Green man design on the choir stalls in Marien Dom in Erfurt
But is paganism really such a joke? People in Europe, just like the Cherokee, Cheyenne or Sioux native Americans, like the Zulu and the Aborigines, have their cultural identity. Going back to these traditions harms nobody, but it takes us back to a golden age before nature was under attack and paganism makes us feel we belong to the earth and that we are connected to our ancestors beyond the complicated disasters of the 19th and 20th Century.
My friends and I celebrate Samhain on the 31st October. We all meet in a forest near our town Hagen in the Ruhrgebiet and we bring plenty of meat and mead with us.
We celebrate Samhain by roasting and eating meat and drinking mead. Mead is a simple wine made of honey and water which the ancients drank. You can taste the honey in mead. We pour it into horns and as we drink the mead we remember our ancestors.
And we also usually have a lot of beer with us. By the time all the mead and beer are gone, we are all dog drunk and singing “Hey wir sind Heiden” which basically means: "We are the pagans."
We toast Donar, the god of thunder; Wodan the god of war; Freya the goddess of fertility; Loki the treacherous; Baldur the son of Wodan, and Tyr the god of justice. As we do this we feel renewed, we feel we are a part of nature, and very strong - as if the gods give us strength, as if the mead has magical properties.
Samhain is the celebration of the beginning of a new pagan year. During Samhain you celebrate the bravest of your dead ancestors. Celebrating Samhain means facing death, because the new year starts when the weather becomes cold and plants start to die back. This makes it different to other religions which don’t dwell on death.
Courage when facing death and violence is at the centre of Norse paganism. You mustn’t fear death any more, because when you die, you go to the Gods and all your ancestors will cheer you for your bravery an your honourable and well intentioned actions.
By Iring
Comments
Is there any concept of sin in Germanic myth? I know the Havamal constitutes something of a moral code. No concept of sin these the believer to live their life as they wish, but it also opens the religion to the accusation of nihilism.
Polytheism is not that unusual. There must be almost a billion practising Hindus in the world. But Hinduism has been abused as much as Christianity to perpetuate the caste system and to persecute followers of other religions in India.
Mead isn't that unusual either. It's brewed in Britain, often by Christian monks. I've had plenty of it, often out of drinking horns while dressed as a Viking. Moniac and Viking Blod are two brands I remember.
I don't want to tar you with the same brush, but many fascists and proto-fascists in Germany and Scandinavia were obsessed with the old religion.
I suppose we should all be free to follow any religion or none, as long as we don't hurt anyone else. I was never raised as a Christian so I have no attachment to that religion. I'm interested in Germanic mythology, but I don't believe in it. My in either is historical and political. The old religion must have served some political purpose in pre-feudal society.
But I think that harking back to the old Gods is something young Germans may be attracted to because it's not stigmatised by history. If you are assigned collective guilt then how you must long to shuck it.
Speaking of which I am off to Munich tomorrow to celebrate what would have been my uncle Heini's 100th birthday with my great aunt Rose.
She has promised to translate lots of war letters for me, including letters to and from the German branch of our family and the Bohemian (in all some of the senses of that word) Jewish side of the family.
But as for pagan beer drinking rituals in the forest, well I would love to drink gallons of mead from a horn in a forest. Won't do that, but I will be going - I think - to Berlin to meet up with old friends from India and beer is on the cards and I want to seek out the site of Hitler's bunker and take a long piss on his grave.
I hear that's perfectly feasable because it's just a bit of an overgrown wasteland.