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As many are aware, recent years have seen the resurgence of interest in the pre-Christian religiosity of Europe, often under terms such as “paganism” or “heathenry.” The reintroduction of the practice of such religiosity necessarily involves a rejection of the dominant religion of today—Christianity. However, it is apparent that the bulk of heathens today merely reject the symbols of Christianity without rejecting the core of Christian thought. Of course, singing praises to our ancestral gods is important, but without the ruthless excision of Semitic despotism, ignorance, and superstition, our heathen faith would be but a hollow mockery of the faith of our ancestors. Therefore, in this series I hope to examine the principal Semitic superstition I see so many would-be heathens witlessly fall into: the devotion to the supernatural. Being a Nordicist, I will elucidate the stark contrast between the unique European view and today’s standard Semitic view through the lens of Germanic heathenry. This series will examine the place of the supernatural in Germanic heathenry (or rather the lack thereof).

The dominant view of religions today centers on the miracle. As defined in the Abrahamic faiths, the miracle is an event whereby divinity (always viewed as outside of or separate from the world) acts directly upon our world in explicit violation of the “laws of nature” to affect a change. The effect of such miracles in Abrahamic myth is that their transcendent monotheistic god is the primary driver of events. Their jealous god acts according to his whims to drive outcomes for his people, who receive benefit from his actions. Such a view would be anathema to our Germanic ancestors. Instead, our ancestors saw divinity as immanent in nature and thought divine action unfolded through natural processes. In Germanic myth, men acting in concert with the divine drive events in ways that comport with the “laws of nature.” One could remove all reference to the divine in some myths (which, as we will see, would appear insane to our ancestors) without disturbing the sequence of events of the myth as a whole. That this view is authentic to how our ancestors understood their religion is evident when examining the origins of Germanic religion itself, the view of the nature of the gods at the pinnacle of Germanic achievement, and via an examination of an exemplary myth – the Saga of the Völsungs. This entry will begin by examining the first: the origin of Germanic religion.

To orient ourselves, we first must establish what is meant by “supernatural.” The word supernatural derives from Latin supernātūrālis, meaning “above” + “nature; that which we are born with.”1 That is, it is essential to the term that the event described goes beyond that which nature provides for. This creates some implications: firstly that there is something outside of nature that can act upon it and secondly that nature as it presents to us is subject to violation. In turn, it follows that nature (the world, what we experience) is subservient to something outside and superior to it. This thing could be a “true world” of the forms or in the Semitic view, the monotheistic god. This begs the question of how a people could come to hold this view. The answer the Semite will give you is quite simple and unquestioned: revelation.

The Torah (תורה) is the revelation of the Semite god to Moses at Sinai. Torah literally mean “instruction” and refers to both the first five books of Hebrew scripture as well as later oral laws such as the Talmud.2 Later, Christians added their own texts to the existing Hebrew scripture to create the Bible, with the final such text itself being named “Revelation.” These writings and teachings are indispensable to the Semitic religions. Without their propagation, the religions would cease to exist. If3 every copy of the Bible was destroyed, and every last person with knowledge of Christianity killed, then intuition and observation alone would be unable to rebuild the precepts of Christian religion. God coming from outside the world into the world either through prophets like Muhammed or himself like the person of Jesus is an essential part of Semitic faiths. Even Muhammed required instruction of the Quran from the transcendent being of the angel Gabriel much like the angel Moroni directed Joseph Smith to the golden plates. Taken on their face, all these Semitic religions are logically consistent with supernaturalism. If beings miraculously appear and state that miracles are possible, then of course we humans have to take their words as truth. Who would I be to question the hook-nosed apparition that suddenly appeared in my room in harsh violation of my heretofore known understanding of the laws of science and fundamental nature of the universe?

Friedrich Nietzsche in classic form psychologizes the origin of these instincts towards supernaturalism in the Abrahamic religions, finding that those who reject the natural for the supernatural are themselves “natural rejects” so to say:

Once the concept “nature” was taken to mean the opposite of the concept God, the word “natural” had to acquire the meaning of abominable,—the whole of that fictitious world takes its root in the hatred of nature (—reality!—), it is the expression of profound discomfiture in the presence of reality.... But this explains everything. What is the only kind of man who has reasons for wriggling out of reality by lies? The man who suffers from reality. But in order to suffer from reality one must be a bungled portion of it. The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion: but any such preponderance furnishes the formula for decadence.4

Hatred of nature is not only a criticism leveled from outside the ranks of Abrahamic religions by characters such as Nietzsche, but so too do those within the ranks proclaim this hatred. In an article I highly doubt the author ever intended non-Jews to read, Jewish scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld juxtaposes Judeo-Christian law with the laws of nature:

Halakhah [Jewish law] is the antithesis of the laws of nature. The latter are cruel: there is no charity in nature; there is no mercy. There is no safety net in nature for marginal beings. The strong eat the weak. The old are abandoned. In the Bible, the Utopian Latter Days are characterized by the disappearance of these characteristics from the world, when Isaiah prophesies that “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb...the cow and the bear shall graze...a babe shall play over a viper’s hole.”5

He goes on to claim, “no nation in the twentieth century has lived as much ‘in harmony with nature’ as Hitler’s Germany. Blood and soil became central values. In the pseudo-religious world of national socialism, nature and its rule, i.e., the survival of the fittest, played an important role.”6 In the Judeo-Christian view, nature is something to be overcome. The existence of religion and law is to subjugate and control nature for the purposes of man, to make natural things available to safen the world for the lowest “marginal beings.” In this regard, the whole purpose of Semitic religion is to be supernatural, for man to go above nature to make it his own. The teleology of Judeo-Christian religion goes hand-in-hand with its cosmology: man ought to be supernatural, god is already supernatural.

The Germanic view of religion and the means by which our ancestors came to know the gods are entirely opposite of this Semitic view. It is evident that, along with all others in the world, Germanic religion developed naturally out of interaction with nature. Because of this, the idea of the supernatural is wholly unintuitive and goes counter to the foundation of Germanic heathenry because a religion built upon observation of the natural world can not include things not naturally possible. The Norrœna Society, a modern Germanic heathen reconstructionist group, clearly and succinctly lays out what we will see the historic Germanic view was in the Society’s declaration of the core tenets of its faith:

We believe in Immanent Divinity and deny the existence of the Supernatural. There is only Nature and nothing exists outside of it.

Within the Doctrine of Immanence, it is believed that the spiritual world pervades our physical world and that the two exist in harmony together rather than in opposition between the natural and the supernatural. We believe that our Gods created the material world and the cosmology within which it rests, and that all things, including the Divine, exist subject to logical principles within this natural existence. We acknowledge no First Cause or appeal to that which lies outside of reality. All things which exist are rationally understandable and logically ordered within reality, and this includes what many understand as “the supernatural.”7

To truly comprehend the incompatibility of the supernatural and Germanic religion we must first have a good grasp upon what is natural, or a strong definition of nature itself. Furthermore, this definition must be appropriate to our Germanic ancestors’ understanding. We can elucidate this historical understanding by looking at another Nordic Indo-European people’s word for nature, its etymology, and their purest-bred aristocracy’s understanding of it: the Greeks. We can then look at the corresponding Germanic word for nature, its etymology, and our ancestors’ understanding of it to see if it aligns with the Greek understanding.

The appropriate Greek word is phusis (φύσις), which literally translated means “to grow.”8 Costin Alamariu contextualizes the Greek use of phusis through Pindar, “the voice of the early Greek aristocracy.”9 The fundamental meaning of the word as expounded by Pindar centers around the body conceptualized biologically—flesh and blood.10 Furthermore, the word as used by Pindar has a botanical connotation connected with bounty, fruitfulness, and energy; which further develops into skill, strength, and general material prowess.11 Lastly, Pindar uses the word in contexts connected to breeding and heredity in an explicitly eugenic fashion.12 The Indo-European Greek aristocracy therefore viewed nature as man’s physical inborn capacities for vibrance, liveliness, and power. The lynchpin of this entire understanding is that these vital traits are inborn. They are given to man by descent, not acquired through one’s experiences. Indeed this focus on the particularity of the body (which will become important in part two of this series) does not preclude a wider inclusion of all things “given to” man in the world. Collin Cleary uses the literal translation of the Chinese word for nature, “of itself so.”13 Comparing this to the Greek understanding of phusis, Cleary writes that “The ‘of itself so’ is that which is, or has happened, independently of conscious, human action or intervention.”14 While eugenic traits may be cultivated through the process of selective breeding, they are not ultimately created by man but instead carefully refined. Their true origin remains ineffable, outside of the reach of man, and ultimately mysterious. Again, Cleary writes, “This is exactly how the Greeks conceived phusis, as surging forth continually out of an ultimate source – archē, in Greek.”15 In sum, the Greek understanding of nature in phusis is the constant outpouring or growth of vitality which is ultimately other from man insofar as it is outside his ultimate control yet which reaches its zenith in the bodies of the most gifted men.

The Old Norse word for nature is óðal (ᛟᚦᚨᛚ) (commonly rendered as aðal, eðli, öðli) which derives from Proto-Germanic *aþalą ultimately from Proto Indo-European *h₂et-olo- literally meaning “to grow over/beyond.”1617 The original sense of the word used in Norse poetry seems to have been “nature, inborn quality, property.”18 The word heavily connotated inborn characteristics as well as heredity, for the term came to be associated with inheritance and property that passed through descent.19 Additionally, all Germanic languages’ words for aristocracy and nobility (save English, which receives its word from Latin) descend from the same root word that their word for nature does, *aþalą.20 This same word also means “race,” thus connecting nobility with descent and ancestry.21 As an aside, this word has descended into German as adel which forms the prefix “A-” in the name “Adolf,” meaning “noble wolf.” The words óðal and phusis are essentially identical: both have meanings of growth and overflowing (over/beyond in *h₂et-), both connect to vitality via the principle of nobility, and both imply something given from otherness—that which is inborn. This parity makes perfect sense, for the Greeks and Germanics shared a common origin on the Indo-European steppe. Both peoples were intimately aware of heredity and how to cultivate traits eugenically having descended from generations of steppe pastoralists subsisting off herds of domesticated cattle whilst riding domesticated horses. Nature, that which is out there in the world and confronts us, was omnipresent for our ancestors.

This constant interaction with nature, which is severely lacking for so many modern people, is the backdrop by which we can understand our ancestors’ intuition and discovery of their religious beliefs. After discussing the meaning of nature itself, Cleary goes onto say, “My thesis is this: our wonder at the being of particular things is an intuition of a god, or divine being.”22 The reasoning follows quite simply, as when one contemplates a natural object such as lightning, his wonder at the being or existence of such lightning leads to the intuition of its divinity. This does not apply to manmade objects, such as a car, for wonder at the being or existence of a car leads simply to the thought of its creator. Instead, our ancestors developed religious thought in response to wonder at the being of nature, which has no such easy answer. That Germanic heathenry is naturalistic is likely not in contention, but nevertheless reference to functions of particular deities demonstrates as much. Among other things, Thor is a god of storms, Njord is a god of the sea, Jord is an Earth goddess—the list of natural domains ruled by Germanic deities can go on and on.

Popular understanding holds that paganism developed out of simple animism, and sees later paganism as a “progression” on this earlier animism and further sees Abrahamic monotheism as a further “progression” on polytheism. In fact, a common Christian criticism of Neopaganism is that it is primitive. The all-too-common trope of an internet Catholic saying that “the Germanic people were living in mud huts prior to their conversion to Christianity” comes to mind. Even if paganism was primitive like its e-Christian detractors makes it out to be, the thesis that it developed through interaction with nature holds true. Nature is something that is other to man, given from without. Man must work within nature, and indeed he himself in his very body is nature. Nature is harsh and uncompromising, it does not moralize nor make exceptions. Given this, and seeing as how our ancestors developed the Germanic religion through living so proximately to nature while always keeping its truths in mind, they could not possibly have come to intuit the possibility that forces existed that so explicitly contravened these natural truths. It is nonsensical to think the wise Icelander, who inherited his mastery of the seas from his ancestors that navigated there from Norway, would without outside input come to the conclusion that a magical unseen elder could miraculously part the sea so that his chosen people could scurry through the newly dried gap.

As an example of how life in close proximity to nature can develop into sophisticated pagan religion is given by Nietzsche in his discussion of the Code of Manu, the Vedic law recognizing the truth of strict caste division in pre-Hindu Vedic religion:

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is only the sanction of a natural order, of a natural legislation of the first rank, over which no arbitrary innovation, no “modern idea” has any power. Every healthy society falls into three distinct types, which reciprocally condition one another and which gravitate differently in the physiological sense; and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special feeling of perfection, and its own mastership. It is Nature, not Manu, that separates from the rest, those individuals preponderating in intellectual power, those excelling in muscular strength and temperament, and the third class which is distinguished neither in one way nor the other, the mediocre,—the latter as the greatest number, the former as the élite.23

The Indo-Aryan Vedics too descend from the same Indo-European ancestors that gave rise to the Greek and Germanic branches of the Nordic race, and so too their early texts uphold and exemplify the principle of natural religion. Nietzsche lauds the inequality of the Code of Manu and contrasts its manly recognition and codification of natural truths with the feeble and slavish rejection of true reality we discussed earlier. Understanding nature allowed the Vedics to communicate nature and recognize the immanence of the divine in the world.

The Germanic faith saw, and still should see, the immanence of the divine within the world. When the crafty Norwegian carefully maintains course and spots the new land of Iceland, he does so with the assistance of a god. When the cruel berserker brings down his axe upon the neck of a pleading monk, he does so with the assistance of a god. This introduces Walter Otto’s thesis on the disposition of European religion, of which he counts the pinnacle as the Greek view laid out by Homer:

In all larger forms and conditions of life and existence the Greek perceived the eternal visage of divinity. Taken all together these essences constituted the holiness of the world. Hence the Homeric poems are filled with divine proximity and presence as are those of no other people or age. In their world the divine is not superimposed as a sovereign power over natural events; it is revealed in the forms of the natural, as their very essence and being. For other peoples miracles take place; but a greater miracle takes place in the spirit of the Greek, for he is capable of so regarding the objects of daily experience that they can display the awesome lineaments of the divine without losing a whit of their natural reality.24

Of course, this leaves many questions about the Germanic faith and its conception of the gods. Many may be willing to accept the derivation of some gods through interaction with nature, but what of the other gods that are not so neatly categorized by natural phenomena? On their face, ideas such as war, justice, or law do not appear as natural “things” out there in the world readily ascribable to the control of the god Tyr, yet our ancestors connected such things to him. Additionally, there are myths whose tales are wholly unintuitive and appear unconnectable to any natural process readily observable in the world. It seems the only way our ancestors could know about Thor hooking the world serpent on a fishing trip is if some higher power revealed it to them.25 Furthermore, the myths seem to speak of the gods performing supernatural actions all the time. To resolve these apparent issues, we must further delve into the Germanic conception of the nature of divinity itself with the help of Walter Otto. This will be the topic of the next entry in this series.

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