Hammerhof

So, every so often I watch a YouTube video about Heathenry in one form or another. Often I hear all about how I am doing it wrong and I should be doing it this way or that way. I’m not here to tell you how to do anything, I am here telling you how I do things. I live in the 21 st century, I am not a Viking, and I did not live in the 900AD or some other past time. I am here and now. The way I have structured my religious and spiritual life is around the modern world. Is it historically accurate or the way the “ancestors” did it? No! It’s fucking not! Good luck with that. I don’t have a time machine and I can do all the research in the world an never get in the heads of the people of the past to truly know what they did. As a historian I can tell you we can only guess based on the evidence we have. Searching for the past and trying to recreate it is a way of escaping reality. I was heavily involved in reenactment, and the reality of that is it is a way to escape the past and relive ...

  Almost from the start modern Asatru had a priestly class. This is due to the fact that the founders of modern Asatru were creating a religion based upon lost ways of the Germanic people. They had little to go on from the past, but plenty to draw from their present. Religion, that is Christianity, had a priestly class, therefore so should Asatru. However, from a historical prospective there is little evidence to suggest that the job of priest ever existed in pre-Christian Germanic religious practice. If you go online and look up “Asatru Groups” or “Organizations” you will find Heathen groups both large and small. All of the national and international organizations have a priestly class associated with them, most calling it the Go ð i. All have some sort of Go ð i training program that you need to endure in order to represent yourself as a priest of the local Heathens. In most cases, this is a good idea. The Troth has an excellent program that will educate you on modern Asatru pr...

 A thousand or so years ago the European Heathen peoples Christianized. What this means is that they threw out the old gods in favor of one new god and that was that. Well, not really. Christian historians (i.e., monks and the like) would like you to believe that all the old folkloric traditions, the tribalist pagan worship was put on the curb and picked up to be disposed of. The reality is that most of the ancient pagan ways of the European Heathens was incorporated into Christianity, including the gods. This may come as a shock, but we know that Heathens prayed, and they did so in various ways: standing and holding their hands open and high, keening, and prone. When they prayed, they asked for things like help with crops, health, trade, and probable for that new tunic they saw in the corner store. The point is they pray for the same things people, non-Heathens, pray for now and they did it much in the same way Christians pray today. In the Heathen glory days, religion was tri...