Part I, Section I (Folkish Heathen Apologetics)
Rebuilding Bifrost and the Elivagar of Ancestry
For the previous article (the Introduction) go here: Introduction
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For the .pdf of this article, go here:
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For the audio-version of this article, go here:
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Today, on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, we behold the Son emerging from the river as the Father once more brings forth creation from the waters with the Spirit, before sending Him into the desert to confront everything opposed to His mission …
I.
Historic Paganism was a totalizing, holistic socio-legal-religious-political system more analogous to a ‘custom’ (sidr) than a ‘religion’ as understood in our contemporary world. Within that historic system, one did not agonize over whether one’s children would ‘accept’ the faith because transmission was embedded in communal patterns of ritual, taboo, and myth, which were all accepted as given rather than seen with a sense of volition. It would be akin to asking if a fish ‘believed in’ their underwater life, to which the fish would respond by asking ‘what’s water?’ It was the ‘old customs’ (forn sidr). It just was. This is why, during the advent of continued contact with Christianity which would ultimately lead to conversion, the incoming faith was understood as a ‘new custom’ (nyr sidr) rather than a ‘true-false belief system.’ While the ancient Greco-Roman world produced figures like Celsus and Porphyry who directly argued against Christianity, nothing comparable survives from the pre-Christian North. There, obligation was derived from law and kinship rather than apologetic treatises which acknowledge epistemic value as such. So there is a tension here: a system that historically did not engage in apologetics is attempting to be transplanted into a milieu where every worldview is forced to justify itself.
Many Pagans/Neopagans today - especially Folkish Heathens - insist that debating non-Pagans or justifying themselves to outsiders is unwarranted given the nature of their faith. Often, the argument will come from Folkish Heathens that ‘the gods don’t need converts’ or ‘these traditions are from and for our people and that’s enough.’ These attitudes can be misinterpreted as obstinance or even ignorance, but their position is more one of sincere conviction or loyalty. One might contrast this insular caution against Alviss the dwarf’s attempt to prove his wisdom and win the hand of Thor’s daughter. As the story goes, Alviss pedantically lectured on his exhaustive knowledge until dawn’s light turned him to stone, all according to Thor’s plan for his daughter to avoid the marriage. A parable, perhaps, that we can succumb to external pressure and promises of intellectual reward to become petrified in place through our educated inaction.
All the same, leading voices in the Folkish Heathen sphere have advised for an outward-facing nuance which can articulate itself to ‘modern man’. Stephen McNallen - founder of the Asatru Folk Assembly (and in many ways the ‘founding father’ of Reconstructionist Heathenry in America) - calls attention to the necessity of polished apologetics when he admits that “[...] verses from the Havamal will not suffice to express our beliefs to a sophisticated world.” Likewise, the Hearthfire Radio network of personalities have strongly advocated for ‘Pagan Apologetics’ to combat Christian and Atheist polemics. This is not only a way to defend itself from the corrosive critique of Modernity at large, but also to attract outsiders. In its more sophisticated understanding, then, Folkish Heathenry aims to appeal to serious, demanding people who in turn expect their worldview to be coherent, articulate, and defensible. After all, as Havamal (st. 26) states:
“The fool who fancies he is full of wisdom
While he sits by his hearth at home.
Quickly finds when questioned by others.
That he knows nothing at all.”
Where arguments are offered, they overwhelmingly take a similar shape: appeals to ancestry, history, and experiential resonance all working on one’s identity and in one’s life. That is: they argue that Folkish Heathenry is uniquely apt for those of European descent. In this way, because they attempt to preclude critique by insinuating the inherent rightness of Folkish Heathenry, our first task will be to deconstruct these arguments before investigating anything else. My goal in this present article is to steelman the core philosophical moves of Folkish Heathenry and then test them against the standards its own proponents explicitly or implicitly accept. From there, in the following article, I will trace the implications of this system and conclude Part I in a third article which analyzes the kinds of people this system tends to attract, and why.
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II.
The foundational move of Folkish Heathenry is not to claim that it is ‘true’ in some abstract sense, but that it is more ‘appropriate and authentic’ for those of European descent (or specifically: German descent) to accept it. This is a very intriguing move because the axis of its evaluation shifts from veracity to legitimacy, and once the primary question becomes ‘is this ours?’ rather than ‘is this true?’ we move away from idealizing a universalized vantage and into accepting a relative vignette. A tradition becomes seen as ‘true’ insofar as it rightly expresses and deepens the life of a specific group. Now, many thinkers in this sphere will of course still assert certain universals, (e.g., that there are objective natural hierarchies or that decadence is bad for all peoples) but they will equally insist that the concrete shape of the ‘good life’ is ancestrally-patterned.
This philosophic positioning shares an “incredulity toward metanarratives” with Postmodern thought, which calls into question the availability of any neutral or universal approach to securing truth. On this view, because there is no ‘independent evidence’ or reasoning beyond internal language games or concepts of reality, we are merely looking out from one of many specific and incomplete vantages, not some sacrosanct peak. Every narrative is only ever a particular narrative, especially those which claim dominion over or superiority to other narratives. Imperium Press, a leading publisher in the Folkish Heathen sphere, argues in Postmodernity as a Return to Tradition that the breakdown of liberal-universalist narratives through Postmodern thought creates space for a return to rooted, ancestral traditions. Similarly, religious studies scholar Kennet Granholm notes in his analysis of Edred Thorsson’s work that pluralism of thought is regarded not as an enemy of tradition, but rather as something which “facilitates the rediscovery of tradition.” In other words: the allowances for multiple viewpoints and the decline of a ‘one-size-fits-all truth’ opens the door for each folk to take its own authentic path.
David Bentley Hart, (an Orthodox theologian) following John Milbank, (an Anglican theologian) also highlights the structural kinship between certain strands of Postmodern philosophy and Historic Paganism. In both cases, reality is understood as, essentially, a ‘field of conflict’ rather than something ordered by a peaceful and metaphysical Logos. In the Postmodernist’s distrust of narratives like traditional metaphysics, they must still explain what epistemic concerns like ‘meaning’ or ‘knowledge’ are, yet in the coherence of their explanation - which is not that ‘differences matter’ or ‘power is an important aspect of epistemology’ - it behaves much more like ‘a hermeneutic skeleton key’ where ‘difference’ and ‘power’ effectively function as foundational ‘anti-Logos’ or as an ‘anti-metaphysical metaphysics.’ This is analogous (though certainly not identical) to the Heraclitean emphasis on ‘becoming’ which similarly finds much agreement (at least with regard to the ‘surface tone’) between the realist philosophy of Historic Pagan thought, like Havamal (st. 76). When applied to Norse-Germanic mythology, one can see resonances: the world arises from conflict (the slaying of Ymir; Aesir vs. Vanir vs. Jotunn), order is continually threatened (Ragnarok), and the gods themselves are enmeshed in inter-pantheon struggles (Lokasenna, for instance). Both Postmodernity and Folkish Heathenry believe that ‘violence’ is almost always unavoidable as different folks or different narratives inevitably come into disagreement. Given this view of an inherently pluralistic and conflictual reality, the crucial question becomes: whose perspective or authority fills the void left by the absence of universal truth?
[...] “I do not believe in Heathenry because it is ‘epistemologically superior’ and better reflects some abstract higher truth, but rather because it is the tribal belief of my ancestors, there can be no higher standard of authority than that.”
In the Folkish Heathen schema, the decisive answer is: ancestry. This is not a metaphor or a loose sociological category, but is instead meant as a biological and genealogical reality: a concrete chain of descent, a shared ‘biospirit,’ a people coherently defined by blood. As a pre-discursive fact - an authoritative, pre-rational inheritance - one’s ancestry expresses itself as a folk, a people, an ethnic community. And organically emerging from that folk and forming that folk in an interplay from primordial times, a religious tradition gives voice to its deep-level needs, wants, and values. To the Folkish Heathen, among the many narratives on offer in the modern world, the one that is truly fitting - indeed, the one that is literally ‘for you’ - is the one that arises from your own ancestry. This is succinctly captured in the Biblical maxim about fidelity in marriage “drink from your own well” (Proverbs 5:15-21) which was adopted and recontextualized by Folkish Heathens to mean: ‘defer to the traditions of your own people.’
This axiomatic principle is argumentatively developed in two main ways: Steven McNallen’s “Metagenetics” and Imperium Press’s “Ancestral Principle.” Within the Folkish Heathen sphere these are increasingly treated as quasi-orthodox. Metagenetics originally comes from an eponymous magazine article from 1985, which was later updated in 1999, formed into a booklet in 2006, and made into a brief sub-chapter of McNallen’s 2015 magnum opus: Asatru: A Native European Spirituality. As one scholar has observed, “McNallen’s need to revisit his concept [...] indicates the impact his provisional reflections have had among Asatruers.” The Asatru book has been reviewed on a two-episode reflection on the Hearthfire Radio show Newark Roundtable with McNallen contributing to the discussions. Another show on Hearthfire Radio, The Bog, opened their ‘Pagan Apologetics’ series with an episode about the Ancestral Principle formulated by Imperium Press. One of the hosts of the show - author of the book Germanic Theology: Volume I - has stated on their Substack page that the Ancestral Principle is “perhaps the most important theological innovation in modern Heathen reconstruction.” Another guest on The Bog, the Norroena Society - who has published leading books for Folkish Heathens like the Asatru Edda and the Aefinrunar books - has an article titled Our Ancestral Endowment where they espouse a view that is very similar in outcome to both arguments. Taken together, these publishers, podcasts, and reconstruction projects treat Metagenetics and the Ancestral Principle as critical to Folkish Heathenry, not incidental or ad hoc rhetoric. Therefore, it is crucial to fully understand them.
First, Metagenetics. Human beings are not blank slates. For McNallen, heredity shapes not only our bodies but also characteristic patterns of temperament, perception, and valuation at the population level. Drawing on numerous studies, theories, and findings, Metagenetics argues that there is a biologically-grounded patterning of inner life. In Asatru: A Native European Spirituality, McNallen reintroduces Metagenetics as the thesis that culture, and specifically religion, is carried along family and ethnic lines:
“Indigenous religions place emphasis on the ancestors and on the identity of the group. In Asatru, as the story of Rig reminds us, we know that the Gods themselves are among these ancestors. The idea that there should be ‘different’ groups with different religions no longer seems strange. Indeed, it becomes inescapable.”
On this reading, a people’s traditional religion is the symbolic and ritual flowering of an inherited psychic structure which finds its origins in the gods rather than from a detachable set of ideas. One’s sense of finding a ‘religion that fits me’ is therefore expected to be answered by following the ancestral path that corresponds to one’s own line of descent.
From within this framework, the preservation of a folk and the preservation of its religion are two aspects of the same underlying reality: a transgenerational pattern of being that manifests as shared ancestry, shared character, and a shared sacred vocabulary. Race (understood as genealogical peoplehood), religion, politics, and morality are treated as inseparable dimensions of this pattern – often condensed into the language of a ‘folk soul’ or ‘racial soul’ that differentiates one people from another. Because this pattern is carried genealogically, it can in principle re-emerge even after centuries under an imported creed. Therefore, the ancestral customs remain latent as a potential expression of one’s deepest being, which one can only truly feel fulfilled and oneself by acknowledging and embracing. This is why the religious organization that McNallen founded, the Asatru Folk Assembly, has its Declaration of Purpose state:
“Asatru is an ancestral religion, one passed down to us from our forebears from ancient times and thus tailored to our unique makeup. [...] If the Ethnic European Folk cease to exist, Asatru would likewise no longer exist. [...] All native religions spring from the unique collective soul of a particular race. [...] Asatru is not just what we believe, it is what we are.”
From Metagenetics’ own logic, someone ‘should’ be Heathen because their ancestral religion is the natural expression of their inherited patterns, so returning to it is framed as the way to live in accordance with what they most deeply and truly are.
Secondly, the Ancestral Principle. Imperium Press begins from a kind of ‘factualism’ about reason and justification. They claim that reason cannot be its own foundation, because any attempt to justify everything by argument eventually bottoms out in something that is simply given rather than chosen after deliberation. This is not only an abstract epistemological point but a claim about ordinary life. One did not reason one’s way into having a native language, a family, a body, a temperament, a community, a childhood formation, or the basic trust in memory and perception that makes reasoning possible at all. One finds oneself already standing inside these conditions. Therefore, Imperium Press treats the deepest, most real premises of human action as simply ‘brute facts’ of embodied existence. The point is not that such givens are infallible, but that they are pre-rational by nature. A core takeaway from this is that critique itself depends on these brute facts. A simple illustration is linguistic formation: one cannot step outside inherited meanings to decide from scratch what words mean, because one learned ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘home’, ‘shame’, and ‘good’ through authorities and practices that preceded personal autonomy.
From that starting point, Imperium Press formulates: “The ancestral principle is: authorship is authority. This simple principle, which the entirety of the Western tradition rests on, justifies folkishness and has radical implications for our religious life.” The relevant given that grounds obligation is genealogical authorship, with the claim not merely stating that ‘my ancestors caused me’ but that ‘what authors me has jurisdiction over me’. Origin is therefore not a neutral historical fact but a normative relation, with ‘parenthood’ being the paradigm case. Parents do not merely produce a child the way a storm produces debris - they stand in an ‘authority relation’ that names, teaches, disciplines, transmits standards, and supplies the first coordinates by which the child can later evaluate anything. Imperium Press then generalizes this parental structure. What made you, and what made your world intelligible, is treated as the proper source of commands for you. To displace that source in favor of an ‘alien’ authority is framed as usurpation rather than neutral intellectual correction, because it rejects the very order that made one’s evaluative capacities possible. After all, the critique one might leverage against those who authored you is foundationally dependent on those authors and therefore, one would be epistemically and morally ‘pulling the rug out from under oneself’.
Finally, then, the Ancestral Principle can be extended into an ‘upstream’ hierarchy intended to cast tradition as primarily imperative. If ‘authorship is authority’ is granted, authority becomes layered. Parents are upstream of children, grandparents upstream of parents, founders upstream of institutions, and gods upstream of peoples. Imperium Press notes that even in day-to-day life, people justify what they value by ‘pointing upstream’ to what made ‘the good’ possible in the first place, meaning (generally) that ‘older is better’. If more recent authorities are derivative, then derived authority cannot outrank - let alone ‘outcompete’ - its source. So when commands conflict, the most upstream command is treated as decisive. Applied to religion, modern norms and universalist claims are treated as recent layers that often conflict with the older, ‘folkish’ ancestral layer. Therefore, tradition is not primarily a set of propositions to be assessed from nowhere but instead it is an inheritance of prescriptive commands binding a particular people. ‘Folkishness’ is presented as the ultimate implication because if a people’s ancestral order authored its way of life and its gods, then that ancestral religion is not one option among many but the apt obligation for those who belong to that lineage, with critique permitted only from within the inherited order rather than by appeal to an external, universal tribunal.
Taken together, Metagenetics and the Ancestral Principle present a commendable defense of Folkish Heathen beliefs. Because we are always already born into a folk, we are also already situated within a web of obligations that reach back to those who first sired and shaped that folk. These arguments draw on widely shared intuitions, such as the preference for cultural rootedness over deracination, the sense that biology and spirituality are somehow not wholly separable, the impulse to honour one’s forebears, and a resistance to cultural or religious colonization and degeneration over time. In this way, Folkish Heathenry presents itself as both an expression and a defence of one’s ethnicity in its thickest sense. It does not deny that there are real gods, real peoples, and real orders of value - rather, it denies that there is a single, universally binding religious or moral code applicable to all peoples. Normativity is ancestrally-patterned and context-dependent - what is virtuous or vicious, permitted or forbidden, can only be rightly judged from within the concrete covenantal situation of a folk and its gods.
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III.
Now, even granting that authority is ‘primordial’ and that ‘the elder command prevails,’ the Ancestral Principle cannot function unless it can non-arbitarily identify who the elders are in relation to me and what they actually commanded. The process of identification inevitably requires the very judgment that the Ancestral Principle claims to exclude when Imperium Press says: “The elder command prevails. No judgement or conscience is involved; this is basically an algorithm.”. It should be noted that this is only the case because the historic transmission of pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs was decisively broken at some point between their issuance and the present, prompting the necessity of ‘reconstruction’ to determine the shape of those customs before they can be ‘enacted’ or ‘obeyed’. A reliable answer to ‘who my ancestors are’ often relies on documentary genealogy and, increasingly, population genetics rather than ‘oral memory.’ This is especially the case for those settler societies like the United States where European lineages have mixed for centuries and family lore is often fragmentary, romanticized, or simply wrong. Likewise, because answers to ‘what my ancestors commanded’ require an epistemology beyond what was given in my pre-rational formation, there is a whole evidential and inferential toolkit of knowledge which precedes my understanding of the commands, such as literacy, translation work, philology, source-criticism, archaeology, and so on. Therefore, by having to use this toolkit, we can say that for any historically-ruptured tradition, because the tradition cannot appeal to an unbroken internal transmission, decisive questions of content and scope are settled by methods of adjudication which by necessity are either not derivable from elder-command or are coming from standards of reason which are outside the tradition.
Therefore, to establish both ‘who my ancestors are’ and ‘what they command of me,’ I first have to reverse the epistemic order of dependence that Imperium Press is insisting upon when they say “the foundation of truth is authority.” This is the case because - whereas ‘new evidence prompting fundamental change’ is not a valid category for the commands of a ‘living tradition’ - in a ‘historically-ruptured tradition,’ ‘new evidence’ can change understandings about my ancestry and about pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs, thereby changing who my authority is or what they tell me to do. Knowledge of the tradition is only possible if I presuppose standards of evidence and reasoning that are not licensed by the tradition itself, but by a prior commitment to accuracy in my correspondence between my reconstruction of the tradition and ‘what actually happened’. This correspondence is colloquially referred to as ‘truth.’ Therefore, a broken tradition that has to be reconstructed using evidence evaluation and interpretive techniques must treat its own claims as answerable to reality because that reconstruction itself is a form of knowledge. Therefore, far from a prescriptive “algorithm,” the elder command requires a long chain of judgements to even begin to be determined. And even if we can discern it, it still requires judgments in applying criteria of ‘correct-incorrect application’ and knowing who is being addressed (only men, only women, the folk as a whole, a certain caste / profession?) because we cannot simply defer to someone inside the tradition. There is no emic insider and has not been for many generations. Obedience presupposes content, but in this case the content must be discovered and ‘reconstructed’, making the tradition primarily a proposition from which the imperative is synthesized - an assembly of shape before loyalty to its form. And it must be noted that this dependence on judgment is not a temporary defect that ‘goes away’ once a reconstruction ‘stabilizes,’ because even if a community successfully perpetuates a reconstructed praxis for (let us say) ten generations, the authority of that praxis still rests on the founding evidential and interpretive decisions that first selected and synthesized it, not on an unbroken transmission from the ancestral command it invokes.
We can see then how it is not that ‘truth trumps authority’ but instead that ‘the authority they appeal to cannot be identified or understood without truth-apt commitments’ and their own position cannot be stated, defended, or applied without ‘norms of correctness’ they did not derive from an elder command. If the Ancestral Principle is “the recognition that you don’t get to choose your own authority” then in the Folkish Heathen ‘acknowledgement’ of their ‘real authority,’ they still completely depend on interpretative judgements about the content and scope of commands, which, at that point, what’s the practical difference between those judgements and ‘choosing’ what their authority is commanding? How can one seriously say that they are not choosing their authority but they are choosing or interpreting what their authority says? Put frankly, ‘blood’ is not an immediate Bifrost from ‘I feel called by my ancestors’ to ‘this is what I should do’. There is still a significant degree of hermeneutics involved.
This also calls into question whether I can be straightforwardly counted as sharing my ancestors’ folk-identity - the supposed ‘tether’ to my ancestral folk that is meant to settle my ‘insider status’ with them in advance. Folkish Heathens typically identify this ‘tether’ with ‘the blood,’ tacitly treating biological descent as both the criterion of folk-membership and a rightful claim to obedience. This reframes disagreement as disloyalty rather than as a dispute about what, exactly, counts as belonging. Imperium Press often speaks as if the ‘folk identity’ they are advocating for is immediately available as a pre-rational brute fact - as though one can just be Germanic or be a man here and now in a way similar to how our ancestors were. This is effectively saying that ‘when you acknowledge your biological and genealogical identity, you are noetically primed to also acknowledge that you are under the authority of the ancestors who root that identity.’
However, even in ancient times, blood or biology alone did not confer manliness or status in the folk - indeed, both were public statuses governed by culturally-specific norms. Indeed, the very act of being accepted into the kinship group of one’s mother and father was not given by the fact of one’s birth through them - it was a ritually-mediated status which could be ‘permanently deferred’ (as we will see more of in the following article). The stock phrasing “was sprinkled with water and given a name” (vatni ausinn ok nafn gefit) marks the moment of incorporation into the family, with the formula appearing in historic sagas like Egils saga (ch. 31), Laxdaela saga (ch. 8, 25, 28, and 36), Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 11), Hardar saga ok Holmverja (ch. 8), along with legendary sagas such as Volsunga saga (ch. 13), Ragnars saga lodbrokar ok sona hans (ch. 7) and Orvar-Odds saga (ch. 21-22). This same rite is performed for biological children and for abandoned or non-kin children taken into the household - such as Knutr in Jomsvikinga saga (ch. 1) - indicating that belonging to the kin-group is a status bestowed by ritual, not a purely genetic fact. The poem Rigsthula uses the same water-and-name motif in its mythological establishment of the thrall, karl, and jarl castes. Therefore, we can see how kin-belonging is narrated as a publicly-conferred status rather than as a brute biological fact.
Even after this initial acceptance, inclusion in the folk was not guaranteed either as one could be ‘outlawed’ by disrespecting the given customs, leaving one legally-abrogated from having the identity of the folk. Therefore, it was of utmost importance to signal one’s inclusion through ‘correct action’ but also correct aesthetic, even with things we might consider as ‘unimportant.’ Tacitus notes that the Suebi tribe distinguish themselves by tying their hair in a knot (Ger. 38), while the Chatti had a custom of letting their hair grow out until they had killed an enemy (Ger. 31) For the Merovingians, long hair denoted status, whereas the Normans would shave the short-back of their necks. We can extrapolate that failing to abide by hairstyling etiquette would warrant exclusion or accusations of ‘unmanliness’. Therefore, if doing certain things would make one ‘less of a man’ and this concept was tied to honor, (with the Gragas lawcode making the insult of ragr - that is: “unmanliness” or “cowardice” - an outlawry-grade insult, even allowing lethal retaliation) then this would be critical to avoid - yet one first had to know (learn from proximate sources) what those things were and how to avoid accusations of such. For another example, the extent of Loki’s taunt at Odin about him ‘practicing seidr’ in Lokasenna (st. 24) can only be fully understood if one knows that seidr is ergi for men to perform. This is effectively a given fact in a custom which we are raised in, but not so if we must learn of the custom first. This is the difference between Historic Paganism and Folkish Heathenry.
Therefore we see how concepts like ‘inclusion in the folk-identity’ or ‘being a man’ were dependent on ritual conferral, legal compliance and aesthetic signalling, very similarly (if not identical) to how it is today. This means though, that one had to understand (be taught) the laws and the social-cues necessary to be considered ‘Germanic’ or ‘a man’, thus making those identities dependent on propositional content. Is someone ‘masculine’ just because they have male genitalia, or does it require a certain mindset, values, and behavior? The same applies to ‘being Germanic’ - it is not given by one’s birth alone. But if the Folkish Heathen continues to say that ‘admission in the folk requires both genealogy and compliance to norms,’ then we can gesture back to our prior critique, which recapitulates how both of these concerns (genealogy and compliance) require universal norms of logic to comprehend and reconstruct. Once that is granted, the Ancestral Principle cannot simply say ‘you already belong to our folk by your very birth, so therefore you are bound to the tradition’ because the very content of the identity that is supposed to confer that belonging is not delivered by a pre-rational brute fact but by the acceptance of certain propositions which must be reconstructed before being accepted. Therefore, the Folkish Heathen instead conflates and insinuates the identity of their ancestors with biology and genealogy to - for all intents and purposes - invite themselves into their ancestor’s identity matrices (whether or not those ancestors would actually accept them in).
‘Conflation’ and ‘insinuation’ are not however isolated to this concern - indeed they run throughout the Ancestral Principle. For instance, the Ancestral Principle correctly observes that our language, cultural-knowledge, and values are formed by authority, but it overreaches when it claims that the genealogically-formative source is automatically the ultimate standard. In this way, the foundation of the Ancestral Principle is built from a conflation between four different things: biological causation (who generated you), cultural-historical origination (who first instituted a folk’s forms), developmental formation (who shaped your outlook), and rightful jurisdiction (who may bind action and conscience). The unacknowledged forcing of the association between the four concerns being conflated is a glaring gap in the argument because Imperium Press requires it to connect their own developmental experiences with qualities far, far beyond it. So even if ‘authority is primordial’ as it relates to one’s upbringing, the Ancestral Principle still has to supply (rather than assume) the bridge from formation to rightful jurisdiction, especially when extended from living parents to remote ancestral strata.
This is where Imperium Press brings in how ‘the elder command prevails.’ Although it is presented as an inherent clarification of how ‘authorship is authority’ scales into a hierarchy of commands, it is actually an additional selection rule chosen from several coherent alternatives. Competing commands could be ranked in at least three ways:
by recency (later authors can revise earlier ones)
by upstreamness (earlier authors override later ones)
by office or station regardless of time (father < king < god)
Imperium Press opts for (B), but that priority is not inherently contained in ‘authorship is authority’ - it is a further value-laden commitment that must be supplied from elsewhere. And even if one tries to ground (B) by appealing to the ‘anti-innovation posture’ of historic Indo-European religions - an ancestral preference for strictly preserving the old ways - that still functions as an external normative premise doing the work of the override rule, not as something inherently entailed by authorship alone. It is actually projecting the conclusions onto an earlier premise so that we arrive at the right answer. Likewise, although it is true that earlier commands are ‘upstream’ of more recent ones ontologically, they are downstream of our epistemological awareness - again, this is the confusion knotted up by attempting to tie all these concerns together.
Because the paradigm case of authorship is the relationship between ‘fathers and sons,’ the selection between the three options here matters as it relates to that example. And in that natural relationship, the authority is proximate, the relationship is clear, and the content of the ‘commands’ is directly accessible. But the Ancestral Principle extrapolates that model (through the same conflation as we saw above) onto remote, abstracted ancestry and treats the oldest discernible layer as spontaneously supreme. This effectively makes ‘the elder command prevails’ a filter for which ancestors ‘actually count’ as authoritative, making it the most important piece for the Folkish Heathen. That function then is the rationale behind the drift from living fathers to selectively-privileged forebears, and ultimately (if taken consistently) toward ever deeper strata of ‘the oldest’ within an Indo-European horizon.
Once the Ancestral Principle is mapped onto history - specifically with that awareness of Indo-European origins - it ceases to support a stable ‘local folk-custom’ picture unless a non-arbitrary cutoff criterion is supplied. If ‘older overrides newer’ is treated as categorical, and if ‘ancestry’ is not explicitly capped at some folk-boundary, then the logic pushes upstream: Anglo-Saxon customs should be subordinate to earlier Continental Germanic customs which should themselves be subordinate eventually to Proto-Indo-European horizons. At that point, significant divergences among Indo-European branches cannot all be equally ‘apt’ in the strong sense, and the view is forced to introduce an ‘essential vs non-essential’ distinction onto any given part of the custom. ‘This Anglo-Saxon belief is illegitimate because it conflicts with this earlier Continental Germanic belief’, or ‘because the Sun has different genders in different Indo-European traditions, they cannot all be right and the Norse conception has to be overwritten despite what that will do to the lore’, etcetera. But even that distinction itself poses a fundamental problem. Either ‘essential’ is fixed by a standard that outruns any single folk (thereby puncturing relativism), or it is fixed by folk discretion (thereby subordinating the priority of upstreamness to more contemporary judgment). Furthermore - and perhaps most importantly - by what authority could ‘essential’ elements even be defined as such? What could ever be called ‘non-essential’ or purely aesthetic in a holistic and totalizing custom? Can one remove a single thread from a crocheted blanket without having to cut and edit (thus reintroducing judgement)? Regardless, these sorts of additional values are doing the adjudicative work that ‘authorship’ or ‘ancestry’ alone were supposed to supply.
From the prior points, we can see how the Ancestral Principle cannot be understood or applied without importing additional criterion that tells us who our ancestors are, what they command of us, what our own identity should be, which ancestors are most authoritative, and whether or not we should override a folk custom. There is still significant adjudication required outside the Ancestral Principle. At this point, the most likely course for Imperium Press is to insist that ‘the Ancestral Principle is not a truth-claim at all but a command of loyalty insulated from evidential dispute.’ That is: a return to relativity. However, the Ancestral Principle cannot function as a sealed, pre-rational ‘ought-only sphere’ because pre-Christian Germanic-Norse ‘oughts’ presuppose a web of ‘is’-claims (theology, cosmology, anthropology). When those propositional and often empirical ‘is’-claims fail to track onto reality, the ‘ought’ loses its rationale or changes its content. In other words: no ‘is’ contains a religious ‘ought’ but every religious ‘ought’ contains ‘is’s, and as our understanding of those ‘is’s changes, so too does our understanding of the ‘ought’ shift, potentially even to the extent that they conflict with other values and goals. For instance, if the gods commanded that we ‘ought’ to treat an illness in a certain traditional way, but it is discovered that that method is ineffective or actually antithetical to curing it, then in order truly to treat the illness we in fact ought to do something different, and the original ought must be revised or abandoned in light of the new facts.
Indeed, taking the view that ‘truth’ is conformity between thought (and language) and reality, Edward Feser distinguishes two relativist theses: 1. - there is no truth ; and 2. - there is no absolute truth. Feser argues that (1) is self-defeating or collapses assertion into meaningless noise, since propositions are by their nature truth-apt. Even by using the word ‘is,’ it already smuggles in truth-claims. Likewise, (2) either refutes itself if asserted absolutely or shrinks to a trivial report of personal or tribal attitude if asserted relatively. If the thesis is absolutely true, it has already conceded at least one absolute truth. If it is only relatively true, it says no more than ‘for relativists, all truth is relative,’ which is tautologically empty. In that sense, relativism cannot even convincingly state its own position without invoking the very absolute notion it denies.
Furthermore, the existence of self-evident, agent-independent truths should finish coaxing the relativist out of their self-isolation disguised as ‘humble realism’ or ‘traditionalism.’ Aristotle’s ‘principle of non-contradiction’ - that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true in the same respect - is the precondition of any reasoning whatsoever. The moment the Folkish Heathen says that one account of the gods, or of our obligations, is mistaken and another is right, he is already presupposing the ‘principle of non-contradiction’ and operating inside that universal logical grammar. Mathematics sharpens the point: we did not invent the number π by fiat, we merely discovered that its decimal expansion does not terminate or repeat. No vote, command, or ancestral decree can make π conveniently end at the third or the hundredth digit. Its definition is beyond culture or language. This is a paradigm case of a mind-independent structure that constrains belief and practice regardless of whatever any folk may wish. Once ‘aptness’ and ancestral religion are articulated and defended using those same trans-folk standards - non-contradiction, mathematical and empirical discipline - then the discussion is back on shared territory: claims about the gods and about duty are either coherent or incoherent, supported or unsupported, true or false. They cannot be insulated from that verdict simply by calling them ‘ours’ (whatever that means at this point).
The intent of all this for Imperium Press is to preserve the claim that ‘Christ and Odin are not even in the same arena,’ with the Ancestral Principle functioning as the carapace that keeps Folkish Heathenry from having to answer criticism on shared ground. That insulation works only if religious commitments are treated as private identity expressions rather than public truth-claims. But once Folkish Heathenry is presented as a serious option that seeks to persuade and respond to objections, its assertions function as claims about how the world is, which are answerable to truth-apt questions. Either Odin exists or he does not, and if he does, he is either what the lore says of him or something else. Likewise, either Christ is Lord of all or He is not. These claims are mutually-exclusive. So which is true …? Claims of this kind cannot be ‘true only for my folk’ without sliding into one of two outcomes: a self-refuting relativism, (‘no universal truth - except for this principle’) or a retreat denying that religion is truth-apt at all, reducing it to identity-performance and ethnopsychology. But if the Folkish Heathen takes that tactical retreat, saying ‘our folk commands us to believe in Odin’s existence,’ the statement only binds those who already accept their contested definition of ‘the folk,’ which we have shown above is not a brute biological given but ideologically-constructed, propositional content. In the end, either Folkish Heathenry acknowledges that it already stands in the common arena of truth and reason, where its claims can be weighed like any others, or it retreats into language-games that it plays only with itself.
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IV.
Now, many of the same critiques leveled against the Ancestral Principle can be brought into our critique of McNallen’s Metagenetics. But due to the distance between the original statement of Metagenetics and here, we should first restate what it actually argues. Metagenetics is “the hypothesis that there are spiritual or metaphysical implications to physical relatedness among humans which correlate with, but go beyond, the known limits of genetics,” meaning that “ancestry matters.” First, it observes that human beings are formed within a folk, which was itself formed by particular environmental and social pressures. Second, this leads to group-level patterns of heritable temperament and dispositions driven by genetic material. Third, McNallen infers that therefore any ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘racial soul’ would be differentiated among groups, with distinct ‘spiritual aptitudes’. Fourth, Metagenetics posits a link between this collective ‘inner life’ and its traditional customs, framing the latter as a sort-of ‘outpouring’ of the former. Fifth, it concludes by stating that therefore, the preservation of a folk and the preservation of its ancestral religion are two sides of the same reality and where one falters so too will the other. McNallen asserts that “we are thus a religion not for all of humanity, but rather one that calls only its own.”
But this raises the question: if we are using evidentiary methodologies to determine reconstruction, then this ‘calling’ seems subordinated to rigorous hermeneutic treatment of the sources. It is at least logically possible that if Heathenry can autochthonically and spontaneously arise ‘from the blood’ through a ‘calling,’ then it can be revived at any point in time by those with ‘the blood.’ However, that critical aspect of if it can ‘spontaneously arise’ remains to be seen. Perhaps the inherent proclivities of the ethnic group would assert themselves over any given externally-accepted system, but to equate this ‘assertion of proclivities’ as being contiguous with a historically-specific religious custom remains to be seen unless we regard that religious custom as a mere instantiation of the ethnicity’s proclivities rather than something we are specifically obliged to accept. This understanding is much more akin to Nietzsche or Benoist than to that of the Folkish Heathen, who believes that reconstructing the particular is the only inlet to the ethnic form. Yet the very fact that there are disagreements about the meaning of primary sources between Folkish Heathens (let alone between those of Germanic descent or between the Folkists and the Inclusivists) demonstrates the lack of uniformity or objective direction in this ‘spontaneous arising.’ The ‘authoritative interpretation’ of the lore does not seem to come from one’s blood, but from one’s hermeneutic acumen, thus discrediting the absolutist view (essentially, lineage-indexed determinacy applied to religion) that McNallen and other Folkish Heathens ascribe to the necessity of.
Indeed, without invoking universal evidence, Metagenetics has no reason to ‘stop’ at the Viking-Age layer. If the operative rule is that genetic ancestry grounds spiritual aptness, then the same genealogical stream runs straight through a full millennium of Christian Europe. Again, like we saw with the Ancestral Principle, elevating Germanic-Norse paganism as the uniquely ‘authentic’ expression of our lineage discloses a rhetorical or aesthetic-ideological preference rather than some ‘hard fact’ of nature. Moreover, if one takes genoculture coevolution seriously, the Christian millennium cannot be treated as a neutral digression because the medieval Latin Church’s marriage and family program (bans on close-kin marriage and polygyny, promotion of lifelong monogamy and smaller, nuclear households) was something which profoundly affected the unique character of Western Europe. Whatever specifically ‘Germanic disposition’ exists at present is therefore the cumulative product of both pre-Christian and Christian selection pressures, with the latter chronologically closer to our current genomic and social environment and thus, on evolutionary assumptions, at least as causally salient as Iron-Age Scandinavia.
If the Folkish Heathen wishes instead to argue that these Christian-era developments were disastrous to European peoples, that is an entirely different debate - one that must proceed in terms of concrete historical, sociological, and moral evaluation, (and one which we shall survey in Part III) not by appealing to ancestry as if it automatically supplied the verdict. Metagenetics therefore smuggles in a normative program into ostensibly descriptive talk about ancestry. It speaks as though ancestry itself delivers the verdict on who or what I should worship and how. But it reaches this conclusion only by minimizing the profoundly formative Christian centuries when they would complicate the story, quietly redefining ‘ancestry’ and converting a bare genealogical fact (‘these are your forebears’) into a prescriptive, content-laden mandate (‘therefore you ought to practice this reconstructed cult based on what they did before Christianity’). The practical upshot is a rhetorical ultimatum that ‘if you want to preserve the White race, you must become Pagan,’ which is a leap from evolutionary description to racial-religious imperative that is neither entailed by the genetic data nor justified by history itself, but simply asserted and then back-filled with selectively-filtered appeals to ancestry.
With these preliminary considerations noted, we can move on to critiquing the core of McNallen’s argument itself. Whereas the Ancestral Principle is more of a philosophical argument, Metagenetics grounds its polemic in behavioral genetics and parapsychology. This means that from the start, Metagenetics acknowledges the utility of accepting universal, objective truth (or at least the attempt at grasping such) even if the argument leans heavily on a set of heterodox philosophical and parapsychological authorities - most notably Jung, Sheldrake, and Rhine. However, McNallen never truly demonstrates how their work entails the conclusion of Metagenetics. Rather than using these sources as evidence for his conclusions, McNallen uses them as ‘seasoning’ to give his own thesis the ‘authoritative weight of science.’ Instead, the recurring pattern is a string of uncited quotations and loose study-summaries that at most suggest gaps in strict materialism, which are then treated as if they supplied evidential support for Metagenetics’ much stronger lineage-specific conclusions.
The most widely known of these authorities is Carl Jung, whose theories of the ‘collective unconscious’ and ‘archetypes’ posit universal, inherited structural patterns in the psyche that are ‘clothed’ in culturally-specific images. Even if one grants the reality of Jung’s theory, this does not itself endorse a historically ‘Germanic-Norse’ inflection of the collective psyche. And even if such a particular inflection is conceded for the sake of argument, it is far from clear how it could be cleanly distinguished from the ‘generic human unconscious’ (which Jung is actually concerned with) or have remained stable and salient across centuries of Christianisation and radical changes in symbolic worlds. Furthermore, and most interestingly, McNallen’s use of Jung here contains a checkable misattribution. He frames the sentence “Because the brain is the principal organ of the mind, the collective unconscious depends directly upon the evolution of the brain” as Jung’s own words. Yet Jung never wrote that. The wording originates from Hall & Nordby’s A Primer of Jungian Psychology (1973), a ‘consumer summary’ of Jung, not a primary text. This matters because Metagenetics repeatedly trades on borrowed psychological prestige, (so-and-so said ‘this, which is something that sounds like McNallen’s thesis) so if a ‘line from Jung’ is actually a secondary paraphrase, then the reader is warranted in demanding stricter sourcing and independent verification from any of McNallen’s work. It also calls into question if McNallen has even read a book written by Jung or if he is relying entirely on this summary.
A parallel treatment of the sources appears in McNallen’s appeals to Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of ‘morphic fields’ and to J. B. Rhine’s ‘extra-sensory-perception’ (ESP) research. Sheldrake presents his concept of ‘morphic resonance’ as a hypothesis about habit and form: that patterns of organization and behavior can become easier to reproduce through repetition among sufficiently similar systems. It must be noted that similarity is the influence-tracker here, not bloodline inheritance. The Metagenetic use of this idea therefore oversteps Sheldrake’s warrant in three ways: it firstly treats a conjectural, form-based influence as if it implied a distinct quasi-ethnic field, which is then secondly treated as exclusive and prior to the historically-dominant patterns that have in fact formed modern Europeans, and lastly it treats whatever the field ‘carries’ as normatively authoritative, as though descriptive inheritance automatically yielded what is best or binding. But on Sheldrake’s own terms, the most salient and repeatedly reinforced ‘fields’ for living populations would be those constituted by the practices and institutions that have actually persisted across generations, meaning: Christian cultural forms. A similar conflation appears in appeals to Rhine’s ESP program. Even setting aside longstanding disputes about replication and reliability, the most that Rhine-style results could suggest is some anomalous information effect under restricted conditions, not a genetically-transmitted, ethnicity-indexed religious content that selects one historical cult as uniquely apt.
Taken at face value, Jung, Sheldrake, and Rhine at most support some sort of inherited or collective psychic structure or field-like influence, but none of them justifies the strong Metagenetic thesis that each ethnic group has a biologically ‘correct’ religion and that practising another is inherently misaligned. What McNallen offers, therefore, is less an evidentially-grounded theory than a narrative reification of a ‘Norse-Germanic racial soul,’ constructed by stitching together disparate, speculative psychological-philosophical motifs to underwrite a religious synthesis already derived from the lore.
With all of this though is McNallen’s much more central account of the ‘heritability of religion,’ which equates heritability with content aptness. This is done using two sources of evidence: ‘twin studies’ and extrapolations from broader ‘inborn aptitude’ research. In adolescence, behavioral-genetic work typically finds that the effect which genes have on religiousness is meager compared to the influence of the subject’s family and social environment. In adulthood, however, the influences often shift, with studies reporting moderate heritabilities for religiousness in general, such that genetic factors help explain how strongly an individual tends to engage with religion, (e.g., frequency of practice and salience of faith). However, ‘heritability’ here is tracking a content-neutral disposition toward religiosity, not a predisposition toward any particular creed or ethnically delineated tradition. Accordingly, syntheses of the literature conclude that denominational and creedal identity are shaped predominantly by upbringing, peer context, and local religious ecology, rather than by ethnicity-specific inheritances. Nor do McNallen’s appeals to ‘twin telepathy’ provide a mechanism for inheriting religious content. When tested under controlled conditions, twins do not reliably outperform non-twins, replications commonly fail, and the residual phenomena are adequately explained by shared environment, mutual familiarity, expectation effects, and coincidence rather than by any robust psychic channel capable of transmitting determinate religious traditions across kin lines.
McNallen’s use of Daniel G. Freedman’s neonatal temperament studies correctly notes that some aspects of temperament are inborn, and it is reasonable to suppose that such traits influence how inclined a person is toward religion in general. But when McNallen claims it is only “a small step from inborn temperament to inborn attitudes to inborn religious predispositions,” he slides from the modest, well-supported thesis that ‘genes influence personality and generic religiosity’ to the much stronger, unsubstantiated thesis that ‘genes specify the correct religion for each folk.’ That move - from ‘you are predisposed to be more or less religious’ to ‘you ought to follow an ancestral cult’ - is not a small step but the entire weight-bearing inference of Metagenetics, and it is precisely where no distinct genetic signal has been demonstrated and no argument given by McNallen. Conceptually, Metagenetics treats a content-neutral heritable trait (religious seriousness) as if it carried built-in content, (‘pagan, not Christian’) which is a similar category mistake as inferring from the heritability of verbal aptitude which language a person should speak. In both cases, the heritable trait sets a degree (how religious, how verbal), not the object (which religion, which language). McNallen even seems to understand this concept as he notes in Asatru: A Native European Spirituality:
“According to one study, [McNallen does not cite or name it] even political party preference is to some extent heritable! (Of course, this doesn’t mean that there’s a Republican or a Democrat gene, but that certain underlying traits of temperament and worldview can be passed on through heredity.) Our genetics, that very special gift from the ancestors, is a powerful thing.”
If there is no ‘Republican or Democrat gene’, then there is no ‘Folkish Heathen or Christian gene’ either. Ultimately, Metagenetics takes a very sane intuition about the heritability of certain traits and extrapolates it into a religious programme about ‘you being made for the reconstruction we synthesized.’ The Metagenetic claim that ethnicities come pre-loaded with a specific, biologically ‘apt’ religion is simply not borne out by the behavioral-genetic evidence, however much McNallen attempts to equivocate from the data.
Lastly, we come to the use of reincarnation accounts as evidence for Metagenetics. In the original 1985 version of Metagenetics, McNallen cites a case of a Tlingit Indian apparently being the reincarnation of an ancestor as an example of “metaphysical implications to the bond of genetic kinship.” That this episode is sourced from a book titled Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation should prompt us to ask ‘what about the other nineteen cases?’ … Indeed, when we look at the literature for well-documented cases which are used as evidence for reincarnation, the overwhelming majority of the data contradicts the ‘within family’ standard that McNallen and other Folkish Heathens insist on.
Across a worldwide sample of 971 ‘reincarnation cases’ documented by researchers, only 20.1% involved the child purportedly reincarnating within their own family. The rest – four out of every five cases – were outside the family (about 27.6% involved an acquaintance of the family, and 52.3% were complete strangers with no prior connection). In the West, documented cases show a mix of family and non-family patterns. A survey of published American cases found that out of 35-39 cases where a past-life identity was verified, only 15 cases were within the child’s family, while the others were outside the family. Likewise, among European cases, only about 23 of 46-51 cases had a previous personality from the same family, but the remaining cases were non-family. Thus, whereas the global pattern is non-kin rebirth, in Western cases, half or more are outside the family lineage.
This data however contradicts the way that Folkish Heathens explicitly frame afterlife claims in terms of lineage, with McNallen writing that the Norse believed that: “A person did not come back [...] as a person of another race or tribe, but as a member of their own clan.” On that picture, rebirth is expected to be mechanically intra-familial and intra-ethnic, underwriting theories like Metagenetics. But if one takes the case-literature seriously, that expectation is empirically misplaced. Non-kin rebirth accounts for a significant portion of the data, with kin-line cases appearing as a subset classification rather than a universal law. This yields a straightforward dilemma for the Folkish Heathen. Either they dismiss the literature as ‘unreliable,’ thus forfeiting any empirical or quasi-scientific support for their reincarnation metaphysics, or they accept the literature as broadly credible, in which case they must concede that their interpretation of the sources conflicts with the data they are appealing to, which indicates that reincarnation does not respect fixed ‘folk boundaries.’
Furthermore, if reincarnation is in principle possible between any humans, but Folkish Heathenism teaches it should only occur within one’s own family or ethnic line, then the two accounts are logically incompatible - at least one must be false, because they set mutually exclusive constraints on the same process. Put bluntly, if souls can cross family and ethnic boundaries, the Folkish Heathen restriction is wrong, but if souls never cross those boundaries, the evidential perspective is wrong. But they cannot both be right about the same world (as we concluded with our critique of the Ancestral Principle). Likewise, if reincarnation is supposed to track a ‘specific family line,’ its scope has to be specified. Either it is confined to a narrow genealogical pedigree (excluding most of one’s actual ancestry), or it extends further and further out to ultimately encompass humanity as a whole. But every move outward either abandons the literal family-line claim or yields a de facto universalist account of reincarnation in which souls routinely cross even racial boundaries - undercutting the attempt to use reincarnation to buttress a closed, ethnic-particularist religious system. It is perhaps out of the need for a strategic retreat that McNallen states: “We of Asatru do not overly concern ourselves with the next life. We live here and now, in this existence.”
Metagenetics ultimately trades on an equivocation, sliding from ‘ancestry and temperament can shape dispositions’ to ‘ancestry therefore delivers a binding verdict about which gods one ought to worship.’ That slide is the classic ‘is–ought gap’ where purely descriptive statements about what is the case do not, by themselves, entail prescriptions about what one ought to do unless an additional normative ‘bridge principle’ is explicitly supplied and defended. Metagenetics never provides the bridge that turns ancestry into religious obligation. None of the materials it gestures toward - parapsychology, studies on religious aptitude, and reincarnation anecdotes - supplies the missing mandate from description to duty. Whether the carrier is DNA, ‘folk-soul,’ collective unconscious, reincarnation, or morphic field, the Metagenetics thesis still requires a lineage-indexed constraint that makes one particular, historical cult uniquely fitting for one ancestry. That constraint is asserted but never demonstrated.
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V.
When the Folkish Heathen is not flatly stating that ‘this religion is for us and us for it,’ they are making arguments like the Ancestral Principle and Metagenetics. These arguments attempt to provide a connection between the pre-Christian Germanic-Norse customs and the present time, overcoming a significant temporal rupture that has forever disqualified anyone from being an ‘insider’ to the customs. The underlying rationale behind the attempted connection is to avoid ‘conversion language’ and to paint Folkish Heathenry as the only ‘natural option’ which one should ‘acknowledge.’ There’s a genuine longing for continuity here – the desire to be what one’s ancestors were. But ironically, insisting that ‘we are just doing what our forebears did’ can become a kind of illusion when so much has to be reconstructed and reimagined as ‘outsiders.’ It glosses over the hard reality that a thousand-year gap can’t be wished or washed away by blood alone. Ironically, in their desire for a ‘birthright’ or a ‘tradition’, they must find a way to ignore history to arrive at it.
A favored claim of Folkish Heathens is to assert that their religion is ‘the oldest in the world’. But it is not the religion that they practice which is the oldest – it is the religion that they appeal to in their reconstructions, not the thing itself. This is to say that their ‘ancestral commands’ or ‘expression of the blood’ is, even moreso, not even correctly called a ‘reconstruction’ or even a ‘revival,’ but a retrojective ‘sleight of hand’ where the Folkish Heathen says: ‘this - this thing that we are doing now is that - what our ancestors did’ (at least to the extent that the theological or ethical force is analogous). When we break down another favored slogan of the Folkish Heathen, the move becomes more clear. ‘This is your tradition’ is translated to something much different sounding when it is parsed out: ‘This’ refers to a particular reconstruction produced by selection of evidence, supplemented by comparative religious studies, and interpretation of both; ‘Your’ means recruitment of the addressee as a subject to whom the tradition already applies to and binds; and ‘Tradition’ is the conflation of authority, normativity, and inheritance with the particular reconstruction. The addressee is effectively ‘shanghaiied’ into Folkish Heathenry when they accept the given definition of each word rather than parsing it out for themselves. A genuine, living tradition is embodied and continuously transmitted through proximate social interaction and community. When this chain is broken, and a distant, abstract past is invoked as the sole authority, the ‘tradition’ becomes a matter of intellectual choice and ideological alignment rather than organic inheritance or identity. Ultimately, it is a category error to say that Folkish Heathenry has any non-hermeneutic continuity with Historic Paganism. This phenomenon will be expanded upon and proven more in Part II.
But regardless, this is why the move is made to associate ‘the religion’ with ‘the blood.’ If that association - as articulated by Metagenetics and the Ancestral Principle - is true, then it does become the case that ‘the religion has always been with us’ and any spacio-temporal distance can be immediately bridged. The operative word here though is if, with Metagenetics and the Ancestral Principle failing to answer it in the affirmative. The core thrust of McNallen’s argument is not only that religious culture and ethnicity are intertwined in a mutual feedback loop such that inhibiting one tends to inhibit the other, but that religious culture itself is spiritually encoded in the hereditary substrate such that a people’s gods, myths, and ritual patterns are, in principle, properties of that ethnic lineage rather than merely learned conventions. It is this extra leap which the evidence advises against. Indeed, if Metagenetics were true, then present gaps in knowledge or disagreements about practices could be adjudicated through (effectively) ‘group meditation’ on the ‘folk soul.’ Indeed, the ongoing scholarly efforts to ‘establish orthodoxy’ within modern Folkish Heathenry (ex.: the Norenna Society) are perhaps the best evidence against ‘blood memory’ or ‘inherited knowledge’. Similarly, the issue with the Ancestral Principle’s association between ‘the religion’ and ‘the blood’ is not in its acknowledgement of ‘pre-rational brute facts,’ or ‘filial piety,’ or the ‘weight of authority’ in our development - instead, the issue is in how these things are defined, how those definitions require conflation, and how authorities are ‘ranked’ as it applies to reconstruction efforts. The issue is that to even apply the Ancestral Principle in a historically-broken tradition, one must presuppose external truth-tracking methods to identify who the ancestors were and what they commanded, so ‘ancestral authority’ is epistemically dependent on the establishment of external, objective standards rather than something ‘primordially binding.’
It should become quite clear at this point, as we conclude this article, that Folkish Heathen apologetics function more to shield the worldview from investigation than to invite a reassessment by ‘setting the record straight.’ The severity of the arguments betrays the desperation of intending to preclude debate, which ultimately undercuts credibility. And it must be stated again that these arguments - along with my own rebuttals - are only really warranted by a ‘broken tradition’ (which is fundamentally an oxymoron). If the pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs had survived to the present, the conversation would be much, much different. However, that is simply not the case, which is again why the Folkish Heathen emphasis must be on the only thing shared between them and their ancestors, which is blood - or moreso: why they transmute a selective genealogy and a particular definition of what ‘blood’ is into an insistence on a priori obedience to the ‘reconstruction’ they generate and gesture toward.
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In the following article, we will investigate the extent of Historic Pagan commands by examining the Folkish Heathen moral system and the lore that it appeals to. After that, we will conclude Part I with an article that investigates who this ideology attracts and why. Let us close in prayer:
“Almighty ever-living God, who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”
Amen.