A Tribe, Not a Church

By Joe M, North Carolina State Representative

In the ancient times, before Lord Odin blessed our Folk with the art of the written word, man met man on plains of icy permafrost in the treacherous and rugged far North. Face to face, the father of each clan took measure of the other.

“His eyes, though a shade lighter, are much like mine”, thought one.

“The way his hand grips his spear, the way he turns his body to shield his women and his children, are all just as I do”, thought the other.

Perhaps this was before the alchemy of shaping and silvering molten glass was known to our Northern ancestors, before they could regularly gaze on their own visage. Perhaps, in this era, man’s most reliable mirror was the faces of his own kinsmen. In this moment, a moment as pregnant with possibility as the Uruz rune, for alliance or for war, for joy or for death, each man saw “You in I and I in You”.

In this wary moment, which seemed an eternity to the spectators on whose lives this meeting rode, each came to know the measure of the other. As they did so, these Fathers discovered the truth recorded by the High One in his Hávamál: “Man is the joy of Man”.

After a long and tense moment, grim faces broke into smiles. Rough hand grasped rough hand, and two isolated families became a Tribe.

Relieved, women crossed lines to embrace one another as new cousins, or perhaps sisters. In the months to come, they’d plan marriages: the daughters of one to the sons of the other, and vice versa. From two families, a new strong Tribe would grow.

As our ancestors grew in might and main, wisdom and intellect; they shaped the harsh landscape of their clime to better accommodate the fire of European Civilization that burned within their hearts. In this process, Tribes allied with Tribes. Each grew into villages, then regional Althings, then kingdoms. But at the heart of each new Innangard was the original one: the family and the Tribe.

It was through the medium of these structures, and not the structures of the Hofs which followed, that the Gods and Goddesses taught our ancestors how to live as the Aesir do.

Long before Asgard had a physical wall, built through trickery and cunning in a battle of wits with a Jotun and his stallion Svaðilfari, the Aesir maintained an Innangard. In that Innangard, that first archetypal Tribe, our Gods and Goddesses knew one another as Father and Mother, Brother and Sister, Grandmother and Grandfather.

To our first Ancestors who lay still as driftwood on the sandy floor of a primeval Earth, Odin gave breath and spirit. To our primitive precursors who lived at the mercy of chaotic forces, Heimdall in the form of Rig gave knowledge of working, building, warring, and leading in an organized society as the Aesir do.

It was no accident that Rig chose man and wife to impart magic and wisdom to. From time immemorial, that same family unit was the source of the Aesir’s strength.

The European Folk expanded, shaping the world by their travels, their interactions, their battles, and their ideas.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the forces of chaos, led by a Jotun of the desert called Jehovah, would use treachery to attack the sacred inheritance of the family unit.

This Jotun possessed the minds of our Kings through the promise of a “mandate of heaven” to their rule. His acolytes convinced our common folk, tillers of the land, hewers of logs, forgers of iron, that a King’s inheritance would be theirs after death if they but renounced their Faith and Folk and followed the Jotun’s prophet. Where the people did not take this treacherous bargain, many were put to death or tortured.

And so, after a thousand-year campaign of lies and terror, did the Jotun’s promise come to pass: “For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household…”

No longer did our Folk look to a Family of Holy Powers for their teachings, their wisdom, and their example. Motherhood became a punishment for eating an apple, and tilling the fertile land of blessed Midgard a penance the father of the family must pay. No longer was our Midgard a place of enchantment and adventure, where Life was a gift to be lived fully. Under the rule of the Jotun, Midgard was a “fallen world”, a place whose very existence was a sin, irredeemable.

A false and hollow faith such as this could not survive forever, and so we see its death throes today. But even as the lies of Jehovah’s prophet are revealed for a ruse, the other half of the Jotun’s wicked jaw closes on our People. “Scientific” nihilism, married to unimaginable technological advancement, drains the last of our people’s remaining vitality. Artificial Intelligence threatens to take away even our ability to think, to imagine, these inherited powers traded away in yet another Lokean bargain with Jotanic forces.

The vast, green wilderness that our Ancestors struggled to tame is nearly gone now, shorn away by the bulldozer’s blade. In its place stands a treeless suburb of manicured, pesticide-soaked lawns, where even the honeybees do not buzz. Yet, the dark woods that once contained the forces of Chaos did not take those forces with them when they were destroyed. In these sprawling, lifeless housing developments the Jotun have found fertile hunting grounds. Addiction, despair, divorce, ennui, and suicide claim our families and our children relentlessly in the very hearths of these flimsy “homes”.

Robbed of clan and Tribe, and not even knowing what they’ve lost, our people drown in a chaotic sea of meaninglessness. No longer can fathers and mothers of shared allegiance gather together as a Tribe in the springtime, and plan amongst themselves the marriages of their daughters and sons. Now a father, bereft of his own wife, watches with bated breath as his daughter wanders off into the world alone. If he is a praying man, he will pray she finds someone of her own kind who is strong when he must be and gentle when he should be, who will protect her and cherish her. Much of the time he is disappointed, and sorrow grips his heart. A mother, bereft of her husband, must watch as her son pledges his life to a banker’s cause in a foreign war he doesn’t understand, just for a taste of the purpose and manhood a father would have given him.

No longer does the young warrior sit at his grandfather’s knee, absorbing the wisdom of past campaigns through memories and stories, as he would in a Tribe. No longer does that grandfather see his own father’s face in the grandson’s, understanding intuitively the cyclical nature of life, taking comfort in this blessed secret, as he would in a Tribe.

All know something is terribly wrong, but few can understand why.

We perish in sorrow for lack of a Tribe. It was this Tribal pattern of life that was designed for us by the Aesir, and shared with us by those Divine Teachers. Those first Ancestors.

In the twilight of this dying world, the voices of our Gods are harder to hear than ever. Were Rig to walk the Earth again to teach our Folk, he’d be hard-pressed to find a hearth to visit. In some He would find single mothers, and children who’ve never known their father’s voice. In other dwellings He would find creatures with the bodies of men but the hearts of wounded boys, chasing a feeling they can barely remember, with a string of sired children in their wake they’ve never met, much less taught to use a weapon or write a Rune.

Against this bleak landscape rises the red and black banner of Raven Folk United.

RFU is a Nation that understands our Faith is more than a building, a tax structure, or a book. A Folk Nation that conducts itself as a Tribe, to build once again an Innangard worthy of the presence of our mighty Gods and Goddesses.

In the RFU, men and their sons find their purpose. In the RFU, fathers can show their sons by actions exactly how a man of our Folk should live. In the RFU, mothers can teach their daughters to weave the tapestry of Folk life and Folk history in the pattern our loom was meant to follow: that of a Tribe.

A father at one of our Tribal gatherings can point to a group of Männerbund men hardening their fists through tough training and say: “there is the brotherhood you aspire to, my son. Grow to be worthy of it.”

He can point in another direction, where our Gythias gather the womenfolk, and say: “there our wise mothers and sisters read the signs and the stars, working their special magic, so that they may advise our leaders with their wisdom.”

He can point to the center of the encampment, where our leaders gather, and say: “there stand our Jarls, and our Hildingr, First-Among-Equals, who breaks the trail for our people to follow.”

In the Raven Folk Nation, our people can once again live as they were meant to. In the Raven Folk Nation, we are more than a piece of paper and a building. In the Raven Folk Nation, you will find your Tribe.

Come home, and warm yourself by our fire. Come home, and take hold of the spear we will forge with you. Come home, and build the world anew with us.