Freedom of Thought
Northern pagan values include independent thought. This is completely at odds with a traditional education system as it is found in the modern world. Part of the mechanics of a post-industrial capitalist society is training children to obey. They passively listen to authority and by rote learn things and then are tested. The method does not engage critical thinking or creativity; nor collaboration with peers and others—as is desperately needed in today’s society. Kids for the most part learn to sit and listen to lectures in school from childhood. Furthering they then study empirical data and repeat what they have been taught, and then follow up with rigorous exams.
When polls such as happiness indices are self-reported, there is often a positive correlation that supports that an individual who has the capacity to fully express themselves and process emotions fully, and is creative—has a happier life outcome. Today in America at least every week there is a shooting. Unhappy children turn to violence to seek answers from a broken society.
Gun laws are a hot topic on capitol hill. Politicians with an ever growing death toll wrangle voting blocks over the possibility of metal detectors in public places and schools.
A solution could be to overhaul this post-industrial Christian system—that focuses on conformity and economic productivity rather than individual realization. Their focus is on obedience rather than ascension into the most creative consciousness and life. Parents have started turning away from what they now call ‘government schools’. The public schooling system has defectors—home school is the new way for pagans and parents who see the inherent flaws in the old education framework. Preparing the youth for the modern world and today’s global marketplace is challenging. The world is increasingly interconnected with semi-open borders and exceptional visas for competitive employment. With the current economy, rising inflation, and more automation stifling the job markets, things will only become more competitive.
While vocational training is available in some places, in America that option is decades dead, and schooling is merely a funnel to jobs that soon will be outsourced, or automated. There is no focus on the individual learning and growth—beings are just a means to an end in producing value for the shareholder. Today we all have our place to consume income, provide taxation for the state, and to reflect the values we imbibe from media driven culture. Statistics in the United States also show fewer and fewer young men engaged in higher education; this tells us that the system has failed. We have no choice but to reboot. The northern pagan response to these phenomena is to truly unplug.
Off-grid culture rejects endless consumerism which prioritizes economic output over environmental conservation and welfare of people or their culture. Living off the grid provides an opportunity to truly embraces the northern pagan values of self-reliance, harmony with nature, and silent time to reflect so as to offer meaningful and wisdomous communication when needed, along with a healthier and more natural lifestyle.
Of course, as can be expected with migration demographics, as the majority of the populations live in cities, so access to rural plains forest and grasslands is extremely limited. Instead, gatherings tend to be at a single shrine. Pagans in New York City meet in great public parks. Others meet privately behind closed doors. Personal access to large swathes of untamed wilderness is outside of the reach of most folk. But few are those even in concrete metropolises who don’t have access to a public park. Tree removals in the greying of places have long since seen counter movements such as the 1 million trees project, which made efforts to bring green to urban slums. Pagans will always find a way to reach into their core consciousness states via nature, trance, and communication with the supernatural.
The northern pagan mystical practice of seiðr utilizes the natural world, its elements and materials. The practitioners may know each herb and its association, they may also contemplate within the forests. The reverence for nature is seen in the activity of communicating with spirits and meditating. In today’s pagan community, the cultural continuity includes meditators or herbalists-intuitives, tree hugging naturalists, plant medicine practitioners, or simply folk with garden apothecaries or kitchen witcheries. The practice of incorporating nature as a partner in this shared and co-created experience of presence and consciousness—is at the heart of the practitioner’s path. The systems of sympathetic understanding or astrological associations with plants, berries, trees, shrubs and flowers is as ancient as mankind’s desire to understand cause and effect and action at a distance. The great Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer is one early scholar who spoke at length of this; where early tribes all knew the interdependence of phenomena. Their ritualistic efforts at what later was called sympathetic magic demonstrated belief that no one was an island—that all was connected.
This interconnection at the clan and tribe level extended itself and evolved into the practice of exchange of goods as people moved from semi-nomadic to permanent and stable farming communities. While history teaches us that some ancient Germanic tribes were more nomadic than others, across Europe the agrarian lifestyle was adopted as time progressed. With cold winters, trade was a stable way to have access to things needed. Without currency, people exchanged things as they liked using their best judgement. Ports up and down all major river outlets of inland Europe and coastal Europe generally have northern place names or port names because of the heavy historical trading in the area.
Looking to the past, the system of exchange of goods and services used by the northern pagans was trade through bartering. Kennings such as oath taker and ring giver tell us a little bit about the tradition of generosity and the cultural and social value of maintaining relationships within members of the clan and tribe through exchange. Marriage-promises, favors and gifts as well as wealth would be traded and locked into family structures to bring more integration and bonds of relationships. So while there was no state to create minted coins, the individuals of tribes gathered to procure the necessities while also tightening bonds of familiarity and kinship.
While our current economic system may be complex enough to host derivatives, insurance, futures and perpetuities as financial products, the basic level of exchange uses money which secures access to recourses. This basic trade was still standard for northern pagans, who also used iron as a form of currency. Goods were still valued at the equilibrium of supply and demand. Excavations in ancient trading hubs in Sweden find iron exchanges—from this we can understand that the medium of trade and bartering was iron and that the marketplace was an ongoing cultural negotiation between folk and tribes. Shared values alone bring people together—even of differing languages or religious backgrounds, and today’s world is no different.
How people exchange bartered goods reflects how they exchange energy. Many are the rituals which attempt to capture a bit of the sun or moon, bringing that magic from above to below into a talismanic pendant, or into a chanted spell. Energy is a fantastic concept that is not forgotten in the practice of commerce within the northern pagan paradigm. A small example of how we bring this ancient exchange traditions back into the present day, are the farmers’ markets. Open meeting of community engaging each other’s energy—it would be remiss to overlook the associations of connection and community building in the bartering square. For the ancient world information was exchanged in the vegetable stalls just as gossip and updates on family was bartered in the herb exchange. News of other tribes and kingdoms were passed along as well as information about ongoings between folk. If a trader had a steep price but too many loaves, one could pay the high price but ask for extra; driving a fair bargain but also bringing down the per loaf cost. Through the back and forth of adjusting the values between barterers, friendly accounts of hearsay, reckonings and ideas were exchanged in the open air of the marketplace.
Through the capital-intensive marketplace, with big box stores like Walmarts, Ikeas, Wegmans and supermarkets of today, the personal touch is gone. What used to be a strong connecting factor in a community, opening the way for alliances with families, wedding between youth, and different ventures recruited with word of mouth, is now a laggard. The unit of society was the household, and its network extensions were in hearths outside of their own home where their kin lived, potentially in-laws or cousins. The village bartering place was not just a grocery share or food cooperative. It was a place to recruit arms if power structures were challenged, and it was an open place to summon others.
The square might not be an official place for a thing—a formal event that resolved civil and legal conflicts within the community, but it was a semi-formal place to open such disagreements and issues, such that resolutions could be aired out and society could move on in peace from concerns that could worsen and deteriorate bonds between people in the village. Today we take for granted the public nature of the grocery store. While assembling in groups has been a protected practice since Habeas corpus, it is challenged today. With the weaponized police enforcement of order and martial suppression of disorder in protecting capital structures in the society, police violence dissuades too much public unrest. Police use tear gas and rubber bullets along with high pressure hoses on people when they want them to go home and stop protesting. All of these events happen in public squares. Yet recently as the public responded to two wrongful deaths by police, mass rioting, looting and arson across the US followed. The outraged public looked to the two manslaughters as overmilitarized police overstepping their bounds. The results were that the angry protestors gathered in mobs and looted and damaged large grocery chains as protesters fought police. In the US the city of Minneapolis had food shortages with the sheer amount of produce and comestibles destroyed in the riots, Los Angeles on the California coast and NYC and the Tristate Area in the north east saw grocery mobs looting and mass violence. What we can understand from these violent events is that the large box grocery store in the center of town still has the essence of the important place where like or not—the thing will be discussed. Even as the nation was in uproar against the forceful actions of authorized police; the marketplace of ideas merged with the food exchange. Thus we see the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The significance and reality of the square arose when the public needed to confront issues related to justice and their cultural values. This teaches, us that the symbolism of the ancient world is alive and well. Mythology and shared understandings of symbols bind northern pagans together. Their shared interpretations of allegories in the Eddas, and lessons from the archetypes in the Hávamál tether disparate individuals. Current populations are not blood bound, nor handfasted, nor connected through occupation or education. Entire cities are filled with strangers without anything in common. But for the northern pagan tradition, the mythology and symbolism binds us in shared philosophy. When people are bound by a story they know, when they share a narrative that identifies them—they gain strength. The power of a network is the strength of its individual members and their numbers. Each member of the tribe gains power from self-realization through identification with the narratives of their ancestors and their own spiritual experiences. In this way the folk come together culturally and form a community.
There are certain rituals that also bring people together in mutual practice. Even for atheistic or secular folk—the occasion of the full moon has interesting connotations that lie on the borders of myth. A non-believer can still see the studies that tell the story; emergency rooms see a spike in occupancy; psychiatric services see a statistically significant increase in admissions of patients during the full moon. People can of course deny that as mere correlation; but triage nurses are staffed more heavily at hospitals—and their testimonials and reports should not be invalidated. Mankind’s modernity may turn our sight away from any external factor that can suade us, but the lived experience of people who document their ongoings in hospital registries cannot be denied. The power of what we perceive as external to our mind still can have sympathetic resonance with us—internally.
(To be Continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Jillian Burnett AKA J.A.A. Narayan