Introduction to Stoic Heathenry
Stoic Heathenry is a synthesis of the ancient Hellenistic philosophy of Stoicism and the modern praxis of Germanic neopaganism (more commonly known as Heathenry). Since it’s a melding of two different ideologies, there are various ways to fuse the two together. What I will be presenting is what I’ve found to be the best way to bring the two together for me.
I was going to make this first Substack post be an introduction to Stoicism, Heathenry, their commonalities, and their differences that might make it a little more difficult to reconcile the two. However, as I have struggled to write such a post, I have reached the conclusion that I'm not qualified to write it because I've only been studying/practicing Stoicism for about a year. So instead, I'm going to link to outside resources, and then discuss the biggest possible difficulties in reconciling the two in future posts.
Studying Stoicism
For Stoicism, there are two major schools of thought in the modern world. There's the New Stoicism which tends to just take the ethics and ignores the physics (cosmology) and logic. Then there's Traditional Stoicism, which tries to incorporate all three like the ancient Stoics did. My Stoic studies actually started out in the New Stoicism, before beginning to dig into the other aspects that Traditional Stoicism tends to focus on. This might be a hot take, but I think this may actually be a good “curriculum” of study for beginners. Arguably, the most benefit one can derive from Stoicism comes from it's ethics, so starting with it's ethics and beginning your Stoic practice there seems like a good idea to me. If you disagree, feel free to tell me why I'm wrong in the comments. I look forward to fruitful conversation
I think this article from the website Modern Stoicism is a good intro to Stoicism from the perspective of the New Stoicism. But honestly, if you just Google “Intro to Stoicism”, most of the results will be from the perspective of the New Stoicism. When you're ready to dig deeper, Chris Fisher's website Traditional Stoicism, and it's accompanying podcast Stoicism on Fire, is probably the best. He is very dogmatic in his approach to Stoicism, and makes heavy use of the No True Scotsman fallacy towards those who disagree with him about the Stoic god, but when it comes to understanding the concepts that were fundamental to ancient Stoicism, there's really not any better resource for the non-academics like me. His website can be found here.
Regardless of which school of Stoicism you follow, or if like me you fall somewhere in the middle (as I suspect most Stoics do), virtue plays a fundamental part for Stoics. The whole point of the famous dichotomy of control is providing a tool to allow one to live more virtuously (a fact that is often ignored by modern critics of Stoicism who argue that Stoicism is a way to enforce the status quo and perpetuate injustice, but that will be a topic for a future post). The goal of Stoicism is to obtain eudaimonia, which is usually translated as “happiness” but is probably better translated as “the good life”. The way to do this is to live a virtuous life. Virtue, argued the Stoics, is the only good in life, and virtue alone is needed to obtain eudaimonia. Everything else in Stoic ethics is training for doing just that! The logic and physics is the justification for the ethics, and gives insights into how the first Stoics derived their philosophy.
Heathenry
Heathenry is the modern revival of the pre-Christian religions of the Germanic tribes that lived in Northern Europe. It's a very broad umbrella term for a great many religious traditions that can vary from each other so much that it would be almost absurd to consider them all one religion. However, there are some things which have a general consensus among self described Heathens. They tend to be polytheists, base their understanding of the gods and the spiritual realms more or less upon the surviving mythologies of the Germanic peoples (though most aren't mythic literalists so the way they choose to interpret these myths may vary from person to person), and try to live virtuous lives (though the virtues that are chosen to emphasize can vary from group to group and even person to person).
For a good introduction to Heathenry in general, The Longship is probably the best website for a beginner. If you’re interested in my specific flavor of Heathenry, known as Fyrnsidu, you can check out the website that I put together with a small group of fellow Fyrnsideras, Fyrnsidu.faith. You can also check out my website dedicated to Fyrnsidu, Mine Wyrtruman.
So, you can probably see from my summaries alone that there's some similarities between Stoicism and Heathenry, but you can probably also see some differences. I want to explore these similarities and differences in upcoming posts. If I have piqued your interest, hit the subscribe button below to get notified of future posts!