Christmas/Winter Solstice in SW Germany

Many aspects of this festival are Alemannic in origin, yet go back to earlier agrarian traditions of heralding the return of the sun. We know from the Nebra Disk and the Golden Hats that our neolithic ancestors had a meticulous calendar system in that regard, based on both solar and lunar cycles. During the dark days of Winter Solstice in central Europe it is as if all has withdrawn into deep hibernation, huddled under a pristine blanket of solace.

Indeed, this is what our ancestors understood as the passing of the old into the new; the heavy white frosts an integral process of purifying and regenerating the earth in this period. Thus it is time to tidy up the old homestead and sweep out the foul air with smoldering bundles of antiseptic herbs, particularly aromatic conifers from which the sap was collected to make frankincense. Boughs of conifer were hung over the doorways and hearth, sometimes their logs burnt in the hearth for that same purpose. Their garlands also included holly and mistletoe; the red and white berries representing the life giving elements of blood and semen in the royal marriage between the sun and the earth.

This time was known to us as “Weihnachten” which literally means “Consecrating Nights”; namely cleansing, blessing and taking stock. It was, after all, on these dark nights that the old wilderness spirits and frost giants descended on the community to steal away the sick, old and feeble in what was understood as the “Wild Hunt”. So, it was only wise that one kept a healthy warm and well stocked household to remain safely indoors on such nights. Even when the Romans invaded with their Saturnalia and the Mithras cult, they too had to adapt to the climatic conditions from which these traditions had been born, nor could the Holy Roman Empire do more than adopt them under more Latin labels with the masquerades of Saturnalia (Fasching) pushed to the end of the season. Otherwise the traditions remained the same in principle over the course because they were agrarian, where neither laurel nor palm leaf could grow.

Hence the first “Christmas tree” appeared in Freiburg in the year 1419, in front of the local bakery, where children were allowed to plunder its sweets. Then over the course of the 16th century they became increasing popular throughout the communities of the Upper Rhine Valley as a decorated festive tree erected in town squares much like the birch tree is to this day. Of course the nobility, far and wide, soon adopted this unusual trend with their own decorated trees in the courtyards of their burgs and palaces. Small candles, figurines of wood, sweets, dried fruit and nuts suspended on ribbons made the decorum. Adept wood carvers from the Black Forest readily advanced their skills; evolving the wooden figures into nutcrackers and incense burners- and inevitably, the elaborate candle driven mobiles known as the “Christmas Pyramid”. However, the finer Norwegian spruce was a rare commodity in those days, and didn't become a household item until the 19th century when the demand was enough to prosper planting whole forests of them. Nonetheless, alot of the decorum that makes traditional Christmas in the western world these days, actually came from this region.

Lament of the Lady Killer

So you reckon you're so haute-culture, posing in your wannabe Armani suit and shabby blue jeans? That vain attempt at a far-away glance, shifty-eyed, like a weasle sizing up his spoils, aspiring to live out some sordid oedipus complex, caught in a testosterone schism between Romantic Age opera and the UEFA Cup. Stalking divas in virtual reality to project their daughters into such diminuitive sexual roles, it's rather like the sadist that goes after the prettiest butterflies just to pull off their wings before a captive audience. Yes, I see you skulking around the site, a regular Don Giovanni posting your virtual bouquets in the hopes that some dejected heart might identify with your sexual nihilisms and actually buy that book, for what pretence and lacking depth of character?...after all, you did say you didn't want anything money can't buy...and since when does someone who professes to teach English, write whether as “weather”, beliefs as “believes” and deluded as “diluted”? Face it man, you're not fooling anyone looking like a Hispanic on the trail of his NS father. I know alot of them were hiding out in South America, so you're definitely barking up the wrong tree here.

In Memoriam

My paternal grandfather was in Vimy and Ypres. My father was in the Scheldt and Normandy. My maternal grandfather was in Sarajevo and my mother was in the Luftwaffe, fleeing the Soviets in Prague and Dresden in that long arduous escape to the Allied front. She will be 86 at the end of this month.

Auf dem Acker der Ruhe

Auf dem Acker der Ruhe
suchte ich dein Grab.
Du lieber Mensch
der vor vielen Jahren starb.
Ich war damals doch noch viel zu klein
Wusste nur, dort tat man dich hinein.

Erinnerungen bliebenmir nicht viel.
Zu schnell kam´s Lebenswechselspiel.
Jedoch gefunden hab´ ich dich nicht mehr.
Es ist auch schon zu lange her.
Du Mutter meiner Großmama
ich dir nicht lang in die Augen sah.

 Ich stand damals oft vor deinem Grab
und wusste das ich irgendwie lieb dich hab.
Jedoch die Zeit verann so schnell
Ich kann sie nur ahnen, diese Stell´
Doch in meinem Herzen brennt ein
kleines Licht was heißen soll -
Es vergisst dich nicht.

Autor: Angelika Adams

Samhaim Greetings

Raiders of the Lost Plot

It seems neo-paganism is becoming ever more inundated by popularity-mongering sociopaths who try to play it for some rebellious fashion statement, where fantasy rules by the proxy that truth is purely subjective. In essence there are no real facts, just opinions, hence all opinions qualify as truths, no matter how erroneous. This gives them the liberty of stretching what little they know to fit whatever wishful precept they strive to allure a following without having to go to any investigative lengths for the sake of authenticity. Rather, whatever they chose to dress up from selectively exotic bits of foreign culture, history and philosophy becomes "authentically" theirs. Genuine archaeological and anthropological sources on ancient history are usually avoided for more controversial authors such as Zacharia Sitchen, Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock. On the subject of modern esoterica and mysticism, 18th century romanticism is favoured, especially what its philosophers conceived of classical history, whereas witchcraft and sorcery inclines to be portrayed in a medieval gothic setting as influenced by the Arthurian myths, often adding the archetypes given by such infamous 15th century manuscripts as the Malleus Maleficarum.

Apparently, it's unimportant whether these themes are credible or not, as long as they beguile some profound sense of oo-ah, much like the religious rapture you see in revivalist churches. So, as much as they allege to be breaking from regimes, they are actually imposing their own with each pop-cult cliché they push as their salvation. Of course if you resist and dare to question their motives, that's where a number psycho-manipulative tactics will come into play. It's much like what any cult leader conspires to cull the nay-sayers; using false kudos, altruisms and other forms of emotional blackmail; playing on the vain assumption that everyone suffers some misunderstood need "to belong". This persistent bombardment is especially annoying to solitaries who prefer to keep their contacts discrete and not be fanfared into appeasing the whims of popularity seeking hoards. Usually their personal circumstances are already complicated enough without some wannabe shyster trying to get on their case.

Don't ask me what dreams of avarice compells the need for a servile following. They will tell you everything they think you'd like to hear, to seem so above reproach and unsuspect of complicity.  Fortunately, sociopaths of this calibre lack their own creative originality, thus`jump onto any bandwagon they think they can exploit until people just plain lose interest. In essence it's really just a competition for the Alpha role of social dominance as measured by consensus and the number of their following, hanging out wherever they think they can allure enough quarry away. It amazes me the number of surreptitious invites I get from this kind so completely oblivious to the fact that I take no prisoners and would sooner shoot them than even give them the time of day...and when I do, how quickly they go running to my colleagues for sympathy as if they didn't know better. Been there, done that, set fire to the t-shirt, so what does it really mean?

More Annoying Neopagan Authors

Back in the 1980s when the German Verfassungsschutz started cracking down on Neo-Nazi literature, they soon found out the shear bulk of it was coming from America, not only Illinois, but various hate groups in the Bible Belt preaching the Aryan brotherhood. Well, any German who knows their history, can tell you that the whole master race shite actually started with Helena Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine". This quote says it all for the pseudo-science of esoteric megalomania:

"Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The 'sacred spark' is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying out. Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent" (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 421).

...which, needless to say, inspired such half-witted "visionaries" as Guido List in his "Armanen-Orden", Heinrich Himmler and his cohort Karl Maria Wiligut; elitaires of the "Thule Gesellschaft" and creators of the "Schwarze Sonnen Kult"- megalithically modelled on the great hall of Asgard and its council of the 12 gods. However, this was not so much of want to be pagan, rather, the intent to replace the Semitic doctrines of Christianity with the Odinistic "All-Father" concept of alleged Germanic spirituality, and that despite the fact of Hitler priding himself in being a staunch Black Catholic of one of the few remaining Holy Roman enclaves. That should have been evident in his affinity for such places as Oberammergau and Passau and pretty much why Hitler was inclined to call his empire the "Third Reich". The Jewish had always been an oppressed folk in Europe for the mere premise of having persecuted Christ, not only branded by Roman Catholics but the Reformationist Martin Luther as well. These persecutions go as far back as the witch hunting crazes stirred by bouts of the Black Death and other pandemics. It was only too easy to point the finger and make spoils of any hoarded wealth to cover the financial deficits. Of course being a national socialist movement only justified the Nazis' ideological excuses to confiscate wealth for the "common good", so this also applied to any aristocrats who didn't side with the party. After WWII, it took historians and museum curators decades to recover the hoards of priceless works the Nazis had mostly stashed away in secret bunkers. In fact, many works were never recovered, as was the case of Frederich Wilhelm's Amber Room in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad)...and that's not to mention the millions of lives lost.

As if it's not enough to see how such utter narcissistic megalomania destroyed the lives of people for generations to come, and left my family in the grey zone of despotic regimes they wanted no part of either way. Then I come across some two-faced heathen author from the Bible Belt, that an online friend alleges to be such a misjudged master of the old Anglo-Saxon ways. Well, after having to get confrontational with various Llewicca authors for their bad anthropology I'm not inclined to trust anything from North America claiming expertise in Germanic culture, especially if they never grew up here to truly learn the language and its customs, and I don't give a damn what they claim to have a degree in. That old white Anglo-Saxon shite just isn't going to cut it with the Havamal, Irminism and the nihilisms of Nietzsche to fill the obvious Anglican void of pagan prehistory. The same goes for these Neo-Druids who insist on exclusive rights over the use of Stonehenge. I've had such an earful of these delerious wannabes of some lost magical race of demigods, I'm really quite sick to death of it. That patronizing come-on as if being German should make me seek salvation from some kind of "Evil Empire". Do you honestly think the British one was any better in its subjugation of what it deemed "decadent" or "barbaric" cultures? and did your Gaelic speaking peoples want any part of that hypocrisy? Think again you arrogant gits. You have no idea of the fearless providence that landed my grandfather in a Nazi labour camp or how the bastards tried to kill my mother for wanting to marry an Englishman.

Do tell me what became of those coveted Nazi scientists, divided amongst the Allied for want of their own New World Order, or how Josef Mengele landed on the payroll of the Canada Reseach Council for experiments in what? And then all this rhetoric about the Pan-Aryan brotherhood, like I can't smell that cross burning on the lawn. I think you lot need a dire update in the science of genealogy, namely the fact that there are no subspecies within the homo-sapiens-sapiens...unless of course you want to make an exception of those Neanderthal genes exclusive to Caucasians. As for the Indo-Aryans, there was no such migration out of old Babylonia, let alone the Indus Valley, nor was so-called "higher civilization" anything more than just a random phenomenon as anything else in evolution.

As for changing that sinister profile of yours to suggest it was all just a figment our paranoid imaginations, it only shows what deceitful lengths you will go to promote your misinformation. Should it be any surprise that reconstructed heathenry is losing "faith" when all it has to offer is no less a hackneyed soup of pseudo-ethnic pretenses than any other neopagan path. You need to put away your RPG and take a serious reality check.

While I'm all for cultural preservation, let's not forget the three things that factor into it; environment, heritage and circumstance. Rather, I see all three being misrepresented again for want of some supremacist religious autonomy that never even existed in Europe before Christianity...and I hardly think any of my fellow Alemanni would see the need for some "long house" apart from the community council to celebrate a toast or swear allegiance to something, let alone replace the springs and groves where they still leave their festive offerings. In this regard it becomes clear how you narcissists have completely missed that bigger picture on cultural continuity. Like I said before, the difference between a culture and a cult.

Revenge of the Goddess Monotheist

We have a few South African members on our site who are indeed curious as to what us pagans are about. I had always hoped we'd have more members from that continent to provide some ethnic background for our Afro-American members to explore. Then one showed up, guns blazing about some self-construed triple great-goddess je-ne-sais-quoi. From what I could make of it, it was supposed to be a combination of Wiccan, Taoist, Arabic and Christian faiths, thrown together in such a convoluted manner, that it made no sense any which way you looked at it. A radical feminist on a crusade against patriarchy, which given her alleged Middle-Eastern roots I can well understand; but why the hell on a pagan site? Why Wicca when its beliefs and practices actually encompass the balance of male and female qualities?

My Scottish colleague was putting together a group on the ethnic origins of various polytheistic pantheons when suddenly this pratt took over the message board, drowning everyone out with her endless convoluted monologues in every way to completely confuse the issue. In the end the group became so buried in it, we had to shut it down, as it was entirely centred on some monotheistic all-goddess and not polytheism as the group was intended. She would not listen to reason and we have grown tired of having to get confrontational with these kind of trolls. Very well, we thought, maybe she doesn't know her way around Ning boards, so I made her the offer of covering African traditional enthnoculture in the Ancestral Trails group, to give her some kind of creative focus. While she expressed being most honoured by the offer, and accepted, she made no effort to make it real. Instead, her impudence only got worse as her focus on the Women, Myth and Lore group failed to get the desired attention. Thus she persisted in diverting any advertised discussions with much the same overweening impertinence. As for the constant play on Wicca being goddess centered, it was just a convenient ploy to attack any outspoken male members of our staff. It Clearly it didn't matter to her that earth-based pagans are neither monist let alone monotheist, regardless what gender; whereas we see duality for what it is in nature; a dynamic exchange that keeps the whole thing in motion, otherwise it would all collapse back into the void. Is that so hard to understand? Well, obviously she wasn't there to understand, rather, sabotage anything that might have stood in the way of dictating her cause on the whole site, even running to our site creator to "rat on us" like this is some kind of kindergarten for the socially dysfunctional. Give it up you troll. We're a team of responsible adults and know how to work together. It's called experience, which means we know what to expect by informing each other. It's not about being like-minded, rather, being symbiotic, flexible in our ability to diverge, to analyse the problem from different angles. Try to mess with us and you're going to have more than one to deal with and that in different ways, so don't kid yourself.

It always amazes me how some take themselves for so godsent, we shouldn't dare question their motives. Just what do they hope to gain by taking whole websites hostage for such mindless obedience to their whims? What is paganism going to look like ten years down the road after every narcissistic troll has distorted it all to suit their greedy ends on the pretense of "religious tolerance"? Well, if that's the case then rest assured I will stick to my guns and shoot any one of them that tries to pull that crap on me while I'm still alive and kicking, but then, after death, you can never be sure either.
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About Pantheism

I'm what most might call a pantheist heathen, but you can forget the wiki definition of it, let alone linear concepts of duality or universality. It's more about comprehending the omniversal nature of the continuum than trying to reduce it to some omnipotent absolute. In essence the general belief in various spirit realms in which all things possess a "soul" entity (albeit individually or collectively) out of which they manifest their own characteristic forms. Hence the term "other worldly" in reference to the denizens of these alternate realms. That is to say, what polytheists call gods, may just be alternate beings or a collective entity on a different mortal plane of existence, like it is with the wights. Seen from a higher dimensional perspective, form is a temporal vessel of this "soul spirit", "life force" or "intelligent design" if you like, operating within the physical limitations of that mortal plane, but not necessarily bound by it in certain aspects. This is what accounts for the phenomenon of the egregor, doppelgänger, fylgja or "fetch" in unusual circumstances. Nor does it mean we cannot perceive what operates beyond that boundary state, rather, the problem lies in trying to relate it in tangible terms of the so-called "here and now".

All too often wiki flogs these concepts too academically to make any sense to anyone. Their assertion that "All is God" is misleading. They seem to have that same problem defining "Gitche-Manitou" which is the general pantheistic view of the Algonquin nations that "all things are interconnected", revolving around a story of a male creator spirit and the weaver (spider) woman, who move through the cosmos in creation as an on-going dynamic process, whereas the trickster spirit invokes change wherever things become too static. One does not necessarily "worship" these ideas, rather, contribute to their spirit meaning in that with which we are also able to create, respecting of course that every effect has a cause and every cause an effect in this web of existence.