I've been some what interested in the conversation here. It is interesting to see how others outside of the Germanic heathen movement view us.
To give you some background about myself. I am Travis Miller. I am currently a stay at home dad and working on turning our small property into a permaculture/forest garden. In ten years or so the site should produce the majority of our food, heating fuel and medicinal herbs. I have been a Germanic heathen for a total of ten years. Most of that time I was what you might call "solitary" since I did not belong to any particular group. For the last few years I've been part of a particular movement referred to as Theodism or Theodish Belief. Though I have a number of duties in my theod, one of my main ones is the public voice of Sweartfenn Theod.
Theodism is a tribal and communal approach to the reconstruction of ancient Germanic belief. To put that in context: This means that each individual theod (an Anglo-Saxon word for "a people or tribe") studies and reconstructs the customs of a particular tribal group within the cultural group that is broadly referred to as Germanic. Our practice is primarily done in a communal manner. We have a community/tribe relationship between us and the gods. Other approaches to heathenry are not communal in that way.
What matters most to me is that my particular group, Sweartfenn Theod, practices in a way that is as authentically Anglo-Saxon as possible. Are we 100%? Certainly not. Theodsmen often say amongst ourselves that we are more proto-theods than theods in a sense that the arch-heathens would recognize. Our purpose is to worship the gods of our ancestors as close to the manner that they did. We wish to revive their worldview and live as closely as we can by that. Why would we want to do that? Clearly, Christianity, its philosophical predecessors and decedents (Enlightenment, marxism, mercantilist capitalism) when syncretized with the various European cultures have created a monstrous and inhuman culture that has destroyed the environment, accepted the genocide and cultural destruction of indigenous peoples and the desacralization of all that was traditionally sacred. What other choices do we have? Practice American Indian religion? Make up something whole cloth? I believe that before the urbanization and the imperial influences of Rome destabilized the whole of Europe, that the Germanic people lived in a way that was wise and sane. In my own way, I'm trying to revive and return to that way of thinking and living as much as I am able.
For a variety of reasons we chose to reconstruct through painstaking research, long conversations amongst ourselves and sometimes asking the gods and our ancestors to give us guidance. Some of what we do is our own creation based on what is known. Since the ancient arch-heathens were an illiterate society and did not write down their liturgy or sacred rites some of what we do may not in anyway resemble what they did. We simply can't know for sure. We do our best though. A number of Theodsmen have dedicated their lives to this effort. Some have graduate degrees in medieval and ancient studies and extensive personal research libraries. The way we do this reconstruction is by a sort of reverse engineering. We look at religion and culture in general like the way anthropologists do, (there are several heathen anthropologists in fact) and then take the source material that we have, try to figure out what is good and what is wrong and then assemble it into a whole. Where we have missing pieces, we make it up in accordance with what we already know to be authentic and see if it works. What works is retained, what doesn't is tossed. It is a slow and tedious process. What we do is extremely difficult and maybe folly but we are too stubborn to give it up. We are aware of our natural limitations in what we are doing, like the fact that we have a 1000 years of separation from the last openly practicing heathens.
So what am I doing here?
What I'm here for is to potentially be a resource for white people that understand that the dominant culture offers little in the way of real fulfillment have come to understand that American Indian spirituality isn't quite right for them and maybe what they should be looking for is an authentic return what was their own indigenous cultural values and worldview. Secondly, I hope that I can contribute in some way to the NAFPS project because I think it is worthwhile and the statements on the opening page are very much in line about what I think about indigenous cultural beliefs.
