There are no words to express my shock.

[sonneillon_v]

(( TW for racism and white supremacy ))

The National Policy Institute, which is a white supremacist organization, recently had their 2011 conference. Media Matters has coverage. While he was there, the reporter ran into some folks from the AFA... that is, the Asatru Folk Assembly. The Wild Hunt has observations on that

Comments

[kittenmommy]

White pride is always a very sketchy thing, and I say that as a white person with absolutely no clue of her origins. I could be a very fair Hispanic person for all I know. I could be Dutch, English, Finnish, Irish, German. I could be Greek or Jewish. I could have any kind of mixed blood in me somewhere. In some ways, that has made my personal practice hard, because without origins, how do I know which beliefs are mine and which ones I would be co-opting from another culture?

Is there a way you could find out?

[sonneillon_v]

The lawyer responsible for my adoption is currently in jail for fraud. It's too much of a pain.

[kittenmommy]

Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Was your adoption even legal???

[sonneillon_v]

As far as I know. The fraud wasn't related to his adoption cases.

[rikibeth]

My ex and I are of Eastern European Jewish heritage. We're both inclined more towards Wicca philosophically (although for the past ten years I've been identifying as agnostic/atheist with Wiccan and Jewish ethical principles). He plays bodhran and sings in an Irish band. He likes to say, when asked by audience members about his heritage, "The only Irish in me, I drank myself." (I think he favors Powers. I'm for Tullamore Dew myself.)

If there are such manifestations as gods, it's my feeling that they'd welcome recognition from anyone who cares to acknowledge them. I know that pagan friends of mine have asked Hindu-from-birth folks about the propriety of performing puja when they weren't raised in the tradition, and their answer has generally been "if you feel a sincere devotion to that deity, they will certainly accept your attention." Likewise, a friend of mine adores salwar kameez, and she's asked some Indian and Pakistani women who wear them if they consider it weird or wrong for a Western woman to wear them. Their response was "

[kitsukatze]

Being a Norwegian and a scholar of religions, modern Asatru bug me. Mostly because the worship of the Æsir was the cult of the Kings and the Kingsmen. Ordinary farmers, fishermen and the like of the time did most likely worship the Vanir instead - a fertility cult - , but very little of that practice was passed down through the ages, as noone bothered writing down the history of the common people. Not everyone was a Viking even though they lived in the time of the Vikings.

Little of what we know about the worship of the Æsir is first hand knowledge, most is second-hand descriptions or descriptions put down on paper several hundred years after the practices ended. Of the Vanir we know little but a few names. And thus Asatru today is the appropriation of a culture anyone has few true bonds to - even us Northerners.

I do wear a hammer-pendant, but that is out of respect for our history, not as a sign of worshipping Thor.

[sonneillon_v]

I really appreciate your perspective on it. I know modern folks tend to romanticize a lot of ancient groups... vikings, pirates, samurai... and that romantic ideal has very little to do with the reality at the time.

[kitsukatze]

So true on the last part there - and even more so for the Vikings than for the other two. Both samurai and pirates (as we think of them now) were products of the late middle ages/early modern era. Their history was written down by their contemporaries. The Viking age ended ca. 1050 in Norway, and few sources are as old as that. Much of what was handed down in writing came from Snorri Sturluson, b. 1179, and his contemporaries - already Christianized, which most definitely coloured their view of their predecessors. He was also a part of the King's circle, and focused mostly on the part of history dealing with the Kingship of Norway.

This coming from the woman who asked as a child what she wanted to become as an adult answered 'either a Egyptian or a Native American'. *Snort* Didn't really have the diva-princess tendencies as a child, nay.

[kitsukatze]

In addition, mixing Åsatru and white supremacy theory pisses me off immensely. The Vikings weren't white supremacists, they were power supremacists. They didn't much care about your skin colour, they cared about how strong you were. Their slaves and victims were whoever couldn't fight them off, including the people in the next village over, if they felt like attacking it. However, they also traded with whomever they felt like - we even find Roman coins and Buddha statues over here. There was a trade route named the Northern Arc which at least reached Baghdad and Constantinople.