“The dissident artist must see himself as an ancient bard. His duty is to guide, to warn, to advise, to preserve the wisdom and heritage of the tribe, and to inspire great deeds. Time is up for the self-indulgent ‘troubled’ artist. That artist is both a creation of the decadent modern age and also partly responsible for creating the decadent modern age. The dissident artist must lift his people up and out of these marshlands of malaise and mediocrity.”
― Pox Populi, Guide to Creating Dissident Nationalist Art

Image: The Bard by Thomas Jones

“The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel was lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.”
― Pope John XXIII

Notes: The scapegoating, self loathing and public self flagellation of ‘woke’ isn’t a new phenomenon but instead a natural outgrowth of the previous ‘religion’ imposed upon the peoples of Europe. Just as "woke" culture prompts Europeans to perceive their ancestors as malevolent and unethical oppressors, Christianity previously instructed them to view their forebears as primitive demon worshippers. Those with discernment will recognise they derive from the same source and ultimately share a common purpose.

Image: Cain slaying Abel by Peter Paul Rubens

"Man's highest vocation is to seek knowledge of himself. Knowledge of oneself is the beginning and the end of all philosophy. A man who knows himself knows what is meant by life and death…Such a man is able to distinguish between good and evil, and between virtue and vice. He understands what is meant by justice and injustice. He knows the nature of all things, and why they exist, and for what purpose. He knows the cause of his own existence, and the cause of all things.”
― Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival

Image: Parsifal In Quest Of The Holy Grail by Ferdinand Leeke

The Mystery of the Grail: The Celtic Cauldron

The origins of the grail mythos is often widely disputed with many citing it as a strictly Christian relic while others look to further afield to Persia and the near East. In tracing back it’s mythological origins the Celtic Cauldron holds a significant role as a cultural and mythical object and is considered to be the precursor to the Grail.

The cauldron appears as a prominent motif within Celtic narratives, with the Dagda, a deity, possessing a ‘cauldron of plenty’ that nourishes valiant warriors but denies food to cowards.

The cauldron is also associated with the Celtic goddess Cerridwen, her magical cauldron takes a year and a day to brew its potent knowledge and inspiration potion. Her wisdom earns her the Crone status, aligning her with the darker aspect of the Triple Goddess. Symbolised by a white sow, she embodies both fertility and motherly strength as a goddess of the Underworld. Cerridwen is revered by for her connection to the full moon as both the Mother and the Crone. This vessel also appears within the Celtic legend of Bran the Blessed. Bran, mighty warrior-god, obtains a magical cauldron of wisdom and rebirth from Cerridwen.

The cauldron while also perhaps a physical vessel symbolizes rebirth, renewal, fertility, and sustenance, often linked to water-based cults. Actual Celtic cauldrons have been discovered in aquatic settings, indicating they were offered as votive objects.

Notably, the Gunderstrup cauldron was dismantled and placed in a peat bog as a ritual offering. A similar practice involved depositing valuable weaponry into bodies of water as offerings to otherworldly water deities, echoing the Arthurian tale of the Lady of the Lake gifting and later reclaiming Excalibur.

Irish mythology recounts four magical items, including the Cauldron of the Dagda. These artefacts were introduced to Ireland by the Tuatha de Danaan, a conquering race described as Otherworld faery beings. These items, along with the Stone of Destiny, the Spear of Lugh, and the Sword of Nuada, held symbolic importance in Celtic culture. In the Grail stories, these magical items serve as the basis for the symbols of the Cup, Spear, Stone, and Dish, collectively known as the four hallows.

All 33 Fyrgen Podcast episodes, free to download and listen:

Episode 1: Why Paganism?
Episode 2: Practicing Paganism
Episode 3: The Power Process with Heiðrūn
Episode 4: The Northman
Episode 5: Divine Encounters
Episode 6: The Coming Battle
Episode 7: Restoring Pride with Mimir's Brunnr
Episode 8: Gnostic Paganism with John Lamb Lash & Rob Miller
Episode 9: Grand Humanism with Stephen McNallen
Episode 10: Ask Me Anything
Episode 11: Folkish Religion with Hwitgeard
Episode 12: The Abrahamic Infection
Episode 13: Pagan Music
Episode 14: Heathen Orthodoxy with Dave Martel
Episode 15: Citizen or Pagan?
Episode 16: Black Metal Roundtable
Episode 17: Working with Wyrd
Episode 18: Solutions with The Woodlander
Episode 19: Astrology with Fiona Ædgar
Episode 20: Ask Me Anything #2
Episode 21: Taking Action with Golden Age Man
Episode 22: Ethnic Healing with Emma Lucy Shaw
Episode 23: The Heathen Soul with Anders Nilsson
Episode 24: Yule 2022 Roundup
Episode 25: The Mechanurge with Dave Martel
Episode 26: Man vs Machine? with Heiðrūn
Episode 27: Théodish Belief with Þórbeorht Hláford
Episode 28: Hard Times, Strong Men with Noah Revoy
Episode 29: Scopcræft with Ælfric Avery
Episode 30: Ask Me Anything #3
Episode 31: Observing The Lore with Mark Puryear
Episode 32: The Secrets of Fire in the White Stone, with ΔĐΔΜ (1)
Episode 33: The Secrets of Fire in the White Stone, with ΔĐΔΜ (2)

"Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt."
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Image: Life of St. Benedict (extract) by Giovanni Antonio Bazz

Is this material world an illusion, or worst still, a prison?

This is the worldview commonly associated with the Gnostics, and is undeniably blasphemous to the Pagan mind. But is it really what the Gnostics believe(d)? Certainly not if you ask one-time Fyrgen Podcast guest and scholar John Lamb Lash.

Some German friends recently introduced me to the 1982 animated film 'The Last Unicorn' which, despite being a children's film, is quite enjoyable. One scene in particular caught my attention, because it rather perfectly expresses what I believe to be the true Gnostic message regarding illusion.

In this scene it is revealed that a 'witch' is able to alter how men perceive reality, but never to alter reality itself. The false Demiurge and Archons spoken of by the Gnostics are, likewise, able to deceive mankind into mis-perceiving the natural world, but cannot create or alter material reality itself.

Nature is wondrous in her display and intent. Deception is the ugly polyester robe cast upon her.

“Shamanism, spiritualism, energy work, rainbows and crystals, totems and spirit animals. In our modern world, these things have existed in the realm of either ‘exotic’ (non-white) cultures or have been snugly in the possession of lefty wingnuts. In the sphere of Western paganism, there has been a great deal of discussion about reconnecting to holistic living, which is in turn often connected to ‘we are all one’ ideology. The irony is that Europeans did, in fact, hold an animistic understanding of the world at one point in time. We, too, believed in an interconnectedness of life and fluidity between the spirit and mundane realms. In fact, the mortal world was not actually mundane at all. It was teeming with spiritual life-force to such an extent that one might say that Midgard, the land of mortals in the Teutonic worldview, was seen as enchanted.”
― Carolyn Emerick, More than Meets the Eye: The Death and Resurrection of European Animism

Image: The Night of Ivan Kuala by Boris Olshansky

“Two soul forms struggle for world domination: Paganism and Christianity. The denominations that bear this name only have very superficial relationships to the that soul forms… The Orient is the main carrier of the Christian, the Occident the main carrier of the pagan mentality: the "pagan" Chinese are better Christians than the "Christian" Germans.

Paganism places vigor at the forefront of ethical value scale, Christianity love. The Christian ideal is the loving saint, the pagan ideal the conquering hero. Christianity wants to convert into a homo domesticus, the pet man, while Paganism wants to convert man to superman homo ferus, the predator man. Christianity will tame Tiger Cats - paganism turns cats to tigers.”
― Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Praktischer Idealismus

Image: The Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens

“With his fabricated “Jesus” and his fabricated “afterlife,” Paul drained all value from this world, the real world. It turned believers into weak and subservient sheep, ones whose lives are oriented around the manufactured sayings of a marginal rabbi and of prayer to Jehovah, the invisible God of the Jews. It took a few hundred years, but when enough people fell for the hoax, it helped to bring down the Roman Empire. And when people—lots of people—still believe it after two thousand years, it cannot but degrade society, weighing us down, blocking us from attaining that which we are capable of, that which was only hinted at in the greatness of Athens and Rome.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

Image: Saint Paul by Barolomeo Montagna

“The new Age of Aquarius is the Age of ‘Knowing’, traditional astrologers considered the whole Age, all 2150 years, to belong to Saturn, but recent astrologers, since the rediscovery of Uranus, have placed the father of Saturn (Uranus) as the ruler for the first 1000 years of this epoch. This makes for a very interesting contrast of planetary energies influencing humanity. While the controlling elite, predominantly aligned with Saturn, are expanding their restrictive Saturnian control grid; Uranus, the planet of rebellion, revolution and unpredictability will be pouring out cosmic frequencies over the human consciousness. Energetic vibrations of freedom, new technology and a need to break with tradition. This will certainly lead to interesting times.”
―Brian R Taylor, Metaphysics of WW2

Image: Aquarius by Jake Baddeley

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Image: Hadrians Wall Sycamore Gap by Peter Phillips

“This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself."
― William Shakespare, Richard II, Act II Scene 1

Image: The Duke of York Discovering his Son Aumerle’s Treachery by William Hamilton

Notes: This eloquent patriotic soliloquy is spoken by John of Gaunt and reflects his lamentation over the state of England, which he views as being misgoverned and suffering from corruption and decay.

“The Anglo-Saxon word 'treow' meant both 'tree', and 'trust' or 'truth'. The tree seemed to represent the very essence of spiritual reality in cosmology, and material trees manifested this deepest level of integrity. For this reason, trees were even thought to provide witness for the most serious of contracts between people. Sacred vows, such as marriages or pledges, were carried out in the presence of these spirits of nature - rather like a pre-Christian ceremony equivalent to swearing on a Bible. Not surprisingly, the Church authorities objected: one of their pronoscriptions admonished ‘no one shall go to trees, or wells, or stones…or anywhere else except to God's church, and there make vows or release himself from them.’”
―Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages

Image: The Hallowing Of Heirdom by David Taylor

“The Dark Ages knew of no mystery schools such as had flourished in Antiquity. The Pythagorean and Orphic brotherhoods, the Platonic Academy, the Hermetic and Mithraic cults all had disappeared from Europe along with the Roman Empire. Their vision of man as a microcosm, reflecting in miniature the whole universe and its source…were almost lost. The new official religion of Christianity could barely tolerate such ideas, even among its own intellectual elite. The Church's power rested on the divinity of one man only, Jesus Christ, and on one path to salvation for the rest: that of obedience.”
— Joscelyn Godwin, The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery Traditions

Image: Destruction from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Now and then, the topic crops up of what constitutes 'natural'. Some Pagans even unwittingly echo the view of prominent Transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari when he said: "From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition."

Most good-intentioned people—when they use the word 'natural' to describe the quality of a thing, act or idea—are really talking about the concept of Dharma (which may be known as Ǣw in the Old English tradition). Dharma is not merely a synonym for 'natural', but is a little more discerning:

"‘Dharma’ is a Sanskrit word which comes from the root ‘Dhri’ – “to support” or “uphold”. Dharma is often translated into English as ‘righteousness’, ‘law’, ‘religion’ or ‘truth’ and literally means “what is established or upheld”."
[source]

If we were to apply this principle to, say, the idea of technological 'progress', even if one wanted to make the argument that technology is natural merely because it exists, one certainly cannot insist that it is Dharmic merely because it exists. Many objects, tools and ideologies exist which are not Dharmic. And actually, one of the principle features of religion (as opposed to Materialism) is that it gives the practitioner a framework and context for discerning good from bad. 'Anything goes' is an attitude antithetical to Indo-European religion, and an action or tool must be considered beyond merely what it can do to one's enemy. Certain actions or tools are attached to customs which can be decidedly un-Dharmic (having the potential to upset righteousness in a far-reaching way).

In closing, I think my point here can be conveyed concisely within the following question: Would you build a sacred temple out of plastic? If not, why not?

“Max Weber spoke of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and ‘life in an iron cage.’ Are we really doomed to this cage, or have we locked ourselves in it? This is, first and foremost, an intuition: life is much more than this. In spite of everything, in spite of all our attempts to ‘rationalize’ it, to make it comprehensible and predictable, life nonetheless remains a mystery. In its “great return”, myth can tell us about what this mystery is. Perhaps we can expect a great wave of “re-mythologization”, the creation of new mythologies after the general banalization that has now reached an unprecedented extent. The future, however, is unpredictable. Even today, man does not live fully in a rational universe, one part of him forever belongs to the great realms of the mythical.”
— Boris Nad, (Re-)Writing Myth: An Interview with Boris Nad

Image: Issa and giant’s head by Nicholas Roerich

“The power of the story is what turns believers into dangerous fanatics, This is a most dangerous situation, for the narrative spell of salvation history can drive the entire human race toward deviant and inhumane behavior. Human beings can act contrary to their own humanity if they be following a noscript about what it means to be human that is erroneous, delusional, and loaded with false expectations. I submit that this is precisely the danger that Gnostics saw in the salvation narrative of the early Christians.

Perpetrators often cite passages of Scripture to justify actions such as suicide bombing or the invasion of Iraq, but they are compelled above all else by the dramatic force of the story they are living out. Today, various factions of society are competing to see who can act out the end-game narrative in the most violent, dramatic way.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

Image: Four Horsemen of Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov

“Despite two centuries of fruitless searching, archaeologists have come to admit that the magnificent Kingdom of Solomon has no more reality than Arthur’s Camelot. At the supposed time of Solomon, Jerusalem was only a large village, while Samaria hosted a palace. The myth of Solomon probably started as a fantasy mirror image of Josiah’s political project, designed to strengthen the claims of prophet-priests that a new David (Josiah) would restore the empire of Solomon. The game of mirrors thus created between mythical past and prophetic future is a masterpiece of political propaganda.”
― Laurent Guyénot, From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land…Clash of Civilisation

Image: The Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon by Lucas de Heere

“Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
― Psalm 137:9

Notes: The assertion is frequently made that the moral framework observed in European cultures owes its existence to the Judeo-Christian heritage. This heritage is often considered a moral "gift" from ‘the righteous’ that has shaped the ethical beliefs. It is noteworthy to recognize that the Abrahamic religions have deep-rooted connections to the concept of child sacrifice, with Abraham's unwavering obedience when tested by a divine command to sacrifice his son serving as a pivotal element in the foundation of Judaism. In a similar vein, Christianity finds its core doctrine in the notion of child sacrifice, as exemplified by the sacrificial act of a divine-human hybrid, who offered himself for the purpose of absolving humanity's sins.

Image: The Sacrifice of Isaac by Pedro Orrente

“The myth relates a sacred history, that is, a primordial event that took place at the beginning of time, ab initio. But to relate a sacred history is equivalent to revealing a mystery. For the persons of the myth are not human beings; they are gods or culture heroes, and for this reason their gesta constitute mysteries; man could not know their acts if they were not revealed to him. The myth, then, is the history of what took place in illo tempore, the recital of what the gods or the semidivine beings did at the beginning of time. To tell a myth is to proclaim what happened ab origine. Once told, that is, revealed, the myth becomes apodictic (capable of demonstration) truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Image: Oedipus and the Sphinx (extract) by François-Émile Ehrmann