Gangleri – articles

I have said on countless occasions that Dumézil and his theories are not very popular among scholars nowadays. I have read arguments against his tripartite system that were sometimes convincing, sometimes not, but no scholar who disgards the hypthesis of Dumézil presents a workable alternative. Currently I am reading the book The War Of The Gods by Jarich Oosten. The book is of 1985 so the criticism is not just of today. The book is subtitled The Social Code in Indo-European Mythology. Some of you might now know what sort of book this is, but only when I started reading…
Continue reading Arguments against Dumézil

Many times I have thought about the subject and recently there has been discussions about it: does the focus of many European “pagans” not lie too much on the North? Does the term “Asatru” not refer to much to the god of the ancient Scandinavians? Why do we refer to “Odin” and “Thor” and not to the same gods in our own tongue? What actually do we really know about these local versions of the old faith? I have tried to to make some sort of inventarisation and initial investigation into a subject that proves to be quite difficult…
Continue reading Regional religious history

People who have followed the public side of my ‘philosophical evolution’ for some time will know, and in my last article I repeated, that I have a ‘Theosophical past’. The writings of Blavatsky, De Purucker, but also Steiner came at the right time when I was ready for some more serious studies and I learned a lot from them. Later I moved on to other things, but of course I still have a nice shelf with Theosophy in my library, which I seldom to never check these days. It has never been like I took everything I read for granted…
Continue reading HPB

Last week I ran into the “blog” of Mark Sedgewick, the author of Against The Modern World, a scholarly investigation of Traditionalism that I haven’t read. On his “blog” Sedgewick puts novelties, thoughts, new leads, etc. One of these new leads is what he calls “music scene Traditionalism”, of which he writes “It is one of the most important and fastest growing forms of Traditionalism in the West today.” In the course of his investigation, he ran into an article with a similar subject in a new periodical called Journal for the study of radicalism (see volume 1, issue 2)…
Continue reading "Music scene Traditionalism"

Today I ran into the review of the Tyr Journal on Northvegr. In quite strong words the reviewer Ári Óðinssen takes distance from the content of this journal.

we should not be allowing the voices we hear in this publication to be the only voices pushing the edge of philosophy in this age. They are, by our silence, representing us. I repeat this to make it clear: they are, by our silence, representing us…

Óðinssen seems to think that Tyr stands for a radical traditionalist form of “Asatru”, while in my own idea, Tyr is a “radical traditionalist” publication…
Continue reading Heithni

Like my previous article (Against the modern world?), the title refers to a book (the English translation of Comment Peut-On Être Païen of Alain de Benoist). Also again I do not (entirely) agree with the content of the book. The title is slightly ironic and suggestive, that is all.

I think you will not be surprised when I tell you that I do not call myself ‘pagan’ and even less ‘heathen’. I don’t like these terms that Christians in past decades (and sometimes still) used to separate people with another religion from themselves. The terms were and are mostly…
Continue reading On being a pagan

“…We think that if a Western tradition could be rebuilt it would be bound to take on a religious form in the strictest sense of this word, and that this form could only be Christian; for on the one hand the other possible forms have been too long foreign to the Western mentality, and on the other it is only in Christianity – and we an say still more definately in Catholicism – that such remnants of a traditional spirit as still exist in the West are to be found. Every ‘traditionalist’ venture that ignores this fact is without foundation

Maybe you don’t immediately realise this, but slang or dialect is about the only remaining regional/local tradition that is left in our modern age. It is also rapidly fading away. I was so fortunate to be raised in a small in village and in a family that still spoke (speaks) the local dialect. On elementary school we of course did speak “general civilized Dutch”, because you had to be able to speak it, especially when you would go to work in a city. Actually, dialect was already looked upon with ‘a skew eye’ as we say and many parents no…
Continue reading Slang

The non-Traditionalist Muslim Haji Muhammad Legenhausen has written a very nice essay called Why I am not a Traditionalist which is online on a few places on the internet. Legenhausen gives a lengthy and critical comment on the Traditionalist School and some leading Traditionalists. On a few occasions, Legenhausen surely has a point, but his overall critique is fairly easy to shoot holes through. That is not the purpose of my article though.

“Traditionalism [and] its rejection of modernity”

Legenhausen writes: “The basic point is that nothing should be accepted or rejected merely because it is modern and…
Continue reading Against the modern world?