- Edred Thorsson

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.

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.

It is not a mighty feeling among other feelings in these people, but the very core of the soul, that gives birth to all thoughts and feelings, and provides them with the energy of life – or it is that centre in the self where thoughts and feelings receive the stamp of their humanity, and are inspired with will and direction. It answers to what we in ourselves call the human.

- Vilhelm Grönbech – The Culture of the Teutons

Frith was the cohesive principle that held the ancient society together. It was not only the binding agent of interpersonal relationships and marriage but was also the substance which held together the principles of freedom, law, vengeance and courage based on the bonds of kinship and the link between men and the gods. Any man castigated from society was a man without frith, and therefore without any of the societal and personal products of it. To the ancient Teutonic clans, the man without frith was a niðing; a ‘wolf-man’ stripped of the very core components of humanity and left as a soulless thrall or wild beast doomed to destruction, like Grendel, far from the warmth of the mead hall, or like the young fir tree that dies, standing alone ‘sheltered by neither bark nor needle in the field’.

The essential core of humanity that is found in the concept of frith is one that is built on the vital connections between man and his kin, his tradition, his culture, his homeland and his gods. Frith is also strongly entwined with the concept of love and freedom. Etymologically, ‘frith’, ‘love’ and ‘free’ all stem from the Proto Indo European word *prijos, meaning ‘dear, beloved’, of which one variant was *pritu, ‘peace’, which eventually became the Old Norse ‘friðu’ and the English ‘frith’. The Proto Germanic adaptation of *prijos was *frijaz, ‘free’, which was a linguistic and conceptual extension of the term ‘beloved’. To be a kinsman, one had to be a free man (that is, not a thrall or an outlaw), and to be a kinsman made one beloved to other kinsmen. Other derivatives of *prijos pertinent to the understanding of frith are Old English ‘freond’ – the precursor of the modern English ‘friend’, the Old English ‘freogan’ – meaning ‘to love, favour’ and the name of the goddess Frigg, which also derives from *prijos and *frijaz. Being the goddess of love and domestic relationships, Frigg is an apt representative for the concept of frith. On noting how the atomised individual, the thrall, is essentially a man without frith – and therefore without a soul and without deep and genuine humanity – the importance of reintegrating with the ways of frith becomes clearer and more appealing.

In the clan community we see the truest expression of the concept of fraternity. This kinship, rooted in frith, has been emulated as the model for fraternal societies in Western Society ever since. In the Gemeinschaft, the principle of obligation was perhaps the most vital manifestation of this brotherhood. The clansman’s innate sense of place amongst and duty towards his fellows made the reciprocal relationships on which such communities were based a matter of natural fact; quite unlike the pecuniary and self-centred motivations that polarise man against folk-spiritedness in today’s society. Although the root of such duty and obligation lay in frith, the state from which frith emanated was the initial kinship found in a society based upon universal commonality and connectedness rather than imposed diversity and separation. One’s kinsmen, being of like nature, blood and creed, were one’s natural, rather than imposed, peers. And thus, like a family, one found the deepest bonds of trust and respect directed towards those that were their brothers in blood and in essence.

To look at the societal traditions and values of the ancient clan is to take an important step towards regaining our core humanity. If one is inspired enough by the thought of living according to the inherently clannish virtues of frith, kinship and tradition rather than the modern values of vapidity, consumerism and social atomism however, the way to a better and more holistic, satisfying and sacred mode of existence could be within reach.

- An excerpt from the essay The Clan as Model for Societal Reintegration, from the forthcoming Traditionalist Journal The Initiate.