This is something of a followup (probably the first of several) to my last post on heritage, wherein I hope to dig into some of the problems with reconstructionism when it’s employed uncritically or with the mentality that “old” is “good” or that beliefs we can trace back to antiquity are somehow politically neutral in the present.

In my last post, I didn’t spend as much time as I had intended on exploring the problem with quests for indigeneity. To do that, I want to dig into some core concepts in heathenry (although similar things occur in many European traditions; this is the one where I have the most background and the vocabulary to talk effectively), and how they can be linked to harmful practices in the modern era, particularly European (and especially British) settler colonialism.

The (False) Dichotomy of Civilization and Nature

To start, let’s deal with the most rudimentary aspects of heathen worldview. For those who aren’t familiar, the modern jargon for these concepts are “inangard” and “utangard” (or any number of spelling variations); essentially, the inner yard and the outer yard. To modern heathens, these are largely modes of social stratification; your kith and kin are your inner yard, while strangers are the outer yard. This, largely, is speculative reconstruction, but the framework is derived from a historical characteristic of Germanic cultures that placed a privileged status on land that had been managed or tamed.

While modern romanticists tend to suggest that ancient (pre-Christian, pre-Industrialized, or whathaveyou) cultures lived in harmony with nature, the Germanic mythic and literary corpus is rife with evidence that these peoples saw their relationship to the natural world as an adversarial one. Whether Beowulf’s chaotic Grendel, the various Thurses and Jotuns encountered by Thor in the lands-beyond, or the Sagaic descriptions of the settling of Iceland, the wilds are depicted as dangerous spaces, beyond the safety and control afforded by human civilization. These were the realms of capricious, chaotic and amoral beings; elves that might bring illness or lead a traveler astray, trolls that would prey upon the unwitting, and thurses that could challenge the gods themselves.

While it’s often pointed out that worship occurred (at times) in groves, what is often avoided is that these groves were themselves sites that were managed and cultivated, and not allowed to grow wild. They might best be compared to a park or a campground at a state park; sometimes surrounded by wilderness, but carefully groomed for utilitarian usage. The claiming of space became a magical, divine action; lands were ritually encircled to separate them from the surrounding wilds. Cultivation itself became a form of taming land; clear cutting, ploughing, and growing. This is by no means unique to Germanic peoples; it is readily apparent elsewhere in Europe and beyond, but the highly sacralized nature of clan-based agriculture itself is worthy of particular note in the long, unfolding narrative of European culture.

Perhaps the first and clearest arena in which these ideas can be seen manifested is in Iceland, from which most of our sources for Germanic myth and legend originate. Iceland today is largely stripped to bare pasture in its arable regions; when it was initially settled, the foremost concern of most arriving Norsemen was to recreate the structures and way of living they already knew. They staked claims, they established farms. Those farmsteads quickly became the seats of clan chiefs, and those chiefs quickly became the political elite of Iceland; paramount to political power was the control of land, particularly of managed land. The Althing, a semi-democratic assembly of settlers, became the apparatus for settling legal disputes, themselves often centering on matters of land, herds, and other property. Today, the Althing enjoys the (disputable) status of being the longest continuous democratic assembly; and yet the price of that triumph of settlement is the near total destruction of Iceland’s forest ecosystems.

As for the gods themselves, we cannot ignore the way these structures and concepts are mirrored in the reckoning of the divine. Asgard is seen as a fenced domain, one with its own inner yard; beyond it, Utgard, the land of the Other, of the Giants. And yet, when one reads the myths presented in the Eddas, many wild spirits behave much like the gods themselves. Giants marry into the Aesir, the Vanir captives are likewise integrated into the pantheon, but none would confuse Surtr or even the primordial Ymir with the gods. The distinguishing factor appears to be one of residence, rather than essential nature. The gods are gods because they are on the side of man, and of civilization; they are in opposition to the chaotic other, to the harsh elements, to the unmanaged wilds. Giants may become gods, may enter civilization- and the pantheon- through marriage or association, but they often remain on the fringes of the accepted, whether looking at Skadi’s abrasive and distant marriage or Loki as the disruptive element of disruption-as-incursion. Rarely are these beings truly rendered as “gods” in the sense of goodness, and there remains the perceived danger of reversion.

Settler Colonialism and the Language of “Land Use”

It is my belief that a through-line can be be seen from the Germanic settlers (whether in Iceland, the Faroes, Ireland, Scotland or England) and both their division between “man” and “wilderness” as well as their notions of what constitutes civilized lands, to the later imperial conquests of North America, Australia, South Africa and other colonial holdings. The foremost similarity in mind is the notions of “land use” and, indeed, of land ownership that essentially persist to this day.

It is no coincidence that England, for all its French, Roman and Celtic cultural influences is continually identified as principally “Saxon” or “Anglo-Saxon.” There has remained a very Germanic character to certain aspects of English culture and, in particular, English imperialism. In most of the settler colonies founded by Britain, the rationalization for displacing indigenous peoples and appropriating their land has nearly invariably been some iteration of “the land wasn’t being used [correctly, efficiently, etc.].” The “correct” and “efficient” use of land, of course, is conventional European agriculture and industry.

As with Iceland, the emphasis of the settlers is foremost the replication of European forms of living; as with Greenland, little heed is paid to the indigenous inhabitants’ ways of having adapted to the local environmental conditions. Rather, it is expected that the local environment will be altered to suit the settler. Indigenous agriculture will be replaced with European-style cultivation; hunting lands will be clear-cut to graze cattle. The essential response to new land is to remake the old, whether the climate, soil or local inhabitants oblige or not.

The acquisition and cultivation of land becomes the basis of political society; the ownership a prerequisite for engagement. The settler becomes the sagaic folk hero; the “Indian” becomes the new “Jotun;” the unknowable, inscrutable and amoral other in campfire stories and poetic dramatization that can only be tamed by marriage or adoption, paving the way for genocide and the “civilizing” of the new Utgard. The entire process of systemic eradication, dressed in the language and aesthetic of Christianity, becomes a perverse, centuries long, ritualized Eternal Return.

The Danger of Reconstructing Harm

When we talk about “inangard” and “utangard,” and about reconstructionism itself, we must understand the legacy of these concepts in our Christianized (and even secularized) cultures. It cannot simply be assumed that reconstruction is a morally neutral act, recreating morally neutral structures. We make our allowances- our few allowances- that slavery and human sacrifice are best left in the past, in the same way that we shake our heads at swastika armbands or white hoods. But these are only the most overt examples of harm that could be reconstructed; other concepts that may first seem innocuous can serve to reinforce extant systems of oppression.

Reconstructionism is not without merits, to be sure; there is value in the past and useful information we can draw from it. But we must approach the methodology with the most critical eye, and examine what we decide to adopt and adapt in the full context of both our present, lived reality and of the times long past that we’re drawing from. We must take pains to ensure that what we reconstruct does not perpetuate, reinvigorate or reify systems of harm. We must ask ourselves how our neo-tribalist movements serve to recreate oppressive hierarchies best left behind, or how they perpetuate an intense undercurrent of the “other.” Whether our basic ideas of heathenry, from its frequently toxic machismo to the notion that frith means deference to patriarchal authority or keeping the perceived peace even if it perpetuates harm. Whether the idealized heathen homestead we see held up and dreamt of is a noble aspiration or a recreation of past harms in the here and now. And we should disabuse ourselves of misconceptions that reconstruction of the Ur-Settler makes us more ecologically minded.

Bringing these elements– the romanticized pastoralism, the hierarchies and codified social stratification– into our modern practices has the consequence of reconstructing practices that compliment some of the most unjust and pervasively toxic elements of our modern society. It’s a tendency touched upon in this excellent blog post on the backwards gaze of paganism that provides some ideas on what I think might move us towards a solution; the use of reconstructionism for a rudimentary framework and little else, upon which we can build vibrant, living traditions. If we turn our eyes as much to the future as we have to the distant past, while remaining ever mindful of the political and material realities of our present (and of recent history), we can establish paganism as the foundation of a sort of new spiritual ecology; one focused on constructing new possibilities that address and assuage the harm done of our alienated culture, rather than reconstructing the harms of cultures past.