Sola Sanguis: A Volkish Credo Of Blood

originally posted on The Purity Spiral Forum, by Wayland Smith

Despite growing popularity, Volkist paganism is not well understood. In our circles, it’s often derided as inauthentic. To those within a Christian framework, our beliefs lack metaphysical assertions and theological substance. We’re even accused of being a “degenerate” movement. Christians cite examples of pop-culture “heathenry” – lesbian cat-ladies in Wiccan covens and dirty hippies wearing pentagrams – as representative of paganry, but we are not these people. We share as much with such human detritus as our Christian cohorts share with the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists. This kind of comparison is disingenuous prima facia, and requires no argument.

The charge of lacking theological substance and metaphysical claims is more severe. Christians claim we don’t actually believe in the gods; that our gods are “symbols” and our beliefs are metaphors, rather than assertions on reality. They claim we worship “deified men”, not supreme beings. This is false. Christians’ habit of denying paganism’s substance is for subjective, not objective, reasons. They assume that if paganism fails to mirror Christian metaphysics, then it has no metaphysics. If paganism lacks a central ideological nucleus (even if Christianity never had one) then it has no theology.

This is an example of Interpretatio Christiana – of Christians approaching Volkist beliefs without a metaphysics of blood to interpret us with. What they perceive is not a lack, but a divergence. The divergence in metaphysics and theology arises not because we fail to meet their standards, but because we reject their standards and assert competing ones. They project their own deracinated (race-less) framework onto our explicitly racial one, and miss the mark entirely._

What do Christians consider properly theological, such that we seem to have none? In the crudest sense, the charge is based on our concept of god(s) conflicting with theirs; they believe themselves to be monotheistic (despite the Apostolic Creed’s affirmation of the Trinity), while we are polytheists who deny the “one-ness” of God. This criticism is partially true; we are polytheists. Despite being polytheistic, we have a concept of the “one-ness” of nature, a metaphysical unity that subsumes all gods and men; Christians also believe in a single transcendent unity that subsumes the division of their triune godhead. Though the pagan conception of the divine might seem analogous to the Christian Trinity’s paradoxical “one-ness”, Christians reject any similarity.

They aren’t entirely wrong. Indeed, the pagan conception of divine unity is far less paradoxical than the Christian one. We assert the continuity of all things. We don’t force contradictory absolutes into the same semantic box. To us, reality is a shadow, the projection of a deeper, more fundamental truth into this world. The gods are a manifestation of the deeper world of spirit: a heirophany that requires no authority beyond the laws of nature and blood ties – ties of blood between gods and men, between the living and the dead.

On the charge of lacking a credo

Christians distinguish themselves with many creeds and proclamations, like the Apostolic Creed, affirming trinitarian belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son and the Holy Spirit – or the Five Solae:

• Sola scriptura – ”by Scripture alone”;
• Sola fide – ”by faith alone”
• Sola gratia – ” by grace alone”
• Solus Christus or Solo Christo – ”Christ alone” or “through Christ alone”
• Soli Deo gloria – ”glory to God alone”

Christians claim that without such credos, paganism cannot be true religion. Ironically, the Five Solae were formally articulated in the 20th century, and the Apostolic Creed was not formally articulated until the 700s. Christians who lived before these principles became concrete theology cannot be true Christians, or practicing a “true” religion at all. Christianity, therefore, has no theological pedigree, and springs out of nothingness. Of course, this notion is absurd, but so is the suggestion that pagans lack legitimate belief because we forego bureaucracy to formulate it.

Formal academic theology is not a pre-requisite. Beneath outward difference, Volkist paganism revolves around an immanent precept: blood is a metaphysical integument… Blood binds us within the tapestry of our kin and the gods. Blood is the vehicle whereby wisdom of the racial past, of the suffering and triumph of our ancestors, carries through us to our children, and all their posterity. The divine Will subsumes our entire being, physical and spiritual. The two are one while we live, and while our race persists. We are its myriad manifestations, tendrils of desire and will stretching backward in time, beyond historical memory, to the dawn of our species.

Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil’s own seed. But do not forget to wait. Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and hour your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit.

―C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus

Volkists represent the turning of desire away from foreign racial impositions, from the amnesiac fog of multicultural Babylon, to the Will of our ancestral past shepherding us to this dispensation. We profess this covenant: Blood is our sacrament and credo – not the dry, dead ink of scripture.

On the charge that paganism lacks a “scriptural basis”

We speak often of Heirophany, a term designating the manifestation of the sacred. It refers to any manifestation of the sacred throughout history. Blood is our central heirophany, not paper. Unlike Christianity, pagans lack a professional theological class, those pale emaciated forms shuffling through the archives of Rome, the synagogues of Tel Aviv, and the libraries of Cambridge.

Our theologians walk in the woods and climb mountains, seeking the the gods in the living world. Our theology requires no intermediaries, no priest-academics or legal scholars to mediate the heirophany for us. We aren’t lawyers worshiping scrolls in archives. We’re living and breathing, with blood in our veins, blood spilled over kilometers of soil, across distant continents. One blood, and one racial soul. Our gods don’t push paper, and neither do we.

As a Volkist, my relationship to the divine is mediated by the blood I’ve inherited – not the blood shed by a virgin birth with no ties to me or any living man (Christ). I exist in concert, within the same nature as the gods, who are also bound by blood ties. It’s not something I have to verbally assert; it’s a metaphysical truth that asserts itself over me. Blood asserts its divinity over me, not the ink of scripture.

Ancestry is our scripture. Our Weltanschauung is the heirophany of history, nature, and the gods. Volkists apply historicity, Aryan syncretism, and Sophia Perrenis to our racial past. Combined with an understanding of metaphysics, syncretism permits spiritual freedom – an independence to determine for our own community what reflects the divine will. History (including modern archeology) tells us this was always the way of Aryans, thousands of years before the present. We honor heritage as the vessel of our racial spirit, the medium between our lives and the divine. The credo of Sola Sanguis says that honoring our inheritance, evoking their lives and practices, manifests the sacred – because our blood is scripture. Our “lives of the Saints” is the enitre tale of our people.

Such concepts are not entirely foreign to Christians, despite their objections. Christianity also reflects an Aryan proclivity for syncretism: Constantine’s “vision” of a solar questenbaum bears conspicuous resemblance to parhelion common in Mithraic cults, Celtic and Germanic stonework – like the Sonnenkreuz – a symbol of Aryans for thousands of years. Christians bristle when reminded of Christianity’s derivative nature, as a simulacrum of pre-existing pagan cults and beliefs, but it’s a fact they can’t deny. Even the concept of the immortal soul, that survives beyond death, is not Christian (or even Jewish) in origin: it’s pagan.

Despite being an unfortunate and unfulfilling facsimile of the wisdom traditions that preceded it, Christianity still housed Aryan blood for thousands of years, and thus, bears the Aryan trace. How could it do otherwise? “The Christ” sheds his blood for the world’s salvation, much as Odin shed his own for knowledge of the runes; but Odin’s blood is our own blood, while Christ’s blood belongs to no one. His divinity is detached from the world, his blood is outside our Volkish continuity.

On the charge that Volkist paganism has a “Northern” preference

Why should paganism not have a “Northern” preference, when we are Northern by racial extraction? We are not Mediterranean or Semitic (though nothing technically prevents these people from adopting our worldview, except that they already have their own). We are the products of thousands of years of co-mingling and co-habitation, through conquest, commerce, and cultural affinity. We are more alike than anyone else. Our languages are more mutually intelligible than our Southern cousins’ to our ears. We shared the same gods, the same cultures, the same traditions – and more importantly – the same blood. One might even argue that Roman Christianity is more authentic to Mediterranean peoples, being the direct descendants of Rome, than it is to anyone North of the Rhine. Our preference for Northern European heritage is obvious, if the principle “blood first and last, blood before all” is understood.

In the words of the Canadian poet, William Wilfred Campbell:

And ye, who dwell in the shadow
Of the century-sculptured piles,
Where sleep our century-honoured dead,
While the great world thunders overhead,
And far out, miles on miles,
Beyond the throb of the mighty town
The blue Thames dimples and smiles,—
Not yours alone the glory of old,
Of the splendid thousand years
Of Britain’s might and Britain’s right
And the brunt of British spears;—
Not yours alone, for the great world round,
Ready to dare and do,
Scot and Celt and Norman and Dane,
With the Northman’s sinew and heart and brain,
And the Northman’s courage for blessing or bane,
Are England’s heroes too.

Northern peoples are more “one people” than anyone else. That is the inescapable truth of history. Some will always claim that “language is my true fatherland”, and similar nonsense. They’ll argue that a Welshman has nothing in common with an Englishman, and a Dane has nothing in common with a German; more words and ink elevated over blood. More of the same spiritual entropy that hollowed out our race over the centuries, and threatens to end us forever.

We don’t deny cultural or regional difference. We cherish it as we cherish things far greater in scope. Our worship and spiritual discipline vary according to particulars of linguistic heritage, communities of the Volk, and divine calling. There is no contradiction in men of the same race respecting different customs and traditions, within the same set of precepts. I can be bound to my German brethren as much as to my Welsh brethren: we are Aryans seeking fellowship in the same racial heritage. Christians must ask themselves: are they more bound to those of their race in the blood of Christ than they are in their literal blood? Can they truly find themselves in the shared suffering of their race without hearing the call of their own blood above all else?

The Aryan racial heritage is the scripture our souls recite. The gods provide insight into this repository of truth to men and women seeking it. All beings are set apart in time and space, but bound together within fate’s fearful symmetry. Gods and men are threads woven within the tapestry of universal truth: the divine law of eternal Nature. We don’t summon thousands of years of priestly bureaucracy to formulate legalist dogma, but this lack of institutional sclerosis does not constitute a lack of theology. Our theology is our Weltanschauung, a living construct like a living tree, its roots reaching back through time. We are its leaves, rising and falling, and rising again. We are the Eternal Return, rooted in the soil of our blood.

“Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. You shall not make totems of foreign trees. No one shall keep you else you trespass your limits; but blessed be the place where we meet the beginning of our limitations. Beyond one’s frontiers there is not but illusion and misery, because there you arrive in a country of the wrong ancestor spirits and the wrong charms …

Why do you look for foreign teachings? They are poisons, they did not come out of your blood. You should be on your own feet, and you have your own rich earth below them. Truth is a tree with roots. It is not words. Truth only grows in your own garden, nowhere else. Only feeble men eat the food of a stranger. But your people need a strong man, one who gets his truth in his own roots and out of his own blood … “

– C.G. Jung