An Open Letter Response to 'Jay Dyer on Paganism'

Penned when I found myself responding aloud to an Orthodox vlogger's critique of "Neopaganism"

Given my cultural and religious interests my Youtube feed is a fairly even mix of mythology, Tru religious content, and various fitness, religious (largely Christian), political and philosophical discussions and vlogs, and a recent one I felt would yield a fruitful discussion is Jay Dyer on Paganism.

I’ve never met the man and frankly, like me or hate me it wouldn’t change his points. I likely won’t quote his statements word for word, but the video is linked in the first paragraph so feel free to check my assessment against the original, I found the criticism fairly even-handed.

1. Pagans assume all objectivity is an extension of Monotheism, and therefore reason objectivity itself is a false concept, leaving only a telos of chaos, the rule of the three uncaring and brutal Fates.

Christians begin from the Monotheistic frame, in which there is a single physical, moral, and teleological author to to time, space and everything within it who has established a pre-determined universe with a beginning, middle, and end. Mr. Dyer reasons therefore in the absence of this creator… the “capital G God”… the only uniting principle would be chaos. I think he is more right than he realizes.

Though he suggests chaos as a negative, a listless and unpredictable alternative to the ordination of existence by a God, I would posit chaos is the unifying feature of the observable universe… put differently… the common feature from the atom to the galaxy is entropy.

If you build a house with all the wiring, siding, furniture, and glass shining and clean and perfect, from the moment it is done (and even before that) it is trying to crumble back to rust and mossy splinters. That is an objective fact, and we pagans readily acknowledge the at-times brutal, efficient rules of reality.

Christians believe in an orderly world that was disrupted by corruption, by a wrong choice. The world was initially a perfect garden made from nothing, from eidos, from the Word which became more carnal, more feral, more violent by a fall.

The Troth recounts how Midgard, and the other worlds, were made with slaughter, with sacrifice. Othinn and his brothers slew the giant Ymir, tore apart his body and the world is composed of his corpse. Nature, with all it’s claws and teeth and venom and muscle and blood and fat, is not the result of a sin, but a natural extension of it’s formation.

The adversaries of the Gods, primordial holdouts of the Etin race, Ymir’s kin, are extensions of this chaos; plague, wildfire, ice storms, the ocean, the naked wrath of a brutal and uncaring wilderness.

All men are doomed, what matters is how we face our doom when it comes. Men and Gods are indeed ruled by impartial and sometimes deeply unfair Fates, but then who told you Fate would be fair?

2. Pagans don’t really believe in the Gods, they are moral stories, archetypes, or totemic representations of ideals and nature.

This is a popular misconception about pagans… that we are “nature worshippers,” or that the Gods aren’t really Gods.

The preserved lore is indeed full of moral stories and explanations about the world, as well as just damn good stories. But then, so is the Bible. Ultimately, the question of belief is a deeply personal one, and while we have more than our share of rainbow-bedecked defilers… so too do Christ’s many churches. For myself, I know deeply that the Gods are very real and very present forces in the world who have their own intelligence, designs, and defy my explanation, beyond that I freely admit ignorance to their deeper natures.

The likes of Varg Vikernes who will write at length about paganism while maintaining his Black Metal contempt for any metaphysical beliefs is clearly not representative of a religious tradition — someday I will write about his book and “theology” but not today.

The Gods hold domain over aspects of nature, that much is true, but especially the Aesir, or Olympians if you’re more familiar with the Classical tradition, are Gods of Order, they outline both metaphysical and cultural guidelines by which the chaos of nature (that overwhelming constant again) is held at bay. Social order, rituals to ensure good crop, safe childbirth, victory in battle, these are not “larping” anymore than the Latin Mass is, they are HOW mankind upholds that order, keeping kinship with the Gods.

3. Pagans are so because they perceive both secular modernity and liberalized Christianity to be effete, vapid, pathetic, and contrary to masculinity. Mr. Dyer gives credence to this criticism for Western European Christian traditions, but argues Orthodox Christianity simply is not.

I gladly accept Mr. Dyer’s, and many other online Christian thinkers, acknowledgement of the dire situation of their religion’s failure to cultivate and uphold a masculine, martial tradition… but that’s not why I keep the Troth. I keep the Folk Faith because it’s true.

However, when it comes to the “liberalizing” character of Christianity, I would say my contentions with it as a social philosophy go much deeper than the largely secular political sheen painted over it since the Civil Rights Movement. Christianity is a universalizing practice, and does not support a theological allowance for the distinction and defense of one’s self, homeland and folk, at least not to the degree a “Folk Faith” does by definition.

All men are not brothers, and we do not owe our attackers anything. Generosity is a virtue, and greed is a dishonor… but where Christ is a Prince of Peace, Othinn is the Father of Victories.

"But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also." Matthew 5:39

“When you are at war, call it war, and give your enemies no peace.” Havamal 127 trans. by Dr. Jackson Crawford

As the new Pope seems at least as keen to defend mass, uncontrolled immigration into Europe and America for the sake of “love and bridges”… I see no reason to believe this self-destructive degree of altruism will change, Western, Eastern or otherwise. If the Folk is not sacred, then it will fall before others who consider THEIR way of life, and their blood, sacred.

4. Pagans are drawn to paganism because it has a false appearance of tradition, of family, of ritual and the transcendent to grasp onto in a godless, materialist age.

While Mr. Dyer maintains pagan practices hold only the appearance of a sense of tradition, family, rootedness and so forth… I simply contend the bonds of kinship, community, and common practice and custom I have found in a decade of my faith are every bit as real as his own, and rooted in my own tongue and homelands both lived and historic, rather than warping myself into a facsimile of a Levantine tribal from a place and practice I have no blood or cultural connection to whatsoever.

If his assertion of the falsehood of these things comes down to “My God is real and yours isn’t,” then there really isn’t a useful discussion to be had here and we’ll simply disagree.

5. Pagans are caught in a contradiction between claiming both the height of Imperial Roman grandeur, and the strength and barbarism of the Celts, Goths, Germans and Britons that fought and sacked the same.

I personally do not see a contradiction here, as he himself points out both Caesar and the Gauls he fought against were pagans, if anything this displays the breadth of Pre-Christian Europe.

By the same token, I could point to Trad Masculine Christians adoration of quiet abbey monks and vicious Crusading orders who — as much as Christians don’t want to admit it — did every bit as much sacking, raping, and burning as any Vikings did, while assured of Heaven because their war was ordained.

One point that did stick out to me as amusing, was Dyer uses the example of Caesar writing about the “degenerate” Gauls as an example of pagan barbarism. I would simply point out Caesar was writing himself into something between war propaganda and an adventure novel for it’s time… and his characterization of both the enemy and himself — while colorful and detailed — is at least politically unreliable.

Meanwhile, other Roman authors would actually use the barbarian Germans as exemplars of sexual and societal restraint to call out moral decay within the Eternal City, as Tacitus would with Germania, in which he exemplifies the Germans as fiercely observing chastity, opposition to drunkenness and commitment to marriage.

Did these pagan Germans flay their enemies alive and feed their hearts to the crows? Absolutely, but were they the orgiastic mother-of-the-wen cult Dyer alludes to? Certainly not as Tacitus recorded them at least.

6. Pagans reject Christianity because they (at least more politically radical ones) think it’s a Jewish, or Roman political, conspiracy. And Pagans are wrong because however weak they think Christianity is, their traditions were crushed by Christianity.

I could, and may, write at length about the political expediency of Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, needless to say I think Christianity succeeded because it was taken up by Europe, not the other way around.

I don’t think “conspiracy” is necessary to explain the importing and re-shaping of the Roman Empire into a medieval theocracy, I don’t even think the Church is cynical, they truly believed and believe in their mission from their God.

But our Gods were with us for 4,000 years against the Christian God’s one and a half, and as His influence has waned in the West with the death Nietzsche saw and lamented in his own day, his mistake was not recognizing while A God may have succumbed to his contradictions, Sunne still rose, Njodr still churned the waves and Othinn still whipped up the winds upon Sleipnir.

The Gods didn’t die when the missionaries burned their idols, we simply forgot their names. Now those names, those Gods, stir again as the Folk need them most to return our homes, our strength, our pride to us.

The Gods are not subjected to the past, they are eternally true and eternally present and we need only reach out to them again, to re-light those fires and we are doing so already so that the Void of this godless age begins to look like the starry sky.

I hope I have communicated respect and goodwill towards my Christian friends, while illuminating something of the constitution and character of the Troth as I have learned it. Thank you!