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"Weoh"

By: Garman Lord

Garman here.


> I kind of see "weoh" as "the wildness of god", that is so sacred you don't  want to f-ck with it.
>


It's probably not too fanciful to say that there are qualities which "wildness" and "otherness" have in common.



> To me it's also a statement that we need a little wildness in our lives in order to fertilize them. While we must live in Midgard which is characterized by the wholesome type of holiness, we also have a tendency to "soften", "dull", and domesticate the world to some degree, which is needed in order to be human in the world, but also numbs us to the great beauties, ecstasies, and agonies. There need to be some things that are off limits to our grubby little hands that want to make everything safe and controllable.
>

Good point. I know that it has long been a dream of mine, impossible while I live in town but possible once I finally manage to move out to the country
somewhere, to set aside a patch of land to be "forever wild." I get to thinking that way every time I have to mow my lawn. Being that I am about the only heathen in my neighborhood for quite a distance, my little residential bacon-strip of land constantly swarms with little wights, and is consequently always threatening to turn itself into a jungle with all the strange floral, and occasionally faunal, life forms that keep cropping up in my back yard out of nowhere. I know that a lot of what I encounter is the horticultural and other experiments of the little wights, sometimes very strange and beautiful, and it just kills me to have to mow it down, just as I know it must terribly depress the little wights every time they hear the start-up of a two-cycle engine around here, and I have to once more please the whim of my Xtian neighbors over theirs. They really ought to have some sort of garden patch of their own, undisturbed by the likes of myself except on occasions of due reverence, and I've long promised myself that if the gods ever vouchsafe me a country home out in the boonies somewhere, they're going to get one.

> There is a Supreme Court case which applies to this, which almost no one of  European background paid much attention to, because they think of  themselves as Christians or as moderns for whom it's irrelevant, but it  does affect us. It was a case on Native American sacred sites. Native  Americans were arguing that there are places that are inherently sacred and  function as temples for them that cannot be disturbed or used by  corporations for resources, etc; and that this should be protected under  their First Amendment rights to religious practice; but of course the  Supreme Court did not recognize this. Just as the Christians in Europe when  they took over began encouraging monks to chop down our sacred groves and  convert them to "economically functioning" farms and plantations. Something  to think about.
>

Ecological power politics on the part of the mediaeval church certainly did teach Western culture a lot of bad habits and attitudes, including the "contempt for nature" that Xtianity inherited from Judaeism. It is interesting, however, to note how not everything Jewish was necessarily passed on to Xtianity; one can see how a religious thesis becomes diluted, attenuated, less intense, more of a caricature of the original, the farther it extends out from its wellspring source. It has been noted that English preserves "holy" but has lost the word "weoh," as a result of Xtianity's necessary pushing of the word out of the language along with the dangerous concept; whatever concept of "weoh" primitive Xtianity may have preserved languished and died out soon enough in the course of the church's imperial history, coming to be seen as merely heathenish.

What is interesting, however, is that Judaeism, its contempt for nature notwithstanding, did and does have the concept of weoh. Its ark of the covenant was weoh; the Jewish temple had the back chamber, the "Holy of Holies," which was understood to be weoh, and one of the names of God, I forget which one, by which God sometimes introduced himself to prophets, translates literally as "Other," i.e. "Weoh." None of this, however, seems to have managed to make it into Xtianity from either Jewish or heathen sources. Xtianity had no ark of its covenant, its earliest temples, after all, were synagogues and then catacombs, and it had no prophets after Jesus; only saints and church fathers, rather a different thing. So it had no place to put "weoh," and, obviously, no impulse to find one, being a more humanized, more Greek-ified religion than Judaeism proper, motivated by different kinds of impulses. Where Judaeism was essentially a religion of "God's Law," that aspect seemed to quickly drop out of Xtianity too, once Paul's attempts to intellectualize Xtianity and get it into the synagogues had failed. It was from that point on that Xtianity began to forget about "the Law" and "Weoh" and all that ultra-holy stuff, uncircumcise itself and take to the streets, and morph into a mere banal tabloid-level mob religion of hysterical sob-sister salvationism amongst the unwashed. So no doubt the historical pattern was only to be expected. After all, how much place can there be for the unwashed on weoh-holy ground?

Godspeed......

Garman