Folkish Worldview

Proto-Indo-European reconstruction is a dangerous business. It's very easy to draw unsound conclusions from nothing more than wild leaps and rough guesswork. There are some in the right-wing pagan community who take this way too far. You'll see such wild generalizations as "Lugh = Odin = Zeus = Shiva" etc. It's easy to see things that aren't there. For example, there's a well known Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon where two gods in disguise visit a town of wicked folk who violate the sacred custom of xenia, refusing to welcome the strangers. Only the good Baucis and Philemon take the strangers in and later only they are spared in a divine flood that wipes out the town. This is very clearly paralleled by the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah where YHVH sends two angels to test the wicked people of Sodom and only Lot welcomes them into his home, after which Sodom is destroyed and Lot is spared. If you were to apply the Lugh = Odin = etc. approach, you could not ask for a more clear "reconstructed" myth between the "last common ancestor" of the Greeks and Jews, leading you to a putative "Proto-Helleno-Semitic" myth, which is clearly gibberish. Proto-Indo-European reconstruction is fraught with danger and pitfalls. It should not be bandied about lightly. Seeing people proceed recklessly here, and then claim to be authoritative, is a big red flag. @folkishworldview

What absolute garbage: https://t.me/FolkAppalachia/1108 Germanic heathenry is orthopraxic over orthodox, but without making the primary sources... well, PRIMARY, you're just making things up because they sound cool. "I do what I want" isn't folkish heathenry, it's secular humanism in a Viking costume. @folkishworldview

Some of you have perhaps heard of Derek Guy, a mainstream menswear commentator. He doesn't seem like the kind of person who would have a deep folkish take but he does. For sure he's not even aware of it. His take is that aesthetics are not governed by a set of eternal rules that are innate in our biology or otherwise "natural". Aesthetics are deeply cultural. In fact, they're completely cultural. They have no reference to anything outside of culture. People see someone with bad fashion sense and they ask Derek to explain what they're doing wrong. Pretty much always, the mistake they're making is to ignore the history of fashion, what cool and influential men have worn in the past. There's nothing inherently "natural" about two colours that clash. They clash because a folk has declared that they clash. Derek likes to point to "Polo Bear" as the emblem of great style. Polo Bear is always dressed in a way that calls to mind a time and a place. 1980s business casual; preppie ca. 1960s; wrangler on the Western frontier; jock ca. 1990s, etc. What makes these outfits work is not an abstract set of color or material matching principles that are valid in all times and places. What makes them work is that they're historical, and what makes new styles work is that they draw on the deep history of fashion that went before it. There's no "bottom" to aesthetics, no ideal form that they're imitating. There's just unmoored, incommensurable, and continuous traditions as far back as you can see. @folkishworldview

A look at the grove on another property I am in the process of purchasing. In this grove a new hof will be built and dedicated to Þórr, and here my family will preserve the Þórr siðr for years to come. Buy land. Build temples. Worship the gods. This is the real way to secure tradition in the world.

Why isn't Plato folkish? Doesn't he tell us to worship our family gods? (Laws, V, 729c). Why isn't Christianity folkish? Didn't Yahweh "mark out the boundaries of the nations"? (Acts 17:26) You can find traces of ethnocentrism in Plato and Christianity if you look hard enough. But folkishness is about more than ethnocentrism. Folkishness is also about tradition. Plato and Christ were hostile to tradition. Christ told you not to get your authority from tradition, but from himself. This is as good as telling you to get it from yourself, because you have to judge his authority. Plato told you not to get your authority from tradition but from your own reason, which means from yourself. Both are telling you the same thing: the source of authority is within you. But what would it even mean to be bound by your own authority? What would it mean to be bound to a norm you yourself invented? ... ahem, reasoned. Simple: you can't. If you are the authority, you can't be bound by anything. The seeds of ethnomasochism are in Plato and Christ, yes. But that's not all. Plato and Christ are also anti-authoritarian. No folkishness can be founded on that. @folkishworldview

When your in-group is an ideology, not a folk.

Teleology is not something that folkish pagans really think about one way or another, but there are good reasons to reject it. Folkishness is an immanentist worldview. It sees the specific, the embodied, and the historical as the final source of good and truth. Folkishness is a this-worldly outlook. Teleology doesn't seem to be opposed to any of this at first glance. Teleology is the idea that morality is about ends, and ends are inherent in nature. It's just baked into the idea of a watch (it's the end or telos of a watch) that it be portable, tell the time, etc. and you can measure a thing's goodness by whether it furthers its end, or telos. Teleology says that everything in reality has a telos. Again, nothing anti-folkish on the surface. The problem is that an end implies a goal, a goal implies an intention, and intention implies a mind. If everything in reality has an end, this means that it embodies an intention, and thus a mind. So as soon as we admit that everything in reality has a telos, we admit that there exists a transcendent mind that imparts its telos. The burden of teleology is that to believe in teleology is to be an idealist. Idealism implies a transcendent mind—all reality is basically a simulation, thought within the mind of a transcendent creator god. This is all anti-folkish through and through. So if you're a folkish pagan, think twice about teleology. You don't need it to account for any feature of the world, and to believe it is to open the door for some very bad things. @folkishworldview

We critique Christianity pretty hard around here but this is different than critiquing Christians. Despite their views, many Christians were admirable, especially our ancestors who simply had no idea what paganism is. Today anti-paganism is much harder to justify, at least if you're identitarian. Conversion is much more recent than people think, considering that most of your ancestors were not elites who converted first and for political purposes, but rather ordinary people who maintained pagan practices for a long time. It's significant that for half the time Europeans were Christianized they could not actually read what was in the Bible. The process of digesting Christianity took a long time after nominal "conversion". Even today we still have not completely digested it. When you do digest it though, it looks like anti-tradition, individualism, anti-authoritarianism, contrarianism, and atheism. Most of the things that right wingers tend to appreciate about Christendom are either unrelated to Christian doctrine or are actively opposed to it. This is why many Christians were admirable: they believed as folkish pagans did, and simply slapped a Jesus sticker over it. @folkishworldview

Christianity has outgrown Europe. Most based Christians aren't Christian because they love Jesus, but because they love Europe. For them Christianity is the cathedrals, the Crusades, feudalism, all the things that are just Europe. Based Christians don't worship Jesus, they worship white people. This is why they say "Europe was always synonymous with Christendom". But that was a long time ago. In the days of Aquinas it was possible for Christianity to be essentially synonymous with whiteness. The religion was a kind of ethnic strategy. This is what the Crusades, the Reconquista, repelling the Mongol hordes was all about. But Christianity has long ago outgrown Europe. It had to. It's universalist. It's for everyone. Now Christianity is mainly the religion of brown people. The only way it could have become anything else was to fail in its mission. Christianity has its own interests separate from Europeans. We were only a stepping stone for Jesus. Folkish pagan religions are different. They're by definition only for us. Paganism and Europeans stand and fall together. And the fact that folkish paganism is roaring back to life after thousands of years, is the best sign that Europeans are again favoured by the divine. Folkishness is the future. @folkishworldview

Platonism is the idea that the invisible is more real than the visible. This seems to agree superficially with science, although ultimately science is an inferential and empirical practice, the opposite of Platonism. But the attempt at scientism is significant. Platonism is atheism in a toga. Platonists don't believe that the gods exist, so they retrofit the intuitive idea of existence (something very much here and now) to conform to abstraction. "Well ACKSHUALLY the MOST real things are ABSTRACT OBJECTS." It's an attempt to rescue theism while denying that the gods could inhabit, impinge on, or even have any relationship to, everyday reality. Platonists pound the divinity peg into the atheism hole, then wonder why their "theology" got repurposed by their enemies, who have now surrendered to exactly the same problem as they did: their theology being a thinly veiled atheism. It's really encouraging that bad ideas are slowly starting to be pushed out of paganism. This is what Christians fear the most: sincere belief in the old gods. @folkishworldview