54-rune-edit-comp-may-2025
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Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: [00:00:00] Today on the show, I
Michael Reiley: welcome Nordic Animus scholar and expert Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen. Rune is a historian of religion and has a PhD from Upsala University in Sweden. In our conversation, we discuss his work bringing animus practices into a modern context and how animism ancestor work and developing connection to the land can be experienced as a spiritual, cultural and activist practice.
Welcome to the Sounds of SAND Podcast, before we get into Nordic animism in your practice, I was just curious about your background a bit. Did you grow up with the traditions of Nordic [00:01:00] animism or is it something you came to as an adult?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I would say it's mainly something I came to as an adult. Scandinavia is generally very modernized and secular particularly southern Scandinavia, where I'm from. So it wasn't it wasn't something that I was brought up to with a, to a very large extent. I do come from a kind of a background.
I grew up fairly secular, but my family has background in a, in a. Kind of special kind of Christianity that's normal here, which is actually very linked to pre-Christian ideas. It builds or kind of wants to build pre-Christian ideas into its matrix, but that's a little bit of its own rather weird story that, that that we have Christianity in.
In Denmark, where I'm from that actually sees heathen religion as the old Testament of our people. But, so I grew up a little bit on that side. I did get that a little bit but it's, I wouldn't call that growing up into nor [00:02:00] animism.
Michael Reiley: And so you're referencing maybe some of the pegan roots that were pre-Christian, that.
Christianity co-opted to make into what we now know as Christianity.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think that would be a slightly different thing, a di different period. This particular kind of Christianity emerged in the 19th century and had this national romanticist bend where it looked very much to this glorious past and therefore wanted to take in the old mythologies and so on.
What you'd be talking about there is more like what perhaps happened in the Middle Ages when Christian Christianity arrived and would then be perhaps taking in specific motifs, which is something that you've seen, you'd see a lot in Northern Europe and you also see sometimes that people would.
Exert cultural resilience through that. So a little bit in a similar way as people in Afro diasporic religions identify their voodoos or the LOAs, the Orisha deities with Catholic Saints you [00:03:00] saw similar tendencies in Northern Europe. But that but these are the kind of two different periods in history.
Michael Reiley: Okay. Thanks for clarifying that. Yeah. I was imagining very ancient when you said that. Cool. So yeah, let's get into this sort of heart of what you do in Nordic animism. Could you give us a very v general overview of what it is and how you. Your relation to it, the like. The
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: basic idea is this, people today are in the process of realizing that indigenous peoples are significantly less destructive to the planet than the rest of us, or the rest of us are significantly more destructive to planet than the indigenous peoples.
And that means that we are in a sense called to reflect on our own backgrounds as your descended people to think, okay, perhaps we have similar things in our background ourselves, and lo and behold, we do the, [00:04:00] this complex of sometimes will, people will talk about culture of land, connectedness, animism, custodianship, and these this kind of culture that keeps humans, human community in some sort of less destructive relation to nature. That is indeed something that I. Many human communities, if not all human communities have in their background. So there's not really any moral or methodological or theoretical or even political reason that the kind of people that are usually racialized as white shouldn't be asking them, asking ourselves, oh, perhaps we can decolonize our.
Our whiteness in an attempt to refind these kind of animist ways of knowing traditional ways of knowing that might lead us towards less destructive ways of being in the world. And that is basically what Nordic animism [00:05:00] is. It's an attempt to try to do that and to try to do it in ways that are.
I hope politically and morally legitimate, they should be based on compromising respect for for instance, people of. All kinds of observances be that sexual or racial or religious or cultural or whatever kind of subjectivity that people that people have. So that's basically the starting point of wanting to think with Nordic animism, can we decolonize out of this?
Rather problematic whiteness that we are encased in. That is locking us into specific ways of being specific perceptions and also specific ways of relating to the world, ways of relating to the world that by now I think. Most of us would probably agree that they have shown to be rather apocalyptically [00:06:00] cataclysmically destructive because it's not a little problem that our global civilization is facing right now.
In fact, it's the biggest collapse in the history of life for 65 million years, which is a period of time that is about. 12,000 times longer than the entirety of human history. Right? Human history began when with writing, in mention of writing an ancient Sumer. So you know the kind of consumer civilization that.
Primarily the Eurocentric culture sphere has imposed on the world, has had, consequences that are so apocalyptically catastrophic that it can hardly be overstated. And so that, that's the base. Line for saying, okay, so can we think ourselves in different ways?
And you could say, this is also, in fact a way of trying to respond to I would say dialogues that are playing out on a macro [00:07:00] level in the world today, where a lot of, for instance, indigenous voices are actually asking, white people to reflect on their culture in indigenous ways, and that does imply some rather serious problems going down that road, but I'm trying to tackle some of those problems.
Yeah.
Michael Reiley: Nice. That's beautiful. 'cause that gives us a bit of the what, but also the why of why is this work so important these days. And just for the context of this conversation and the way that we're using the term. So when we say decolonization, how does that manifest itself in Nordic animism?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Yeah, that's a really good and important question because when we are talking about decolonization in the context of white people, it's po important to sort just define how we, for instance, are not colonized. So yeah, it's important to understand that white people haven't been exposed to genocides systemic racism.[00:08:00]
Simulation programs and boarding schools. Maybe there are some who think that perhaps capitalism have some aspects of that, or, but it's a different story. It's a different discussion. Let's leave that out for a moment. The important thing is that we have also been exposed to a mind colonization to, to an.
A colonization of our ways of knowing and our ways of perceiving the world. Because if you go back a couple of hundred years, you'd find that people in the countryside, in someplace in Europe, probably also North America, would have an animus knowledge system where stones, trees, rivers, would be inhabited by spirit beings.
However that. Was then culturally subjected to a rather harsh judgment that was not okay. That was not the right way of being a modern [00:09:00] white person. So that way of knowing these ways of knowing has been very steeply rejected and pushed out our our self image and our knowledge system.
And that is a colonizing process, and it has. Played out with the same tools, the same judgemental stereotypes and so on, which was applied on other people peoples, in other parts of the world. So if peasants somewhere in Europe were engaging spirit beings in, in, in stones and mounds and rivers than scholars.
For instance, representing elites would say they are as primitive as African fetishists. Even in almost e explicit racial judgment on actual Euro descendants that are not really complying with how you're supposed to be if you're supposed to be a proper white person. See what I'm saying? Does it make sense?
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Because I think the word animism is coming into vogue now, like in spiritual [00:10:00] and social justice circles, but correct me if I'm wrong the word animism was quite pejorative in the past, right? Like it was
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: kinda I'm not, yeah it was part of an.
Evolutionist, it came about as part of an evolutionist understanding of human culture. And that was an understanding in which human culture moved from animism and upwards. So where animism was the ground zero of being human, and it was seen as something infantile and backwards. So that would then advance towards being more and more advanced.
Being modern European, which was then the pinnacle of humanity, right? So yes, that is the, like in terms of research history, that is where animism started. But during the, the late part of the 20th century, this word has then been taken back by researchers with much more sympathetic views on animism.
Particularly a British [00:11:00] scholar named Graham Harvey but also a very or very important north American anthropologist named Irving Hallowell. I'm actually not sure he was working specifically with animism, but he was part of creating these new understandings of animism that have become popularity.
So yeah, the animism started as well as a very problematic term, but one that has been retained. But I would also say that like. When we talk about cultural history and terms that define something in culture, I think it's probably almost difficult to find terms that are not problematic. I think the term religion is problematic term, magic also problematic, and but yeah, definitely, yeah.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And and when you frame it as Nordic animism, I'm just curious too is there a universality to animism across the globe or is there something specific in Nordic animism?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think there is the universality to animism that it's always very local [00:12:00] and very culture specific. And so like wherever you have humans, you will have.
O often you will have animus practices. And these animus practices are they inscribe these humans with relation in relation with the ecosystem in which they exist. And that of course means that you are relating to different ecosystems and. You are also relating in different ways. If you are in in the northeastern part of north America.
Wild Rice is a really important plant that give people life. So there will be stories about how wild rice is a sacred plant. And people will be relating with their landscapes by tobacco, which is a way of sharing. Tobacco is a way of building relation. [00:13:00] If you are in Northern Europe rye is a really important plant that give people life, and you'll have rituals that ceremonies the rye as a deity, a life.
Bringing life giving guests that people are receiving in when the rye harvest is brought in and singing and they will be forming it into a deity that they will be celebrating. And people will have like in North America, they'll have a mean means of sharing, which is not tobacco, but beer.
So beer in Northern Europe plays an almost. Identical role sometimes as tobacco has played in, in, or plays in North America. So you see that there are different forms but sometimes these forms can be very similar. Sometimes they can also be very different. But these are just examples of very similar kinds of animism.
So when I'm talking about Nordic animism it's because. I [00:14:00] want to talk about it in a frame where a specific group of people can relate to it. And where I also has have a legitimacy to talk about it because I'm from this part of the world. So a good way of starting to talk about animism is to say, okay this is a way of thinking that kind of comes from here and belongs here.
And and it relates to this landscape here.
Michael Reiley: Yeah and I'm sure too the. Your ancestors are Nordic, right? Like basically going back as far as, so it Is that true?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm, I think I'm ethnically pretty unmixed. But, or almost, I think I'm completely unmixed, but but I also think we should be a little bit careful.
Placing too much weight in bio ancestry because it can become this, it can become problematic.
Michael Reiley: Yeah, no, I was just asking that to say that, your relationality to the specific animism of your place is probably [00:15:00] rooted in your blood and your cells and your DNA. It's all interconnected, so it probably resonates in a very specific way for you.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I'm not too in love with bringing DNA into this because because humans move quite a lot historically. And and we, and our genome does change. We do look different, for instance, in different parts of the world but our. I don't think that, I think the genomes change at an extremely slow pace compared to the speed of human migration.
Even if you look at a very long period of time is it. 10, 20,000 years ago that that indigenous Americans migrated into north America through the Bearing Strait. I think from a a genetic point of view that is a moment, it's a glimpse in time, 10,000 years. So I'm a little bit careful with [00:16:00] the, or I'm cautious with the genetic perspective also because it it very quickly can veer just in English, veer into.
Ideas of race, for instance, where my sister was adopted from Korea as a child, so she less legitimately Danish than me. Does she have a less of a of a a right, for instance, to feel connected to the landscape? He is like culturally, of course, he's fully as. Danish as me. She grew up in exactly the same.
So yeah, just to say I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit, yeah. No cautious with that
Michael Reiley: that
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: perspective.
Michael Reiley: Thank you for clarifying that. I think I was saying DNA almost as a modern way just to say bones. Like you feel it in your bones, but
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Yeah.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Not being very precise with my language
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: though.
And I think that's that's an important point, if we say, for instance, when we want to say stuff like essence, [00:17:00] like you feel an essential connect connection to something, then that is, I think that in, in some cases, that's a very good, in some cases it's a very good. Way to speak, but we need to be very cautious about what metaphors for essence we we use.
See what I'm saying?
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And what comes to mind is I grew, I'm about three generations American, my gen, going back to my great-great-grandparents. Are American, but my lineage is from Ireland. And my first time going back to Ireland, specifically the county where my father's family's from it.
I don't know if it was imagined, but it just felt very resonant in my body. It just felt like when I inhaled the air and smelled the grass and walked around and went to the cemeteries, just felt very alive and, yeah like a place I've been before. And of course this all could just be my, me projecting that on, going back to my quote unquote homeland, where my ancestors are from.
But yeah,
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: and it's important to acknowledge that experience. [00:18:00] It's important to to, to not or to be able to embrace that experience or bring it into how we are understanding ourselves today as transatlantic Creole mixed people who are inventing ourselves into contemporary, respectful, hopefully decolonial self image.[00:19:00]
And
Michael Reiley: [00:20:00] in terms of your practice in Nordic animism do you see it as a spiritual practice? Or a [00:21:00] cultural practice or where are the
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: lines or lack thereof? I think that would probably be lack thereof. Okay. I think I sometimes use the words spirituality or religiosity. And I think those words are.
Good because they they do have somewhat of a stigma, particularly here in Europe, perhaps more here in Europe than in America. And that stigma is a problem that should probably be, I. Dealt with because it comes from the way that modernity has been used to reject specific ways of knowing as woo hippie stuff, and I think there's an importance to perhaps resists that tendency of rejection somehow. Yeah I think that the. Concept in the practice of a well any kind of animism is reciprocity and relation that, that you're [00:22:00] building a reciprocal relationship with others around you. And these others can be human or they can be other than human of different sorts.
And. That thing about for instance physical embodied giving. If you have a an ancient grave mount in close to your, the place you live, and you are actually giving it a bowl of beer to the spirits that live in that. That site then, the bowl of beer is important. It's not just an imagination.
The actual giving itself is important and that creates a reciprocity where you are where you are entering into relatedness. And I think that our. Common modern perceptions of the world often makes this weird, and that is something [00:23:00] that we have to perhaps forget about or push out of our minds a little bit and just go into that giving and and receiving, which is and this.
Sometimes these forms are there in perhaps potential form or the. Often it seems that under the surface in our culture, so if you look at normal North European seasonal culture, for instance, you'll find a lot of these traditions that are really very beautiful traditions of engaging others in the land.
A beautiful example from North America's Halloween where people are carving these jacko. Lanterns that are simultaneously, they are an offering of a crop because these pumpkins they're a crop of course, but they're also monstrous. There's something monstrous about them, so they somehow represent an underworld that at that time of [00:24:00] year is opening.
Its. It's gates. So the dark time is coming to us. So it, there is an a a unity between life and death in that image of the of these pumpkin heads. And you're lighting a candle inside it. That is a candle. That it is as if you are lighting a candle in the underworld inside this monstrous being perhaps associated with death, which is at the same time ultimately life-giving.
It is actually a piece of crop life-giving sustenance. Now that kind of density of symbolism is. I think it's core in animist relating, and when we look at, for instance, stuff like folklore we find a lot of it and we can, some of it we can just take out and use again, like these jackal Landons.
That is an example of stuff that is a very live contemporary tradition, but a lot has also been lost. But sometimes it [00:25:00] can be taken back into our normal celebrations of, I don't know, Christmas or midsummer or November day or whatever we, celebrate.
Michael Reiley: Yeah, that's true. It's like there's all of these almost like shadows of animism in our popular culture.
And it's just a matter of maybe spending time with them and deconstructing them and doing the research on where they come from. And, you mentioned Halloween and. As an American, I'll say we're a very death phobic culture. Like we basically don't talk about death. It's very taboo subject to talk about, yet we have this very popular holiday these days.
It's like super, it's, it's up there with Christmas and Thanksgiving now with like how much it's advertised on tv and you see it in the stores and this celebration of getting your costume ready and finding, for children and adults nowadays.
So it's, yeah it's interesting these sort of maybe these portals into animism that, that are there.
We just have to maybe go through them a bit more to, to rediscover what it's, what can be about.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Yeah. [00:26:00] Okay. So Halloween is also growing in North America. Yeah. Okay awesome. What has happened here is actually that we have imported Halloween from North America because we used to have all hello celebrations that were the same, but they died out, and then people have started to celebrate north American Halloween, which is, it.
It's a renewal actually of. Culture that basically used to be there. And I think animism often works like that, that there are aspects of renewal in, in, in contact between different cultural spaces.
Michael Reiley: And in terms of animism as a spiritual practice, I'm just curious too, in, in Denmark and Scandinavia, is it like on forms and things like that, like government forms? Is it like something you can actually put down as a religion? Is it like an accepted religion? No.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: No. I think in Norway some people have started an animist an animist.
Offic, officially acknowledged [00:27:00] religion. But that doesn't exist in Denmark. What there is is there's neo paganism or are true, which is somewhat of a different yet related thing because this is a thing that focuses very much on the pre-Christian, the specifically pre-Christian part of our animus tradition you could say, which is also extremely rich and beautiful and fascinating in all kinds of ways.
So it's very understandable. But but I'm not sure that all of these are true heathen new pagans, that they necessarily understand themselves as animus. So it's a, its own. Kind of category.
Michael Reiley: And what are some of the sort of day-to-day things that one, as an animus does are there rituals or readings or prayers?
It's a very basic, maybe ignorant question, but I'm just curious like, how does the, how does it, the day, how does the animism come through in a day-to-day sense? I.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think today we are very much in [00:28:00] recovery which means that there isn't a lot it's not if you become a Buddhist or a Her Krishna practicing Hindu, that then there is a set complex of rituals that you can then start performing and then you are basically in the flow of performing that kind of spirituality or internalizing that spirit kind of spirituality that isn't available in the same way because. Many of these practices have been eject, basically rejected from our culture.
So a lot of it is gone. What I'm trying to do is trying to bring back some of these practices and stuff like, like I mentioned the beer before. The idea that beer is a basic vessel of connectivity in a similar way as tobacco is for specific indigenous Americans. That is something that.
Can be applied [00:29:00] in con contemporary life. If an Ojibwe Native American brings tobacco in, in his hand when he visit an elder, we still bring a bottle of wine when we visit each other. That each other, that's today's high status alcohol. But, if we stop bringing beer and bringing it with this consciousness that exchange is.
A fundamental connectivity that we are working with, which is found fundamentally is flowing out of the spirit of the earth basically because it is made out of the produce of the earth and the spirits in that alcohol. It comes from these incredibly sacred, actually processes of distilling and invoking out actually these this yeah, the spirit of the earth.
Now, this is something that you can work with today, right? It's something that you can bring into practice. It is about understanding it and bringing it out. I would say the same with some of the holiday [00:30:00] traditions. That that I have been talking about. I actually wrote a book about that. And basically to, to use the wheel of the Seasons as a, as basically as a path back into some of these practices.
Another, thing that I have become aware of, which is I think incredibly beautiful and has been a really important part of people's life is the sacred fire. The treatment of specific fire, and that can be a hearth fire in the house, or it can be a seasonal pyre or it can be Christmas lights to basically.
Take the saity of fire back 'cause there's been a lot of sacred fire among Europeans. It's a very characteristically European thing and you find it among all kinds of peoples, of course, sacred fire, but it, you just find it among Europeans a lot. So this is, these are [00:31:00] concrete.
Little things that it, that technologies that I'm trying to bring back somehow and make available knowledge of them for people hopefully to somehow use or apply in their in their daily life lives.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. It's interesting because it the things you're describing, they sound new and novel, but obviously we're talking about things that 99.9% of our ancestors did who are also animus.
Like we're the, in the vast majority in terms of being non animus in our relation to the more than human and nature and each other.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Animism is the animism, is the rule in, in, in cultural history and the. The idea that humanity is encased in in loneliness in cosmic loneliness, that is an exception in [00:32:00] the history of humanity.
And that's also why the, in a sense, it must be available to, to move back, and so I think some, like some kinds of culture is it ought to be possible to make it available. There's an indigenous American author named Robin Wall Camera who's describing. She's very much into plants and she describes the relationship to plants and the close relation and the gratitude.
This culture of gratitude and reciprocity when receiving life from plants.
Michael Reiley: Yeah.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: And it's braid Braiding.
Michael Reiley: Sweetgrass is her woman book about that. Yes. Braiding, yeah. Braiding.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: A braining. Sweetgrass. Exactly. And it's beautiful. And, but as I mentioned before, if we think with Robin Kim's perspective and look at.
European culture we find for instance, stuff like this, celebration for the rye, [00:33:00] that plant, which is giving life to people. We find practices of what Robin Kimer calls the Honorable Harvest that you are not. Taking everything, you're leaving something out there in the fields. We find stuff like very close relationship with plants in the landscape.
I read about the the an important plant relation in southern Scandinavia, the elder tree recently, which is a plant that has been used for myriads of. Of purposes in people's lives. I think I counted more than a hundred different medicinal purposes that were described in the text that I had.
I think around 30 different co culinary users from this single plant. Now that that closeness and proximity in the relation to those beings that give us life, I think that is something that we can. Oh, we must find it [00:34:00] again. And here I'm talking about plants. We could also talk about animals.
Now, one thing is that, some choose to live as vegetarians or vegans, and I think that's I totally understand that choice. But if we look at animist relation to. To, for instance, hunt hunted animals. Then there is a relation of respect, which is. Absolutely foundational.
I went to northern Norway some months back and visited a Samami man a guy from the indigenous population of northern Norway who grew up as a traditional reindeer herter herder. And for him, the like for instance, the act of killing animals in order to eat them is very normal, but also.
When he described this he described it as a very like a very deep act of respect. That and it is not something you enjoy doing, but there's a very deep relation of [00:35:00] respect that is going on in that. Now if we think about the the conventional industrialized meat production system that we have today, then that is.
Gone. It is a very atrocious way of dealing with these beings that are giving us our life by be becoming meat. When you look at pigs, for instance, I'm from Denmark. I grew up in Denmark. I grew up in a pig farm. The Denmark has 6 million human people and produces 30 million pigs for slaughter annually.
30 million for a population of 6 million people. It's grotesque. When we, if we roll back time and look at our relation to that particular animal back in time, you would find that Friar, the goddess of love, she was named Sr. In Old Nors, which means the sow, so there is an [00:36:00] extreme deval Today's sow would be what's some of the most ugly thing you can even imagine saying to a woman?
So the there's an extreme deval of our relation to that animal. I. That goes together with this very atrocious way of actually relating with that animal. In two generations or three generations ago in Northern Europe, people would ceremonially apologize to a pig when slaughtering it in the same way as an Inuit hunter in Greenland would apologize to the soul of a seal after after killing it.
Now that respect relation is. Is absolutely gone. And I think that stuff like that, respecting the beings that give us life, be that rye or be that pig, or be that, the elderly tree, these are things that are so intuitive that it must be possible to bring them back into prac, into practice, into [00:37:00] common practice.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Beautifully said. Yeah. The the examples you're giving of connecting with the earth, the more than human I, I think are all great. And I'm wondering, can we expand this to the way we relate to each other. So are there animus practices that can deal with some of the psychological and societal things that are plaguing us?
Like you mentioned loneliness or polarization even. As Sam, we've been working a lot with individualized trauma, with the wisdom of trauma film. Are there methodologies, do you think, in animism that can be applied to these these problems we're having as a society? I. Yeah. The answer to the question is, yeah.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Next question. No yeah, I'm I'm inspired by this Australian thinker Tyson, Yung Porter, original Australian thinker who suggests, yeah, he presented at Sand a few times. Yeah, I, yeah, he probably [00:38:00] has like he. Is suggesting that we think about culture in terms of the laws of is it called inertia in English or entropy?
Michael Reiley: Ent yeah. Inertia is like the forward momentum of a thing. Entropy is like the breakdown over time of Yeah, exactly.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: And he's talking about the two different laws where the basic law is connectivity and transformation, which is the one that, that many indigenous peoples operate their reality by.
And the second law, the tropic. Way of functioning is that if you take a system and you and you close it and you have energy in there, then that energy g will atrophy. It will dilute. And the thing is that in throughout history, there's been a tendency to toward more and more way of ways of building our culture right [00:39:00] now.
Today, for instance, we have nationalisms. They are very entropic being, Danish is being part of this uniform mass, which is inside a container called Denmark. And that is different from being German. And there isn't a, there isn't a mixing space in between. These are two different jars. And.
I think that many of the ways that we perceive ourselves and that we perceive our world are, they flow out from this idea of entropy. Modernity, the modern world and the way of of perceiving reality in the modern world is monumentally tropic. It is very focused on non relation, right?
That is nowhere more so true than. Our subjectivities. We are living inside these little shells where [00:40:00] I am, inside this shell of me, and then there's this whole alien world outside me, right? That is the modern way of building a subject. It's in tropic because there's this clear distinction that it's a non relation.
Now I think we see that manifesting. Problems in our time. We see tendencies towards nationalisms, for instance, that are growing. We also see the Identitarian left wing leaning into nationalist perceptions of reality. And thats problems the. Now when, for instance, like me, you're talking in public space about stuff like Nordic past, you get a lot of attention from bad people.
I cancel a lot of, I cancel a lot of people from my platforms because they may be, I don't know, racists or something like that, so I don't. I basically don't want them to to co-opt what I'm saying and bring it [00:41:00] into their their way of seeing things.
And that, that is a result I think of entropic thinking.
Michael Reiley: What are some of the aspects
of animism then that can help us get out of this entropic system that Tyson and you are talking about?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: One particular. Part I think is is modes of self-image that build on relation to others around us rather than the what do you say, the nationalist idea of an tropic container.
So if instead of. Postulating a contained sameness. We understand ourselves as related to something other. Then we are moving towards an animist way of building self-image. So if you have animist groups somewhere, you often have these relations to you have tomic groups a. Is basically a family group that includes some humans and [00:42:00] something else in the world, right?
So you have a group of humans and ravens, and that's a that's a Raven clan that includes both humans and raven members. So that, that is one non tropic, I think, way of trying to build self image in our time. Another. Aspect, which might be relevant to to your podcast here is the the aspect of trauma.
And perhaps I should just start by disclaiming that I'm speaking here as a person who's not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and as a person who's very nont traumatized I have a friend who's actually a trauma. Taking a trauma education and he's saying that I'm one of theum know I was once lynched.
In interior Angola. And I did a PTSD test after that and I hadn't accu [00:43:00] accrued any traumatization from it. And this is not to say that I'm a super solid, cool person or anything. I think everybody has breaking points and so on. It is just to say I'm a nont traumatized person talking about trauma now.
Michael Reiley: So you were. People were chasing you and trying to string you up to hang you to death, you mean?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: No. Do you wanna hear the story?
Michael Reiley: Yeah, sure. Before we
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: get, wow. It's just, I was working for a humanitarian I was working for a humanitarian agency. And a horrible accident had happened where a lot of people had died that were implied, employed by our organization.
And in that part of the world, people wanna bury their dead immediately, and that wasn't possible because of some what do you call it? Admin, administrative stuff that was going on. And that meant that a crowd of people. Like almost attacked, basically our headquarters. Okay. So we had to hide.
Okay. Anyway, so that was just that story. Yeah. My [00:44:00] point here is just that, that the specific language about trauma that I often hear. I feel that it tend, it, it has the potential of enforcing the entropic understanding of self so that. In the modern understanding of subjectivity, we already have the bounded subjectivity, right?
But today it is as if the bounded subjectivity is come becoming even more bounded as if the borders, the bounds are becoming almost brittle or hard. So people have very strong reactions to each other and to to seeing other, to perceiving other. And that is in a sense, very non animist. If you look at animist culture, often there will be initiation rituals.
And these rituals they serve to make to the opposite. [00:45:00] To your sub to make your subjectivity porous, to make your sub activities softer and more relational, less hard, less brittle, less overreactive because that is how you. Get in the direction of an animist perception. So if you want to perce perceive yourself as in relation with the world around you, then your subjectivity has to be molded.
It has to be opened. To that perception. Now, that process is almost in principle, transgressive, which is why if you look for instance, at indigenous initiation rituals, they often are rather transgressive. There are aspects of violence, there are aspects of humiliation. And and these are, I think, ways of making subjectivity more perceptive or more relational basically.
And that is something that I think our culture today needs. So one [00:46:00] example of this, I. Initiatory culture. You find, for instance, in the Nordic heritage, there is an tic poem, which is a, an ancient poem from the Viking Age, which is called the hin. And this hin describes an initiatory process.
So it's almost like a sad, masochist situation where these two really badass goddesses that are demeaning and humiliating. This young man who's being initiated somehow, whose name is Atar, and they're just demeaning him throughout the whole lay. He's being humiliated and in the end he drinks poison and his world collapses and so on, and that.
Breakdown of his subjectivity. Then inscribes him in relationship with the the other than human world. So the end of the poem inscribes him and recounts all the part of the world, which is now his family, which is now [00:47:00] his kin. And these kind of, this kind of culture, I think has been lost to us.
And when we talk about. Trauma. I think the loss of the relational culture is part of the reason that we become so traumatized today that our of activities become so brittle because these, for instance, initiatory processes and cultures are not. Available to us anymore. And then I think that is somewhere at the root of trauma.
Did that make
Michael Reiley: sense what I was saying? It did. It did. Yeah. No I think you're weaving a lot of really. Beautiful concepts, but also practical ways to connect with animism. And so with that in mind, if someone is, feels called towards animism we'll have links to your website and to your books and things like that.
But are there some other resources you could recommend for someone who's basically knows nothing about animism but wants to get started with [00:48:00] it?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: I think that in the last decades what has happened is that a lot of these rather amazing indigenous writers have started to be basically heard in cultural spaces.
When I was a youngster, the only thing we had was Chief Seattle speech, if you know what that is, which is. It's a it's a forgery actually. It doesn't have anything to do with any, didn't have any ever had anything to do with any indigenous Americans. It was created by some hippie in the 1970s to lend credibility to environmental message.
But today there are these amazing voices like Robin Kimra that we spoke about. Tyson Porter, who has spoken has spoken here many times. An a Smithsonian guy what's his name now? Ma Doma Somme from west Africa. There's so many of these indigenous voices that are that are being heard and are available.
You can get. Access to this stuff fairly easily. And I think that reading [00:49:00] that stuff and trying to apply it on, for instance, our own cultural background is an incredibly enriching path to, towards realizing realizing our. Anim potential in our culture. And I think but there are not a lot of people who have thought exactly along the lines that that I'm doing here.
It's starting to come, you're starting to find, people who are thinking along these lines and and of course there's a lot of neo paganism and so on. Graham Harvey that I mentioned before, has some wonderful books about animism respecting the living World. Animism, respecting the Living World is a wonderful book.
Yeah I recommend those sources.
Michael Reiley: Nice. And yeah. And I recommend people check out your website and you have YouTube channel, which you're frequently updating adding videos on. Any other projects coming up this fall you wanted to mention that people can connect with you?
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Yeah, I'm, I have an online seminar on [00:50:00] autumn Animism coming up on October 1st.
And I also I'm gonna publish every year I'm publishing a Nordic animist calendar that is coming out for the following year. And you can also find that one on my website. Let me think. I think that's that.
Michael Reiley: Alright. Thank you Irun, for being on the show today and for imparting us with such deep wisdom about Nordic animism.
Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Thank you very much for bringing me in. It was super nice to to chat to you, Michael.
I. [00:51:00]
