A close ally and kinsmen of mine said to me recently in his brusque and straight forward way that he speaks “You can not have culture, without the children”, obvious right? But this doesn’t mean to go out and just fuck any woman of the Germanic heritage that looks nice and then spend the rest of your life stuck on the system, while your youth grows up in the eyes of a modern, consumerist society bent of exploitation and nihilism.
Any two hot bodies can mate, and still bring nothing to the table if they aren’t doing the work to pass the cultures of truth to their nex of kin, and I see it everywhere. You have this child, the latest representation of your name and tradition, a gift to you and the new world, and he/she is forced to go to school, and play with all the new toys, and wear jeans, and sit inside becoming bored because you have no time to dedicate to them, and then end up the same as everyone else, but are inseparable from the ‘specialness’ you give them because of your ego. The child learns to fear authority, get in line, follow-pseudo intellectual pursuits or money gambles, and conform into filtered down pop culture. They become unhealthy because they do not have an intimacy with nature, and therefore feel inferior from judgement of their peers, their core interests do not extend into things like spirituality, nature, the esoteric, farming or traditionalism, because movies, facebook, internet, pop culture, and pornography already take up all their time. Then they grow up, at least a little, and spend every monday through friday not wanting to live through another day of work, and friday though sunday, drinking to forget their life is even happening. Their dates are short lived and frivolous, enganging in shallow pleasures to self-medicate from any deeper involvement with responsibility, and eventually making the same mistakes as every one else and becoming imprisoned in a sedentary life, paying bills, serving the system that aims to destroy culture, and passing time in idle, because they feel they were given a bad lot.
This can be seen in the modern nuclear family, male or female, and even in some of the so called heathen people I have met, and actually I see a lot of loners who can’t get a girl in the first place because they work at a gas station, and spend all their money on weed and beer, nothing striking me as heroic, inspiring, or worthwhile, needless to say they are not much of a gift to the eyes either. Heathenism is Beauty.
So what does the Heathen Family look like, and I will take current day examples of those I choose to spend my time with, representations from the places I inhabit, and experiences I have had with building relationships. The Heathen community for one is like a cohesive planet of it’s own, and the unit of the family is a strong root that makes up the larger tree. The Heathen Family would ideally, (but we can not assume these days) be living in the country first of all, the word heathen does mean -heath dweller- or country dweller, they lived outside the city because the city in Viking age respresented control and institution. So in the country, they would practice their tradition, that is, the ways of the North Germanic peoples. Skill crafting, because this is manditory to have in a community or hamlet of heathen families. The father and mother would carry traditional roles; gardening, child care, cooking, cleaning and so forth for the mother, and trade skills, husbandry, building, trade, and fortifying the home for the father, and of course in this age, some of these roles are shared and useful for both. If something couldn’t be grown from the land they lived on, a health food market in their village would be useful to get imported superfoods, or a local farmers market for culinaries. In the village would also be a master brewer, a blacksmith or a toolshop, a bakery, several farms, a library carrying real books, the sagas of our people and free information, medicine women/doctors of some sort, a textile maker, a harbour, a moot hall, several other gathering places, and wild parks, and maybe a few other services. There would be no need for restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers or technicians, the families would know these basic of most skills themselves, no banks for they would manage their own money, or trade for what they need. The work would be centered on the gild tradition, cobblers, blacksmithing, timber framing, turf cutters, farmers, fishermen, seamstress, midwifery, hunters and the so on.
Inside the domain, the house would be made of sturdy timber, no modern cheap materials like plaster and dry wall, because we know those don’t work. There would be no gmo foods in the pantry and almost everything would be made from scratch, then eating gratefully with thanks to the Gods and Goddesses. There would be a ve, a holy place, on the land for worship, fruit trees and things growing, a lack of electrical appliances (it can easily be done when you think what can be replaced if you just had more patience and care), and a lack of synthetic clothes being worn. An indiginous Germanic language would be spoken in the house, even if it be fluent well learned English, and not the bastardized unintelligent way we speak today in slang, acronyms, and abbreviations. The children would learn to appreciate what is going on outside and not be bombarded with plastic toys, they would make their games with sticks and bones, or playing hide and seek in the woods, a very good thing for kids to learn to navigate natural spaces. Or they would idenitify plants and animals at an early age. Certainly no tv. There is no reason that can’t be fun for a 3 year old. I have lived this way and observed this in practice in a few others here in Nova Scotia, on the shores of Mahone Bay, and it works, far more readily than the American, or Canadian dream, or for that matter, the world ethic of hedonism, consumerism, exploitation, and enslavement.
The house should have a few traditional instruments, and decorated sparsely, and the family would spend as much time together as possible, or the boy with his father when he left, and the daughter with her mother learning how to be a man, and a woman respectively. They would honor the heathen holidays, not the materialistic, christian faith drivel that encourages us all to go in debt about once a month or so. Real, cosmological holidays that affect us directly. Altogether, a heathen family would be interdependent, and have solidarity with their neighbours, truly creating a cohesive collective. In this age where people hardly even get to know their nextdoor neighbour, there are so many people stuck in their lonely planet with no outlet to express their true selves. A Heathen Family would not have to be dictated by the goverment, and told how to live, or chained to domesticity. It is imperative that the youth know the ideals of our folk from 1000 years ago, even a few centuries ago as a start, for they will carry your name, the one etched in granite at your local christian graveyard, and if you want anyone to remember that you were worth a damn and did anything good for the world, teach it to your kids, and they will bring it out. I do not yet have any of my own, for I am simply not ready. And this is something also of an epidemic, too many people are simply not ready, and end up bringing this youth into broken, distracting, suffering lifestlyes, and only project the same problems on to them. I have dreamt often that for it to happen in my life, what realities this youth would face, growing up in my eyes, in nature, and how far superior they would be from their teachings of a loving mother and father figure. A heathen family is not divisive, and cut off. So many families spend all their lives in different rooms of their house, they do not even at the the table together anymore. Heathen families must work together, and live together, they would travel to other places together, and learn what it takes to truly be self-sufficient in the world, and most of all, they would Live. Their children would grow, and carry these traditions to the next line.
There is so much allocation of energy and attention to fixing broken people, which is not to say that people are unworthy of fixing, but this selfish desire for ‘healing’ and fixing oneself at the expenditure of others is draining to the energy available to our next in line, the children, and if you don’t have them, you have a dead culture. These children will grow up with respect for animals, real regard for community, and adherence to honorable codes, they need us to emulate their role model. We must observe the true and tried effect of a strong family, and the tribe, on young people!
:aferalspirit: 