The Old Gods

Ack. This was supposed to be published before the “art as embellishment” post, but I accidentally scheduled that other post and it published while I was on vacation.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of historical research on Pre-Christian Germanic culture. Much of this is what people think of as “Viking” culture, but that topic is such a jumble of confused ridiculousness that I try to avoid it. What I’m looking into is not “Vikings.” In fact, it’s a few hundred to thousands of years before that particular subset of Germanic travelers. What I’m seeking is an understanding of the underlying philosophical and spiritual framework of the Germanic peoples… before Christianity.

What I’ve been finding is, to say the least, mind-blowing. The long story is a topic for another post, or another blog, or a book, or even a series of books. It’s vast, as the universe of any culture is vast. One of the most interesting things, however, is that the early Germanic people– far from being the barbaric brutes of movies– were very deeply spiritual, philosophical, and thoughtful.

Hindu Hippies

Here in the Northwest, we have no lack of prayer flags. Hell, I even have some flying on my house. Ashrams, Buddhist temples, everything to cater to those neo-new age practitioners who are looking to The East for spiritual inspiration, many as a reaction to Christianity. There are countless descendants of Western Europe here, and around the globe, who recognize the wisdom of cultures like those of Northern India.

Truthfully, my own path passed through this landscape. I was seeking something closer to what was in my heart, closer to the words of my father. All through growing up, people would tell me that I “must be a Buddhist” or I “talk like a Buddhist.” This started in High School, where teachers and others whom I looked up to would tell me this. Thus, I wanted to know why they were saying it. In my head, I knew that I wasn’t a “Buddhist,” whatever that was. I was Indian. The words of my father were my blood, as we all are the blood of Great Spirit. But I wanted to know more, so I studied.

Fast forward a couple decades, and I decide to look into the religion of Pre-Christian Germany, partially because of a book that I’m working on, but mostly because I’m a mixed race person. My mother’s family is German, and some time spent in Germany during my thesis showed me, despite my attempts to believe otherwise, just how much of a home that was.

I wanted to know more about these people, my people.

My Humanity and My Germanity

I’ve spent the better part of my spiritual life reacquainting myself with the words of my father, with the relationships I built on and off reservations– from the Santee in South Carolina to the Colville in Eastern Washington. I’ve spent the better part of my spiritual life reading about Eastern religions to figure out why everyone kept calling me Buddhist. My life, as anyone’s, has been a quest to find the truth of the me.

And yet, through all of that search, I’d ignored the family that was closest to me in so many ways. They are my mother’s family. The family I grew up with. In some ways, the family I ran away from as a child.

So I find myself in adulthood, and find that I feel more and more that they are the family that is closest to my heart. They are, in ways that I did not have the wisdom to appreciate before, my family.

And so, just as I took trips to Germany and found a place that was comfortable and familiar, a place like home. So I see the family that I left– the ancestors that I had forgotten– and I see a spirituality, a humanity, that is so familiar. It is a humanity that is so much a part of me.

And so, I set out to learn about my forgotten ancestors.

The Old Gods

Like I do with everything in my spiritual life– I sought information that was outside of the context of Christianity. The true roots of these people lie not in the church, but in Pre-Christian Germany. Just like one can never understand Native American culture by going to a Christian church, I wanted to know what the spiritual landscape of these ancestors of mine was prior to this “great stirring of the pot” called Christ.

What I found stunned me. After so many years reading Mid- and Far-Eastern philosophy, what began to emerge was a sense of familiarity. It was almost as if I were walking through a forest that I’d known in my childhood. Features had changed, the trees were different, paths had been formed and disappeared, but the landscape was the same! It was, it still is, breathtaking.

The beauty, the depth, overwhelms me. Gods, heavens, depths. Spiritual and philosophical contexts. So vast, so universal, and so familiar. This was a people that were so strong, yet so thoughtful. When necessity called, they could exhibit the violence we see in movies, but most of their focus was on thought, on wit, on spiritual and philosophical transcendence. I found a religion that had all of the aspects that so many people seek when they look to India and the East, but I found it within our own cultural context.

Of course, there are great differences between this early Norse/Germanic religion and religions of the east like Hinduism and Buddhism. There are gulfs of time and space, as there are with any two cultures. But it was the universal truths that resonated with me. It was the connections between such different peoples that I held on to– because my ancestors were also different peoples.

In so many ways they are all the same, all of these old worldviews. We are all humanity. We are all of the same blood. We just have to be brave enough that we can look back on our history far enough to see that. In this looking, I found that the wisdom and religion, the spiritual landscape of Hinduism and Buddhism was incredibly similar to that of Northern Europe.

It’s interesting to note that many of the roots of Hinduism and Buddhism lie in the same soil as Pre-Christian Germanic culture. This is not surprising, given that these people are all Indo-European. The cultures, after all, did arise from the same place. Yet it’s not something that seems evident to most people. We look at our European ancestors and we see Christianity. But in the context of the vast sweep of humanity, that’s a very recent, and a notably foreign, religion.

What gives me pause is that so many European descendants in our time turn to Buddhism and other Eastern worldviews as a reaction to Christianity, when there is such breadth and wisdom in their own culture and they just don’t know it. You must dig deep, the Christian church demonized it for over a thousand years.

Hel became Hell, a place not of peaceful end in quiet snow, but of eternal torment in fire. Loki was once a trickster god, like all trickster gods– including Coyote in America– he was a positive figure who forced us to focus on the message, rather than the deity. Yet he became a demonic figure of evil under the Christian pen. The Seidkona and Völva, female figures of power, magic, and– most importantly– wisdom, became witches– in fact, many symbols of the feminine power and wisdom in European culture came to symbolize evil. The entire concept of witchcraft became synonymous with this foreign concept of “The Devil.” Thus, what was once an earth-based philosophy of peace and fertility because demonic.

You must dig deep for the wisdom of the old gods, but it’s there. It’s there. It’s feminine and it’s strong, it’s wise and it’s brutal, it’s witty and it’s foolish, and it’s so incredibly beautiful that it breaks my heart.

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