The Holly King

The Oak King

Slavic mythology describes the mistress of the copper Mountain as a beautiful young maiden with a long black braid. Her braid is not loose as regular braids on normal human women, her black braid doesn’t move, and appears as if it is glued down along her spine. She is said to either fully transform into a large lizard, or a lizard with a female head. This reminds me the how they presented Angelena Jolie’s character in film Beowulf. Angelina Jolie‘s character in Beowulf was also lizard/dragon like

Spirituality is a very personal thing. Over the centuries there were spiritual teachers with followers. These followers often turned the lessons of their teacher in rigid teachings and rituals. This was the birth of religion. Is religion bad? Not necessarely, because it offers a framework for investigative, brave and wise people to find there own spirituality. Unfortunately these people are a minority and religions turn into money- and powermachines sooner or later. The Tribe of the Fox made several video's to warn people for this. "Pagans and heathens, dont get fooled" and "Tribal spirituality vs axial age religion" are good examples of this. People of Germanic, Slavic, Celtic and Baltic heritage are freedomloving by nature. Some organisations might practice 'abrahamic style' without understanding they do this and other might be downright controlled opposition. Recently i came across a video made by The Antlered One that adressed the same topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-BXbQbAwwU

I agree with this. I came to the same conclusion, that true spirituality is personal, and this was the spirituality of our pagan ancestors. Spirituality is your personal relationship with the gods/divine, with your ancestors, with nature, with the world, with yourself, etc... Religion is more of a crowd control.

True spirituality is not on the same level with rigid doctrine of beliefs, teachings and concepts held to be the only truth by self-proclaimed authorities on spiritual matters. True spirituality is different from organized religion.

It’s can get very complicated, because, yes, our aancestors did have their tribal culture, their set of traditions, customs, rites of passage, celebrations, myths/folklore, and their tribal pantheon of gods & goddesses.

However, they didn’t have big books written by so-called authorities/specialists/experts, teaching rigid dogma about exactly how one must carry out any specific tradition, rite of passage, celebration, or dogma about each of the gods & goddesses, teaching people the “correct” or “proper” way to perceive the gods & goddesses and how to correctly worship them.

We cannot compare the organic, free flowing spirituality of our pagan ancestors to our modern, controlled, dogmatic religion that masquerades as spirituality. The reason why we cannot compare the old pagan spirituality to modern dogmatic religions, is number one, these are completely 2 separate animals.

And secondly, it has to do with how their pagan spirituality and our modern religion has developed. The old original pagan spirituality is a natural occurrence, it developed organically, over generations. Our ancestors were passing knowledge down from generation to generation. Our ancestors just kept adding more and more ancestral knowledge that came straight from their direct living experience, from living history. Original pagan spirituality has a basis in truth & reality. It’s nature-based. No holy books or books with religious instructions needed. For old pagans life itself is a book. Nature was your teacher, your ancestors were your teachers allowing you to learn from history. You were your own teacher, your own priest.

Modern religions with their dogma is falsehood! It’s not true spirituality, only masking as such. They wish to force-feed you their version of spirituality. Modern religions didn’t develop organically. Modern religions are actually very recent creations made from scratch by mixing a lot of pagan elements in a distorted form, different spiritual concepts from the ancient world, mixing it all together with their personal ideology

I believe our ancestors were able to have their tribal communal culture, and shared tribal spirituality without involving rigid dogma, by finding the middle ground/balance between collectivism and individualism.

When it comes to spirituality, it falls into the category of subjective truths, and it cannot be objective and dogmatic.


It’s just me speculating, but this is how I imagine our ancestors were able to keep their objective, communal culture, spirituality, pantheon, mythology and traditions without dogma:

I believe they were able to keep it objective without dogma by leaving a little room for individualism/personalisation.

Let’s say there is a famous tribal God, and everybody knows this God, his attributes, his heroic deeds, his history, and his place within the tribal mythology. So for the most part, all tribe members pretty much know all of the same attributes and heroic deeds of this god. However, it’s possible that if you went to separate individual families, they may have had a slightly different, and personalised representation of this same God. It didn’t deviate too much from the communally shared objective view of this god, but some small elements may have been added in, or taken out to make it more personal.

According to some scholars, prior to the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten taking the throne of Egypt, and immediately banning the native Egyptian pagan pantheon, the citizens of Egypt all acknowledged and followed the state pagan religion of Egypt, but each family, or individual groups had the freedom to choose their own supreme god/goddess or a set of gods that represented their family/group. So Egyptians had a state religion, but there was also concept of family god/gods. Maybe it was the same for our pagan ancestors. Maybe they too had specific family god/gods, goddess/goddesses that identified with the family.

I don’t believe it had to necessarily be an individual family within the tribe that could personalise a tradition, a god or goddess. It can be even further divided into each separate individual tribe member.

Each individual has an inner-world/selfhood something that he/she shares only with his/herself, but then there is an outer world ego-self that he/she shares with their family, their tribe, and the rest of the world. Because of this balance of inner and outer, collective and individualism, there can be no dogma.

Time subject to change but I will do my best
https://youtu.be/lVLmx4QB8W4

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (detail) by Edward Burne-Jones,