Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Recovering nordic animist relations (ep375)
“Mythology is a language that places knowledge of relation into relation with people—[in a] way that appeals to our emotions and imaginations. It is a language that reaches deep into our instinctual system and our whole human constitution in order to make relational knowledge workable for us.”
In this episode, we welcome Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, a Ph.D in History of Religions, researching Brazilian orisha religion. He has lived in a number of countries in Europe, Africa North- and South America. His present work focuses on the rejected animist landconnectedness ecological knowledge and kinship with the greater community of beings in North European Traditional knowledge.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include how the construction of Nordic modernity and nationalism led to a rejection of animism in Northern Europe, reclaiming Euro- ‘traditionalism’ from right-wing extremism, understanding myths as stories that produce relations, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Forest Veil
Episode-inspired artwork by Isadora Machado
Episode references:
Nordic Animism, Rune’s website
“The Return of Ragnarok & Our Apocalypse Now”, Rune on The Mythic Masculine podcast
Sand Talk, a book by Tyson Yunkaporta
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I'm just reacting to something that I think all humans are reacting to today. We feel the proximity of relational collapse, our connectedness to nature, our connectedness to each other, our connectedness to our own culture, our connectedness to the lands that we're living and the beings that we eat, have been ruptured in so many ways. So we are, in a sense, all of us—you see this all over the world—are turning towards animisms, because animisms are connective systems.
My personal story goes back a little bit because I grew up in the countryside, in a little farm. My family comes from this form of Christianity that is here in Denmark, where there's a very strong attraction and valorization of pre-Christian worldviews. That doesn't sound completely normal, but there is that sort of Christianity and that means that, for instance, my grandparents basically immersed me in Nordic mythology. I got interested in that stuff when I was a child and so I was trying actually to go in the direction of studying that when I went to university.
But I got a little bit disillusioned because when you study something that is very far away, like strange, medieval sorcerers and such, at university, you quickly realize that a large part of studying it is to deconstruct it. And I didn't really have the mind to study faulty, contextual, biased reflections of religious knowledge. I actually wanted to study religious knowledge or animist knowledge, so I actually ended up studying much more live stuff. I became interested in Afro-disaporic religions. I was so lucky that there were priestesses of the Candomblé, the Brazilian Orisha religion, who shared some of their knowledge with me during my education. That has been very formative for me. These people have a very competent, effective, contemporary way of thinking about and dialoging their traditional knowledge systems into our our time.
So even though I'm looking at what could hardly be more sort of my own cultural heritage, the way that I'm thinking with my own cultural heritage is actually very inspired by particularly the ways that Afro-disaporic peoples are re-engaging their cultural heritage and creating cultural resilience also.
Kamea Chayne: One of the concerns you've shared in regards to the climate crisis is that in spite of the numerous studies and research and reports that have been published, they have not been enough to change the course of society because they, "don't produce a language that enables most people to relate properly to the situation. We have to use the deepest and strongest language available to us to remake human kinship with the world." Could you expand on this to share about the role of mythology and what it might mean to view the climate crisis in part as a relational crisis, that myths might offer pathways towards healing for?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen:
Myths are narratives, stories that produce relation.
If you have a weather phenomenon, then that deity, which is perhaps a thunder god or something, is in a sense, our relating to that, or that complex of reality that we are relating to. If you are, say Inuit, and your whole life depends on relating with the sea, with the ocean, you derive your whole livelihood from that, then you are relating with the sea. It is an incredibly important relating, and that relation is subjective. So the myth of the sea mother manifests relation for us.
Climate reports and scholarship are actually predicated on a modernist idea of perceiving the world, where we are detaching ourselves, from the world. We are making the world something that we observe and describe as detached from ourselves. That's a really good thing, in itself—it gives us a high level of knowledge. Climate reports from the UN represent an extremely high level of knowledge, but it is a problem that nobody gets it. Do you know anybody who ever read the climate report? I don't. That's a little bit of a problem considering the fact that the content of those reports is that we are accelerating towards the biggest catastrophe in the history of life for 66 million years.
But people don't get it because the climate reports are communicating in the language of topsoil erosion and global tipping points and methane release and all this [obscure], difficult language that people don't understand. It is a disconnect of language that doesn't [allow] people to relate to a problem. Now, mythology is a language that places knowledge of relation, into relation with people, [in a] way, that appeals to our emotions and our imaginations. It is a language that reaches deep into our instinctual system and our whole human constitution in order to make relational knowledge workable for us.
So an example of a mythology that [talks about a] knowledge that [is comparable to] the UN climate reports... I would say much more relational knowledge could be the Ragnarok myth, which is a myth that emerged in the Viking age, as a reflection on loss of traditional culture, which happened in that period, in the context where there was still a very imminent cultural memory of extremely culturally disruptive climate change that had happened just a couple of hundred years earlier in the preceding period in the Viking age.
The myth of this relational collapse, you could say it's a traditional knowledge reflection on that connectivity of the world, that the interconnectedness of the cosmos is not something that's a given, it's not something we can take for granted. It's actually threatened, and it can collapse. And that it is very dangerous when it collapses. This is what you would call a Euro-descendant, traditional knowledge, this ancient prophecy that actually talks about relational collapse. And so when we are today living in a situation that, in my view, and probably in the view of a lot of other people, is very characterized by relational collapse, we find these multiple ruptures of connectivity, [and we realize that] there's a myth actually talking about that, then that becomes very much a myth about our time.
It's a myth with an enormous potential to speak to our time, and to help people understand what we are looking at. That is actually some really scary shit, because the Ragnarok myth is noteasy listening—it's really hardcore stuff. It is brother killings, killing each other, and axes and wolves, and flames scorching the sky, and the deep sea serpent rising and devouring the land. It is an extremely dark and frightening vision of where we are going. And I think that kind of knowledge is stuff that ought to be projected, narrated, brought out there much more, in order to basically make people relate to it.
The deep knowledge in the Ragnarok myth is a myth of a cosmos that is extremely interconnected. The gods, for instance, are connected with the trolls or the giants, in the ancient Nordic worldview. They are interconnected in so many ways—they make babies with each other and they play little games with each other and cheat each other, and they exchange knowledge and identify with each other and descend from each other, in myriads of ways. But in the Ragnarok, this whole web of connectedness deteriorates and they end up in this cosmic collapse where they end up behaving pretty much like Christian angels and demons, in this absolute war of collapse of connectedness. And that means that this myth would be about reclaiming connectivity, connectedness, not, for instance, about going out and fighting someone. On a deeper level, it's about making babies with the trolls.
Kamea Chayne: It definitely sounds like there are very relevant teachings that we could learn from a myth like this. Something that I found really fascinating is when you talked about how conspiracy theories are, in a sense, animism out of place, animism that has gone bananas. The subject of conspiracies is a big and messy one, especially because while there are a lot of misguided conspiracies floating around, there are also stories that are actually true, that have been dismissed as conspiracy to discredit their possibility.
But beyond that, I'd be curious to hear you expand on how the rejection of animistic relations with the world give room and create space for more theorizing of conspiracies within the human realm.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: My thinking with conspiracy theory is basically an animist theory perspective on what conspiracy theories are.
There's this amazing old tale. It's very well-known in anthropology, where the British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, he was learning from Azande in Central Africa. And when a granary fell down—because it was on poles and termites ate the poles—and killed a person Evans-Pritchard described how the Azande were looking for a culprit. They were looking for somebody whose intention made that happen. Then they ended up deciding that it was some witch being, or something like that, which might not have been a human.
Now, that way of thinking is foundational for how animists and perhaps thereby humans in general, encounter the world.
We encounter the world as imbued with personhood and intention.
Whenever something happens to us or anything happens in the world, then there is an intention in it. There's somebody who wants something to happen. So if you look at an animist engagement with the world, there would be different ways of, you could say, disclosing or making a revelation and revealing those intentions. Who is it that wants something with that stuff that happened there or that stuff that is not happening?
Perhaps people make a divination. They will throw their cowrie shells or their tarot cards or their I Ching sticks, and they will read them. And then they will, in this way, reveal an intention. However when we move into the contemporary, modern, more disconnected way of perceiving the world, then what we find is that people still have that urge, and that you'd almost say knowledge, that there is intention in stuff that happens. It's like if I'm meeting with you, I will know with my whole being that you are a person and that you want things in the world, like me, like everybody. So in the same way we humans, I think, we know that there is intention and there is personhood in the world.
But when we have been sort of prevented from realizing that, or we have been prevented from revealing that to ourselves by the modern reality, then we make up conspiracy theories, because the modern reality teaches us there's only personhood and intention inside human minds, it's only inside our minds. A tree, or a river—that's just a dead resource that's there for Eurocentric modernity to come and exploit it as efficiently as possible. There isn't a goddess in that river. The tree doesn't have a spirit. That's the modern idea.
So when COVID hits the Western world, then we have lost the capacity to do what West Africans did in the 19th century, when smallpox hit them and they engaged the smallpox as a deity. Or what happened with COVID in northern India, where they engaged COVID as a goddess? We have lost that. And then all these weird stories, skewed mythologies pop up, where all of a sudden it's Bill Gates who was the person and intention. It's not the Corona Devi, as the North Indians revealed to themselves the subject and intention of COVID. So these conspiracy theories, they are deeply dysfunctional because they end up having harmful effects in the way that people relate with COVID.
Kamea Chayne: That's super fascinating and interesting to think about how different theories or interpretations of the source of certain problems then lead people to engage and approach or ideate solutions in different ways.
A lot of your work has been centered on presenting Euro-animism as a path towards a culture of land connectedness, and making kin with the greater community of the other-than-human beings around us. I want to read this quote from you to preface my question. "It is the construction of Nordic modernity and nationalism that creates the rejection of animism in Northern Europe. Animist knowledge has basically been "Viking-washed" out of our construction of the self." Could you elaborate on this, and how recovering and engaging with euro-traditional knowledge might release it from its association with right-wing extremism?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think an important step in that is to actively do stuff that unambiguously stands in a different place than right-wing extremism, the sort of mining of right-wing extremism of Euro-traditional heritage, particularly in Northern Europe, but I think also in other parts of Europe. That's actually something that goes back quite a bit. And I've used a lot, the term Viking-washing, as this idea that if something is supposed to be legitimate in North European context, or as, say, an image of identity, then it has to be Viking, because Vikings are these aggressive, expansive, hyper-white people. Or that's the myth of what Vikings are.
But in fact, Vikings was a rather short period in history where a group of people in Northern Europe had this piracy thing going on. A Viking just means a pirate.
[The concept of Vikings] was made into a general nomer, or general label, for essentially being North European or something like that, in the 19th century—with the explicit purpose of producing North European nationalisms.
"We are Vikings", is a way of saying we are noble, expansive, virile, warrior people, which... is obviously not... If there's one thing in the world that Scandinavians are definitely most certainly totally not, it's probably Vikings. We're fairly mellow people.
So this Viking motif has a history. However, I've also become more and more aware of the notion of Vikings as a possible positive attractor. I've been having some conversations, on my own channel and also outside with the Australian thinker Tyson Yunkaporta, who mentioned this idea of Vikings as a motif that people can relate to. It's something that people know and that means that it might be able to channel people into traditional knowledge, or a realization of the importance of traditional knowledge.
And I'm working on figuring out exactly where to place myself on the Viking-washing. If we look at nationalism specifically, then that is an incredibly important and incredibly destructive part of how your traditional knowledge has been encased in a specific way of producing an "us", producing an identity, which is an essence inside of us—we have perhaps an essential "whiteness", or an essential "Danishness", or something like that. This nationalist idea... Vikings have been used to produce that. That is a huge problem in so many ways. And it is very real—you have real white supremacist groups who are leaning over this whole North European cultural sphere, and they're taking symbols and waving flags with them and all that kind of stuff.
But we are actually also in a double-bind as Euro descendants, which is that, one thing is that that problem is real. And if you are a decent anti-racist person, then you're fighting that stuff. But another problem is that that problem is being overexposed in the press, actually. So whenever people are talking about, for instance, Euro-traditional animism, there tends to be this sort of clickbaity overfocus on the fact that it has been owned by fascists. Now that serves to move it away from normal, decent, Euro-descendent people. So all the normal, kind, respectful, white North Americans that are there, would be pushed away from their access to their own traditional animist knowledge.
So what I'm trying to do and what other people are also trying to do is to move away from it, create staunchly anti-racist spaces and do something with it. I was recently at a big rock festival in Norway, and these people basically took a site that was strongly tainted by Nazism—real Nazism during the Second World War, this ancient Iron Age, Viking age sacred site was taken by Nazis and used for rallies during the Second World War—and said that this was not a Nazi thing. It's a thousand years older and it's ours. It's part of our heritage. And at this festival, they enforced a very strict ban on Nazi symbolism.
This is just one example of how people are creating something where they are pushing out the fascist associations and then focusing on what they are actually doing. And I think that is exactly the right way of doing it.
Kamea Chayne: I'm certain that there's a lot of reclamation of what it means to engage with a Euro-traditional culture that is very different than what the media or what people might associate with it. And that's beautiful because we need to diversify the narratives in order for people to realize that there are alternate ways of relating to their own heritage.
To take a step back, you've shared about the discrepancy between what people typically imagine as being "traditional", and what it really means. What misconceptions about "traditional" do you think are important to address, and to add nuance here, how would you clarify the relationship between what you've been describing as traditional for Euro-descendants and indigenous, as something that may share deeper roots, and similar guidance for healthier relations with the world, but ultimately is paramount as a distinction for its political implications?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think it's really important to make the distinction, even though the two things are very similar—as Indigenous and traditional. The important difference is that most Euro-descendants have not been colonized. We've mostly been the colonizers. You can have people who would be racialized as Black in North America, but who also have Euro-descendancy as well. So they have a right to also access Euro-descendant culture. It's important, I think, to modify the concept of white and whiteness because it's extremely exclusive.
The UN actually has a definition of what it means to be Indigenous. And there's a couple of different criteria: firstness in an area, attached to traditional lifestyles. One of the important markers is that Indigenous peoples have been exposed to colonization or marginalization by dominant, typically, states. And I am, for instance, a majority person in the country where I live, and I'm also First Nation, where I live. But not being colonized is a really, really important distinction.
When you look at the international scholarship and thinking, there's a lot of indigenous knowledge thinking, but there's almost no Euro-descendent, traditional knowledge thinking. And I think part of the reason is that I cannot walk up as a scholar to an Indigenous knowledge institute and say, hey, I have Indigenous knowledge too, and I'm studying that stuff, because I belong to a group of people, where there are I think 6 million people who speak my first language, we have our own state and our own television channels and everything. If you have an indigenous knowledge institute, say, in Canada and Australia, those resources that they have are supposed to be directed to [communities] where there are perhaps only eleven individuals left in the world who speak that language. They are supposed to be directed to people whose culture has been incredibly marginalized by Euro-descendants, by the way. And that means that when you're presenting Euro-traditional knowledge, you cannot impose on, for instance, indigenous knowledge. I'm rambling a little bit here, but the difference is basically the political domination and colonization process, which makes a very big difference.
So traditional knowledge is a way of referring to the Indigenous knowledge of majority populations basically, and the word traditional in itself has a problematic ring when you use it in a Euro-traditional or a Euro-descendant context because fascist-leaning idea systems have taken that word traditionalism, and they then [brand it] as this kind of conservatism, something that's static and old and identitarian, focused on our cultural coherence and so on.
Traditional knowledge thinking like that of what Tyson Yunkaporta introduces is extremely useful because he thinks of traditional knowledge as something that's very dynamic, connective, and transformational.
It's always relating across cultural lines, and with changing landscapes. And, in the Eurosphere, the gringosphere, there is this idea of that traditionalism, this romantic[ized] idea of a static, nationalist, culturally conservative thing, but that's actually not what traditionalism means. And then that is often identified as fascist—which it might be in some cases. So there you see, this is another one of these double binds that seem to be holding Euro-descendence in the clutches of whiteness, you could almost say, in seclusion from our traditional knowledge reservoirs.
Kamea Chayne: I want to go deeper into that. You've noted before that "the point of mythology is creating relation, not creating consistent narrative." And I do think there's often a misunderstanding that traditional means something that is fixed in the past, and there are growing movements of people who are fascinated by ancestral cultures and traditional knowledges, who are eager to bring them back, and I think that is really beautiful, and there are always things that we can learn from our deeper histories and myths and cultures.
And at the same time, I wonder if a dogmatism in fetishizing or seeing traditional knowledge and mythological teachings as fixed could become unhealthy as well, if these stories and teachings aren't given the fluidity to evolve and become a co-creation with the everchanging dynamics and characteristics of our landscapes and communities of today. Then I wonder therefore, whether we might need new myths as well to help us reroot ourselves to this very time and place.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Amen. I totally agree with what you say there.
The imagination of distant, idealized pasts is not necessarily a good idea, particularly not for Euro-descendants. It might be a better idea for other people whose present is very characterized by oppression, for instance, but bad for a lot of other people. The casting of this static, ideal past, which is often represented by notions of purity, is compromised by ideas of contamination. They aren't particularly good for us as contemporary traditionalists, who are renewing our traditional knowledge into our time.
That also entails some rather serious questions, because how do you, for instance, if you are an Indigenous person and most of your spiritual tradition has been discontinued in all kinds of violent ways? Or how do you if you're a Euro-descendant and your traditional culture is preserved in weird medieval chronicles…
How do you take that and bring it into an ongoing dialoging, dynamic, transformative flow of engaging the times that we live in?
I don't think that's an easy task. I'm trying to do it, but doing it has to have a certain level of playfulness and lightness.
And there was a Netflix series called Ragnarok which was talking about the Ragnarok myth, and I made a little review of it—I thought was quite problematic. When I'm making a review of this piece of contemporary production of traditional knowledge, I'm actually using this traditional knowledge in a very contemporary way. I'm bringing it into our time as a way of thinking about stuff in our time. And that also comes with political stuff when we are seeing stuff like the rise of Donald Trump, that is something that we can look at, from the lens of traditional knowledge.
Kamea Chayne: A lot of what I've learned from your work leads me to ponder this bigger question. I wonder if it would be accurate to say that people of every or maybe most cultures and religions today have deeper roots and ties to animistic ways of relating to the world. And that these ways of relating to the world can be relearned and practiced by people of various cultures and religions today, even if their more contemporary teachings and cultural norms might have long been disentangled from or even sometimes seem contradicting to animistic worldviews.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think you're right. And I think that different religions possibly have slightly different capacities for producing animist relatedness. I'm not a big fan of criticizing other people's religion. But I think the religion that you come from yourself, you are allowed to criticize a little bit. I come from a context dominated by Protestant Christianity. That's probably an example of a religion from which it is a little bit difficult to produce animist relatedness, but I would very much encourage Protestant Christians to find that in their religion, because religions are always rich, they're always filled with contradictions and different aspects, as they are rolling through time. But they have a great capacity to reinvent them themselves.
But also, as you say, all over the world, you find this sort of resurgence of attention to or valorization of animist parts of religion. I would imagine that if you look at, say, Asian religion, which is something that I don't know a lot about here, first you probably find extremely rich animist traditions that are still there, that are still being practiced. But even if there are parts of it that are not particularly animist, I would imagine that you're probably going to find a lot of good stuff. You're probably going to find a lot of stuff that is about connectedness to the lands that that that we inhabit.
You find people turning towards their animist traditions pretty much all over the planet. You find it among Afro-descendants in the Americas, to a very large degree. You find it in Africa, all the way through the Indigenous world, and you find it in Europe, to a very large degree, among Euro-Americans—this turning towards animist religiosity.
Kamea Chayne: I think this again speaks to our potential for healing our relations with the world through giving myths and stories the fluidity to grow and evolve and be adapted and just letting them come alive to the present.
And in terms of offering some inspirations for our paths forward, you share, "Humans are responsible for the right functioning of the world... and we need to participate in it in the right way for it to function..." This also counters a pretty cynical and I think misguided narrative of separatism that I often come across in environmentalist spaces, which is this idea that humans need the Earth, but the Earth does not need humans, as if we are not parts of the greater bodies of our landscapes and the planet, and also as if destruction were the only story inherent to human nature.
Is there anything else that comes to mind for you here, with regard to what we need to do to participate in the healthier functioning of the world? And do you have any other invitations to action or deeper inquiry for us?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: That cynicism that you are talking about there. The idea that Earth doesn't need us. I can't help suspecting that it might come from people, [who kind of go,] humanity should just die out, and then the world will flourish again. Well, perhaps, in 30 million years, the biodiversity would probably be back on track, but I mean, it seems to me to be a little bit of a teenage perspective. We are facing here, we are standing with our feet, and we are facing catastrophes of incredible proportions.
We are facing problems of a seriousness that is so radical that I don't think it's an option to say I'm not dealing with that.
It also smells a little bit of somebody who's probably living in a Northern hemisphere, privileged urban setting.
This is also why I would say a more Indigenous-leaning perspective [is key]. That is where we think about humans as actively engaged in making the world work. Humans have a role. Many of these Indigenous thinkers, they would talk about custodianship, humans as the custodial species or stewardship. There is something that we do all the time in order to make stuff continue working. And if you actually look at these Indigenous peoples, you find that the Barasana in Colombia, they have rules about how they derive their livelihood from the river in which they live, and those rules make the river an environment that is not overcrowded by human activity all the time—that's custodianship.
Even here in Northern Europe, in the pre-Christian age, there were these great celebrations where everybody gathered in one place in the sacred sites, and they basically called on connectedness. They were purifying their communities of those corrosive, invisible violences that are creating the disconnect between us and the world around us. That is humans stepping into, taking responsibility for being part of the world, and perhaps even managing the world with through custodianship.
There's a people with this idea that when European colonizers moved around in the world, there was this serene nature, where there happened to be human beings living there. But we know now that that's actually not the case. What they were looking at were landscapes that were very thoroughly and tightly managed by indigenous populations based on their millennia of developing their ecological, traditional knowledge in order to maintain the world as a functioning, harmonious place where there is also space for humans.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk. I think some of the best stuff you read or that that you hear is the stuff that makes you go, oh, so that is why I think and do what I do. It felt very aligned with the stuff I was already finding and realizing, about a dynamic and relational way of thinking that steps very clearly away from the static, nationalist way of thinking about human culture. It's very much Indigenous thinking for our times.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: All the power to all the relations.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I'm continuously inspired by the Edda, which are pre-Christian sacred poems, songs from Northern Europe. It's incredibly, incredibly deep, enigmatic and difficult.
Kamea Chayne: Rune, it's been an honor to have you. Thank you so much for sharing your wealth of learnings and inspirations here with us. What final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I would like to just leave you with a note of connectedness and transformation as the motto or the label under which we can deal with the huge traffic accident that we have made of contemporary civilization.
