Race and Religion
by Asbjeorn, CG.

Featured in Northwind - Yearbook of the Odinic Rite.
September 1991, Issue 1.

It is the usual thing today for a religion to be regarded as "universal", suitable for all the races and cultures found among human beings. Christianity is a case in point. The Christian religion, although based on tenets of a closely ethnocentric parent faith, Judaism, is deemed by the adherents to be necessary for the welfare of all the peoples of the Earth. Ever since it's rise two thousand years ago it has split and fragmented, and each of the fragments has set out to convert mankind.

We see Islam, so active in the world today, which arose some 1400 years ago in the Middle East , and which can be considered to be a Judeo/Christian heresy. Since it's beginnings it has attempted to force all the races of humankind into its harsh and intolerant role. It is a true religion of the sword, as Christianity was when it arose.

We see now, at this late period of the decay of Christianity, a burgeoning proliferation of sects, cults, denominations, churches and evangelical brethren of various sorts who swarm about like blow-flies in the putrescent corpse of Christendom. Now not only Christian sects abound, but Easter religious systems and strange "scientific" and "occult" doctrines compete for the "souls" of the world.

It is not surprising in such a milieu that even those who seek to return to the Old Gods should fall into the trap of this universalism. We find groups who call themselves "witches", for instance, who believe themselves to be sincere pagans, and yet believe that every God on Earth is equally valid for all. Sincere seekers after truth set out to formulate a religion for everyone, and because, for example, there is a connection with the same natural force, will see Thor, the Thunder Bird, and Chango as equivalent, the same deity under a different name.

These people fall into the old habit of Christian thought which regards divinity and religion as being apart from Man. Yet, if the divinities of Race and Nature are considered to be apart from us, then we have cut ourselves off from the living cosmos. We have made the fatal mistake once again.

We must here define true religion. To start with, religion is a human need, as food and drink and sex are human needs. But for a religion to be true it must grow naturally out of the heart and soul of a people. It must be organic. It thus follows that no true religion can be "universal", applicable to all races and cultures.

In once sense only can paganism be seen to be universal, and that is in its very basic concept - the unity of man with nature, the recognition that human beings are the children of the Earth, that the life which runs and flies and swims, the green life that grows in the soil, is kin to mankind. In some form this is the basis of all paganism. But the expression of this awareness, the growth of a system of belief, comes out by the interaction of an individual race or nation with nature. An organic religion is the articulation of a people's soul. Yet it is more than the religious instinct, collectively expressed. It is deeply entwined in the daily life, the history and heritage of the folk who give rise to it. It is an essential component of the living and developing entity which is that people, and changes and develops as the race evolves.

Today we are being taught to fear the idea of race. We are being conditioned to equate a recognition of the existence of separate races with the desire for "white supremacy". It is forbidden to recognise what our senses tell us: that the nations and races of man are different from each other in many and various ways - different as tigers are from lions, and wolves from dogs. Yet if we are to accept our existence as part of the everflowing stream of life we must recognise that the races are also a part of this stream: different organisms striving to grow and develop, and as such, worthy of the respect we accord to all the organisms of nature. Each race, each nation, craves for its own integrity, its own living-space and that includes our own.

The organism that is a race or people exists in the multiversal cosmos on much more than the material level. The being of our Nordic peoples extends through the Worlds we have called in our mythology, Hel, Midgard, and Asgard. This ethnic organism is a living entity, with a mind and soul shared by all its components on all levels of existence. Its soul is the Folk Soul of our people. We are familiar enough with the idea of the Black "soul brother", but few of us are willing to admit today that the Germanic peoples too have a collective soul, a shared unconscious.

Within the great "unity in diversity" which is life, each species, each race, is an organism, a living and evolving entity. As part of the unity of all life each of these organisms shares a great sea of collective unconscious, a submerged memory that we know deep in our physical being. Our cells remember when they were micro-organisms swimming in the Primal Ocean, and the developing zygote recalls its past as it grows, through the long ages of gestation, from the one-celled animalcule, through fish, through reptile, and on to man.

The races of humankind are branches on the Tree of Life, the great Tree of Life that grows from the womb of Mother Earth, from the seeds of the Great Sky Father that blow as dust between the stars. (1) And not only in the World of Form have the races grown, but in all the Worlds. The Gods have grown with them, and are part of them. The Folk Soul is the manifestation not only of the greatness of its people, but of the greatness of its Gods.

We read of Jungian archetypes, and many see them as the sum total of divinity, so that we hear the anguished query "Do the Gods exist?" Some answer that the Gods are merely projected aspects of one's own mind. It is not so. Our Gods and Goddesses are the part of our race who live in another aspect of reality. They are the power, the driving force, the will of our people: manifest reality on another plane of existence, as we, an active material force, are on this one. The archetypes are channels, contact points, through which man and divinity can communicate.

The Aesir and Vanir are not mere projections of our personalities. They are real. Neither are they archaic has-beens living in some outmoded Valhalla ; viking figures wearing bear-skins and horned helmets. Over the centuries since the imposition of Judeo/Christianity upon our people, our unconscious knowledge of the Gods has changed and evolved as we ourselves have changed. Wotan, the fierce old God-image of a warrior people may have been dead as an archetype in the minds of our people for a long time, but Odin, the inspiration, the seminal force behind our creative power, is alive as ever he was.

As all life grows it changers, maybe as a result of chance evolution but more likely at the Will of Wyrd, that Great Spirit who weaves the pattern of Being. The great creative forces, the powers of natural growth and change - the Gods - are executors of Wyrd's Will. As life grows it becomes more complex and more diversified, ever seeking new adventures on the cosmic journey on which we are all embarked. The peoples of humankind evolve and change at the will of these great powers, each moving and striving in its own way to become the great new thing into which each life form must eventually grow. Diverse, unique, wonderful. (2)

And yet we are urged to cease to grow and evolve. We are told that to believe in any essential differences between the races is a sin. We, the differing races, are pushed together and told to cease to be the races of humankind, and to become instead an amalgamation. We are told, in fact, to return to the common ancestor who lived before the last great diversification gave birth to the new branches of the Tree of Life which are the human races.

It cannot be, of course. By thrusting us together they only make us hate each other.

As individual human beings have a living space about them into which they resent intrusion, so too does the Folk Soul of a people have a living space into which it resents the intrusion of other racial entities. And so we see race riots, race hatred, and a twisted racial development which will lead eventually to outright racial war if the diverse peoples cannot draw back, away from each other, before it is too late.

At the basis of this continual racial conflict is the Christian lie that all races are �equal�. Not, as they should be, worthy of respect as unique and individual racial entities, but equal, that is, the same. Closely examined, this is a contradiction, because, even while making this statement Judeo/Christianity holds up its own distorted way of life as being superior to all others. So we see �native� cultures, living in harmony with nature, deemed �primitive� and judged therefore to be �backward� in comparison to our own society. They are taken over, changed, Christianised, (when they are not slaughtered outright!) and their traditions lost, their people uprooted, to make way for the greed and �progress� of commerce. So, they wander, like bees when the hive is destroyed, homeless and hopeless, to dwindle and perish. For the past few hundred years many such shoots of the Tree of Life have been hacked off, one by one.

And what of our people? We are strong and we survive, but how terrible the damage that has been done to us! More perhaps than any surviving race have we, Northern Europeans, been harmed by the Christian teaching that nature is a treasure chest to be rifled at our will. We, who once were a people, as other �native� peoples, living in the love of nature and the Earth, have been used and twisted by this creed so that our powers and strengths have become a danger to the Earth and the life she shelters. Now, in our turn, our very existence as a race is threatened.

Scarce half a century ago, our people, even when engaged in a murderous and unwanted war, still felt pride of nation and race, on both sides of the conflict. Our folk were still strong, however misused their strength. But since that time our self-awareness as a people, our racial identity, has been drained away. Coerced by lies, we are the bailiffs at our own dispossession. (3) The genius of the folk stands unused, or turned to suicidal ends. We have been swamped by a flood of lie-imposed guilt. The society in which we live has built machines and neglected men, so that the machines work and we stand idle, even when �employed�; our hands untrained to conceive; like parasites, we can only consume. That is our function in society, to consume and consume the substance of the Earth, our Mother

We have become the victims of a power that is against life itself, an insane power that sees the universe from a crass materialistic outlook, and mistakes the illusion of �matter� for total reality.

For Odinists, and for all our folk who recognise the danger of this alien way of life, the way ahead is clear. It is not a road back into the past, although we grasp the hands of our ancestors held out to us in help and solstice. It is a road into a new future, where life is not based on greed, but on human worth, where we can once again live in harmony with nature � we and all the races of the Earth.

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(1) F. Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinge, �life cloud� (Sphere Books, 1979)

(2) R.B. Cattell, �A New Morality from Science � Beyondism� (Pergamon Press, 1972)

(3) Wilmot Robertson, �The Dispossessed Majority�, ( Florida : Howard Allan).