Religion — Codex North

The Zoo-Keepers, and The Devil's Seduction

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 22:15:56 +0200

George Hotz often uses this analogy of the tiger and the chum.

You’re a tiger and get the choice between two ways of living:

Being a zoo-animal, where you get to mope around, being fed buckets of chum.
You live out in the wild, like tigers do, having to hunt antelopes and conquer nature’s challenges.

The tiger would choose the buckets of chum. Even if there was an open door between the two, once the tiger has entered the zoo, and experienced the buckets of chum, he won’t leave. The zoo-keeper isn’t stronger than the tiger, it is just smart enough to control the tiger with chum.

This is analogous to our current state. In the west, we live in very controlled societies with massive governments that rule over us, deciding what we’re allowed and not allowed to eat, sell, learn, say and (without them admitting it) think. This does afford us an extremely convenient life. Schooling is provided the young, band-aids for the hurt, and money for the poor. Buckets of chum.

However, as is discussed at length in Industrial Society and Its Future, this convenient life leads directly to the death of autonomy, dignity, purpose and humanity. It leads to centralization, depression, nihilism, hubristic atheism, and all the degeneracy the Ring of Gyges can afford you.

There is an alternative. Escaping to the woods, building small, local, low-tech and independent communities. Almost nobody does this, because you have to give up your buckets of chum. It is difficult.

There is here an illusion of choice. The fact that it is mostly physically possible to choose the alternative makes it seem as though the buckets of chum aren’t bad, like the zoo-keeper isn’t bad. They’re just giving you food! However, you have become a tourist attraction, completely deprived of everything that once made you, a pathetic husk only human by name. If convenience will tempt the people into going along with something 100% of the time, that is not significantly different from forcing them to. Sufficiently advanced temptation is indistinguishable from force.

Speaking of names, this process has many. Some call it “perverse incentives”, some call it Moloch, some call it the devil or the Beast, some call it Loki. No matter what name you give him, this is how he operates. Nobody forced you to enter this state.¹ You choose it yourself, by the small choices you make every day. He doesn’t come and threaten you directly. Almost nothing of the devil purports to genuinely be of the devil. The devil wears a suit and tie, and will at the very least disguise his antics in sarcasm. If you’re under the impression that you’ve seen nothing but increased fun and enjoyment, then force is never needed. If all goes according to plan, you’ll simply follow where ever the pleasure leads you, never even aware of his existence. Supreme victory is achieved if you even started vehemently denying the existence of the devil! For you will never fight what you refuse to see.

In that case, if someone tries to tell you about this, you might even get mad! Why are you trying to take away my buckets of chum!? Why are you insulting my zoo-keepers?! You would naturally think them cruel, for trying to deprive you of your chum! Every zoo-animal deserves the right to free chum!

I say all this to you as a hypocrite. I have not escaped. I too am addicted to the buckets of chum. Maybe less than other people, but my lesser indulgence doesn’t mean I’m not a zoo-animal. Just that I am a begrudging zoo-animal. No better than the others, just hungrier.

Given that we agree the end result of this process is bad, how do we stop it? Is it even possible to fight the urge to indulge? Clearly there is something in us that wants to fight. Some would call it our better nature, some would call it the voice of God, or Odin. Whatever you call it, we have better start listening sooner rather than later.

I believe this is the ultimate fight of our time, if not of all eternity, and I’m not entirely sure we will win. I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a fight if I was. At least this difficulty makes it possible to describe as a fight or as a war. This helps to explain that it is real. That the enemies of the Good in humanity are real. The enemies of the Æsir. That we stand before forces much larger than ourselves. We’re facing the Jotun, and we better be preparing for war, for Ragnarok, for it is coming.

Yes, the government is free to kill you if you ignore or fight them. But, if you minimize how much you are seen to struggle against their rules, and put aside enough money to pay their ransoms, you’ll be fine. ↩︎

The Myth of Norse Discontinuity

Mon, 29 May 2023 02:32:37 +0100

First, a note on the term “pagan”: This is what most people seem to use when describing people who believe in Norse mythology. To me they are just the stories, because I’m surrounded by them. I’m a fish in water. However, I see the need for labeling it. “Norse mythology” is simple and descriptive enough to make sense, so that’s what I’ll default to.

If you read or listen to Americans on this subject you will often hear them say that Paganism, or northern mythology, or Asatru or whatever they may choose to call it, died a long time ago, and has long been replaced by Christianity. Therefore, anyone still telling stories of the same variety, or people calibrating their moral compass from these stories are simply LARPing being vikings. That they are playing pretend based on what they’ve seen in TV-shows or heard from YouTube-gurus, because they have no connection to the old Norse culture. While this is likely true for a lot of non-European pagans (which I find to be immensely cringe examples of true bugmanism), it’s a very different thing for me, an actual Norwegian.¹

The mistake

These Americans tend to have this view that the populus equals what the books say. That the books say that around year 1000-ish Norway became Christian, and therefore the people must all be Jesus-lovers from that point on. That in the religion field of the Excel spreadsheet, Paganism was deleted, and Christianity was pasted in its place. And that, randomly, a thousand years later, a bunch of LARP’ers decided to pretend to be living in year 900, without having any actual connection to it.

Sure, if you were to look at a list of countries and their religions in the 1300s, you would see Norway listed as a Roman catholic country. However go to rural Norway, and all the stories you hear are of the kind descendant of the world before Christianity pretended to be “the religion that people in Norway believe”. Stories of trolls, elves, and gnomes.²

We have mountains named things like Jotunheim. A jotun, for those that don’t know, is a sort of god-giant from Norse mythology. The first creatures of the world, and the opposition of the Æsir.

“Til valhall!” is a war-cry used in the Norwegian army, especially in the Telemark Battalion.

Reading the inscriptions on old rune staves, you will find classic insults towards cheaters, gays and fat people that have survived to this day. My favorite being “deigræv”, an insult calling someone fat, that translates to dough-ass.

Our streets bear viking names, our cities bear names of the Æsir (I live right by Heimdal) and are adorned with statues of jarls, which also feature on our coats of arms.

Our weekdays include Tirsdag (Týr’s day), Onsdag (Odin’s day), Torsdag (Thor’s day), Fredag (Frigg’s day), which are all Æsir.

Despite the explicit religious practices having faded, we are still extremely noticeably descended from the Old Norse heritage and culture.

I liken this to the thing that happened when the Norwegian state decided that the correct way to pronounce numbers is from left to right. 34 is to be said as “thirty-four” (trettifire). Most pronounced it as “four-and-thirty” (firogtredve). It’s been decades since they imposed this, and if you only consume official government media, or only talk to people who live in big cities, you would think everyone changed over. However, many people still say “four-and-thirty”, especially in rural areas.

Imperfect continuity

None of this is to say that we have a perfect surviving verbal tradition of Norse mythology. We have had hundreds of years where practicing anything other than Lutheran orthodoxy was strictly prohibited. Therefore, much of the most overtly “religious-sounding” parts of Norse mythology have faded. You won’t find anyone in rural Norway that believes in the Æsir and commits blot because their family has done that for a hundred generations.

However, enough of the culture has survived that deciding to stick more to the Norse tradition rather than Christianity, for a Norwegian, is very far from the act of sheer bugmanism that it is often made to sound like. We have a real connection to the history. It’s not like a Swede suddenly deciding he’s a Buddhist after reading the Buddhism Wikipedia-page and listening to some Alan Watts.

The actual loss we suffered was that of our ancient sense of fervor, conviction and grandeur. Christendom’s most successful usurpation was bending the culture from one that worshiped the grand, to one that worshiped the poor, suffering and tortured. For yes, it is easier for a camel/rope to pass through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to enter the poor man’s heaven. This, in turn, gave birth to the same malformed culture you find all throughout the Occident today. Child and son of Christianity, the Last Man, judges the poor, malformed and “humble” as worthy of heaven, and the great as hellbound oppressor. Yes, it took time for this bastard child to reach maturity, and although the ancient pagan fervor did see some death-throws in Wagner, the renaissance, et cetera, we sit today in the midst of the common ruins of Christianity. Such is the true nature of pagan discontinuity.

I say this not to make an enemy out of Christians. There is a revival of true Christianity in the modern day, and I respect these men as my brothers in the war against evil and decay. They too are following the red thread back out of the cave of despair, and back along the trail of tradition. This is good.

Of course there are movements and groups in Norway too that are pure cringe bugman LARPs. Åsatrufellesskapet Bifrost is an officially recognized “religious society” in Norway that mixes together “current nature-religions” and “neo-heathen experience” to basically make itself whatever you want it to be. This is just a bunch of nerds pretending to be spiritual while painting themselves with cool viking branding, rather than any serious religious belief. As evidenced by their softie version of blot (ritual sacrifice), where they dress up like they’re going to a fair, yet they never seem to kill anything, nor spread any blood. Instead, sacrificing teddy bears, poems and groceries. ↩︎
Americans and reconstructionists tend to only emphasize the role of the Æsir and Vanir, ignoring how most people’s stories of mythical nature were about fellow Midgard creatures like trolls, elves, gnomes, fairies and vetter. ↩︎