10 Comments

Very true. After all, we learn to reason from our mother and father when they read to us our favorite bedtime stories. That’s how we learned our particular morality and principles, which are also partly genetic as well. Our morals are also informed by our collective history where failure teach a hard lesson for the survivors. Realism, authority, strength all depends on each other. Even the language used to reason must come from a cultural tradition!

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It's hard to overstate how much of our reasoning is done "below the surface". By the time we come to that syllogism, almost the whole operation has already been carried out.

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I'm drawn to this idea and believe it must be right. However, I'm unsure and unmoored from whatever nonsense I have been fed my whole life. Which authority / folk is ours?

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It's useful to read this article in conjunction with the one on the Ancestral Principle:

https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/where-do-pagans-get-their-authority-a05

In short, the elder authority trumps the younger. In practical terms, this means going back to the oldest paganism that can be recovered. So if you're of broadly Anglo heritage, this means Germanic paganism, as supplemented where necessary by Indo-European reconstruction. Odin is your highest authority. (If you're Italic or Greek or Slavic or something else then this answer may not apply.)

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Great thank you. I just read through it. Now I am on a new journey to find the original pagan (Odin it turns out) tradition.

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One more question, if you would be so kind. I must know more about this topic and especially in particular to Germanic paganism. Are there any works in your Imperium Press library that covers this topic in depth?

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We are about to drop one this week. We've also got the best edition of the Poetic Edda around, and an edition of the Havamal that collects proverbs from the Norse sagas.

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Awesome. I’ll buy those and can’t wait to see what’s dropping.

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I can only see this where a strong lawgiver is alive and well. Otherwise words as written will be misinterpreted, maliciously or otherwise. That is, the lawgiver must be extant to exert his will over those who would interpret it.

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Certainly interpretation is liable to error. Unfortunately that's just the name of the game. Even so, something must simply be counted as unquestionable for reason to have any warrant. We could be wrong about that something, but the takeaway is that truth can't be the foundation—it always leans on some form of authority.

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