I am a Purity Test’s Worst Nightmare
I’ve found that throughout my life, my pragmatic outlook and independent mind has allowed the adoption of ideas, hobbies, philosophies, view points, and policy stances from seemingly disparate, and on the surface, conflicting places.
Combined together, these diverse building blocks form “me”. But, in a world with unprecedented levels of polarization, black & white thinking, and all-or-nothing entrenched conflict, I’ve often found myself trapped somewhere in the middle being lambasted on all sides for failing ideological purity tests. My approach to Heathenry is no different.
Heathenry’s History is Complicated
The history of Germanic Heathenry and Neo-Paganism in all its forms, all nearly 200 years of it, is complicated and fraught with problematic, controversial, and outright evil groups seeking to claim the banner of our ancestral gods. Even today, we are at war with groups like the Odalist biker and prison gangs, the Asatru Folk Assembly, and all the various splinter Folkish groups that erupted from the remains of the Theodist school of thought.
Not to say the Theodists are entirely gone, they are still somewhere fighting amongst themselves, declaring one another “Outlaws” and playing Sacral King. From these battles, those of us on the side of inclusiveness and anti-racism have had the impulse to reject and eject anything that the above mentioned groups ever touched or found meaning in. Countless babies thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak.
Heathenry’s Practice Doesn’t Have to Be
So why am I the Centrist Heathen? Because I advocate that not all of scholarly sources need to be discarded simply because someone we don’t agree with had used them at some point in time and drew a different conclusion than we would. That it’s completely valid for someone to feel drawn to heathenry to better understand the way their ancestors worshipped, as heathenry is a faith built on ancestor veneration. But that there is no ethnicity requirement to be a heathen because our ancestors weren’t exclusionary and we shouldn’t be either. That heathenry can be practiced just as well as a solitary practitioner as in a group of believers.
That we can study the society of the pre-Christian people of Northern Europe to better understand how they interacted with their gods without needing to replicate their unjust social systems and gender norms in our modern world. That between the anything-goes approach of the Eclectic New Age style paganism and the strict and narrow approach to heathenry of the Theodish there’s a Middle. A properly-shaped world view and foundational reconstructed praxis on which to learn and grow through personal experience with your ancestors, spirits of the home and land, and the gods.
The middle can be a tumultuous space to occupy, but I think the world at large needs to find the middle.
Hi, I’m Nick and I am the Centrist Heathen.