellectual defense of polytheism. IMO has some strong arguments. Still a Christian as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are too real to be otherwise.
A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism by John Michael Greer
Greer is an eclectic (ie real) pagan. He isn’t trying to reconstruct shit he’s trying to use the supernatural to improve his life which is something you absolutely can do even if it’s unadvisable to do so as a Christian.
I've actually read some of his stuff and listened to some podcasts with him on it. Eclectic Pagans like Greer, while also wrong and leading people to damnation, are a bit more interesting.
And that approach even applies in a way to Christianity. We don’t have sufficient information in the New Testament to really “reconstruct” what the first decades of Christian experience and practice was like. We have the Bible and the subsequent development and history of Christianity to serve as sources for our own eclecticism. I fall into a Pentecostal, charismatic Protestant approach paying high respect to deeply understanding the New Testament with deference to the classic creeds and aiming to know the Living God in my own body, circumstances and experience.
This was a good read. I’m Catholic and have interacted with pagans on here before. When they’re not talking about their Faith and Christianity directly, they’re not too bad, but the problem is they often become progressive light are almost butthurt they lost to Christianity. Progressives and some Pagans definitely think the Medieval world was dark and dreary, when in reality it was a harsh yet still bright world with pageantry, universities, great faith, and larger than life men and women.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. The term Germanic is rather simple, it refers to someone as having German blood ancestrally but is not “German,” but it also refers to the sort of paganism they practice/believe in, which also had an unbroken tradition over millennia like Christianity does today, though that tradition has not been passed down to us in an intact form, however many pagans, and even I, believe it has been transmitted to us in many ways because it was interwoven into our history in various ways. I get into this in my episode with Kulak. These are called “pagan values.” But you are right, there is no practice.
I appreciate you listening to this episode and while I’m sorry you were underwhelmed, you have to understand these guys have their own podcast, and have been podcasting, for
Years and years and years. I’ve been listening to them for probably 5 years. So while perhaps this episode didn’t delve far enough into what you wanted to hear, there are dozens if not hundreds of hours out there where they expand on these things
But you are proving my point with the word Germanic. Its definition given in the 20th century and your current interpretation is most likely from the 21st. The Latin word Germanic has a meaning and has had one since Julius Cesar wrote it in his books, you guys are taking it and defining it through a revisionist frame.
Second, there is no Germanic Pagan today that has an unbroken line of tradition to any sort of religious tradition practiced by the disparate tribes East of the Rhine called Germani by Cesar. All practices are reconstruction from archeological and fragmentary literary sources. There is no tradition.
Your second point is entirely correct no quibbles here.
Regarding the word Germanic, while I guess you’re right yeah, I don’t see the problem. It seems a perfectly fine use of the term. They admit on the episode what they’re doing is a reconstruction, and also that they know it’s a romantic movement
Yeah, and that's absolutely fine, I would have no problem besides theological, if they outright said that we are recreationists reconstructionist, which is basically a nice way of saying larper, and we are taking bits and pieces of the past forward.
My problem is with the constant use of the word Tradition and the framing of this tradition in opposition to Christianity. Words have meaning and the word tradition has a very specific meaning and nothing they are doing is traditional but new. It's how the new Mini Cooper is not really a Mini Cooper but a compact BMW not even made by a British company.
You can walk into a random Roman Catholic church and you will see traditions that have been held for over a thousand years. You can walk in to several Baptist churches and their traditions are often older than the rites and practices codified by neo-paganism.
But here's the thing. Everything is ok, there is no problem with doing new things and finding faith in new places. Just don't present yourself as something you are not, especially when you are attacking traditions that are unbroken for millennia
Curious if you would accept that there has been a long standing practice of observing the equinoxes? This seems to be an example of a pagan tradition. We know this based on neolithic tombs that align with the shortest/longest days of the year (You can read about the Irish one called Newgrange which dates some 3000 years before the birth of Christ). Observing the shortest and longest days of the year does seem to be a longer standing practice (and perhaps then tradition) than Christian worship.
Oh my god, germanic is an academic term used to describe a fucking language/cultural family. Its used because it's easier to say germanic than to list the dozen distinct tribes that shared a common language, religion and law structure. Kind of like how we say "Greek" when discussing the Hellenic Greeks even though only the Romans called them Greeks, except some pretentious jerk doesn't adopt a willfully ignorant act and wonder who these "greeks" are, they only know Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, Thebans, etc.
The term “Greek” (or Hellene, if you prefer since the Greeks were literate) was, and still remains, contested. Although it did exist as a collective designation before the Persian Wars, the term “Hellenes” was hardly ever used (the Greeks preferred to identify with either their polis, as you state above, or with their tribe, i.e., Achaeans, Aeolians, Dorians, Ionians) and the origins of the term are shrouded in unverifiable legend. It was used in a more ethnic?/nationalistic? sense first by Herodotus, to describe that alliance of city-states that combined to resist the Persian invasions. It is, in my opinion, critically important to note here, in the context of the conversation above, that a distinct minority of city-states were members of that alliance…probably 31 out of more than 700 Greek-speaking, Greek-worshipping, and Greek-acting polities across the Mediterranean with more than a 100 or so on the Greek peninsula itself. Many others remained neutral in the conflict and some actually joined the Persians.
So, Alexandru’s point is telling and highly relevant. If the literate Greeks with centuries of identity- formation behind them couldn’t decide who was and was not “Greek,” at an existential moment for their civilization no less, how can moderns confidently reconstruct a coherent religious identity from an ancient linguistic group that was illiterate and never had a collective sense of itself (even in a limited way like the Greek example above) to begin with?
So, what you're saying is that Greek is an academic term that describes a laguage/cultural family because its easier than listing the dozens of distinct tribes that shared a common language, religion and law structure? And only a pretentious jerk would adopt a willfully ignorant act and pretend they didn't understand who it was referring to?
It's so obvious that it's intellectually insulting to deny. Clearly there was a germanic cultural/linguistic group who had a common religion that can be largely reconstructed. With that out of the way it's a conversation over theology. If christians want to have this conversation they should learn about the serious work that is being done in the folkish movement right now instead of harping on a previous iteration of paganism. A good place to start would be Germanic Theology by Tristan Powers.
I doubt they would apply the same standard if they were in the position of recreating christianity from second hand accounts and archeological evidence after 1000 years.
I think it really depends what your purpose is here. If you are a scholar or student of history interested in learning a few things about those people then yes, parsing about tribes and micro-groups (engaging in scholastic bullshit and acadamese) is counter-productive to your goal. If, however, your purpose is to reconstruct a coherent theology/belief system complete with a moral code and spiritual substance, I would say being ok with a vague linguistic generalization is just not enough. (I apologize since I had not originally written this message as a reply.)
I've written a lot about the relationship of land/people, or ecology, and what implications that has for paganism. Specifically, the idea that we should be comfortable with the idea of "new gods", or at least reinterpretations. I doubt they will be utterly novel - our ancestors moved across entire continents and the religious system retained remarkable levels of continuity, ancient peoples commented frequently on the mutual intelligibility between their respective pantheons. The land is different, but the American landscape can only be so different from the Eurasian. A forest is still a forest, be it oak or birch. It wouldn't be difficult, thousands of years in the future, to understand black holes in context of Chronos or Kala. I can't remember where I read this, but I recall a passage about a modern American Indian chief talking about this, remarking something along the lines of "you are too new, spend centuries more on this land, and the gods will show themselves to you".
Related is the concept of technology, changing more frequently than blood/landscape. The Norse went from using chariots in the underworld to longboats in just a few centuries, and the runes themselves are a sacred technology - written language - and this was very recent, 1st or 2nd century. I've always joked that if we were being consistent, Helios's chariot would be an F150. There's art out there with the wolfmen of Woden from Raedwald's Sutton Hoo helmet retrofitted with SMAWs and M4s.
Study of Norse or other ancient myth, ritual, peoples, etc is for the crucial purpose of reconstructing the worldview and religion of pre-Christian Europe. Once that "template" is achieved, then we can begin talking about what that looks like for us, specifically. Yet, it likely will not be all that different in the end.
I consider myself a pagan because it's the best word for it, but terms come after the concepts. Reality is alive and grows, it isn’t bound by definitions. The origin of a word doesn’t diminish the concept it represents. If anything this is an issue of needing to create more terms for language to better express the concept, and this process has always existed. I simply do not resonate with the premise that something is more authentic because it’s better defined. Paganism is a more natural or innate state. The divine is not something out there that is learned by abstract definition but can be experienced in all facets of life.
I don’t find it easy to understand what someone means when they say they’re Christian. There are so many types, and the differences seem to stem mostly from how they interpret scripture. They might all say they believe in Jesus, but their worldviews and ways of interacting with the world can be completely different. The idea that everything hinges on interpreting someone else’s past spiritual experience or communion with the divine is a fundemental issue. I believe it leads to fragmentation, as does mass expansion and conversion in inorganic ways. When people rely only on fixed, defined forms as abstractions to understand the divine, they end up splitting over interpretation instead of being like parts of a whole, each with a unique vantage on the divine and ancestral worship.
I’ll admit I don’t have much of an understanding of Orthodoxy, but those I’ve interacted with tend to be very balanced in their outlook compared to other Christian denominations. Orthodoxy is not something common in the far West since it’s still relatively new here but I have seen it growing. I do think they have more localism and its less universalizing, but people from the West don’t have those same cultural roots, and it’s hard to know what someone really means when they say they’re Christian. Many reject that confusion for different reasons, including the false morality that often doesn’t reflect how people actually live. I know pagans who left their parents' faith because of serious abuse of power and the gap between public image and private virtue with a lot of hypocrisy. When many in the West leave Christianity, they sometimes end up mimicking it in how they approach paganism, looking backward to fixed forms. So from my perspective the critique of reconstructing the past isn’t that different from relying on 2,000-year-old scripture. It reduces spirituality to something stuck in a stasis of forms. Any overly fixed definition risks stasis unless it’s part of a living, ongoing process that keeps evolving and includes new additions.
In my family, my recent forefathers weren’t culturally Christian at all, only Christian in name. Culture isn’t just abstract beliefs; it’s how people actually live. Cultural transmission is far more complex than anything a book or abstract idea can capture or teach. Growing up, my experience of Christian holidays reflected their pagan roots much more than anything biblical. My family would gamble, drink, feast, fight, give gifts, play games, joke, and enjoy each other. We didn’t go to church or pray to a savior, but we did have Santa (a pagan origin), Easter eggs (also pagan), and no one ever went to church. There are distinct regional differences in the US… the wild west, plains, and north were much different than the South (and the south has a million forms of Christianity that are hard to understand and feuds between them that bubble under the surface, very tribal in nature while the current threat of liberalism is the unifying opposition).
My great-grandfather Rudolph prided himself on never stepping foot in a church, but they weren’t lowbrow people by any means. My grandfather was a phenomenal athlete who later traveled the world in a high-level role at IBM. My great-uncles were all veterans—one on underwater demolition crew and among the first SEALs, and I won’t even get into what the others did. Culturally and even genetically, they were far closer to Germanic and Roman pagans than anything else. They hunted, they were fiercely family-first and community-oriented—rough, rugged people with a culture that was beautiful, risk-seeking, bonded, loving, brutal, and wild. There are very distinct cultures in the West, and many of them are more barbarian than the pleb/noble distinction of pagan and Christian in feudal times.
I like many Christians (I’m constantly invited to Church social events) and they tend to be better here than most liberals. But I still don’t really understand them, with their endless denominations and constant in-fighting. What I admire about pagans is that they don’t care so much about those distinctions. It’s a living state of being and becoming. Past rituals and principles always morphed over time, with breaks between wars or cultural shifts with some similarity so this is no different. They had shared threads, but each iteration was born anew, because paganism is an intrinsic state guided by intuition and the living and changing web of wyrd, not something you learn just by looking at some past document/scripture to try to reconstruct it as it was. I’d also point out that many modern religions were formed by pulling together in the face of opposition. Christianity is one example. Hinduism, too, is actually quite new—a recent fusion of many tribal belief systems, first united by external Muslim threats, then carried into a period of prosperity under British rule. Yet no one questions whether Hinduism counts as a religion.
Your metaphysical question about the purpose of life is one I find especially interesting, because it marks a fundamental distinction in foundations of interacting with reality. I believe the Christian search for external purpose and emphasis on the afterlife often leads to a loss of meaning and existential crisis. Sadly, for a long time, many pagans also leaned toward a Gnostic-style metaphyics. I’ve been writing about a lost metaphysical perspective, that the purpose of creation is the process of forming meaning. So asking “what is the meaning of life” becomes a kind of conundrum, because life itself is the process through which meaning is created. The horseshoe of creation is that the all-powerful divine split itself in an act of first conception, energetically sacrificing to form physical reality which could grow to house divine consciousness. Materialism, which seeks to hold life in stasis, is part of the inherent risk of creation. I would argue that holding spirituality in the stasis of scripture folds into its mirror image in transhumanism, where life is again held in literal stasis. The intended state of creation, though, is the unfolding of meaning, growth, and the dynamic dance between being and becoming. Creation of meaning is the purpose of life.
I guess the best way to depict the pagan worldview is that definition or scripture isn’t something that mediates a connection with the divine but helps us to understand a past emanation or form in its development. The gods are not static, while underlying life force or God has more of a Christian understanding of the eternal. I’ve read past texts from Greece, Rome, the Eddas but not in the manner that I believe Christian’s read scripture (ill reiterate though that I don’t know much about Orthodox and from what I’ve seen it’s more militant and honors heroicism more than western Christianity).
I was hoping to get some kind of summary of the podcast. Instead, I get the standard Christian sermon. First, Germanic heathens are a small portion of the pagan culture. Then, you pull out the historical legitimacy card because you have creds going back 2025 years. What do the pagans have? 10,000, 20,000, maybe more years?
Then, you say you are legitimate because you Christians wrote things down, neglecting the fact that if pagans wrote things down, good Christians would hunt them down, pull their tongues out and burn them alive on a bonfire. If they could not find pagans, there was always a rival Christian faction they could torture or kill.
If you good Christians know right from wrong, where were the Orthodox priests telling people not to inject themselves and their families with untested mRNA a few years back? Where are the Christians today fighting to stop Israelis from killing children, often by starvation, in Gaza?
Maybe part of your storied Orthodox Catholic tradition should be figuring out right from wrong and then doing the right thing.
I didn't write a critique against paganism, I wrote a critique against the subject of Astral's show. All three of the guests were Germanic Pagans, so I addressed that. If they were Hellenistic worshipers of Athena or devotees of Isis I would have written about that. But, they weren't, and I haven't met many of those. Maybe you should write something about your paganism or go on a podcast and I will answer that, I find it ridiculous that you come on here upset that I responded to what was in front of me instead of what you imagined I should have done instead.
Your second point is ahistorical and also makes you sound like some progressive liberal bitch. Pagans persecuted and martyred Christians for centuries before Europe became Christianized, and that Christianization was mostly done through wiling conversion led by unarmed monks and priests. The reason there isn't much writing is because most of the early pagans didn't know how to write. There's plenty of writing about the Greek gods and the Roman gods, because those guys knew how to write.
As for your final point, once again you show your intellectual and physical laziness. There were a lot of Orthodox priests that advised against Covid vaccines and Covid hysteria, and right now the internet is full of Orthodox priests condemning Isreal, especially because of the sizable Coptic Orthodox community in Gaza. But you know, 10 seconds of google could of told you that.
Hello, I am not upset. I am not pagan. I am not certain how to identify a liberal bitch, but I hope it is a not good descriptor of myself. I do not regard people who do not read and write as inferior.
I heard from reliable sources only one U.S. institute of higher education did not require Covid injections of students. Wikipedia lists 13 Orthodox Catholic institutes of higher education and it sounds like they required Covid injections of their students. That's about all the time I have for research.
Since you profess these deep Romanian roots, are you living in Romania? If not, can you move back? Some people identify gypsies as Romas. I don't think either identifier is precise. When I was a kid, they said the gypsies stole chickens from the A&P. I saw them one day—they were passing thru, being gypsies and all— but I did not see them take chickens without paying.
If you aren't a liberal bitch then don't write like one because you sure as fuck come off as a hardcore retard.
Your reliable sources, just like your self -mage of not being a bitch are wrong. There aren't even 13 Orthodox Christian institutes in the United States. You clearly have a poor education because most kids learn how to use google by first grade.
As for the thinly vailed blood and soil attack, yes I'm Romanian, I might move back when I am older, and I go back as often as I can, but I enjoy my home right here where I am. I don't know what gypsies have to do with me, they are hindu in ethnicity and live across the world. Now of course you are being a smart little boy trying to equate Ethnic Gypsies with Romanians, but that's stupid. Gypsies make up only 3% of the population of Romania, if that makes Romanians Gypsies that means Americans who are 20% Hispanic are Mexicans and the English who have a 6% Muslim population are Islamic.
I actually had a discussion touching on this yesterday at a book club discussing Walker Percy's essay "Diagnosing the Modern Malaise." We touched on how the modern world at the time of Percy's writing had no goal, no drive, because it was so sterile and scientific in it's outlook. He specifically says that scientism isn't pagan or idolatry at the time.
I brought up that I thought that had changed. That our current malaise had begun to shift to the paganism that we are seeing. That we have white robbed neo-pagans, and black ones in our judges and unis as I've written. That we have literal pagans as you write of here.
That this malaise, this shifting, is part of what has brought the country to our current antagonistic mode of dialogue. Because peoples with conflicting religious views and drives will come to blows - always and everywhere. That we're currently restructuring the Empire and it will fall out one way or another.
I think that it's hard for Pagans (if not impossible) to divorce their thinking from Christian metaphysics. You talk to them, and what they talk about simply does not line up with a lot of what seems to be found from source materials. Like you said, LARPing. They want to make it somewhat acceptable to modern man, and reasonable to them; not a bloody altar of virgins sacrificed to war gods, fertility gods, etc. Nor do they want to acknowledge any other number of inconvenient truths - as you point out.
I've been a lifelong "I don't know if I believe in anything" type of person who, in my edgy atheist teens, was introduced to the idea of paganism through my friends who pretended to be Wiccan on the weekends.
But something that gets me about paganism, coming from a mixed-ethnic background, what am I supposed to go with? I'm not Norse. Not Celtic enough, not Hungarian enough, not Russian or German enough etc etc. Some say you can pick and choose because that's what they did in the past, a bunch of deities on an altar. Somehow that feels more shallow to me than a meaningful connection with one. And then there's the argument "you can pick just one." ...I dunno. I think it's an interesting idea but every time I talk to "pagans" IRL they're only doing it to rebel against their family, that they don't genuinely Believe, like being a loud atheist with extra steps.
At least with faiths like Christianity it feels like it's actually be more "true" to my ancestry because like... Hungary for example has been Christian since, what, the Roman era? And similarly to everything else...?
That said, never mind mixed ethnicity, being brought up in a mixed religious home is something that definitely fucked with my head growing up and I just have a hard time connecting with the idea of faith in anything. But that's my own problem to deal with. I'm OK with poking fun at myself for this, and do it regularly.
I was into Norse Paganism for a while but it lacked firmament and did not answer most questions properly and borrowed too heavily from Christianity. And morally it relied on Christian ethics and philosophy so what's the point of assatruism?
At this point I view pagan revival nonsense as larping and don't take it seriously. I'm a blood and soil guy, but view pgan stories as fun and a great source to mine for my stories. That said they are a cloak for Catholic philosophy and morality play.
It is also why I don't discuss apologetics with Pagans. I need not prove or apologize foe anything. It is them who ought to prove their 'faith' or lack thereof to me and others. They also are terrible at apologetics.
The Thing I learned, as a serious pagan , was that in reading the Gospels( John really got me!) in an effort to be able to address an Apologetics type discussion with my daughter, I was confronted with, the Gospel... There are only two honest choices then, acknowledge CHRIST, or acknowledge Christ and consciously reject Him.
Every "question" raised by Pagan European philosophers was, is, addressed in John. The who,what, where, when,why and how of ALL the big questions laid out clearly.
Bon point good point.
I was a Celtic Reconstructionist.
Actual study of the Culture, Archeology, language, myths is not actually present.
For example, Reincarnation, is NOT an Western European concept, it does Not exist in ANY context of ANY pre Christian Western European Myths.
The Celtic Tir Na Nagogh, or the Teutonic Hel/Valhalla/Freys hall, and the Greek Hades are clear in that.
Try and discuss that fact with them... Or the roots in Ancestor worship.
What I did find was, deliberately misrepresented history, ignorance of and denial of Archeology, History and the surviving myths. Along with abject ignorance of the cultural context of the larping.
I would estimate that 90% of "Theology" discussion revolved around;
(1) Christians stole Pagan beliefs-Practices-customs.
(2) Pagans good, Christians Bad.
(3) Completely distorted, deliberately misrepresented history.
(4) Christians murdered Pagans
(5) Christians are evil
(6) Did we mention Christians are bad lately?
I should point out, Pretty much everything the Pagans held as "Good, Moral, Ethical" is derived entirely from the last 1500 years of Western European Christian Civilization.
Heavily influenced by the Romantic revival of the 1800s.
Try talking to a Celtic Pagan about Brehon law, or the Actual myths, or the Archeological evidence, or contemporary Greek and Roman references...
9 out of 10 are abjectly clueless.
One of my favorites is" they never wrote anything down"
Funny all those folded lead prayers and curses found in sacred wells written in Greek, Roman, Ligurian, Tartessian, Etruscan, Alphabets, in Brythonic, Gaulish, Galatian, Celt-Iberian...
Funny all those ruins, pre Roman in Celt-Iberian regions with inscriptions written in Celtic Languages, using Tartessian script....
You would think those things, prayers especially, and Altar inscriptions, would be important to Reconstructionists.
There is no active actual revival of pre Christian Western European Religion occurring.
There is a rebellion against corruption, Abuse, on one side, and general rebellion for rebellion on the other.
The current practices are based entirely on misunderstanding, pure invention, and a great deal of anger.
The ODDEST thing is, to me, all that anger, hate, is never about personal experience, it's always framed in the classic Marxist dichotomy, and is exactly the same as shown by Marxist vs Capitalism, and the far left obsession with being offended for others sake.
Regarding Marxism,
There is a very small conservative/Libertarian element among the neo Pagans, however the majority of neopagans fall inline with the Marxist socialist beliefs.
I had a couple of prominent, international Celtic "Scholars" in the movement tell me I could not worship The Irish Battle Goddess because I am a Cis White Male and not a Marxist.
What?
Huh?
That was step one in my wake up.
Step two was Reading the Book of John.
Haven't read them. I will have to check them out.
I have to wonder how old these guys are. I say that in the sense that when I was younger (in my early 20s to late), I was in a similar boat.
I was disillusioned with current society. I saw the “church” as a failure. Every church leader I had ever met was some weak, effeminate man. Nothing spoke to me in the church.
Enter “Paganism” and “The Norse Gods”. I saw picture of brave warriors, gods and goddesses that interacted and impacted their followers lives. There was an energy to it. Something that was lacking in my Christian upbringing.
But despite all that. I could never “believe it”. I knew deep down that Christ was the truth, and that all this was escapism. Something akin to “Marvel movies” for the soul. It was fascinating on a surface layer but empty and lacking any depth.
It was only after I really committed to Christianity that I realized there is a depth of history and knowledge that rivals any sense of “Paganism” out there.
All that to say, I understand where they are coming from.
I also understand where they are coming from. Also your experience isn't anything new, half of Paul's letters are about early Christians being fake and gay or too jewy.
Same thing happened to me, was a young guy went Pagan then came back to the Faith.
A good reflection on Paganism. I'm sympathetic to the pagan desire to have a faith tradition, but I think their usual justification of it being the tradition of their "ancestors" is incredibly weak. They point to a hypothetical, abstract Ancestor and never grapple with the fact that most of our actual ancestors were Christians. I don't care about some hypothetical Master Ancestor, I care about my actual, flesh and blood father (Catholic), my grandfather (Catholic), my great-grandfather (Catholic), and all my other ancestors whom I can actually name.
Ghost Dance movement of distraught white men who do not believe in the Resurrection of the Dead.
I find cultural paganism to be more potent than any literal version. It allows people to reject Judaic morality without having to write up (or read) the reasons for doing so. They can simply say, "my ancestors did this and I should be allowed to honor them." But by the nature of these religions being conquered, left behind, and expunged, any reconstruction of them is a LARP and always will be.
But as a secular Enlightenment atheist, I find the aesthetic to be helpful my own ends. It's a net-positive for Nietszcheans, glorifying strength, nobility, and nature. The difficulty is then in getting the adherents to stop worshiping grass and trying to cast magical spells.
Here is an intellectual defense of polytheism. IMO has some strong arguments. Still a Christian as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are too real to be otherwise.
A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism by John Michael Greer
Greer is an eclectic (ie real) pagan. He isn’t trying to reconstruct shit he’s trying to use the supernatural to improve his life which is something you absolutely can do even if it’s unadvisable to do so as a Christian.
I've actually read some of his stuff and listened to some podcasts with him on it. Eclectic Pagans like Greer, while also wrong and leading people to damnation, are a bit more interesting.
And that approach even applies in a way to Christianity. We don’t have sufficient information in the New Testament to really “reconstruct” what the first decades of Christian experience and practice was like. We have the Bible and the subsequent development and history of Christianity to serve as sources for our own eclecticism. I fall into a Pentecostal, charismatic Protestant approach paying high respect to deeply understanding the New Testament with deference to the classic creeds and aiming to know the Living God in my own body, circumstances and experience.
In my experience, the bulk of Neo-Pagan apologetics consists of “Nuh uh. Shut up Christ-cuck.”
This was a good read. I’m Catholic and have interacted with pagans on here before. When they’re not talking about their Faith and Christianity directly, they’re not too bad, but the problem is they often become progressive light are almost butthurt they lost to Christianity. Progressives and some Pagans definitely think the Medieval world was dark and dreary, when in reality it was a harsh yet still bright world with pageantry, universities, great faith, and larger than life men and women.
They didn't lose to Christianity. Their ancestors were blessed with the wisdom and accepted the mercy and salvation of Christ. They won.
True, but the pagans of today don’t see it that way sadly.
If they worship their ancestors as much as they say that they do eventually they will come around to the wisdom that those ancestors possessed.
Let’s pray they do. 🙏🏻
Well put
I appreciate the thoughtful response. The term Germanic is rather simple, it refers to someone as having German blood ancestrally but is not “German,” but it also refers to the sort of paganism they practice/believe in, which also had an unbroken tradition over millennia like Christianity does today, though that tradition has not been passed down to us in an intact form, however many pagans, and even I, believe it has been transmitted to us in many ways because it was interwoven into our history in various ways. I get into this in my episode with Kulak. These are called “pagan values.” But you are right, there is no practice.
I appreciate you listening to this episode and while I’m sorry you were underwhelmed, you have to understand these guys have their own podcast, and have been podcasting, for
Years and years and years. I’ve been listening to them for probably 5 years. So while perhaps this episode didn’t delve far enough into what you wanted to hear, there are dozens if not hundreds of hours out there where they expand on these things
But you are proving my point with the word Germanic. Its definition given in the 20th century and your current interpretation is most likely from the 21st. The Latin word Germanic has a meaning and has had one since Julius Cesar wrote it in his books, you guys are taking it and defining it through a revisionist frame.
Second, there is no Germanic Pagan today that has an unbroken line of tradition to any sort of religious tradition practiced by the disparate tribes East of the Rhine called Germani by Cesar. All practices are reconstruction from archeological and fragmentary literary sources. There is no tradition.
Your second point is entirely correct no quibbles here.
Regarding the word Germanic, while I guess you’re right yeah, I don’t see the problem. It seems a perfectly fine use of the term. They admit on the episode what they’re doing is a reconstruction, and also that they know it’s a romantic movement
Yeah, and that's absolutely fine, I would have no problem besides theological, if they outright said that we are recreationists reconstructionist, which is basically a nice way of saying larper, and we are taking bits and pieces of the past forward.
My problem is with the constant use of the word Tradition and the framing of this tradition in opposition to Christianity. Words have meaning and the word tradition has a very specific meaning and nothing they are doing is traditional but new. It's how the new Mini Cooper is not really a Mini Cooper but a compact BMW not even made by a British company.
You can walk into a random Roman Catholic church and you will see traditions that have been held for over a thousand years. You can walk in to several Baptist churches and their traditions are often older than the rites and practices codified by neo-paganism.
But here's the thing. Everything is ok, there is no problem with doing new things and finding faith in new places. Just don't present yourself as something you are not, especially when you are attacking traditions that are unbroken for millennia
.
Curious if you would accept that there has been a long standing practice of observing the equinoxes? This seems to be an example of a pagan tradition. We know this based on neolithic tombs that align with the shortest/longest days of the year (You can read about the Irish one called Newgrange which dates some 3000 years before the birth of Christ). Observing the shortest and longest days of the year does seem to be a longer standing practice (and perhaps then tradition) than Christian worship.
Oh my god, germanic is an academic term used to describe a fucking language/cultural family. Its used because it's easier to say germanic than to list the dozen distinct tribes that shared a common language, religion and law structure. Kind of like how we say "Greek" when discussing the Hellenic Greeks even though only the Romans called them Greeks, except some pretentious jerk doesn't adopt a willfully ignorant act and wonder who these "greeks" are, they only know Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, Thebans, etc.
The term “Greek” (or Hellene, if you prefer since the Greeks were literate) was, and still remains, contested. Although it did exist as a collective designation before the Persian Wars, the term “Hellenes” was hardly ever used (the Greeks preferred to identify with either their polis, as you state above, or with their tribe, i.e., Achaeans, Aeolians, Dorians, Ionians) and the origins of the term are shrouded in unverifiable legend. It was used in a more ethnic?/nationalistic? sense first by Herodotus, to describe that alliance of city-states that combined to resist the Persian invasions. It is, in my opinion, critically important to note here, in the context of the conversation above, that a distinct minority of city-states were members of that alliance…probably 31 out of more than 700 Greek-speaking, Greek-worshipping, and Greek-acting polities across the Mediterranean with more than a 100 or so on the Greek peninsula itself. Many others remained neutral in the conflict and some actually joined the Persians.
So, Alexandru’s point is telling and highly relevant. If the literate Greeks with centuries of identity- formation behind them couldn’t decide who was and was not “Greek,” at an existential moment for their civilization no less, how can moderns confidently reconstruct a coherent religious identity from an ancient linguistic group that was illiterate and never had a collective sense of itself (even in a limited way like the Greek example above) to begin with?
So, what you're saying is that Greek is an academic term that describes a laguage/cultural family because its easier than listing the dozens of distinct tribes that shared a common language, religion and law structure? And only a pretentious jerk would adopt a willfully ignorant act and pretend they didn't understand who it was referring to?
It's so obvious that it's intellectually insulting to deny. Clearly there was a germanic cultural/linguistic group who had a common religion that can be largely reconstructed. With that out of the way it's a conversation over theology. If christians want to have this conversation they should learn about the serious work that is being done in the folkish movement right now instead of harping on a previous iteration of paganism. A good place to start would be Germanic Theology by Tristan Powers.
I doubt they would apply the same standard if they were in the position of recreating christianity from second hand accounts and archeological evidence after 1000 years.
I think it really depends what your purpose is here. If you are a scholar or student of history interested in learning a few things about those people then yes, parsing about tribes and micro-groups (engaging in scholastic bullshit and acadamese) is counter-productive to your goal. If, however, your purpose is to reconstruct a coherent theology/belief system complete with a moral code and spiritual substance, I would say being ok with a vague linguistic generalization is just not enough. (I apologize since I had not originally written this message as a reply.)
A podcast is not a theological symposium on germanic pagan syncretism.
I've written a lot about the relationship of land/people, or ecology, and what implications that has for paganism. Specifically, the idea that we should be comfortable with the idea of "new gods", or at least reinterpretations. I doubt they will be utterly novel - our ancestors moved across entire continents and the religious system retained remarkable levels of continuity, ancient peoples commented frequently on the mutual intelligibility between their respective pantheons. The land is different, but the American landscape can only be so different from the Eurasian. A forest is still a forest, be it oak or birch. It wouldn't be difficult, thousands of years in the future, to understand black holes in context of Chronos or Kala. I can't remember where I read this, but I recall a passage about a modern American Indian chief talking about this, remarking something along the lines of "you are too new, spend centuries more on this land, and the gods will show themselves to you".
Related is the concept of technology, changing more frequently than blood/landscape. The Norse went from using chariots in the underworld to longboats in just a few centuries, and the runes themselves are a sacred technology - written language - and this was very recent, 1st or 2nd century. I've always joked that if we were being consistent, Helios's chariot would be an F150. There's art out there with the wolfmen of Woden from Raedwald's Sutton Hoo helmet retrofitted with SMAWs and M4s.
Study of Norse or other ancient myth, ritual, peoples, etc is for the crucial purpose of reconstructing the worldview and religion of pre-Christian Europe. Once that "template" is achieved, then we can begin talking about what that looks like for us, specifically. Yet, it likely will not be all that different in the end.
I consider myself a pagan because it's the best word for it, but terms come after the concepts. Reality is alive and grows, it isn’t bound by definitions. The origin of a word doesn’t diminish the concept it represents. If anything this is an issue of needing to create more terms for language to better express the concept, and this process has always existed. I simply do not resonate with the premise that something is more authentic because it’s better defined. Paganism is a more natural or innate state. The divine is not something out there that is learned by abstract definition but can be experienced in all facets of life.
I don’t find it easy to understand what someone means when they say they’re Christian. There are so many types, and the differences seem to stem mostly from how they interpret scripture. They might all say they believe in Jesus, but their worldviews and ways of interacting with the world can be completely different. The idea that everything hinges on interpreting someone else’s past spiritual experience or communion with the divine is a fundemental issue. I believe it leads to fragmentation, as does mass expansion and conversion in inorganic ways. When people rely only on fixed, defined forms as abstractions to understand the divine, they end up splitting over interpretation instead of being like parts of a whole, each with a unique vantage on the divine and ancestral worship.
I’ll admit I don’t have much of an understanding of Orthodoxy, but those I’ve interacted with tend to be very balanced in their outlook compared to other Christian denominations. Orthodoxy is not something common in the far West since it’s still relatively new here but I have seen it growing. I do think they have more localism and its less universalizing, but people from the West don’t have those same cultural roots, and it’s hard to know what someone really means when they say they’re Christian. Many reject that confusion for different reasons, including the false morality that often doesn’t reflect how people actually live. I know pagans who left their parents' faith because of serious abuse of power and the gap between public image and private virtue with a lot of hypocrisy. When many in the West leave Christianity, they sometimes end up mimicking it in how they approach paganism, looking backward to fixed forms. So from my perspective the critique of reconstructing the past isn’t that different from relying on 2,000-year-old scripture. It reduces spirituality to something stuck in a stasis of forms. Any overly fixed definition risks stasis unless it’s part of a living, ongoing process that keeps evolving and includes new additions.
In my family, my recent forefathers weren’t culturally Christian at all, only Christian in name. Culture isn’t just abstract beliefs; it’s how people actually live. Cultural transmission is far more complex than anything a book or abstract idea can capture or teach. Growing up, my experience of Christian holidays reflected their pagan roots much more than anything biblical. My family would gamble, drink, feast, fight, give gifts, play games, joke, and enjoy each other. We didn’t go to church or pray to a savior, but we did have Santa (a pagan origin), Easter eggs (also pagan), and no one ever went to church. There are distinct regional differences in the US… the wild west, plains, and north were much different than the South (and the south has a million forms of Christianity that are hard to understand and feuds between them that bubble under the surface, very tribal in nature while the current threat of liberalism is the unifying opposition).
My great-grandfather Rudolph prided himself on never stepping foot in a church, but they weren’t lowbrow people by any means. My grandfather was a phenomenal athlete who later traveled the world in a high-level role at IBM. My great-uncles were all veterans—one on underwater demolition crew and among the first SEALs, and I won’t even get into what the others did. Culturally and even genetically, they were far closer to Germanic and Roman pagans than anything else. They hunted, they were fiercely family-first and community-oriented—rough, rugged people with a culture that was beautiful, risk-seeking, bonded, loving, brutal, and wild. There are very distinct cultures in the West, and many of them are more barbarian than the pleb/noble distinction of pagan and Christian in feudal times.
I like many Christians (I’m constantly invited to Church social events) and they tend to be better here than most liberals. But I still don’t really understand them, with their endless denominations and constant in-fighting. What I admire about pagans is that they don’t care so much about those distinctions. It’s a living state of being and becoming. Past rituals and principles always morphed over time, with breaks between wars or cultural shifts with some similarity so this is no different. They had shared threads, but each iteration was born anew, because paganism is an intrinsic state guided by intuition and the living and changing web of wyrd, not something you learn just by looking at some past document/scripture to try to reconstruct it as it was. I’d also point out that many modern religions were formed by pulling together in the face of opposition. Christianity is one example. Hinduism, too, is actually quite new—a recent fusion of many tribal belief systems, first united by external Muslim threats, then carried into a period of prosperity under British rule. Yet no one questions whether Hinduism counts as a religion.
Your metaphysical question about the purpose of life is one I find especially interesting, because it marks a fundamental distinction in foundations of interacting with reality. I believe the Christian search for external purpose and emphasis on the afterlife often leads to a loss of meaning and existential crisis. Sadly, for a long time, many pagans also leaned toward a Gnostic-style metaphyics. I’ve been writing about a lost metaphysical perspective, that the purpose of creation is the process of forming meaning. So asking “what is the meaning of life” becomes a kind of conundrum, because life itself is the process through which meaning is created. The horseshoe of creation is that the all-powerful divine split itself in an act of first conception, energetically sacrificing to form physical reality which could grow to house divine consciousness. Materialism, which seeks to hold life in stasis, is part of the inherent risk of creation. I would argue that holding spirituality in the stasis of scripture folds into its mirror image in transhumanism, where life is again held in literal stasis. The intended state of creation, though, is the unfolding of meaning, growth, and the dynamic dance between being and becoming. Creation of meaning is the purpose of life.
I guess the best way to depict the pagan worldview is that definition or scripture isn’t something that mediates a connection with the divine but helps us to understand a past emanation or form in its development. The gods are not static, while underlying life force or God has more of a Christian understanding of the eternal. I’ve read past texts from Greece, Rome, the Eddas but not in the manner that I believe Christian’s read scripture (ill reiterate though that I don’t know much about Orthodox and from what I’ve seen it’s more militant and honors heroicism more than western Christianity).
Excellent response!
Thank you!
I was hoping to get some kind of summary of the podcast. Instead, I get the standard Christian sermon. First, Germanic heathens are a small portion of the pagan culture. Then, you pull out the historical legitimacy card because you have creds going back 2025 years. What do the pagans have? 10,000, 20,000, maybe more years?
Then, you say you are legitimate because you Christians wrote things down, neglecting the fact that if pagans wrote things down, good Christians would hunt them down, pull their tongues out and burn them alive on a bonfire. If they could not find pagans, there was always a rival Christian faction they could torture or kill.
If you good Christians know right from wrong, where were the Orthodox priests telling people not to inject themselves and their families with untested mRNA a few years back? Where are the Christians today fighting to stop Israelis from killing children, often by starvation, in Gaza?
Maybe part of your storied Orthodox Catholic tradition should be figuring out right from wrong and then doing the right thing.
I didn't write a critique against paganism, I wrote a critique against the subject of Astral's show. All three of the guests were Germanic Pagans, so I addressed that. If they were Hellenistic worshipers of Athena or devotees of Isis I would have written about that. But, they weren't, and I haven't met many of those. Maybe you should write something about your paganism or go on a podcast and I will answer that, I find it ridiculous that you come on here upset that I responded to what was in front of me instead of what you imagined I should have done instead.
Your second point is ahistorical and also makes you sound like some progressive liberal bitch. Pagans persecuted and martyred Christians for centuries before Europe became Christianized, and that Christianization was mostly done through wiling conversion led by unarmed monks and priests. The reason there isn't much writing is because most of the early pagans didn't know how to write. There's plenty of writing about the Greek gods and the Roman gods, because those guys knew how to write.
As for your final point, once again you show your intellectual and physical laziness. There were a lot of Orthodox priests that advised against Covid vaccines and Covid hysteria, and right now the internet is full of Orthodox priests condemning Isreal, especially because of the sizable Coptic Orthodox community in Gaza. But you know, 10 seconds of google could of told you that.
Hello, I am not upset. I am not pagan. I am not certain how to identify a liberal bitch, but I hope it is a not good descriptor of myself. I do not regard people who do not read and write as inferior.
I heard from reliable sources only one U.S. institute of higher education did not require Covid injections of students. Wikipedia lists 13 Orthodox Catholic institutes of higher education and it sounds like they required Covid injections of their students. That's about all the time I have for research.
Since you profess these deep Romanian roots, are you living in Romania? If not, can you move back? Some people identify gypsies as Romas. I don't think either identifier is precise. When I was a kid, they said the gypsies stole chickens from the A&P. I saw them one day—they were passing thru, being gypsies and all— but I did not see them take chickens without paying.
If you aren't a liberal bitch then don't write like one because you sure as fuck come off as a hardcore retard.
Your reliable sources, just like your self -mage of not being a bitch are wrong. There aren't even 13 Orthodox Christian institutes in the United States. You clearly have a poor education because most kids learn how to use google by first grade.
As for the thinly vailed blood and soil attack, yes I'm Romanian, I might move back when I am older, and I go back as often as I can, but I enjoy my home right here where I am. I don't know what gypsies have to do with me, they are hindu in ethnicity and live across the world. Now of course you are being a smart little boy trying to equate Ethnic Gypsies with Romanians, but that's stupid. Gypsies make up only 3% of the population of Romania, if that makes Romanians Gypsies that means Americans who are 20% Hispanic are Mexicans and the English who have a 6% Muslim population are Islamic.
Stupid, but you are clearly a retard.
I have used dozens of search engines and spent a decade working in SEO. I don't know why you would assume otherwise.
You have lost the ability to engage in normal human discourse.
Part of your job as a Christian is to be a salesman, or proselitizer, to use a preferred term. You are failing miserably.
Go to your priest and ask for guidance. Shut off your screens, read the Bible for a year and come back to tell us what you learned.
God bless you.
Great article here Alexandru.
I actually had a discussion touching on this yesterday at a book club discussing Walker Percy's essay "Diagnosing the Modern Malaise." We touched on how the modern world at the time of Percy's writing had no goal, no drive, because it was so sterile and scientific in it's outlook. He specifically says that scientism isn't pagan or idolatry at the time.
I brought up that I thought that had changed. That our current malaise had begun to shift to the paganism that we are seeing. That we have white robbed neo-pagans, and black ones in our judges and unis as I've written. That we have literal pagans as you write of here.
That this malaise, this shifting, is part of what has brought the country to our current antagonistic mode of dialogue. Because peoples with conflicting religious views and drives will come to blows - always and everywhere. That we're currently restructuring the Empire and it will fall out one way or another.
I think that it's hard for Pagans (if not impossible) to divorce their thinking from Christian metaphysics. You talk to them, and what they talk about simply does not line up with a lot of what seems to be found from source materials. Like you said, LARPing. They want to make it somewhat acceptable to modern man, and reasonable to them; not a bloody altar of virgins sacrificed to war gods, fertility gods, etc. Nor do they want to acknowledge any other number of inconvenient truths - as you point out.
I've been a lifelong "I don't know if I believe in anything" type of person who, in my edgy atheist teens, was introduced to the idea of paganism through my friends who pretended to be Wiccan on the weekends.
But something that gets me about paganism, coming from a mixed-ethnic background, what am I supposed to go with? I'm not Norse. Not Celtic enough, not Hungarian enough, not Russian or German enough etc etc. Some say you can pick and choose because that's what they did in the past, a bunch of deities on an altar. Somehow that feels more shallow to me than a meaningful connection with one. And then there's the argument "you can pick just one." ...I dunno. I think it's an interesting idea but every time I talk to "pagans" IRL they're only doing it to rebel against their family, that they don't genuinely Believe, like being a loud atheist with extra steps.
At least with faiths like Christianity it feels like it's actually be more "true" to my ancestry because like... Hungary for example has been Christian since, what, the Roman era? And similarly to everything else...?
That said, never mind mixed ethnicity, being brought up in a mixed religious home is something that definitely fucked with my head growing up and I just have a hard time connecting with the idea of faith in anything. But that's my own problem to deal with. I'm OK with poking fun at myself for this, and do it regularly.
Leif Erikson came to North America before the Christians. Name checks out. Ethnicity checks out. He liked the soil here and so do I.
Leif Erikson was Christian
Christian convert from Pagan mid life.