Quest Magazine

Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and Germanic Tribes

Hans-Peter Hasenfratz Translated by Michael Moynihan
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2011. Paper, xi + 164 pages, $16.95

For reasons both good and bad, the religion of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes exercise a fascination on the modern mind. Unfortunately, a clear picture of what these tribes practiced and believed has been hard to come by.

One reason is a shortage of sources. During the period in question, from roughly 200 bc to ad 1000, most of these tribes were preliterate. Since literacy generally coincided with conversion to Christianity, the vast majority of written sources come from a time after Christianization, and it is sometimes hard to tell what kinds of alterations this produced in the myths and sagas. Was the famous sacrifice of the god Odin on the World-Tree Yggdrasil, for example, a genuine Germanic myth, or was it somehow an echo of the sacrifice of Christ?

Admittedly, there are a few texts from pre-Christian times. One of the most important is the Germania (“Germany”) by the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, written around ad 100, a short work that can be reckoned as one of the first anthropological treatises ever written. Other sources include the Old English poem Beowulf and archaeological artifacts, some of which bear a few scraps of writing in runes, the quasi-magical Germanic alphabet, but most of which are mute.

But there is another reason that the Germanic tribes have been hard to approach. They have been mythologized in ways both benign and sinister. As Hans-Peter Hasenfratz points out in this learned but readable study, part of Tacitus’s agenda was to portray the Germanic tribes of his day (whom the Romans were never able to subdue) as epitomes of the ancient martial virtues that he believed Rome had lost. A far more familiar, and more malign, use was that of the Nazis, who claimed to be reviving the spirit of the Germans’ ancient forebears.

Thus Hasenfratz’s book is particularly welcome. The author is a professor emeritus of the history of religion at Germany’s Ruhr University, so he comes well-equipped to sift through the evidence in a balanced and impartial way. Barbarian Rites gives a brief, general survey of the religion of the ancient Germanic tribes, including the populations of present-day Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries. He devotes considerable attention to the Age of the Vikings (ad 800-1100), not only because of the intrinsic interest of the period but because so many of our sources come from that time. But he is remarkably judicious in evaluating the evidence. He points out, for example, that the bloodthirsty aspects of Viking religion may have been partly a reflection of the warlike times and that our picture of Germanic religion may have looked somewhat different if we had more evidence from more peaceable periods in the tribes’ history.

Another strength of this work is that Hasenfratz does not sentimentalize his subjects. He portrays them as he sees them, and the portrait is a stark one. A “straw death”—dying peacefully in bed—was considered contemptible; it was far more glorious to die in battle. Old people were frequently abandoned or dispatched as unnecessary mouths to feed, and human sacrifice was common. The grimmest version was the “blood eagle” ritual of the Vikings, in which a living victim’s back was cut open, the ribs separated from the spine, and the lungs pulled out in such a way that they formed a pair of “wings”—presumably speeding his journey to the gods.

There are enough such details in this book to suggest that any attempt to revive the Germanic religion is misguided. Hasenfratz does not dwell at length at the largest and most ambitious of such attempts—the Nazi quasireligion of the Third Reich—but he does suggest how Nazi ideology was in some cases drawn from German antiquity. He notes, for example, that Hitler and Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg envisioned the Third Reich as an Ordenstaat—an “order-based state,” with a Führer (“leader”) chosen out of this order. (“Order” in this sense means an elite brotherhood of Nazis that was inspired by the ancient German institution of the Männerbund, a kind of male sodality with its own, often secret cultic rites and functions.) Below this elite order would be the classes of ordinary Nazi party members and, at the bottom, the sheeplike masses.

Hasenfratz avoids moralizing about these facts, but for the reader, the lesson is clear. While we may enjoy the Germanic myths as expressed in the Icelandic sagas or the operas of Richard Wagner, a real restoration of these religions is neither possible (we know too little about them) nor desirable (what we know is too appalling). While the author may not have intended to sound a warning against Neopagan revivals of the ancient German cults, this is in the end one objective the book achieves.

Richard Smoley

Alistair Conwell
Brooklyn, N.Y.: O Books, 2010. Paper, 259 pages, $24.95

Alistair Conwell’s scholarly and poetic work explores the phenomenon of the audible life stream, or the primordial sound current of the universe. Sound is presented as a messenger offering guidance from otherworldly realities. Testimonials from those who have had out of body and near-death experiences, quotations from classical religious texts, and references to quantum physics are presented to explain the potential for the expansion of consciousness by attunement to the sounds that reverberate around us always. Readers who are facing the grieving process, as well as those who seek understanding and a peaceful acceptance of the inevitability of death, will be especially uplifted by this highly original volume.

Dikki-Jo Mullen

The reviewer is a Florida-based astrologer and spiritual counseler.

Sharing the Light: The Collected Articles of Geoffrey Hodson

edited by John and Elizabeth Sell and Roselmo Z. Doval Santos
Quezon City, Philippines: Theosophical Publishing House, 2008. Two volumes. Hardcover, xxxvii + 1889 pages, $59.

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) ranks among the Theosophical Society’s most respected teachers, lecturers, and writers. In addition to serving as director of studies at the School of the Wisdom at the TS headquarters in Adyar, he taught at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy and was a featured speaker at many Theosophical conventions around the world. The lecture series he presented at Krotona in 1972 attracted students from throughout southern California, and were praised for their clarity, inspiration, and common-sense approach to human problems.

A highly gifted clairvoyant, Hodson worked with physicians and scientists to investigate the mysteries of the physical world. This research culminated in perhaps his most famous book, The Kingdom of the Gods, a groundbreaking investigation of the angelic kingdom, complete with dazzling color drawings of his clairvoyant observations. A devoted Gnostic and priest in the Liberal Catholic Church, Hodson was extremely knowledgeable about the Christian faith, and wrote numerous books on esoteric Christianity, including his landmark four-volume series The Hidden Wisdom in the Holy Bible.

In addition to having authored at least forty-six books and thirty-seven booklets, Hodson wrote hundreds of articles, making him the most prolific Theosophical writer of the twentieth century. Like his books, which have been praised for their clear and accessible style, most of his articles were based on original research. They appeared in Theosophical journals in Australia, India, the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa between 1927 and the late 1980s.

In keeping with Hodson’s broad and eclectic range of personal and professional interests, his articles covered a vast array of subjects, ranging from Theosophical teachings and their practical application to poetry, Maori esotericism, mystical Christianity, yoga, reincarnation, war and peace, health and healing, the angelic kingdom, Theosophical solutions to world problems, clairvoyant research with physicians and scientists, animal rights, and ways to promote and teach Theosophy. A number of articles included personal observations about the TS itself and some of its leaders, as well as insights into world figures including Jiddu Krishnamurti, John F. Kennedy, and the Dalai Lama.

Aware that many of Hodson’s writings for periodicals could become lost to both present and future generations, John and Elizabeth Sell, two prominent members of the New Zealand Section, devoted nearly four years of six-day workweeks tracking down, collecting, and editing nearly all of his published articles. Many have never been read by the vast majority of Theosophical students. The Theosophical Publishing House in the Philippines has published this extraordinary collection in two beautifully bound volumes containing nearly 2000 pages of text and illustrations.

Organizing the collected material was obviously a major challenge for the compilers, who divided more than 400 individual articles into thirteen sections, including “Spirituality and the Path of Discipleship,” “Theosophical Teachings,” “Clairvoyant Investigations,” “Ceremonial and Symbolism,” “The Keys to Health and Healing,” and “Presenting and Promoting the Wisdom Teachings.” A detailed glossary of terms has been constructed along with a comprehensive index (which alone totals forty pages), making what could have been an unwieldy assemblage of highly diverse material easily accessible to readers.

This astounding collection is a banquet of material for both individual and group study. Titles include “Ten Ways to Attract the Attention of the Masters,” “Meditation: the Elixir of Life,” “Clairvoyant Diagnosis of Disease,” “Earthquake in California,” “The Practice of World Brotherhood,” “The Monadic Purpose: Finding One’s Life Work,” “Art Modes of the Future,” “Theosophy for the Lawyer,” “Theosophy and the World’s Economists,” “Mind Radio: Thought Projection,” “Radiation of Power,” and “Before Himalayan Snows.”

One of my personal favorites was “Impressions of the Giant Sequoias,” in which the author describes these magnificent trees through a clairvoyant’s unique perspective. Another was “Our Work,” an article published in Theosophy in Australia, which discusses the lodge library as a center of occult power and the special role entrusted to the librarian to help individual readers select the most appropriate reading materials for their spiritual development.

The teachings found in the vast majority of articles are just as applicable today as when they were first written. In “What Are We Going to Build?” (published in The American Theosophist towards the end of the Second World War) Hodson calls upon us to become more aware of our personal responsibilities as students of Theosophy and “builders of the New Age”:

All our daily activities from rising to retiring . . . are of profound spiritual importance both to ourselves and to our fellow men. Every human activity, collective and individual, is Divine activity, an expression of Divine life, ruled by Divine Law. This is the great truth which humanity as a whole must one day acknowledge.

In addition to his articles, Sharing the Light includes a number of inspiring invocations that Hodson often used in his personal meditations and healing work. Readers will also delight at rare photographs of Hodson taken with family, friends, and colleagues at the TS. Many of these photos have never been published before.

Given the tremendous range of subjects presented in these volumes, many readers will be primarily attracted to specific themes for personal study and reflection. At the same time, much of the material presented in Sharing the Light can be utilized for group study in lodges and study centers.

While not a small investment, Sharing the Light presents a wealth of original, eclectic, and valuable teachings that will both challenge and inspire. In addition to becoming a valuable part of every lodge and study center library, it can be a timeless resource for every serious student of Theosophy.

Nathaniel Altman

The reviewer has been a member of the Theosophical Society in America since 1970. He was a student of Geoffrey Hodson at the Krotona School of Theosophy in 1972.

Sufism and the Way of Blame: Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology

Yannis Toussulis
Wheaton: Quest, 2011. Paper, xxii + 282 pages, $18.95

Over the last twenty years, many excellent translations of Sufi texts have appeared in English, but few original studies have appeared that could truly be called groundbreaking. Most publications have tended to be extremely academic, or extremely popular and generalized, or specifically written for members of various Sufi schools, or tariqas.

Sufism and the Way of Blame is a unique and engaging original study that transcends all these categories, and is a work that will be valuable both to serious scholars and to general readers. Based on years of painstaking research and scholarship, the book is clearly written, and while presenting a wealth of detail and information, it remains easily accessible to the serious, interested reader. Sufism and the Way of Blame offers much in the way of new material to English-speaking readers, and is a discerning, reliable work, which will remain a serious and thought-provoking resource for many years to come.

What makes this work so unique is that it carefully documents the teachings of the Malamiyya, one of the most important but little-known schools within the Sufi tradition. Originating in Persian Sufism, the term Malamati refers to the “blameworthy ones” who shun the religious idolatry of sanctimonious egoism, in order to draw closer to the divine, even if that draws reproach or blame from others. The Malamatis thus practiced “perfect sincerity” (ikhlas) and “the nothingness of man before God.” In this way, Malamatis emphasize a characteristic of the great Sufis as a whole: an unwillingness to embrace the idolatry of religion at the expense of genuine spirituality.

One irony of the Islamic tradition over the centuries is the unreflective tendency of exoteric followers to make a “god” out of their religion so that religion at times becomes even more important than the experience of divine presence. And once religion becomes a god, so too does the personal ego. As the French novelist Anatole France once wrote, “It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.” However, this exaltation of religion and the self, common enough in all Western religious systems, violates the absolute monotheism and spiritual humility that characterizes both the Qur’an and the original message of the prophet Muhammad.

In this book, Yannis Toussulis provides a short history of the transmission of Sufism to the West, including a critical assessment of figures like G. I. Gurdjieff and Idries Shah and the myths they propagated, which is especially valuable given the author’s access to background information about these figures. In the case of Idries Shah, this information he shares is otherwise unavailable. Toussulis also critically discusses different approaches to Sufism, including those of the Perennialist and Traditionalist schools.

The author then provides a history of the Malamati tradition in Sufism, spanning several chapters, with a particular emphasis on the Turkish tradition of Pir Nur al-Arabi (1813–88). Living at a time when the Ottoman Empire was in decline, Nur al-Arabi worked to adapt Sufism to the contemporary world, an approach that has been a characteristic of the school since his time. While little-known to outsiders and even to academic specialists, in Turkey the Malamiyya has functioned as a kind of Sufi “supra-order”; many members are shaykhs (teachers) of different tariqas, and it has functioned as a kind of Sufi graduate school, if you will pardon the expression. (Nur al-Arabi himself was a shaykh of the Naqshbandi order.) In a chapter on its twentieth-century representatives, several illuminating interviews are offered with Mehmet Selim, a current, English-speaking representative of the Nuriyya-Malamiyya based in Istanbul.

In the last and perhaps most valuable section of the book, Toussulis carefully outlines “The Seven Stations of Wisdom” as taught by the Nuriyya- Malamiyya, which provides a map of human psychospiritual development. Another extremely valuable section is the appendix, which contains the translation of a short work by Pir Nur al-Arabi entitled “The Testament of the Righteous,” which outlines the highest stages of mystical realization. Ultimately, within the Sufi tradition, God’s creation of the world is a continuous, unfolding event; and the realized human being, through purification and training, is able to attain a state in which he or she is able to witness this creative unfolding of the world, not from a human perspective, but from the perspective of the divine.

Sufism and the Way of Blame benefits not only from the author’s meticulous research and critical discernment, but also from his many years of contact with important teachers within the contemporary world of Turkish Sufism, especially Mehmet Selim Öziç, an inheritor of the Malamati Sufi lineage tracing itself back to Pir Nur al-Arabi.

Writing as both a scholar and as someone who knows the field of Sufism as a well-informed insider, Yannis Tossulis provides the reader with a fasci nating, insightful exploration of one of the most important but least understood lineages of Sufism, and one that is still active in the contemporary world. He discusses the contributions that Sufism can make to contemporary spirituality and to interfaith understanding, and he presents with real clarity the classical aims of Sufi training—a clarity that is often lacking in other volumes.

David Fideler

David Fideler is cotranslator of Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition. He is currently researching a book about the history of religious pluralism in Sarajevo, Bosnia.