The Old Ways, The New ways, What Way is Right?

I am all about tradition and history, I have a Master's in history after all. For close to 40 years, I have study what we call Asatru, Germanic Paganism, Heathenism, or what not along with the history that accompanies the traditions. Over the paste year I have read a lot of blogs, social media posts, and articles by heathens claiming that we, the modern heathens, are doing it wrong. Let me explain…

I recently read an article, Historical Heathen Yule and the Facebook comments that went along with it. While the article makes a lot of good points and I somewhat agree, we are not them. That is, we are not the Saxons of the 5th – 6th Centuries, nor the Germanic Tribes of yesteryear, nor the Vikings. We are modern people in a modern world. We are not agrarian peoples who live by the rising and setting of the sun and the cycle of the moon. Though these natural elements of our world have their place in our lives and or religion.

Historically the Germanic Tribes, and the Anglo-Saxons were farmers first. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came to what is now England to settle to rising populations and loss of land in their homelands. The power vacuum created when the Romans left England was an opportunity for small groups of warriors to enter and establish locations for settlers to come and farm. Farming was a fulltime job that was based around lunar and solar cycles and the wheel of the year.

Society, politics, and religion were all connected, and farming was a major part of the lives of the Germanic peoples, the Saxons were no exception. That is why so many religious rites we have today in modern Heathenry are agriculturally related. If you know anything about ancient farming (and not so ancient) you know that lunar and solar cycles played a part. Keeping in mind that the modern calendar was not a thing yet and a lunar like calendar was being used. I will not pretend to know all the ins and outs of that!

The Anglo-Saxon people did not just stop being pagan on a Tuesday and Wednesday morning they were Christian, it took generations to convert the vast majority. Most likely what happened is that Christian influences worked their way into pagan society through migration, marriage, and yes missionaries. Over time people had a mixed religion of pagan and Christian. Yes, there were forced conversions and laws introduced by Christion kingdoms and the religious powerbase to force conversion, but in the beginning, it was probably a trickle of influence. The Anglo-Saxons were attracted to Christianity for a variety of reasons. It is perhaps no coincidence that some began converting to Christianity at the time when larger kingdoms began to be formed. The conversion was also influenced by political connections. Æthelberht was married to Bertha, a Christian princess from the area around Paris, and there were many cultural, social and political exchanges between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Christians in Ireland. Ultimately, conversion happened because of a change in socio-political and religious need. 

The argument being made in many of these posts, articles, blogs, etc. is that the Christians in an attempt to convert people and stop them from practicing their pagan traditions made changes to the pagan traditions and the Christion traditions to speed conversion by assimilation. Therefore, as Heathens we should reject these changes and go back to the old ways in order to preserve the old ways. I fully understand tradition and the importance of tradition, but at what point do we need to make changes in our old ways to accommodate our new ways? The Catholic church has refused to change any of its centuries old dogma in order to accommodate a changing society, thus they have been hemorrhaging members for decades.

One argument being made was, “Once you start abandoning the Old Ways of your Ancestors, soon, they are no longer the Old Ways…”. First the ways of my ancestors are not in Question. The ancestors I can trace through genealogy were either Christians, or in one case free thinking anarchists who rejected church and state. The commenter’s reference to “ancestors” was not his ancestors but what I call The Ancestors – the Germanic peoples who established our belief system. Once again, I say, we are not them, we can never be them, not as long as our modern world exists. Let’s say there was an apocalypse, and we were all blown back in to a tribal state with no central government or modern technology. Now we can take it all back and start over, but it is not likely. It would be more likely that new traditions and ways of life and religion would develop that fit the new tribes. It is a form of evolution.

All-in-all, modern heathenry is new and evolving. There is no real central ruling body that dictates our ideology, theology, or dogma… We are on our own. We are solitary or in small tribes who meet once a month and, on the holytides to celebrate and rejoice. There are no temples on the village green, in the cities, or in the mountains. They are in our private homes, apartments, backyards, and sometimes a grassy knoll in a public park. We no longer live by the lunar and solar cycle (not like the Ancestors). We have alarm clocks, day jobs, night jobs, and modern concepts the Ancestors could never imagine. I cannot take all the 12-days of Yule off from work to celebrate and hold rituals and no employer is going to pay me for that! Therefore, I adapt and change to fit my needs, my family’s needs, and my tribe’s needs so that we can honor the gods and our ancestors during the cycle of the year. As modern Heathens we need to adapt our way of life and religion to meet the changes of today.