Gangleri – bookreviews

In several regards this German publication is like the Tyr Journal. An anual publication with three issues available in the form of a 450 page well-printed book with essays of different authors about paganism and related subjects and book and music reviews at the end. Those are the similarities, because there are of course more differences. The nice thing about the Heidnisches Jahrbuch is that is deals with contemporary paganism and its problems. No investigations of archeological evidence and myths to contruct a theory, but writings about how pagans of today can fill in their faith and practises. However the Jahrbuch does not come from a certain organisation, the authors seem to agree on two points: paganism is polytheistic and paganism is democratic. I personally disagree with both which makes it ‘difficult’ to follow reasonings here and there. The first article About the reception of germanic neopaganism in Germany nowadays is a nice piece about how different media report about paganism. Of course they display a lot of ignorance and prejudice. A critical article follows about the fact that people say: “but the Eddas say…”, while Kurt Oertel displays how flawed our sources and their translations are. For the rest: textual investigations, modern runestones, Frau Percht and the Perchten-movements that are popular today, headhunters; a whole range of subjects pass. The interpretation is often very philosophical or scholarly. One subject that one of course cannot avoid when talking about contemporary paganism is the link with conservative politics. The last and longest article takes about 80 pages to distinguish “völkische esoterik” from “germanic heathenry”. Pages and pages are filled with the history of prenazi “völkish” groups, antisemitism, racism all to prove that the supposed ‘pagan’ ideas of people from the past and present with these ideas are in fact Christian with a pagan varnish and not the least bit based on a polytheistic religion.
Heidnisches Jahrbuch 2007 was a nice read. There should be more publications about contemporary paganism, so I support the initiative. I have not seen the other two volumes of this publication yet, so maybe it was just this issue, but all three Heidnisches Jahrbücher are well available (through Amazon.de for example), so if you can read German and are prepared to pay a relatively high price for a publication like this, these series could be something for you.
2009 verlag daniel junker, isbn 9783938432068

I bought this book when I was ‘in between literature’. It is not really a book by Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), but rather the written result of a series of interviews by his former student Bill Moyers that were broadcasted on TV. My Dutch translation has a title translating as “myths and consciousness”, I think the original title fits the content a lot better. Campbell might have had ideas that I do not agree with, but as the introduction to this book says:

He was, of course, criticized for dwelling on the psychological interpretation of myth, for seeming to confine the contemporary role of myth to either an ideological or therapeutic function. I am not competent to enter that debate, and leave it for others to wage. He never seemed bothered by the controversy. He just kept on seeing, opening to others a new way of seeing.

And Campbell doing what he thought he ought to be doing can easily inspire both people who follow his ideas as those who do not (entirely). And inspire is exactly what this book does. Campbell may have been a scholar, a writer of books, a teacher at universities, but this man lived myth. Already in the first minutes of the first interview, he says:

One of the problems of today is that we are hardly acquinted with the literature of the mind. We are interested in the daily news and problems of the moment.

Campbell had a fixed period of time in each day to read, both to keep up with the literature in his field, but mostly to be continuesly inspired. The way Campbell in the interviews flies from one mythology to another, from Amerindian stories to Star Wars, from daily things to the Vedas is amazing. Subjects dealt with vary from heros to goddesses to marriage. What I liked most about this book is that time and time again Campbell shows the importance of myth for our daily lives. A whole range of nice tales, anecdotes and interesting pieces of information pass, but the parts in which Campbell shows what the subject of his lifelong studies meant to him make this little book worth reading to anyone who is interested in religion and mythology.
1988 apostrophe, isbn 0385418868 (of the anchor editions)

I had not heard of this book, nor of the author before I noticed a reference to it in a book that I read recently. Apparently it was first published under the title Forgotten Truth: the Perennial Tradition, was reprinted under this title a couple of times and later republished under the title Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions, because the “Perennial Tradition” in the title would lower the sales? In any case, Smith (1919-) is a scholar and author of the popular Religions Of Man/The World’s Religions and he follows the ideas of Traditionalists such as Guénon and Burckhardt. Interested in a book in this ‘low period’ of Traditionalism, I got this book which is both easy and cheap to get second hand. Smith obviously a scholar, mostly deals with contemporary subjects and why things are differently as we usually think. Evolution theory, the idea of progress and mostly the role of science in general are put in a different perspective. This might be interesting as an introduction for people who are looking for alternative ideas on a variety of still current subjects, but when you, like me, have read your share of ‘Perennial literature’, nothing much new is to be found here. Moreover, like I said before, I am not so much interested in this level of knowledge, I would love to run into something more metaphysically Traditionalistic. In any case, Forgotten Truth is a good introduction for Western thinking people. There is not all that much Tradition to be found, rather the hows and whys of the incorrectness of many modern ideas and theories. After that, you might want to learn more about religions and this author seems to be able to provide that too, but I have not read any of these works.
1976 harper & row, isbn 0060139021