Clan Folkmoot, Snowdonia, Wales

Starting on Thursday 10th and concluding Sunday 13th April 2008, the Clan of The great Bear held the latest of its folkmoots. Though this is the first to be recorded in this blog, this is the tenth such meeting that has been held by brethren of the Clan since our endevour was magically inaugurated on Midsummer Day last year. Typical among the elements of our folkmoots are physical excercise, intense academic debates (amongst other things), Blot, Sumbel and copious imbidment of ale and mead. Our recent folkmoot in Snowdonia in North Wales featured all of these elements. English and Welsh brothers tackled a gruelling ascent of Glydder Fawr in freezing winds and snow, concluding at the famed Devil’s Kitchen, a sheer gorge plummetting 3000ft from the mountainous heights into the valley below. Our rather damp nights under canvas were made bearable by the hospitality of the local pub, the Vaynol Arms in the little mountain village of Nant Peris, and by a strange soundtrack of hillbilly cajun music, provided by Baby Gramps. Our return trip from North Wales to Cardiff was broken by a detour to the magisterial Harlech Castle on the coast of the Irish Sea. On the return to civilisation, a traditional celbratory “traditionalist” curry was enjoyed by the group, before some of the brothers dispersed, and others continued the revellry at the hearth of one of our number. Please watch this space for upcoming photos of the recent folkmoot

 

Eclectic mind

It is a rather odd and ironic trait of the “eclectic mind” that it really desires nothing more than to reduce all the diverse and vibrant forms of the human spirit, to homogenize them, into one universal (and easily greasped) paradigm.

- Edred Thorsson

 

The Initiate

A website is now in place for The Initiate, a Journal of Traditional Studies created and edited by clansmen of the Great Bear.

The Initiate seeks to provide a forum for academic research into fields related to Tradition and Traditionalism. Our scope covers folklore, myth, culture, religion, politics, language, history, esoteric studies, archaeology, anthropology and the relevance of Tradition in the modern world. Our goal is to make the work and philosophy of both well-known and upcoming Traditionalists more widely accessible to the English-speaking world.

The Initiate does not take a partisan position on religion, politics or culture. However, our vision is to promote the rebirth of the diverse traditions of the Integral cultures that once graced the face of the Earth, in opposition to the shallow, fragmented culture of modernity.

The Initiate stands against the ethos of materialism, atomized individualism, political correctness and multiculturalism that characterises the modern world. In our studies, we seek to honour the eternal quest for higher meaning, which characterises the human condition in the world of Tradition and Initiation.

Our aim in this quest is to remember and preserve the traditions and voices of generations past.

 

 

Memory

From the dark waters of the unconscious there comes a particular call that, when realised, pulls our waking minds towards it with a force as unavoidable as death. This is the call that cries out to us when we feel the deep resonances of myth, culture and tradition binding themselves anew to our beings. This is the call that stokes the flames of our deepest passions and longings; the silent, wordless voices of those who came before sharing the soul, lore, crafts and wisdom of a less perverse age. It is the residue of the touch of the Allfather; the Ancestral god; he of the Regin who gave his people breath, speech and senses, though their memory now fades as they become blighted and numbed by the frosts of Utgard. This memory is that of both the dead and of the living. It is the collective unconscious spilling into our own dark, vast chasms of waters that, to most, remain unexplored and unstirred. It is that to which we are all bound but are mostly asleep to except for the occasional, haunted sense of yearning, the sudden, brief urge towards Mystery or the innate sense of wrongness that grasps at us through our dreams, lost hopes and lonely boredom.

Yet we can find this memory again. It lives on within us and within the world. The keys to our lost selves lie Tradition. For the spark of memory is not dead, nor will it ever die; as long as even just a few minds sustain it, it will remain. Silent, unbidden and elusive it may now be, but it cannot be repressed from the soul of man entirely, though forces of blindness and forgetfulness exist in both man and in Midgard that will always strive for this to be so. Though the gathering storm of convenient witlessness swells in the minds of many, a memory persists in the core of man’s being that will tug and gnaw and burn its way to the surface of the soul of he who can hear its echoes through the ages. But so also shall it confuse and confound the senseless and the lost into a maelstrom of oblivion.