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thorraborinn · 4 years

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What do you think about "The Well and the Tree" by Paul C. Bauschatz? (if you have read it that is) I often see recon heathens recommend as a crucial text on Germanic cosmologies but it seems to go against a more popular notion of fatalism supposedly held by the Norse (idk about other "Germanic" cosmologies). Very informative blog, by the way. :D

I had to reread it (well, skim it). I guess I didn’t have to but I figured I probably should. I read it some 10 years ago, could barely remember it, and most of what I thought I knew from it comes from heathens referring to it, and not necessarily being right about what it contains.

It sucks so much. My gods. I think the reason it has currency is that nobody can understand it and they take that to mean that it’s above their comprehension rather than that it’s incoherent.

The rest behind a break so nobody has to watch me lose my mind writing this if they don’t want to.

It doesn’t start that bad, the first couple chapters are basically okay if outdated (but not worse than other staples like Ellis Davidson and Turville-Petre).

It’s a good, if especially egregious, example of an older paradigm of scholarship influenced too much by structural linguistics that takes for granted that Tacitus’s Germania, Beowulf, the Edda poems, and Heimskringla are all describing a contiguous thought-world that can be pieced back together by figuring out how to plug the different parts of each text back together. Thus, since the symbel in Beowulf doesn’t contain any references to pagan gods, no sumbl/symbel ever could have included worship of gods (no mention is made of the general lack of explicit mention of pagan deities in Beowulf).

Oh, and he doesn’t just not explain this, he actually says “I don’t know the other sources I’m drawing conclusions about that well, but I believe I’m right because, you know, I probably am” (p. 88):

He presents anything written in any Germanic language as representative of the “Germanic worldview” with no consideration whatsoever for possible Christian influence EXCEPT FOR THIS FUCKING PART:

Ignore the “automobiles” part, it’s the lack of context that makes that look ridiculous. But the rest of this is: EVERY SOURCE USED FOR THIS WORK EXCEPT TACITUS IS CHRISTIAN-INFLUENCED AND THAT’S WHY IT’S REPRESENTATIVE OF PAGAN GERMANIC THOUGHT ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

On the note of “older scholarship” and “too influenced by structural linguistics,” here’s a fun coincidence. On page 144, Bauschatz describes Lévi-Strauss’s model of “hot” and “cold” societies, and proceeds to describe what he thinks Germanic people believed using this model. You might have seen this post I did recently while this ask was sitting in my inbox, which I concluded with a quotation from Thunder Shaman by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo. In the middle of that I skipped over some text with “[...]” because it was pretty long already.

Here’s what I skipped over:

Lévi-Strauss’s perception of time as a binary opposition ignores indigenous understandings of time as an ongoing process that includes the past, present, and future simultaneously. Anthropologists capture the past, present, and future in social processes as they arise, change, and decline—only to be reinvented (Nash 2015).

aldfhasdl;kj there really do seem to be aspects of Bacigalupo’s articulation of Mapuche time concepts that have things in common with something that Bauschatz is grasping at but can’t get out of his own way to find. I’m gonna say this straight up: I think his belief in the causal force of the past on the present in Germanic mythology is, in a vague way, broadly correct and worth continuing to explore, but he proved incapable of doing it.

His elaboration on his idea that Germanic people had no concept of “the future” is completely meaningless semantics. If Völuspá‘s description of events that are going to happen but haven’t yet doesn’t describe “the future” (which he says it doesn’t) then it’s only by giving “future” such a narrow definition that nobody could ever possibly have a concept of “future.”

So much of the book is dedicated not to making arguments but trying to explain the things he thinks he’s already proven, like the comparison of his model of “Germanic time” to Augustine’s model of time and eternity (somehow he thinks he’s denying that Germanic people had a “future” but what he’s really saying is that they didn’t have “eternity” which would be a more useful argument worth going into for real).

The entire chapter 5 is just flagrant abuse of linguistics, none of it means anything. Furthermore, it’s circular; he arranges a model of Germanic time and a model of Germanic grammatical time (by picking and choosing different Indo-European features that are not necessarily contemporary to each other) so that they are similar, and then goes “look how similar they are!”

The last chapter is the best, not because it’s actually insightful, but because it’s where he lays out all his cards and explains (while not noticing that he’s doing so) that the entire project is just him reshaping the past in the image of his present but warped into an exoticized ideal Other in response to the alienation of modern existence. It’s so good. He walks right into it. Once again, I refer to the ask I just answered while yours was in my inbox, or rather to a comment in the tags of a reblog where someone mentioned this article by Ármann Jakobsson, about exactly this.

And I think that is why it’s secured such an important place in modern heathenry, it provides them with the exoticized ideal Other that they are looking for.

One last thing I want to say about it is that I actually wasn’t able to find a lot of the problems that I thought I was going to. I thought the weird modern heathen thing about wyrd and ørlǫg being two distinct but interrelating components of a single system came from Bauschatz, but if it did I couldn’t find it. Also while the chapter on verb tenses and aspects is bad it’s not as horrendously bad as the oversimplified “Germanic people had no concept of the future because they had no future tense” thing that heathens like to say, which can be disproven as easily as pointing out that Modern English has no future tense. The rigid, formulaic symbel/sumbl structure that heathens insist on repeating with no change or development is nowhere to be found; while I have problems with his chapter on the subject it at least has a lot more depth than what most heathens have made of it. Like I mentioned, he denies the presence of devotion to deities at symbel/sumbl -- if heathens were as into this book as they say, our sumbl would look a lot different. I’m honestly not convinced that that many of them have read it.

(Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had really incredible experiences at sumbl, as has probably anyone who’s been to enough of them. But I grieve the loss of what we could have if we weren’t holding ourselves to an arbitrary, rigid pattern based on unwavering loyalty to incorrect beliefs about what people did a thousand+ years ago).

Ultimately, the biggest problem with this book isn’t even really the book itself, it’s the way heathens use it. Instead of being like “hey this idea is interesting, maybe let’s develop this more but also see if it checks out with other sources/scholarship,” the role of this book has been to shut down discussion and enforce boundaries on legitimate expressions of heathenry.

Rather than The Well and the Tree some better books that touch on overlapping topics include The Norns in Old Norse Mythology by Karen Bek-Pedersen (the earlier version, her dissertation, is available for free online) and Tracing Old Norse Cosmology by Anders Andrén which unfortunately costs a billion dollars if you can find it, I dunno if it would be on Library Genesis because I would never encourage using that.

#anon #ask #heathenry #the well and the tree #paul bauschatz

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catsconflictscopicsandchamomile · 11 months

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Gotta hand it (no pun intended) to Grendel's Mother.

Really who is doing it like her. Like you go up to this...Thing... that OVER A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP hasn't be able to determine the species of, she's a human/troll/elf/dark elf/ogress/water spirit/mermaid/wolf mermaid/troll(the other kind)/troll-kin(seriously)/Generic Big Scary Monster/demon/ghost/dragon/shapeshifter/berserker/abstract concept, some people think she's the remnants of an ancient Germanic goddess, the only thing the text is clear about is that she's descended from Cain. she's like a hundred years old. you say "who or what the fuck are you" and she says "you can call me Dana, Jenny Greenteeth or SHE-WARRIOR BRIDE OF HELL, I don't know what I am so fuck you. I only care about one person anywhere ever and its the giant kid that I raised. dont ask who his dad is fuck you. he drinks blood he kills people if you fuck with him I'll kill you. if you fuck with me I'll kill you. I live in a giant secret cave full of treasures under a lake, I'm so fucking shiny, get out of my lake fuck you fuck you fuck you" and she's just the hottest MILF you've ever seen

...god I love her so much!!!

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