This has started off as one idea but it has evolved and I want to follow this thread. This is will be a work extending over series of articles that continue in the same theme. It will create an overall tapestry over time. When writing about such topics as the spiritual nature of man it can be challenging to be too precise and to approach things too directly. So many ideas must be explored and expanded upon because of the depth of the topic. Anything less would cheapen the project. Praise the Gods and thanks for reading.
How shall we begin? How do I proceed? How do we write about the Gods? At first, I was thinking about going straight into Carl Jung and the archetypes. It really should be Archetypes with a capital A. This is because Archetypes are living entities, more than just mere symbols that most people think. Further, Jung is always a great way to start a spiritual discussion when confronted with the Western mind that has lost its way of seeing. Though I love delving into Jung, upon further reflection maybe this is not the best place to start. My own journey and how I came to relate to the Gods seems like the better jumping off point. Understanding can come in many ways. My life and search for the Gods has been a story. All our lives are stories. Those stories, those personal journeys can do more for understanding than well-reasoned arguments. After all, we are all on the path whether we know it or not, the path of the soul.
I remember in high school trying to read the bible. It is probably an age when many people question their faith, and this is when I started to question the nature of life, God, and human’s spiritual nature. It was as if a dark shadow came across my vision. The optimism of my early years of a still young life had faded and I felt now a sense of meaninglessness to the world. Being raised Catholic I did what any good Catholic would do. I read the bible. Faith was something that needed to be kindled right? Just have faith, right? Easy to say but hard to put into practice. I tried reading the Old Testament but after a while it really did not click at all, so I switched to the New Testament. Upon reading the New Testament nothing resonated either. I did not feel connection to what I read, and it failed to offer insights I was seeking.
Eventually I had to put the idea of faith behind, and I became agnostic. These issues, these questions I had were overwhelming me and I decided I could not keep traveling the path of searching with no answers. The idea of God would have to be shelved and reconsidered at some future date. I had to live my life and so I did. I put out of my mind the questions of nature of life, death and God. I just focused on each day. This approach worked for a while.
Later in college a friend gave me a book by Richard Dawkins. At the time I became convinced that the only rational position was atheism. So, I became an atheist for a few years. I am thinking upon that now and wondering what that was like for me so many years ago? Many have postulated that the spiritual impulse in man is natural and universal and always comes through one way or another. I believe for modern people in the United States the spiritual impulse largely comes through in national politics, obviously in a very distorted way. For most people the government is their God, their ideologies reign supreme over everything else. Right and Left in constant battle like the angels and fallen angels of old; each side with its villains and saviors.
If the American political system are not people’s God, then second on the list would be sports figures. You can always tell a civilization’s priorities by what it builds. Most civilizations, when healthy, build large temples to their Gods. In the United Sates, the largest buildings are sports arenas where people drive distances to wait in lines, to pile into impossibly small, crowded seats, to drink beer and to watch their favorite team. Alcohol could even be considered the undeclared sacrament of “sports watching”. Athleticism and its celebration is very healthy but its worship at the expense of everything else is not. These people are not spiritual in any traditional or natural way. They are internally filling in those uncomfortable gaps in their psyche with entertainment and distraction.
What was it like for me back then? After high school I joined the Marine Corps and went to boot camp right after. I realize now, in my present state of mind, that the Marine Corps was my God. My life revolved around it in a way that only other Marines would understand. The martial ethos was in the very fabric of the organization. It also changed me. I was not the same person when I came out.
The Marine Corps was an initiation. Today most religions have some type of initiation such as First Communion. These initiations are based on much older traditions. Modern initiations have been watered down so much that they do little to satisfy the spiritual impulse. This was not the case in the past. Traditional tribal societies were much different. Coming of age ceremonies and rituals could often be deadly and would be considered outright torture today. It took great perseverance and inner strength to become a man, to become part of the tribe. Though this is almost completely absent in modern society, the need for great challenges is deeply part of who we are, as in the hero’s journey for example. One of the few places that mankind can find such a challenge today is in the military, especially the Marine Corps. This deep need for the initiation and spiritual challenge is no longer found through religion but strangely enough through the military arm of the United States government.
Just like the past, where the trials of ordeal and initiation create a strong sense of tribe and community, so does Boot Camp for Marines. I think these words “tribe” and “community” fail to capture the true feeling of what has been created. You are part of a new inner club, an “elite”, different from the rest of society who now seem undisciplined and lazy. You feel this down into your bones. Furthermore, it is more than just a feeling, you ARE different. You are forever changed and so are those who went through the same ordeal. The OTHERS will never know, they will never understand. They are not part of the tribe. Those belonging to the tribe become brothers, family.
Now, looking back, those fellow Marines were spiritual brothers. They filled that deep need in all of us for true comradery instead of the shallow relationships that are the norm in modern civilization. Modern churches might try to create a sense community, usually through charity but this is deeply different than the warrior communities of old where death and war were always present. Nearness to death and experiences of great hardship create a different sort of comrade.
Only now do I understand how the Marine Corps fills a deep need in the Indo-European soul even though I had abandoned overt spiritual faith at the time. If one looks back on all the Indo-European religions, they were all martial religions. A people’s God’s always reflects to a people’s Folk Soul. To go into further detail from encyclopedia.com of all places:
“As Georges Dumézil, the leading contemporary expert on comparative Indo-European mythology, long ago demonstrated, war gods and the ideology that is associated with them played an extremely important role in the pantheons of most, if not all of the early Indo-European-speaking societies. To cite several well-attested examples: the ancient Indic war god Indra, by far the most prominent of the Vedic divinities, the ubiquitous Roman god Mars, the Greek war god Ares, and the Norse god Þórr (Thor), thunderbolt-wielder par excellence and the most popular of the ancient Scandinavian divinities. Moreover, heroes and demigods, like Arjuna, Herakles, Siegfried, Cú Chulainn, Arthur, and Achilles, all occupied important positions in their respective traditions. Indeed, like most pastoral nomads, modern as well as ancient, the ancestors of the Greeks, Hittites, Aryans, Celts, Germans, and so forth, seem to have regarded warfare as a fundamental fact of life and to have held both the war band and its collective representations in high esteem.(Littleton, 2023)”
These archetypes simply do not go away because today’s society has become focused on bourgeois values of materialism. Furthermore, those that shy away from the idea of warrior values being at the heart of society have to contend that we live in physical reality, not the “FEEL-GOOD” reality that they wish or pretend exists. To live in truth, the Tao, the Ur, is most important. The ability to fight and defend one’s self and one’s civilization has been critical for survival for all of human history. In addition, warrior virtues are “part of the package” so to speak. These include honor, loyalty, courage, and the idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the tribe and people. This contrasts with today’s pampered consumerist values that put profit seeking above all else. The values of our ancestors were much different.
A peoples’ Gods represent the collective unconscious of a people. This is always true except for the cases where a foreign creed is imposed on a people. Examples of this are Islam and Christianity. In the Jungian model, a people’s Gods are their archetypes, powerful psychic influences that exist beyond the individual person but in the collective or racial unconscious.
The Gods are always there waiting, our archetypes are always inside of us. It matters little if a foreign religion has become the outside veneer of a people. Their true Gods and archetypes will always come through. The more virile the people, the more they adhere to their nature, the more their archetypes come through. This can be seen in the Middle Ages, though Christianity overlaid the culture, the people remained largely unchanged. Instead European people adapted and changed Christianity to suit them.(Russel, 1994)
In the end, the conflict between the Folk Soul and the teachings of a foreign religion will become apparent. A people can only adapt to a foreign religion until the glaring inconsistences become too obvious. Then the people must make a choice. Giving up religion and spirituality altogether is one option and indeed the most common one in the modern age. The second option, is to continue to choose the foreign creed over their own nature. The third option, and the whole purpose of the Dagaz Rite project, is to look back into the past and rediscover our true spiritual nature. TO REDISCOVER OUR GODS.
1. Littleton, Scott (2023, February 25th) WAR AND WARRIORS: INDO-EUROPEAN BELIEFS AND PRACTICES. Encyclopedia.com https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/war-and-warriors-indo-european-beliefs-and-practices
2. Russel, James. (1994) The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation