Asatru? Asanotru? Inono...

[avevale_intelligencer]

I see from what is becomig my regular twice-daily dip into Facebook that in Iceland some people are trying to revive the worship of the Norse gods.

I think they're doing it wrong.

Not that I know anything about how they're doing it, except of course the usual modern line about how one does not of course do anything so utterly crass and jejune as believing in the gods, oh dear me no, nonono, one sees them rather as poetic metaphors and aspects of the universal creative principle and dedah dedah dedah, phthppbbbbt. (I don't know why that kind of talk makes me want to go phthppbbbbt. It just does.)

But the thing is that we have very little idea how people believed in gods before God, as it were. The Abrahamic, monotheistic religions have irrevocably altered our conception of belief and deity, and neither the Norse gods, nor the Greek, nor the Roman, nor the Egyptian, nor any other set of polytheistic gods, fit comfortably with how we think of belief now. The Abrahamic God, however he may vary from creed to creed, is a singular being in every sense of the word, and has nothing to do with any notion of how gods were perceived before; he'd been debated, meditated and con-templated into almost an abstraction before he ever even got as far as northern Europe. He was never a great big loud stupid guy with a beard and a hammer who could be fooled into trying to drink the ocean. So of course you can't worship a god like that in the same way.

But the airy-fairy poetic metaphor line isn't right either. That's a post-worship attitude, an uneasy, shifty compromise with rationalism, Vichy religion, if that's the phrase I'm after. (Probably not.) Maybe that's why it makes me go phthppbbbbt. Maybe I think you should either believe or not believe. Believe, or not believe, and still get on with people who believe or don't believe differently. If we can guess one thing about the people who told stories about Thor, it's that they didn't waffle on about poetic metaphors. They weren't stupid, but nor had they spent centuries over-thinking things the way we have. Maybe they did believe in the big dumb guy with the hammer or the one-eyed man on the eight-legged horse; or maybe, rather than believing in him, they just thought he was real. The world, after all, was full of mysteries and unexplained things back then, almost as full of them as it is now. Why shouldn't gods be real? You could shout "Thor, strike me dead!" and nothing would happen; just meant Thor was busy somewhere else. It's these Christians (they might say) who talk up their god as being everywhere and seeing all and knowing all and then look uncomfortable when you ask why he doesn't do something about all this mess. There's a lot to be said for human-sized gods, who make human mistakes.

I'm not saying these people shouldn't worship whatever they want to in their own way. I hope you all know me better than that. There's room for all kinds of religion in this world, from the three-thousand-year-old monotheistic abstraction kind to the pick'n'mix invention of a civil servant and naturist that has yet to reach its first century. But, as with the latter, I do hope they don't cherish any fond illusion that they are somehow reaching back through the ages to connect with their ancestors in the way they honoured their gods...because I'm fairly sure their ancestors would think they were crazy.

Comments

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

One of my problems with the Asatru is the source material.

The Vikings had a writing system - runes - for a very long time, but they didn't (for various reasons) develop a literature until after they converted to Christianity. By the time the major source of norse mythology (The Prose Edda by Snorri Struluson in 1220) was composed - possibly written by Snorri, possible merely collated by him - Iceland had been a Christian nation for over two centuries. (It converted by act of Thing - parliament - in AD 1000.)

There are hints - like the story about drinking the sea - that the religion had been fading into some sort of running joke before Christianity arrived, and I think it unlikely that we have true record of what people actually believed in its main period of belief.

It is possible that some more could be derived by comparisons with the Greek and Roman religions, and maybe even by a study of Hinduism - all three are Indo-European religions like Asatru, and there are parallels between the myths about the rise of the gods in opposition to the titans in the norse legends (the norse gods were aesir and overthrew another race/tribe of gods, and Loki/Loge wasn't actually an aesir). But given the long gap (spatially and temporally) between the various groups, this might not be as helpful as at first appear. Unfortunately, those belief-systems which most strongly resembled norse myth (Anglo-Saxon, Germanic) are not documented to anything like the degree that the norse myths are.

The parallels with the civil servant and naturist is all too appropriate, I fear. But, like you say, people should be free to worship what, and how they like (with an obvious caveat about certain practises like human sacrifice).

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Do we have any reason to think that the story about drinking the sea was a late addition arising out of decadence, or do we just think it must be that because it doesn't fit with our idea of what a "serious" religion should be about?

This is exactly what I mean. I don't see any reason why that story could not be part of a vigorous and colourful religion, the kind in which, yes, the gods could be funny and make mistakes and (as with the Greek gods) carry on with mortal women and get into trouble with their wives because of it, but were no less the gods and no less powerful and no less terrible when they wanted to be. But we've so deeply absorbed the idea that religion has to be a particular kind of thing that when we meet something that doesn't fit that particular kind of thing, we have to make excuses for it, like saying it's a metaphor, or they didn't really believe it, or if they did they must have been thick, or (as you suggest here) that it was already fading away from something else that it had been before. We don't know that, or that whatever it was before was any more like what we would think of as a religion now. As you say, we only have the evidence we have, and measuring that evidence against the yardsticks we use for completely different kinds of belief is unlikely to give us reliable comparisons.

[eintx.livejournal.com]

Remind me to introduce you to a friend of mine who is Asatru and very intelligent and critical. (Duke, remember?) I'm sure he'll love a conversation!

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

*goes and hides under sofa* :)

[batyatoon]

See, yeah -- gods as poetic metaphors works just fine for me, but not in conjunction with actually being part of the religion that's about those gods.