The truth which the “conservative” refuses to accept is that presidents, parties, popes and pastors have been selling them upriver for years, and will continue to, because just like we heathens out on the fringes, they know what time it is. While reactionaries cling to such leaders hoping for a dramatic “raise the colors” moment where a single Alexandrian figure will declare the Retvrn, those within the power structure are busy prying gems out of the walls of their palaces and making their escape from the disaster they facilitated. COVID was the beginning of the “loot the treasury” phase of the West as we know it, but it wasn’t even close to the end.

Since I returned from my time out West, and have been welcomed into the wider world of organized Heathenry, I have seen the (forgive the academic buzzword) intersection of these two issues, and a common solution to the two. The sense of belonging and direction which has historically flowed down from nation, organized church and ethnic enclave is being fostered within Kindreds.

A Kindred is a formal name for a practicing group of Asatruar, but far beyond a simple “faith community,” it often also entails an oath-sworn clan of common history, beliefs, and a shared goal of practical independence from broader structures.

In much the same way agricultural cooperatives and distant, rural communities trade amongst themselves for skills, goods, and services which are otherwise distant and expensive, the Kindred offers a social adhesive, a moral grounding in one’s own culture and history, and the counsel of a Gothi or Gythia without the need for a foreign creed or deference to a distant pontiff. Even within Heathenry itself, or associations of Kindreds, there is wide room for locally-tailored expressions of the Folk-Faith. The development of a unique character based on the landscape, local customs, and in-group priorities of the Kindred are not only anticipated, but encouraged by the broader movement.

This independence has been cited by more outspoken critics, especially Christians, as it prevents an “orthodoxy” of Folkish practice and, so they say, prevents a broader society from being able to rest upon and build up from this social environment. I do think there is some merit to this argument, in that what we build must be scalable beyond the village to a degree, and it cannot be totally left to every individual Gothi and Kindred to “reinvent the wheel.” Also, a common baseline does prevent the excesses of more new-age ideas from warping the Folk-Faith into something degrading and sterile. That said, a strong groundwork has been laid drawing from the Eddas, Sagas, and well-established archaeological evidence, and as these proliferate into the wider culture I believe Heathenry will pass it’s “pre-Nicene” state.

The inverse of the “orthodoxy” argument against Heathenry is also true, being bound to a single creed and hierarchy also entangles the destiny of a kindred (or congregation) to the decisions of their sprawling authority apparatus. Look no further than Catholics today, forced to find increasingly elaborate ways to explain around the obvious corruption of their clergy and the secular-political motivations of their leaders. Kindreds are assemblies of family units, in the manner of an ancient Republic, where the Gothi is held to the highest standard among equals, and can be called to account, stripped of title and even outlawed by the community should corruption be proven. Within the Kindred, authority makes one more beholden to the body of the Folk, not less.

In summary, what I am finding is just as we can avoid eating sludge by buying local, we can dig deep roots and build meaningful bonds by believing local, and find in our sworn kinsmen, our shared heritage, the gods of our blood, and the very land we live on a more fulfilling, generative and resilient source of meaning to safeguard our lives and legacy across this tumultuous era.

Go with the Gods,

Bran

I have seen shrines erected, I have felt the fire stoked,

I have seen the grasp of foreign creed from countless True sons broke!

Our Way is marching on…

Glory, glory to the Old Ways!

Glory, glory to our Folk Ways!

Glory to the Aesir and tradition come again!

Our Way is marching on!

I have heard Them in the poets of a hundred circling camps,

I have poured out my libation in the evening dews and damps,

I’ve recited ancient stories by the dim and flaring lamps!

Our Way is marching on…

Glory, glory to the Old Ways!

Glory, glory to our Folk Ways!

Glory to the Aesir and tradition come again!

Our Way is marching on!

In the beauty of the tall pines, I have seen the hawk a’wing,

I have felt my Kindred’s kindness, I have learned the songs to sing,

I have sat and born-ed witness to the proud and noble Thing!

while Our Way is marching on…

Glory, glory to the Old Ways!

Glory, glory to our Folk Ways!

Glory to the Aesir and tradition come again!

Our Way is marching on!

We have sounded now the war-horn that shall never call retreat,

The Allfather stirs men to fight from his all-seeing seat,

Be swift to answer him, my kin, and never taste defeat!

Our Way is marching on…

Glory, glory to the Old Ways!

Glory, glory to our Folk Ways!

Glory to the Aesir and tradition come again!

Our Way is marching on!

I have previously addressed what I call “pubmoot pagans” as well in an article of my own, but rather than drilling down more on the fake and gay of the scene, I believe the most constructive direction to take this discourse is to begin from the question left behind following critique… what does Heathenry look like without the Renaissance Faire/D&D/Vikings™ trappings?

An easy distinguishing feature of Tru folk from LARPers is, the honor-based morality and ideals of the Folkway. While the general moral imagination in the West is still predicated upon sin or guilt, and the alleviation of it either through absolution or therapy, the heathen heart sees our spirits, strengths, and shortcomings as our own, and tied to the honor and reputation of those who associate with us. This is on the one hand liberating, as it carries immense freedom and agency for the individual, but it also demands a heavy responsibility as there’s no cosmic “backsies,” what’s put out is out and no one but us and ours are responsible for it.

Lived Heathenry is also deeply local, to the Kindred, to the region, and to the very spirits of the land one inhabits. Whereas most modern religions are universalizing and globalizing, Heathenry has a significant substrate of animism, in which one’s ancestors, the forests, rivers and mountains make up the pantheon which is most regularly engaged with. The Gods are present and observed properly, but in truth it is the ancestors and vaettir who are the most frequent, and closest, entities to the daily practice. Observances such as donning Thor’s hammer, or kindling a hearth or shrine candle are seamlessly integrated and pragmatic elements of one’s day which weave in the understanding of the world as overflowing with spiritual potency.

This proximity is not just for the supernatural either, kinship and even deep friendship bonds are an explicit good in the Troth, and the giving of gifts, of travelling to visit kinsmen and being there to support them is at the core of the practicing heathen’s responsibility. In contrast to the “telescopic empathy” of evangelizing missions or going door-to-door fishing for converts, it is the physical, mental, and spiritual wellness of one’s own extended clan which represents the highest need.

The spiritual calendar of the Heathen is guided by the turning of the seasons, in which offerings are made to the Gods to maintain the Frithshelga, or “sacred bond” between the clan and Holy Powers. These are not offerings to stay the wrath of a jealous divine, or a compelled servitude, but the maintaining of a reciprocal partnership with the greater forces that created and safeguard order in the chaos of the cosmos. The gods bless and guide us, and in return they have a seat at our table, and a hero’s portion of our bounty. As previous great authors of our folkway have said, our relationship to the Holy Powers is not that of master and servant, but that of greater and lesser nobility. We are descended from the Gods, and hold them in the esteem of royalty, while conducting ourselves as faithful and honored descendents of that house.

In gathering as Kindreds at the high points of the year, in the reciting of sacred lore, and the telling of deeds accomplished, and taking oaths to the Gods, to one another, and pressing one another to lift the bar yet higher, we conduct ourselves in a manner our heroic ancestors would recognize and approve of, and in so doing, embody the Folkway.

You may have noticed at this point I’ve not mentioned any materials yet. If there’s one criticism of contemporary pagans I’ve heard from both detractors and even some tough-love types within our sphere, it’s the all-too frequent obsession with “pagan stuff.” Statues, malas, card sets, rune sets, incense, wall art, floor art, outdoor art, historical clothing, pendants, horns, mugs, shirts, hats, lots of weapons. While this is hardly unique to Heathendom, there’s truth to it.

A good chunk of the reason for this is simply vulgar consumerism to be sure, but I would also say many Tru folk are artists in their own right, and with gift-giving being such a significant element of the Folkway, it makes sense for adherents to garner items of that type. Perhaps the better advice is not to abstain from “pagan stuff,” but to make a point to gift treasures out at least as much as one takes in. Othinn is not a god of denial, but he does advise moderation.

Some materials are necessary, I would say at minimum some sort of pendant to wear as a daily devotional, idols of the Gods one observes, a rune set for becoming familiar with the Futhark, casting and so on, and a bowl and horn or chalice for performing libations. A sacred space should have a flame (usually a candle or a kind of incense), a bell, a ritual hammer and an oath ring. Essentially, what is needed to maintain a sacred space, and ritual components.

These taken together, the portrait of a heathen practitioner is certainly less boisterous than LARPers of both the hammer and cross-wearing varieties would have one believe. A faithful, local nature-lover who tells stories, gives gifts frequently, follows the seasons, hosts family and friends and maintains an altar to the Gods and spirits. In short, a life which makes for terrible “content.” Maybe that should be the goal all along.

Go with the Gods,

Bran

A rootless suburban American becomes disaffected with the hollow and sterile state of the modern West’s spiritual life, the obvious corruption of local churches, anachronistic hold-ups and general blindness to the hunger for sincerity and ancient wisdom brought on by our “culture” consisting of a 24/7 barrage of commercials.

This unmoored soul hears about the pristine and mysterious East, a bastion of wisdom beyond the reach of the flickering screens, where wise men with impressive beards and staves maintain thousand-year old customs and train a select few to pursue a closeness to the Divine.

They pick up a handful of books, find a local outpost of this oriental tradition for community, and scrap their entire personality prior to finding The Way™ because finally, FINALLY they feel the depth of history, the conviction of discipline, and the richness of contemplation in the tradition.

Ultimately, this newborn seeker reaches the Sacred East themselves, having a profound immersion in the heartland of their adopted tradition, accepting initiation from the masters who have always dwelt there, returning triumphant to their decadent and debased Western homeland ready to lift up the willing to their newfound state of bliss, and condemn without mercy those who cling to their ignorance.

They will extoll The Way™ to anyone who will listen and plenty who won’t, write off the improprieties of their mentors and idols as either Western slander or somehow still serving The Way™ and generally be a nuisance for the people who actually were born into and keep the original tradition.

Am I describing the trend of recent young male converts to Eastern Orthodoxy…

… Or your aunt Karen’s trip to India in the 80’s?

I say “Orthobros are bitter New Agers” because the underlying motivation of the two movements is the same. There really is good reason to be sick to death of the spiritual poverty of Secular Humanism, and it’s easy to imagine a culture beyond the bounds of the GAE (Global American Empire, for you uninitiated) would offer a sanctuary from the excesses of The Cult of the Rainbow Flag.

But in the same way Karen was suckered in by a sex-pest of a guru during her acid ceremony in the Amazon a few decades ago, these guys are being fed a diluted version of an ethnic form of Christianity by the bullshitters within ROCOR or wherever else will take them, to the chagrin of actual Greeks, Ukrainians, Russians etc. who are no doubt wondering where these terminally-online dudes came from.

In the same way you can do yoga without being a “pilgrimage to India girlie,” I’m not saying every westerner who becomes Orthodox is on this train, and I have to think many of them are far more critical of the situation than I am.

As is generally my refrain when addressing the state of spirituality in the West, the answer which both New Agers and Orthobros (and Tradcaths who follow a similar path, even if strictly speaking it is “more Western”) ignore or even flee from is to look to their blood.

The taboo against reverence for our own history and ancestors underlies both Christianity and the draw towards foreign ‘indigenous’ customs. White kids will attend powwows, or Greek monasteries, or Amazonian poison-frog vision quests because the one verboten path is the one of our own forebears. But the weight of that taboo has lessened and continues to decline.

I’m not going to try to reason with Orthobros any more than I do other hostile Christian sects, especially knowing like these other “rushes to the east,” it will fizzle out, a handful of sincere die-hards will remain, and those that get bored will style themselves Christian Samurai in a year or two.

To my readers however, I will argue that you carry within your blood a heritage and a practice which is deeply rooted in your OWN ancestral lands, languages, and customs, and myself and many other gifted creators across Europe and her diaspora are breathing new life into Heathendom, so our children don’t feel the need to go venturing into the Amazon, up the Ganges, or to Moscow for a spiritual tradition.

Go with the Gods,

Bran

but while I bear the Hammer, I shall not bend the knee,

Come trouble and come foeman, come supernatural strife,

I’ll meet you with a vicious laugh, and boot and fist and knife!

I did not cross the mountains, nor seas to give up now,

the waves of this newest storm shall crash upon the bow!

The Choosers fly above us, keeping vigil for the fall,

In this Wolf Age we’re facing, the victor will take all!

We march beneath the standard, it grants us strength and pride,

ten-thousand years of Ancestors marching at our side!

Our blood runs hot, our honor high, for we are in the right,

And when the foe shall cross our path, they’ll feel the Striker’s might!

We’ll wrest a noble living, from this ruined rocky ground,

our fields will flourish once again, and families abound!

There’s no paradise awaiting, nor honor in defeat,

We’ll be asked what we did for blood, when the Gods above we meet.

The foreign creed would have us throw our honor down,

They offers us submission, to the thorns upon his crown,

But pleading and insulting shall nothing them avail,

for I choose to hold the Hammer, instead of cross and nails!

We fight beneath the standard, it grants us strength and pride,

ten-thousand years of Ancestors fighting at our side!

Our blood runs hot, our honor high, for we are in the right,

And when the foe shall cross our path, they’ll feel the Striker’s might!

A new dawn is approaching, but the battle shall not end,

for to live is to struggle, and this we shall commend!

We have the strength and spirits high for the Just and Good and Right,

and when the Serpent should rise up, Brave Thor shall lead the fight!

Take heed to me, my kinsmen, don’t let the threat unman!,

Your blood has faced every tragedy as a noble, fighting clan!

Let us pick our ground with certainty, a fine place to die,

and with bared steel in our hands we hold the standard high!

We win beneath the standard, it grants us strength and pride,

ten-thousand years of Ancestors victorious at our side!

Our blood runs hot, our honor high, for we are in the right,

And when the foe shall cross our path, they’ll feel the Striker’s might!

Am I attractive? How would I know? The conventional wisdom most of us would have been brought up in is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but I think everyone intuits that this principle does not scale. We’re on about a decade straight of beauty and fashion companies forwarding “diverse” expressions of beauty to either the ridicule, or far worse apathy, of the public.

The mere existence of academic pieces and culture articles condemning “Western beauty standards” shows that

a.) there are recognizable hard, fast rules to a “conventional” beauty

b.) these standards are clearly resistant to social conditioning to change or undermine them.

Beauty as a realm of social competition has traditionally fallen primarily within the female space, which may be characterized with ruthless passive-aggressive observations in group pictures between the fit of clothes, shape of knees, facial expression etc. This competition has only accelerated for the ladies in the time of social media.

What has proven far more jarring, especially lately, is the explosion of masculine beauty competition online.

Emerging from a variety of long-existing subcultures, from self-described “involuntary celibates” to pick up artistry communities and even overlap with the vitalism/fizeek gym sphere, the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing” seems to have sprung whole and complicated from nowhere… but in truth is the coming to a head of a LOT of nihilistic masculine wandering in the decaying blue-light of our contemporary social environment.

The comparison to the ‘beautiful ones’ from the Mouse Utopia experiments has been done to death already, and while certainly an apt comparison, doesn’t explain much beyond returning to the same old lines we have about our dead-end culture. What interests me about this subculture is its intuition about the ideal of the male form, and how it’s perversion of the path to seek it seems stuck between the abstract, and the realization of the personal. If there’s one thing the ‘looksmaxxers’ get right in their analysis, it’s their rejection of “everyone being beautiful in their own way.” This sentiment is identified as a comforting platitude and disregarded. However, rather than fulfilling the arc of striving towards the timeless and then returning to individuation, realizing the ideal in their own form, they remain slavishly attached to the abstract.

In other words, these young men are not trying to achieve the greatness Greek or Roman statues represent, but to become these statues themselves. Dead stone (or in this case, plastic) molded to resemble strength, competence, and fine genetics. Not to actually possess the vitality or the confidence of the figure they aspire to, even the version of themselves they imagine, only to achieve it’s likeness. These young men with the thousands of dollars in surgery, skincare, and pharmaceuticals to achieve this copy-paste look cannot afford to be involved in the kinds of real-world circumstances that actually shape a man to have the particular aura, the physicality, and the “predatory” confidence their fashion is intended to reflect. A perfect example came from influencer Clavicular, when he collapsed in public and his entourage of fellow maxxers looked like deer in headlights as their friend bodied into the floor out of nowhere.

Now, I want to clarify, I’m sure a seasoned Looksmaxxer could use photographs of my face to write up a 100 page report on how the tilt of my eyebrows and shape of my eyes under medium-yellow lighting means I’m a 5/100 and will be viciously chinmogged by every maxxer on the subreddit. All of that may in fact, be true. I’m not interested in pursuing my “maximum potential” the way they define it.

In truth I feel bad for these guys. They can clearly feel something masculine has been stripped from them, and with the directionless digital environment they’ve been given, in a weird way they’re trying to claw it back. Being sensitive young men, especially those raised online, I think many of them deeply want a very straightforward “how to” to gain that missing confidence. A gamified, understandable progression. Looksmaxxing seems to me full of charts, ratios, and systems-type thinking towards exactly this end. Trying to create the look of confidence in a $99/month program.

When I train in the gym, I am inspired by Brad Pitt in Troy, Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, guys who closer resemble my natural frame and have built up impressive physiques around it. But my goal is not to ‘become Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy 2004’ to the degree of intentionally breaking my nose and jaw then applying makeup to better resemble his proportions.

I am in good shape, I’m proud of it, but it’s far from the most interesting thing about me. I have no idea if I have “predator” or “prey-coded” eyes, but I know i’ve boxed enough to be comfortable with intense physical confrontation. I’ve gotten a date from over-explaining the Saga I was reading at the time (Egil’s Saga for those curious.) The ideal is a step, we take the unmolded clay of who we are and use these figures, statues, actors as guideposts towards the timeless aesthetic of the masculine, but under healthy pressure this becomes the realization of ourselves more fully. Through subjecting ourselves to discipline, to challenge, to risk, in skills and in strength and endurance we develop an innate confidence, which the outer physique merely represents.

Looksmaxxing is a dead end, to be honest I think if Clavicular didn’t create it, his medical problems and the fallout of social perception will help it to recede into the background of terminally online beauty culture. I just sincerely hope the guys who have done so much to themselves to prop up a certain image, are able to craft a self within it to truly ground them, and push them forwards.

“‘What then will you do this night?’ asked Laeg, as Cu Chulainn sat looking sullen looking into their campfire. The young hero turned to his chariot-driver in bewilderment, ‘What will I do? I must prepare to fight to the death with my battle-brother, one I would have died for but a few days ago!”

The driver nodded, “and Ferdiad must prepare for the same. Do you believe he sits resigned in the dark, waiting for the dawn? I tell you, he is cleaning his weapons, seeing to his armor, eating hearty and drinking deep, and taking his lover as many times as he can this night, for he knows tomorrow he must prevail… or die. I ask you again, friend Cu Chulainn… what will you do this night?”

The above is my rough retelling from memory of a passage from The Raid, a retelling of the Cattle Raid of Cooley lent to me by my good friend , for research on some longform writing I am working on. The passage itself stuck with me, as I felt in Laeg’s admonishment some criticism of my own predisposition towards overthinking.

Be it social, romantic, or financial troubles, it is easy to allow worried thoughts to play like radio static over clear, directional thinking. What others have called “analysis paralysis,” which has been made all the worse among my peers by the constant torrent of fake, targeted, or even just useless information from being constantly plugged into the web.

The material circumstances Cu Chulainn faces do not change in the above passage, the duel, his friend, and the consequences remain the same. What Laeg is doing is not ‘fixing’ the external issues for his friend, but snapping him out of a downward spiral of overthinking. In our digital hellscape, Zoomers have coined the turn of phrase “touch grass” for this sort of jolt, to draw back from the cloud of mental and digital noise and experience the real.

“Fortune comes to effort’s aid” is a mantra I often repeat, especially while shaking free of the digitally-induced mental cloud. Something as simple as identifying two or three objectives for the day, and seeing them done is usually enough to disturb the feedback loop and break the spell. Setting aside time to wander in the forest, or a day to hit the gym without a set plan and just work out whatever catches my eye in the moment.

Notice also, that Laeg’s advice is not solely about immediate preparation for the task. Plenty of influencers write on optimising one’s circumstances, which the above passage might resemble at first glance, but as essential as arms and armor are before the fight, according to Laeg, so is making love to a woman. Not a hedonistic frivolity, but a connection to nourish the body and spirit before fate calls. Mental and physical upkeep, not in ignorance of the challenges in front of us, but precisely because of them. Our adversaries (worldly and supernatural) would have us exhausted and overwhelmed.

We must not drown in thoughts about what was or will be, nor become bogged down in the details of a situation, but to live fully in the moment, to be consciously above the mental chatter, and to commit fully to the task with the dignity and strength expected of a warrior.

This advice is as needed today as it was by that campfire, as we too prepare for the struggles that will make, or break us.

Though not part of the original novel, the mantra itself feels very in-line with Dune’s emphasis on personal will as a spiritual and motivating force, the weight of conviction which the author intended primarily as a warning, but which has been embraced more and more by Gen Z readers as a beckoning call to a faith nourished by the will to power, the makings of a truly atavistic warrior religion.

Another strong example from Dune is the “litany against fear,” which despite being referred to as “praying,” is not an invocation of a deity in the way a Christian or Muslim would recognize,

“I must not fear, fear is the mind-killer, fear is the little death that brings about obliteration. I must face my fear, allow it to pass over and through me, and when the fear is gone only I will remain.”

Again, the intention of this prayer is not to beseech divine assistance so much as to assert the individual’s will, their higher function, over animal impulses including something as deeply-felt as fear.

This same conception of a spirituality from within rather than above came to my mind during a recent Ostarablot I was privileged to attend on Kindred land. During the ceremony, we recited the affirmation “Ek tru mattr megin” - “I believe in my physical and spiritual might,” which carries much of the same spirit as the above two fictional examples.

The well of might is something inside of ourselves, which our spiritual practice and interaction with the divine enables us to access. This is in stark contrast to the Abrahamic and Buddhist/ latter-Vedic systems which see the individual Will as something to amputate, or eternally do battle with. In the Abrahamic conception, there is only one ‘correct’ Will, their Holy Spirit, which they seek to become transparent vessels for. Doing the single perfect and universal Will at the expense of their Selves, what we Heathens would call their Hugr, their Hamr, and their Odr.

Now, I’m not saying each heathen considers their sole individual will the ‘correct’ one, the kind of spiritual anarchy which LARP-y Satanists and TV Preachers both can’t shut up about, but rather that we are taught our will is an authority we can hone, and be held to, in the push onward through struggle, and upward towards greatness.

From my understanding, even the most ‘based’ Templar-poster is really operating with a half of a soul, with so much of his internal spiritual environment either repressed or discarded to fulfill the moral dichotomy imposed upon him. Ironically it was Christian apologist C.S. Lewis who, in his critique of modernity, criticized us as “castrating the men and bidding the geldings be fruitful.”

What he does not recognize is, it is the Abrahamic practices which first took up the clippers and started taking bits off of manhood (literally, in many cases.) The Will is the fruitful fire in the stomach and loins of the young man, and it is the most reproached and outcast element of manhood in both Secular Humanist, and le-trad Christian circles. Neither of these spiritualities or philosophies can independently produce a warrior tradition, because they reject out of hand the Will, the striving element of men’s souls that pushes them to be warriors in the first place.

As others like the esteemable Morgoth’s Review have already pointed out, we now know why the Orange One was allowed to make his return in 2024. Not out of any great change of heart from the powers-under-power that really control things, but essentially as a gasp of a dying empire to get the last drops from decrepit Boomers shipping their life savings to the Levant before younger generations go into open revolt against them.

But this is much more than just political or even economic in nature, to say Israel is a sacred cow for American Evangelicals and their ‘tribal’ overlords, is not an exaggeration or a figure of speech, it is literally the idol they worship, with snippets of the Bible, American founding documents, and World War documentaries smashed together as an apocalyptic scripture.

In this “prayer meeting” in the Oval Office, the man doing the speaking quotes the Pledge of Allegiance verbatim while laying hands on Trump.

What we have now is a flagging ethnic and religious elite who sincerely believe they have a right to lord over the world, being exposed in real time before an exhausted and cynical public who openly express disdain for them, despite burning millions on Tik-tok propaganda campaigns and the like.

What is happening right now is a kind of chaos magic, a floor show which is very much meant to bend reality, and one which has been used before. Entrenched power is trying to invoke the egregore of the Global War on Terror.

This egregore had previously served — up until about 2012 when the ‘Cult of Progress’ overthrew it — as the American Imperial Cult, “ra-ra U-S-A, God Bless America, Two World Wars, without us they’d be speaking German, our Greatest Ally™” which crystallized in the days after the September 11th attacks.

I personally do not believe these egregores are entirely invented, nor do the people doing the invoking seem to. They DO MEAN they want to bring about the War of Gog and Magog, Israeli outlets have openly praised the war beginning during the holiday Purim which commemorates an ancient victory of their tribe, American commanders are praising the fight as a means to bring about Armageddon, according to military watch-dogs.

Here’s Trump’s “faith advisor” Pastor Paula White doing… whatever it is she does… to invoke victory against Iran.

Like Cthulhu cultists dancing around their graven idol on arctic shores, they are speaking the names and chanting the slogans to call up from the deep Void a long-dormant belief, a cultural fever, a civilizational direction, which leads straight into the bombs and - in their minds - the coming/return of their Savior.

But the American people, especially those who backed the administration on opposition to foreign entanglement are not climbing aboard. Trump’s approval is plummeting and the GOP seems set to burn the midterms, next presidential election and the very atmosphere itself without asking the American people once what they think of it, because they don’t care. The powers behind this aren’t trying to sell it to the public, just the administration they need to get the greenlight to act. The people, their livelihoods, and the country are the fuel to burn to get them over their Biblical threshold before the time is spent.

The American Imperial Cult won’t work the way it did on September 12th because these same powers destroyed the America they had in 2001 for short-term gains. Millions of South Americans, Indians, and Africans don’t give a damn about an evangelical doomsday prophecy, or the nation they were invited in to pillage.

The American People, exhausted by the 2012-2024 culture war, increasing evidence of elite depravity, and their leader’s neglect for them, are in no mood to rise to the call of a handful of pastors speaking tongues, or the foreign organizations that fund them.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the powerful are perfectly aware how unpopular all of this is, that’s why they’re pushing so hard now. There are other egregores, much older ones, stirring in the Void and what you are witnessing, dear reader, is essentially a spiritual arms race. Not between Islam and Judeo-Christianity, which are all three variations of the same weltanschauung (even if they all think the other two do it wrong,) but between the god of the desert Yahweh, and the Volksgeist of the West, variously Jupiter, Zeus, Woden, and their accompanying pantheons.

Even younger Christians in the West see the Levant as, at best, a Holy place occupied by a deeply corrupt modern nation-state. A growing segment of Western youth, after generations spiritually adrift, are taking the next step by going beyond the Abrahamic paradigm altogether. Returning to their ancestral beliefs and fealty to homeland, kin, and veneration of both cultural and familial ancestors instead of being subservient actors in a foreign tribe’s territorial holy war.

This is the uprising these pastors, senators, and foreign operators fear. In a sense, it IS the end of the world, of their world.

I have referred to the Baby Boomers before as “Generation Saturn,” comparing them to the Titan who devoured his own children to protect his rule. Building on this metaphor, the Sky Father is rising up in the Void to challenge this corrupt sovereign.

I have faith the Folk, and our ancestral Gods, will triumph in the end over the machinations of these lunatics. What I fear is the damage they will do out of spite, because spite seems to be their only recourse now.

It’s hard to imagine the kind of energy and fun that I distinctly remember feeling around the “Great Meme War” of 2016. Social Media had only just risen to cultural dominance, and this represented a narrative clash the older thought-leader class did not have an answer to yet, like lines of footmen facing heavy cavalry for the first time.

I’m not talking about politics here, but the means and the motive around the discourse itself. While the world post-2012 was already deeply cynical compared to the starry-eyed visions of an internet era imagined in the closing decades of the last century, the cynicism was at least characterized by a kind of chaotic, spiteful joy, an army of silly cartoon frogs on a rampage against their goofy, naive elders and sterile hippy-era niceties.

”Meme war” was at that time largely taken as a joke itself, characterizing the narrative dissonance of the largely pre-censorship internet against baffled and agitated commentators who were unequipped to handle an audience who could respond to their consensus manufacturing with a torrent of slurs. But following 2016, and exponentially after 2020, the reality of influence and narrative warfare as a deadly serious endeavor has become more apparent. It turns out, governments and intelligence bodies very much do have a vested interest in social media, and they are struggling against organic discourse, by censorship, by subversion, and by obfuscation.

While the dissident spirit remains very much kindled, it stopped being “fun” a few years ago. On the one hand, we simply grew up and became more serious and convicted of our beliefs, spiritual, political, or otherwise. On the other, immediate, lived conditions have continued to decline precipitously.

The Dissolution of Digital Counterculture

What began as a mocking commentary of power has quieted into the understanding we will simply have to dig deep and prepare for the consequences that will follow this cascading social-trust collapse. Such times tend to drive people back to first principles, and what used to be an extremely loose but coherent critique of one political “side” by the other has dissolved into a free-for-all between “Trad” Christians, Liberal Materialists, Pagans, Anarchists and Communists of dozens of stripes, and so on. Even the medium of social media increasingly appears passed its expiration date. What was once a new, wild means of communication populated by young and spunky rebels has become a rotting advertising platform overrun with foreign AI-generated filler. The visual equivalent of self-eating twinkies. We are sectioned off into our niche factions, increasingly feeling the pull away from social media, and are more cynical than ever about both material prospects for the immediate future and any hope of reform from existing authorities.

It might be tempting to consider this a success for the narrative control cabal, the surrender of the digital battlefield by the remnants of a sincere resistance. But I don’t see it that way, and the powers-that-be don’t appear to either. The popular conversation of the public sounds like a forbidden chat room ten years ago, the most schitzo conspiracies have slipped containment. “Agartha” is a tiktok trend, I have to imagine, without most viewers having any idea of the context of that antarctic urheim. Now is the time for the once-digital vanguard to again lead the way, back into the real. Now is the time to reduce the digital to a series of tools, and “realitymaxx.” To launch a full-court press for lived vitalism as an intentional, fanatical Counter-Manifestationkrieg (to build off a concept from fellow heathen author Serena Butler.)

A Social Post-Post Apocalypse

It probably won’t be for another generation or two before we can truly comprehend the depth of the dissolution the 2010’s and early 2020’s have wrought on the West. Not only in the immediate communal and interpersonal sense, but on the deepest and grandest social scale. What does it MEAN to be “the West?” Is it Christendom? Ethnic Europeans and their diaspora? Anyone who subscribes to “enlightenment values?” Given the Boomers and Gen X obstinately refuse to even address these questions means there is a good 40-60 years of clean break from the continuity of the past. To borrow a term from the Galilean Superstition, our “time in the desert.”

But this dissolution has led to the founding of new fraternities, new (and renewed) spiritual paths and new answers to the questions of a new world. An anecdote to elaborate my point, I had a long and interesting discussion with my father ( an avid reader of this publication, hi dad!) about if I could try to explain to his father the origin and significance of this project and specifically it’s heraldry, the Aquila Solberandi.

While my grandfather, and his father, and his father before him would no doubt approve of and recognize the essential ethos of the work, they are from the America of apple pie and baseball. That their progeny in the distant future would swear by and uphold these principles under a totally alien, vaguely-medieval looking aesthetic totally divorced from the religion, culture, and lived experience they are familiar with would likely be difficult to fully accept.

Conservatism, “trads,” and their institutional outlets like TPUSA or Daily Wire are stuck doing what several gifted writers in the sphere have called the “ghost dance of the white man,” insisting that dragging forward the forms of the past into the present will somehow rejuvenate them, without addressing the realities which have caused the collapse to begin with. All of this, mind you, while they are desperate for the approval of those that hate them, still married to the 60’s free-love fiction as the American mainstream right is.

Where they are worshipping ashes, I say we must preserve the fire, under new forms, with a cold and pragmatic understanding of the current moment, but our gaze fixed “onward and upward.”Forming clans and brotherhoods, building up relationships within our immediate communities and disengaging from the digital, manipulated, culture. Making only forays beyond tightly-knit spheres into the “marketplace of ideas” to mogg, to raid, and to promote IRL efforts to like-minded keyboard warlords before escaping back into the real.

This is the Counter-Manifestationkrieg in action, the rejection of the necessity of “engaging” with idiots that hate us — be they tankie troll or prime minister — on an even playing field, leveraging the platforms and resources available to us and maximizing our impact upon discourse while minimizing it’s impact upon us. This both frees the aspirational and vital segment of the dissident sphere from the doom-loop of “chasing the algo,” and encourages a RETVRN to the vicious, gleeful spirit of the original “meme warriors,” dominating their discourse with surety and a healthy dose of contempt for the whole exercise.

The correct and appropriate response to obviously bad-faith actors going forward shall be “You’re wrong, ugly, and I can squat more than you. Get fucked.”

I will admit, I have been in a wrestling match with burnout and despair lately, and I know I’m not the only one. Things seem to be approaching a fever pitch across the field all at once. The final vestiges of political optimism have been quenched, the market is tangibly reaching steeper slopes of whatever chasm we’ve been slipping down and the collective sense of stir-crazy atomization feels like a bow with no arrow pulled back till it’s threatening to snap in half. The world our parents were born into, which we were brought up to expect, is long gone. Whether you consider the decline to have been inevitable in 2001, 2008, 2020, or 2024… the collapse is here.

My goal with Sunnatru has always been to advance and defend a heroic outlook, but a realistic reading of the situation seems anything but redeeming. In declining career prospects, damage done to pair-bonding and family formation, compounded in the impact of both of those against building home and hearth, modernity feels more and more terminal.

What are we, the dispossessed young men of the West, to make of this? Do we, as the proverb goes, burn down the village to feel its warmth? Or perhaps worse, stop struggling and let the waves of corn syrup and pornography do their terrible work? Of course, neither of these are the solution. But I want to illustrate how the situation seems to the young man on the ground, there is a visceral feeling of ending and failure all around, and over a long enough time even the most dedicated and aspirational spirit will begin to internalize it and buckle under that cultural attitude.

The collapse we are witnessing is the death throes of the Star Trek/John Lennon’s “Imagine”/Boomer Truth Regime world. This is why not only the broad political left, but a plurality of the older political right and certainly the “center” are utterly unable to rise to the moment, their model for the world no longer works. Like birds at the bottom of the ocean, they don’t have the frame of mind to even understand what is broken, nevermind fix it.

This does present us with a truly brutal bottleneck, the huge majority of men never had children in history, and the collapse of organized religious monogamy back into hypergamy (and the accompanying drifting and various iterations of ‘incel’) is just one example how the “novel” crises of today are actually just the fangs of an older, more callous world re-emerging.

This world-in-freefall feeling has swept the world before, and it was into that chaos a young Arthur Pendragon was born.

Be he a mythologized actual king, or a composite semi-divine archetype for nobility, the Once and Future King Arthur of the Britons inherited an Albion closely reminiscent of our own chaos. Rome was a hazy but still-living memory in his time, and the late-ancient-early-medieval world was similarly seeking to stabilize itself from the truly generational blow of Empire crumbling into isolated, warring principalities.

Myths are not fiction, but eternal truth, and they can be both statements and allegory at once. Arthur’s return from Avalon to save Britain may well be a Ragnarok to come, but I equally consider it a call to arms for young men of the West to take up the (rhetorical, at least for now) sword and BRING ARTHUR BACK THROUGH US.

Like Conan escaping slavery and discovering the Atlantean sword, in shaking off the stupor of “consume product” we have already slipped out from our preordained march into nonbeing… and come upon the spiritual inheritance of better men of the old world. This spiritual inheritance has been summarized by my good friend as “pagan, imperial and vital,” which to me connotes the following:

Pagan, not only literally as a religious tradition, but in rootedness. A belief and identity which is firmly and clearly of our place and people.

Imperial, in the embracing of the Nietzschean Will, of an assertive outlook. Imperator, Imperative, “my own and my people’s flourishing is not up for debate.”

Vital, wine, women and song. We aren’t surviving to merely subsist, but to create and expand and live with a furor and a warmth of heart which makes life worth preserving to begin with. Absolute rejection of the “line go up” mentality.

To continue building on the Arthurian allegory, our purpose here is not to somehow restore the distant, fallen Empire which has forsaken us anyway, nor even to serve the status quo we find ourselves in, but to overcome terrible odds to carve out new “Camelots” from the chaos of wider structural illegitimacy. Marble will continue to crack and crumble in far-away Babylon, and the decadent and soulless will plunder and savage each other for the scraps of the ending age.

But here, in this Hyperborean wilderness where pagan gods and fairies haunt the snowed-over ruins of mills and the wind-blasted icicles glimmer like cathedral windows, with the love of family and the blessing of the Gods, I work quietly, tirelessly, slaying doubt with action a bit at a time.

To my fellow traveller, to the young man pushing with all his might through this collapse, we likely won’t receive laurels in our lifetime for our struggle. We won’t inherit the prestige and luxury held by our elders because they have bargained it away for a few more months on the throne. But we are working now for the world to come, not the one we have. Not in a Christian heavenly sense, but in that the communities, the stories, perhaps even the nations who will tell our stories reverently do not exist yet. You, YOU are the founding myth for a more heroic, more honorable, and more sacred way of life to come. That is our mission, and it is our reward.

Keep the fire burning,

Bran

The mainstream everything is having a crisis of legitimacy, so the unelected power structure is left with a difficult situation. Their consent-manufacturing apparati, most directly represented by the news media, are relying on airports for air-time. How does a cynical individual, agency, or class of society disburse criticism, and redirect energy away from them when ‘the official line’ on anything is taken to be the inverse of reality by a critical mass of the general populace?

One could say the emerging “conspiracy sphere” is just the lowest common denominator of slop-content to engage Facebook Boomers without any critical thinking skills. Even if the pattern of poorly-done conspiracy content is entirely emergent from market forces, that only further shows the prevailing attitude of the populace is a deep mistrust.

Everyone, especially the poorly-informed, know what they’re being told is fake and they want to be on the inside, with the hidden knowledge. Half of the AI-generated ads I am subjected to begin with some variation of “They are trying to ban this erection pill/watch/flashlight get it before this special loophole is gone!” An appeal to exclusivity.

The Dissident Right has a storied history of overlap with the “conspiracy sphere,” from Pizzagate and QAnon in 2016 to current adjacent scuffles like Candice Owens’ insistence on verifying Brigitte Macron’s biological sex. If that sounds like a pointless issue to delve, it is. It’s a revival of a much older internet “schitzo” theory insisting most, if not all, public personalities must be transsexual as a sort of illuminati shame-control ritual.

I have heard it argued in passing the infamous “flat earth” theory is an intentional psyop (psychological operation) to associate with and discredit more grounded theories about elite power and mass manipulation. Real questions about the impact of tap water fluoride, food dyes, corn fillers, and impacts of vaccine tech are lumped in with vast underground CIA tunnel kidnapping torture operations. The COVID pandemic may be the premier case-study in just this shouting-down of criticism under the label “conspiracy theorist.”

But with the collapse in public trust which has followed COVID, I get the impression figures like Owens and Alex Jones, even if not explicitly bankrolled by a three-letter agency, are leveraging their own social capital concerning the events of January 6th and other bona fides while their contemporary work muddies the waters around far more motivating questions like the failed Epstein releases etc.

That is the function I postulate this growing interest in “conspiracy” really serves. The power structure has given up the ground of being able to insist “everything is well, the experts are in control,” and are shifting to flooding the digital environment with tailored, directionless rabbit holes. QAnon, with it’s Nostradamus-level obscure references serving as a prime example of a containment mechanism, a soothing fable to dress over the very real bloc politics which are behind and underneath the official floorshow.

Perhaps as a more tame example, and more of an aside, I could not and cannot understand the Boomer fixation on alien disclosure, it’s a regular topic of discussion among the geezers in power but doesn’t seem to matter to the young at all. Maybe they’re so determined to study the stars for signs of other life so they don’t have to look down at the mess they’ve made of ours.

The driving teleological force of Tru cosmology is entropy, since the fires of Muspelheim and ice of Nifelheim collided in the Gap, Yggdrasil has been ever-so-slowly sagging back down into the Void. It is the efforts of the chaotic Etins to aid this collapse, and the work of the Norns and Gods to prevent it. What I would explore here is how this same conflict between striving and decay is taking place within our hearts and minds, as Above so Below, as Without so Within.

During the very earliest days of this project I wrote extensively about the “Heroic Cycle,” from success to advancement to struggle to overcoming to success, and its inverse from failure to despair to inward-turning to shame to failure.

If this sounds like a re-hashing of the Hero’s Journey or Rota Fortuna, that’s because it is, with associations of the Sky Father, Striker, Adversary and Dawn Goddess as patrons or archetypes of the four elements of the cycle, and my observation that while the Hero’s Journey in myth and storytelling makes for a singular narrative arc, in truth life is a continuous process of oscillating between the positive and negative forms of this cycle. Herein we see the outer conflict between entropy and order reflected, with the deciding factor between advancement or decline being one’s Will.

Even for one who has set out on their course properly oriented, motivated, and guided, as days turn to weeks to months, under the barrage of demoralization campaigns and visible decline, the Will is sapped and what was undertaken at first as a sacred and noble endeavor is whittled down to material necessity and can begin to appear itself a restriction, empty of purpose. I do not consider this waning life-drive a lack of effort or a moral failing necessarily, at least not at first. We all must contend with the false starts, failures, and heartbreaks of life and there will be extended periods of dark and difficulty which can humble the proudest of souls.

This is the decline from ritual to routine to rut, a change which may not reflect at all in the actual tasks performed, but in the inner conception of them. The point at which we are left wondering why we persist at all. For those who have robust familial and in-real-life social support, this entropy may be much slower-acting but it is a persistent process be it over months or years. Not to mention the tangible damage done to such social support structures in those my own age and younger, and a prevailing culture in the modern west which is uniquely incapable of addressing profound questions.

If the inner conflict reflects the outer one, so too must the inner solution mirror the outer, in the upholding of a divine order to continually press back entropy. Through Othinn and his brothers creating the world and mankind, and Heimdall creating the castes of society through his wanderings as Rig, the Gods establish the broader natural and social orders which can stave off the natural drag down towards primordial decay. Continuation is not part of a pre-ordained plan, it is a constant effort.

This is a concept alike to the Vedic Dharma, the upholding of the correct and sacred ordering of the world. Like Dharma, this concept has a personal expression as well as a wider social and cosmological expression. Both the wider world and one’s inner life, both secular and spiritual. A conscious recognition of these interlocking spheres of responsibility and effect is the beginning of repairing a spirit weighed down into the rut of despair and ressentiment.

Beginning from the purely pragmatic, what are the immediate material needs being met by an undertaking? Be it a job, training, writing, or a maligned task no matter how small. Considering on a practical level, what is served by doing that which makes us groan? Making ends meet financially, keeping a healthy order and cleanliness in our home, fulfilling obligations to the people we love, seeing things this way turns the rut back into routine. Recognition of the short-term necessity of our tasks, and the incremental improvement performing them consciously provides. While not spiritual in the direct sense, any concrete choice towards proper ordering and action is a step against entropy, and thus already serves the spiritual goal of upholding divine order.

This same practical attitude can, of course, also be turned to our spiritual inner lives. A careful census of what our spiritual practice looks like and why we do it can restore sapped vitality and purpose. Our ancestors were anything but superstitious fools and their rituals were indeed measured and practical, to achieve their appropriate and desired ends.

Even if we’ve done something for a very long time, if we no longer feel a strong “because” behind it, it’s time to either interrogate why that connection has faded and restore it, or clear out the old and establish a more fitting practice. This doesn’t mean inventing a new system wholesale, but treating our spiritual life as a dynamic part of us, which requires attention and purpose as much as any mundane task.

Thus, not only are our daily tasks returned to an appropriate understanding of their function, and our spiritual life allowed to address our lives as we adapt to the turning of the wheel, but through this very process we become proactive, rather than reactive. From routine, to ritual. Our efforts both mundane and spiritual become individual motions towards the expression of our Will towards our goals. Be they a single overarching work, or simply the current objective. A unity of purpose is achieved which can lend profundity to every task.

This is the essential difference between the two iterations of the Cycle mentioned above, the latter downward spiral is at the mercy of circumstance, whereas the former upward spiral imposes upon circumstance. The vital and willful individual presses their effort out onto their environment, and external forces both mundane and supernatural must respond to the Will.

I have written before the core of our resistance to modernity is to be those who “build and defend.” What I have outlined here is the very same principle, applied to our internal environment. To safeguard our peace and our purpose against the surges and the hurt of our time, and to extend that awareness and strength out into our environment. It is no small task, but without a robust inner practice of this ideal, an outward expression of it will have all the strength of wet paper. Entropy is the natural state of both the world and self, it’s infinitely easier not to try, but we were given the gifts of the Gods to set ourselves against this listlessness, and like the mighty oak and flowing grain, resist the pull of the entire earth’s gravity and stretch towards the sun.

One of the more commonly-repeated criticisms of modern Pagans is that we are engaged in a futile attempt to reconstruct a lost faith from the past. Be this due to a lack of documentation, or a changed moral and legal landscape which makes something like animal sacrifice much less practical in many circumstances… We are cast as though we must either abandon a great portion of the historical practice, or attribute modern methods to our pre-Christian ancestors.

Generally these criticisms are from a place of bitterness and have very little intellectual rigor behind them, and I don’t generally engage a discussion which devolves into “seek Christ, fa****.” But for the sake of exploring more grounded and sincere criticism of the modern revival of the Troth, I think this topic bears addressing.

While most sincere pagans will consider their beliefs to be in the tradition of the ancestors, and will endeavor to recreate the original practices to at least some degree, I think it is very few — if any — who would claim to have perfectly re-created a particular era’s practice. Be it the paganism of the 1000’s, 600’s, or 300’s. The Tru folk of each of these eras interacted with the Gods differently to each other, and did not stress endlessly if they were adequately re-creating the exact formula of rites their own great-great-great ancestors underwent.

That said, it IS true we are compelled by our time to rely on primary sources and archaeology to ensure our practices are (as close as we can manage) direct descendents of the historical practice. But this is not the same thing as having no idea. The Sagas, the Iliad, and other classic European literature contain detailed accounts of worship, funerary practices, and discussions of the nature of the Gods which serve as a sketch outline of their own practice, and allows us to root our current practice in the same soil, so to speak.

A good example is the Sigridrifrumal, a prayer to the Norse Gods preserved in the Eddas, which provides a format for sincere invocations of these deities. Hailing, naming of attributes, a request and so forth. This means while a prayer to Thor or Othinn might be composed in the present day, it is in the liturgical style of prayers from the Heathen period.

This same logic applies to sacrifice, it is evident that alcohol libations were a commonplace means of offering to the Gods, with ceremonies like Blót carried over in this manner by modern heathens. I may not have a hundred cattle to offer like Menelaus, but I know I have a form of sacrifice I can perform has historical precedent.

These are mostly practical arguments however, what about theological? Of course, Christians write off the Gods as either pure fabrications or demonic forces out of hand, but if one can accept the Aesir, Vanir, Tuatha De Danann and other IE pantheons are real and active sacred forces in the world, the discussion over the practicality of a modern iteration of their worship can be more fruitful.

If the Gods are real, active forces, and are truly our eldest ancestors and the progenitors of our cultures and bloodlines as Tru folk contend, then they would be aware of the material and social conditions of the Folk today, and our condition or only just waking up to the Folk-Faith after generations of wandering in another’s mythos. I can only speak for myself when I say I have felt the Gods and ancestors respond to my practice, and that of others, and there’s no fruitful argument against results, plain and simple.

The Troth of today will not look like the Troth of 1,000 years ago, nor will it look the same as it does now in another 1,000 years. It is not a calcified ritualism or doctrine, but the relationship of a people to their living history and the forces which shape the world.

Especially mainline Christian denominations criticism of the Troth as being LARP “Live Action Role Playing” is ironic, given these institutions specifically ARE calcified late-Roman religion, carried on with only local cultural flavoring to distinguish its many limbs.

It is they, not Heathens, who have chosen a very narrow window of time when their religion was “correct” and clung to that model since. Perhaps it could be argued Protestants are even more “LARPing” - as they maintain somehow their branch which split from the mainline churches in the past century are somehow secret holdouts of the “original, true, pre-Roman,” Christianity.

Abrahamists who rail against the Folk-Faith for not being doctrinal are missing the point entirely, their primary criticism of the Troth is that it does not operate or look like their monotheistic, universalizing, confessional and doctrinal faith. But it is these religions which are the exception, rather than the rule.

Put simply, I fault no one their faith, but the Gods are the Gods believe in them or not, and I and a rapidly increasing number of others are building historically rooted, contemporary and vital practices to approach, honor, and beseech assistance from the Holy Powers and seeing the fruits of these reforged bonds in our own lives.

Hail the Gods, hail the Folk!

The question I was left with as early as April was, is it worse to begin from scratch, or to persist and try to fight through making only just above minimum wage in one of the most expensive cities in the western world. The death of Charlie Kirk and the accelerated erosion of the cultural hegemony of the ailing modern Liberal order coincided with personal and financial pressures that forced the dramatic break that defined 2025 for me, the journey back to the Northeast, to home and hearth.

These were the “push” factors, and only half of the journey. It is also true that I made some life-changing connections this year as well, including a new Kindred whose invitation for me to celebrate Samhain with them matched up with my return home to a degree which could only have been fated.

There is still a long path ahead, I can now say I’ve done the whole school-college-career path “the right way,” but now I find myself with the blessings of kin and hard, honest work to do it another way. Since coming back to the snowy north I have submitted magazine pieces, been approached for commission work and have a major project which I will describe in more detail as time goes on. Though this year proved to be challenge after challenge, in the words of John Paul Jones: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

That the American conservative establishment, to which I was adjacent, has become increasingly frenetic in their defense of their greatest ally and other shibboleths of the past era only deepened my skepticism of the conservative answers to the decline. The political divide is increasingly defined by the rear-guard action of the old and entrenched trying to ward off a revolutionary, reactionary youth.

Though materially, things have continued to decline on the ground level, the “noticing” has breached containment at this point and will only continue further. The dominant culture of Europe and her diaspora since the 60’s has been torn to its final threads, and as ordinary folks begin to ask serious questions about belonging, lineage, identity and homeland, it is projects and communities like Sunnatru which, to whatever degree we can, must rush into the gap and provide answers grounded in, tradition, physicality and our natural and ancestral faith.

Happy New Year to you and yours, and let’s get to work!

Bran

(This piece, as evidenced by its reference of the “pride flags” is already somewhat dated, being a product of mid 2023, but I stand by it’s commentary and think discussion around the fracturing and retreat of the salt-of-the-earth American continues to be relevant today.)

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That Despair’s maw shall meet thy steel ; it’s gaze meet thy blazing eyes.

O banished son, your folk cry out ; for strength of arm and heart devout!

Do not curse your lot which the fates have spun ;

This collapse become your war be won

An epic to be told in ages to come, by kinsmen not yet born!

As Venus heralds the Sun to rise ; your defiance signifies

the spark in spirit ; against worldly lies,

as the lost stir in unsettled dreams.

Think ye back upon the years now past ;

the effort expended your soul to wrest, and flame to douse, to no effect,

They broke upon thy will

A single flame against neon night ;

with conviction’s charge burning bright, till spotted by your brothers in fight,

a blaze catching o’re the world

They will lash and they will lie ;

they will strike out as they cry, aged curses limp as lies,

not knowing their blows harden steel

And ye shall topple their rotten temples ;

drag to earth their sordid idols, restore the homelands they’ve defiled,

and consign them to the Void whence they’ve come.

Emerald flags fly, gold catches dawn’s sheen ;

the princes returned, their birthrights redeem,

their pride restored and fallen seen in the company of the victorious dead.