Etymology is not a science, and pretending like it is a science makes you look genuinely ungodly. Proto-Indo-European philology has obviously done work. It holds up the entire field of comparative religious studies: without it, people would think you were completely schizophrenic, maybe even stupid, for saying English and Hindi are related.¹ It's like a good compass. But you cannot mistake the fucking compass for the land. And it's not even a map. It's a shitty compass.
At the same time, philology reintroduced the Inquisitor. It reintroduced the catechism, the cathedral, the creed. This stuff is creed, and it comes from a priesthood that isn't pagan. The people doing all this aren't pagan. Philology is not a pagan pursuit; it's an academic, secular pursuit. These philologists, and the way they constantly undermine etymology, have done more harm to pagans than the witch trials. They have made any sort of pagan movement greater than a single congregation impossible.² If you wanted to stop pagans from ever collaborating or working together, you couldn't design a better thing in a lab.
Take Freya.
Frigg, Freyja and Freya are all the same woman: Odin's wife, his feminine counterpart.³ The split between Frigg and Freyja happens only in Old Norse. She's Frīg in Old English, whose day is Friday, and Frija in the Merseburg Charm. In the Lombardic story, five hundred years before Snorri, Odin's wife is Frea.⁴ The English chroniclers and historians used Frea, and in modern English that became Freya, the name we already use for her.⁵
"Frigg" is really "Frīg." In Old English a g after a vowel was said like a y, so Frīg is "Freey," not "frig," and Frīgedæg was pronounced FREE-yah-day. The hard g is only in Old Norse; it was never pronounced that way in English. If the name had survived into modern phonetic English like other words, it would be Fry. We are speaking modern English. There is absolutely no reason to spell it Frig, because any unacquainted person will say the hard g. English does not have the spelling for Frigga anymore. Just spell it phonetically: Freya. That's the name. Freya looks better in English, and it's the convention everywhere outside of Neo-Pagans trying to look more Nordic. It's even the best Anglish you can have, if your Anglish is trying to put function before form, which is the Germanic thing to do!
And the Freya spelling makes the connection between Freya, Freedom and Friendship visually obvious. Frigg's name shares its root with free and friend, so the freedom-through-love is hers, and so it's Freya's.⁶ To me, this is the most important semantic bundle in the English native faith. Freya gives us freedom, which allows us to have friends. The Gothicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries said the English are born free because our race are the seed of Japhet, and Japhet means freedom.⁷ The seed of Freedom is the seed of Freya.
And yet, according to the philologists, one name comes from the Proto-Indo-European root for beloved and sounds like Freya, and the other comes from the Proto-Indo-European root for lady, which also sounds like Freya, but there's a mathematical glottal stop somewhere in there that makes it a different word.⁸ So Odin's wife named Beloved and the goddess titled Lady are two completely different women who just happen to both be called Freya. The math checks out. They found a glottal stop in Hittite. Stop the presses: words don't mean anything anymore.
The vowel stuff, the consonant stuff, the glottal stuff: it's such a minute difference. If two Proto-Indo-European words sound the same and look the same, they're the same. Even in modern English, people cannot tell the difference when someone is speaking with glottal stops, and they mishear vowels constantly, which is why there are vowel shifts happening all over the English-speaking world, and consonant shifts too.⁹ Philology is so reductive that it can't even say that if a cow barks like a dog and acts like a dog, then it's a dog. It has to ask: is it a woof? Is it a bark? Is it a roof?
It's the same with ghosti. Ghost, guest and host are the same word.¹⁰ Maybe don't even use the word etymology, but they're the same word, and I don't care if the fucking stupid math doesn't align with it. There are so many words that are so obviously the same word, and the field acts as if nobody ever said so:¹¹ buddy and bodhi;¹² dharma and darn it and damn it;¹³ Auðumbla and autumn;¹⁴ Freya, freedom and friendship;⁶ ghost, guest and host;¹⁰ the Ing in English and Yngvi, and the Ynglings.¹⁵ The Scylfings, the Sacae, the Saka, the Scythians: the peoples whose names start with S all carry knives and ride on horseback and do the same thing.¹⁶ I don't care if they're all etymologically different words. They've clearly refounded themselves. The philologists say they're different words because, technically, this is a different consonant. It's b instead of p,¹⁷ or it's a glottal stop, or it's a specific kind of glottal stop, and this one's a different kind of glottal stop.¹⁸
The entire field has only been validated, what, a single time (two if you count Linear B), through the Hittite connection.¹⁹ And they change the math constantly. Every time they figure something out and add stuff, the math changes. I've been following Proto-Indo-European philology for maybe fifteen years, and they constantly change things.²⁰ There are so many exceptions that the whole thing is just made-up nonsense. People will go out of their way to act like these laws don't have a million exceptions and aren't made up by random people, but they are.²¹ They're made up by academics from all over the world who don't agree on anything.²² If you actually read anything these people do, it's just them making stuff up and saying, oh, well, the math looks good. And if the math isn't good, then they make the math work.²³ And then it works, but now there are all these other things, and the other things cause problems, and the problems become fun facts for midwits on the internet: technically these two words seem really related, but they're actually not, because 8,000 years ago this word that sounds exactly the same had a glottal stop and this one didn't. As if the Proto-Indo-Europeans, a made-up people speaking a made-up language, would have completely understood the difference in every single case, because they spoke received proper Proto-Indo-European, which doesn't exist, because it's a made-up language. Every Proto-Indo-European word is a myth itself.²⁴
It just depends on who you ask. Nobody knows anything, and pretending like everything is clear-cut is genuinely dumb. That is why this stuff is genuinely super low-brow. I went to university for this. So much of academia, and especially the humanities, since no one gives a fuck about the humanities anymore, is just people trying to get their PhD or their thesis done. People make an entire PhD career just looking at the math of some Proto-Indo-European words and being like, these are two separate words because of blah, blah, blah. It's an entire racket. People will say and do anything; it's just making an argument, and there's no actual consensus. When someone dies who was the only person writing about something, now you can finally be the new consensus, because most often in the humanities a consensus means one person has this opinion and is actively writing about it. Or it's the consensus in the English-speaking world but not in every other place, or the inverse. That's not to say one is right or the other. The point is that these are all made-up human institutions, ultimately tribal, and ultimately levers of state and governmental power, and they don't have any relation to a folksy pagan who just wants to learn about their own religion, which they were born with in their blood. And then people who've never set foot in a university, who've never taken a class on linguistics, talk about this stuff as if it's gospel. I genuinely hate these amateur philologist freaks who spew out academic nonsense without understanding how made up it all is, while undermining their own blood faith. It makes me sick.
The entire operating epistemology of academia and science and scholarship is deconstruction. Postmodernism is built upon the deconstruction of everything.²⁵ When you are trying to build something, anything that operates under postmodern assumptions is so destructive and poisonous, honestly so satanic, to whatever you're doing that it can't even be allowed to enter your thinking, or you will never be able to build anything. Every pagan who tries never ends up doing anything, because they constantly have to say, oh, well, there's no source for this, or, obviously these seem similar and it feels correct in my heart, but the smart people with the funny hats aren't going to take me seriously.
So you cannot be a pagan and be secular. You cannot be an academic or a scholar and be a pagan. You need to choose one. You can say that you're both. You might even be a scholar and claim to be a pagan, but your loyalties are somewhere else. You cannot live in two ontological worlds. You can't say, I'm a Christian, but I'm also a secular biblical-studies person; one of those is not true, and it's fine, whichever one isn't. People put themselves in this situation where they can't decide between two things, and it isn't because the choice is too hard. It's because they don't even realize there's a choice to make. A lot of people don't understand ontology on any fundamental level. They don't understand that things have all this built-up fundamental logic that is completely and utterly incompatible. All they see are the little puddles downstream, but those come down from entirely different mountains. If you try to follow them to one universal mountain of ontology, you're never going to find it, because there are infinite ontologies and infinite ways for things to work. If you say you're a pagan and a philologist, you're not. You're a LARPer, and you like the aesthetic. Leave reviving the ancient faith of our ancestors to the people who not only feel it in their blood but act on that feeling, instead of constantly thought-terminating it like godless ghouls.
That doesn't mean we can't use it. It's completely fine to work within the system, to exist within it, even to abuse it and use it. Many pagans have used philology; pagans make philological arguments and talk about Proto-Indo-European comparative linguistics all the time, and I think those do good. But you have to remember that it's just upaya, skillful means.²⁶ It doesn't actually mean anything. Once you mistake these things for the actual faith, which is something in the blood and lived, you've made yourself an unthinking, mindless cattle person, and you're not a pagan, because pagans are not unthinking, mindless cattle people. The kind of paganism I care about is about seeing things with your own eyes and feeling things with your own mind and heart. If we want pagan science, if we want academia and scholarship, we need to do it pagan: our way, on our own ontological basis. The system as it's set up is antithetical to everything pagans believe.
Even the greatest reachers weren't ours. I have great respect for Grimm and Tolkien.²⁷ They were reaching for the old faith, the ancient faith. But at the end of the day, despite their reaching, they weren't pagans. Neither of them was. They might have contributed a lot to us and helped us a lot, but they were Christians. Maybe they didn't follow the Nicene Creed one to one, but they were Christians ontologically, and we can't hold them up as gods either. Grimm and Tolkien are great regardless. Many pagans are influenced by the many Christians who reached for the native faith, and there's something almost beautiful and harrowing about how common it is to reach for the native faith and then have thought-terminating Abrahamism descend on your brain and make you stop thinking.
We should know better, because we know where our freedom came from. The witch trials were bad, don't get me wrong, but the witch trials happened after the Protestants freed us from Catholicism. They were a hangover of inquisitorial reach. In the Protestant world they seem like such a big deal because the whole point of Protestantism is that we weren't going to do witch trials anymore; to us they were weird. Why are you doing this weird Catholic thing? In the Catholic world they weren't seen as unique, and they didn't leave the same scar. We learned so much from them, and we traumatized ourselves so much, that the Congregationalists became Unitarians!²⁸ Since then, the Protestants have given us our freedom as pagans in a lot of ways. Modern pagans are Protestants.²⁹ And the entire field of Theosophy was built, when science was still new, on the idea that science would eventually be able to prove God, and prove this, and prove that. It was built around a worship of the scientific method.³⁰ We are the descendants of the Theosophists, who are themselves descendants of the Calvinists, who are descendants of the great Reformation thinkers like Luther. We need to move on, because it's over. There's no point in thinking that science is ever going to save us, because at this point Science™ is a completely different thing.
Look at what the philologists have done with our freedom. You have Scottish and English and Swedish and Norwegian and Danish and German and Frisian and Dutch and Flemish and Lombardic people, and they all think their own weird, unique spelling of Odin or Freya makes a different god.³¹ All of them say, oh, Odin was a guy and Freya was his wife, and then, oh, these are just completely different. It's nonsense. It makes it impossible to do anything. It makes it impossible to have a quorum, impossible to have consensus, impossible to talk about things. It reduces everything to tidbitty factoid pedantic nonsense that is honestly shameful. That's the type of thing Christians are meant to worry about.³² It's not the type of thing pagans give a fuck about. The reason neo-paganism is a complete meme, and Wicca is a complete meme, is that they constantly cuck to all of this academic, scholarly nonsense.³³
When you talk to a pagan, you know what they say? Odin is the father of my race, and Freya was his wife.³⁴ That's it. They're not going to be like, oh, Freya with the G, or whatever. I am not talking about a goddess; I am talking about the history of our tribe. Freya is a real person, and Odin is a real person. They're the founders of my ancestral line, as recorded in countless histories written down by my people and their adversaries. The spelling is irrelevant: Wodan, Odin, Óðr, all the same person, Odin of Aesirland.³⁵ Her names are the same: names that sound nearly identical, for the same woman, married to the patriarch of our race, from whom we descend. Beloved Lady Nerthus: call her whatever you want.³⁶ The Odinlings were tribes who chose to follow them, and I'm one.
So what does a pagan movement bigger than one congregation look like? I don't know. I gave up on it many years ago. I completely gave up on any sort of pan-paganism. I don't think it's a thing. I think it's stupid, and everyone who's attempted it is a moron, or they get eaten alive. The only way you can be pagan is to create a congregation, figure out what your actual ontological beliefs are, and accept only those whose beliefs fall within an acceptable range of difference. I would argue it should be homogeneous in belief, at least until you have a core group, and then everyone else gets kicked out and is not allowed in. That's the only way. I'm a congregationalist.
It's the most insane idea, that you can grasp the truth and nature of reality through all this clawing and grasping. It's all made up. They just made it up. There is no authority. That position is central to understanding how Tianmu interfaces with the world: it's re-enchantment.³⁷
You cannot be a pagan and an academic. You need to pick one. I'm not an academic. I am a descendant of Odin.
Notes
¹ Sir William Jones, in his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (2 February 1786), on Sanskrit, Greek and Latin: no philologer could examine all three "without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." ↩
² In Tianmu, we believe there is one Old Faith, and that every people will express it in its own way. ↩
³ Scholars have made this argument. Some have held that the split between the two goddesses may simply be due to the scarcity of records (discussed by Stephan Grundy, 1998), and Norbert Wagner (1999) suggested that the names Freyja and Frigg may stem from a common linguistic source. ↩
⁴ Frigg's name is attested in Old Norse (Frigg), Old English (Frīg), Old High German (Frija) and Lombardic (Frea); Freyja's only in Old Norse. The Lombards' own story of how they got their name, in which Wodan's wife Frea outwits him, is told in the Origo Gentis Langobardorum (seventh century) and again by Paul the Deacon (late eighth century). Snorri wrote in the 1220s. ↩
⁵ Geoffrey of Monmouth (1136) has Hengist himself tell Vortigern: "Next to him we worship the powerful goddess, Frea, to whom they also dedicated the sixth day, which after her name we call Friday" (Giles's Old English Chronicles, in the Good Works Library). William of Malmesbury (c. 1125) gives the sixth day "to his wife Frea." ↩
⁶ Jacob Grimm, father of the whole field, wrote: "Freyja means the gladsome, gladdening, sweet, gracious goddess, Frigg the free, beautiful, loveable" (Teutonic Mythology). Webster's dictionary of 1913, under Friday, took her name to be "prob. from the root of E. friend, free." The old word split two ways: into love, courtship and friendship (friend), and into freedom (free). Pagans carry it on: a 2012 hearth-witch post, "Friday — Freya's Day," reads the day as Freo, "free." And the dictionaries keep the bundle still. Jan de Vries (1962), Vladimir Orel (2003) and Guus Kroonen (2013) all derive Frigg's name from the Germanic adjective frijaz, "free," the same root as *friend, and it stands close to Sanskrit priyā, "dear, beloved"; her day is Old English Frīgedæg, Friday. Old English frēodōm is frēo, "free," plus dōm. In our Twelve, Freedom is the Earth, and Freyja is one of her names. ↩
⁷ The Gothicists traced the northern peoples to Japhet, son of Noah: "By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue" (Genesis 10:5), and the blessing on him is "God shall enlarge Japheth" (Genesis 9:27). Richard Lynche, in his English translation of the old genealogical histories that went under the name of Berosus (1602), gave the name its meaning: "Japhet, which signifies libertie or freedome." Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons (1828): "our language, our government, and our laws, display our Gothic ancestors in every part." (Lynche and Turner as quoted in Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England, 1952.) ↩
⁸ The dictionaries derive Frigg from a root meaning "beloved" and Freyja from one meaning "lady." The older witnesses know one wife of Odin: in Old English she is Frīg, whose day is Frīgedæg, Friday. In Tianmu, Odin's wife is Freya. ↩
⁹ In the Inland North of the United States, a chain shift of vowels that began in the 1930s or earlier has moved stock and botch toward what most Americans would hear as stack and batch. In British English, a glottal stop for t, as in button, was being noted in Scotland by the nineteenth century, and has spread widely since. ↩
¹⁰ In Guest and Host (June 2026) I wrote of "the PIE root 'ghosti' which gives us the words Guest, Host, and Ghost, the sacred law of hospitality that even the Gods themselves couldn't break." The dictionaries already grant guest and host: both come from gʰóstis, "stranger, guest, host, someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality," which also gives Latin *hostis and hospes; the Greeks called the law xenia. Others have heard the ghost in it too. Jacques Derrida, in Aporias (1993), runs the series "hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost, and Geist," and asks for an open hospitality to the guest as ghost; scholars since have named it "ghostpitality." Among pagans, "Ghosti!" has become a cheer and a toast at gatherings of ADF, the Druid fellowship. In Tianmu, we hold that ghost, guest and host are one word, and that the covenant of guest and host is the oldest law we keep. ↩
¹¹ The textbook case is Latin deus and Greek theos. Both mean "god," and they sound alike. The reconstruction derives deus from deywós, from the root for "sky," and *theos from dʰéh₁s, and Wiktionary's entry for *theos says it outright: "Despite its similarity in form and meaning, the word is not related to Latin deus." ↩
¹² Some have derived bud and buddy from the name Buddha, as the etymologist Anatoly Liberman records (OUPblog, 2023). The dictionaries themselves call buddy "of uncertain origin." ↩
¹³ The University of Texas Indo-European Lexicon, following Pokorny, lists English dern, darn, "to hide, conceal, keep secret," under the same root as dharma: dher-, "to hold, support." The dictionaries also make *dharma a doublet of English firm. ↩
¹⁴ In the Prose Edda, straightway after the rime dripped "there sprang from it the cow called Audumla; four streams of milk ran from her udders, and she nourished Ymir." She licked the salty ice-blocks, and from them came forth Búri, the grandfather of Odin (Brodeur's translation, in the Good Works Library). Her name is generally taken from Old Norse auðr, "riches." Latin autumnus was earlier auctumnus, which the dictionaries think was "possibly influenced by auctus," enriched, ample: the rich cow and the rich season. ↩
¹⁵ Tacitus, Germania 2: "To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names, they say, the coast tribes are called Ingævones" (Church and Brodribb, in the Good Works Library), and linguists still call the family of Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon "Ingvaeonic." Others have drawn the line to England itself. Noah Webster (1823) speculated that the Ingaevones gave England its name, and John Grigsby (2005) found it "tempting to speculate that the word Angle was derived from, or thought of as a pun on, the name of Ing." An Ingui stands in the royal genealogy of Anglian Bernicia. Jacob Grimm (1835) took Ing to be originally the same as the Scandinavian Yngvi, and Beowulf calls the Danish king Hrothgar fréa Ingwina, lord of the friends of Ing. ↩
¹⁶ Herodotus (7.64) describes the Sacans in Xerxes' army with "native bows and daggers," and adds: "These were called Amyrgian Sacans, being in fact Scythians; for the Persians call all the Scythians Sacans" (Macaulay's translation, in the Good Works Library). Sir William Temple, in "Of Heroic Virtue" (1690): "Odin or Woden or Goden (according to the different northern dialects) was the first and great hero of the western Scythians," who "led a mighty swarm of the Getes under the name of Goths, from the Asiatic Scythia." John Pinkerton titled his book of 1787 A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths. British Israelite writers carried the chain from the Sacae to the Saxons, "Sac's sons." The Ynglings themselves appear in Beowulf as the Scylfings (Old English Scylfingas, Old Norse Skilfingar): its Ohthere and Eadgils are the Óttarr and Aðils of the Ynglingatal. And the usual derivation of Scythian is from an Iranian Skuda, "archers," from the root of English *shoot. ↩
¹⁷ The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *b is so rare that some doubt it existed at all. That gap is why, in 1973, Paul Hopper in the United States and Tamaz Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the Soviet Union separately proposed that the whole series of "voiced" stops were really ejectives, glottalized stops. Most Indo-Europeanists reject the glottalic theory; linguists at Leiden still defend it. Half a century on, the field has not settled what its own consonants were. ↩
¹⁸ The "laryngeals" are written h₁, h₂ and h₃: three kinds of throat sound whose actual sounds are still argued over. ↩
¹⁹ In his Mémoire of 1879, Ferdinand de Saussure proposed vanished sounds he called coefficients sonantiques, which no known language showed. Hittite was deciphered in the early twentieth century, and in 1927 Jerzy Kuryłowicz found a sound written ḫ in many of the places the theory predicted. The second confirmation is Linear B, deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 as Mycenaean Greek, the oldest Greek ever written. It still wrote the labiovelars, kʷ- and gʷ-sounds that classical Greek had lost: qo-u-ko-ro, pronounced gʷoukoloi, for classical boukoloi, "cowherds." ↩
²⁰ In 1868 August Schleicher wrote a short fable in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, "The Sheep and the Horses." It has been rewritten again and again as the reconstruction changed: by Hirt (1939), Lehmann and Zgusta (1979), Danka (1986), Adams (1997), Kortlandt (2007, revised 2010), Lühr (2008), Voyles and Barrack (2009) and Byrd (2013). The opening sentence, "a sheep that had no wool saw horses," in Schleicher's 1868 version: Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams. The same sentence in Byrd's 2013 version: h₂áu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osméi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁ést, só h₁éḱu̯oms derḱt. ↩
²¹ In 1878 Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann, founders of the Neogrammarian school, laid down that a sound change affects every word where its conditions are met, without exception (Morphologische Untersuchungen, Leipzig). The field has been explaining its exceptions ever since. ↩
²² Oswald Szemerényi reconstructed one laryngeal. Most now write three. Jaan Puhvel reconstructed eight or more. ↩
²³ Grimm's law (1822) says that the Proto-Indo-European word for "father," *ph₂tḗr, should have become Germanic *faþēr. It became *faðēr. In 1877 Karl Verner published "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung," "An Exception to the First Sound Shift," and explained the exception by where the stress had fallen in Proto-Indo-European. ↩
²⁴ Every reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word is printed with an asterisk, the linguists' own mark for a form no one has ever found written down. There is no inscription and no tablet, not one sentence. ↩
²⁵ The concept of deconstruction was introduced by Jacques Derrida, whose Of Grammatology (1967) set out most of its ideas. ↩
²⁶ The Buddha, in the Middle Discourses (MN 22): "I have taught a simile of the teaching as a raft: for crossing over, not for holding on. By understanding the simile of the raft, you will even give up the teachings, let alone what is not the teachings" (Bhikkhu Sujato's translation, in the Good Works Library). ↩
²⁷ Jacob Grimm gathered the household tales with his brother Wilhelm (1812), stated the first sound law, which bears his name (1822), and wrote Teutonic Mythology (1835). J. R. R. Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and a devout Catholic. ↩
²⁸ Reginald Scot published The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 to show that witchcraft did not exist. He was an Englishman of the Reformed faith who quotes John Calvin more than a dozen times. In 1736 the Witchcraft Act repealed Britain's old witchcraft statutes and made it a crime instead to claim that anyone had magical powers or practised witchcraft, with a year in prison at most. In New England the scar shows. On 14 January 1697 Samuel Sewall, one of the Salem judges, stood in his meeting house while his minister read out his confession of guilt. In 1711 the Massachusetts legislature annulled the convictions, reversing the attainders of twenty-two people by name. In 1712 the church in Salem Town reversed its excommunication of Rebecca Nurse, who had been hanged in 1692; that church is now the First Church in Salem, Unitarian Universalist. On 5 May 1819 William Ellery Channing preached his Baltimore sermon, titled simply "Unitarian Christianity." ↩
²⁹ One of the books that brought the Norse gods back to English readers was the work of a Protestant churchman. Thomas Percy, a clergyman of the Church of England, put Paul Henri Mallet's Northern Antiquities into English in 1770. In 1782 he became Bishop of Dromore. ↩
³⁰ The Theosophical Society's three Objects: to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity; "to encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science"; and to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in the human being. ↩
³¹ Odin is Wōden in Old English, Uuodan in the Merseburg Charm, Godan among the Lombards and Óðinn in Old Norse. The week keeps his name and hers across these peoples: Wednesday, woensdag, onsdag; Friday, vrijdag, Freitag, fredag. ↩
³² "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:18, King James Version). ↩
³³ Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) argued that the witch trials had persecuted a surviving pagan religion. Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today (1954), the book that launched Wicca, carried her introduction. Historians of the witch trials never accepted the thesis and took it apart in the 1960s and 1970s; the academic consensus now is that those executed as witches followed no witch religion at all. ↩
³⁴ William of Malmesbury, Chronicle of the Kings of England (c. 1125), on Hengist and Horsa, "great-grandsons of the celebrated Woden, from whom almost all the royal families of these barbarous nations deduce their origin; and to whom the nations of the Angles, fondly deifying him, have consecrated by immemorial superstition the fourth day of the week, as they have the sixth to his wife Frea" (Sharpe's translation, revised by Giles, in the Good Works Library). ↩
³⁵ Scholars have long identified the two. Jan de Vries argued that Óðinn and Óðr were probably originally connected; Hilda Ellis Davidson (1965) called Óðr a "strange double of Odin"; and Rudolf Simek (2007) wrote that "the most obvious explanation is to identify Óðr with Odin." Sir William Temple (1690) already had "Odin or Woden or Goden (according to the different northern dialects)." ↩
³⁶ Tacitus, Germania 40 (98 AD), on the Langobardi, the Anglii and their neighbours: "None of these tribes have any noteworthy feature, except their common worship of Ertha, or mother-Earth, and their belief that she interposes in human affairs, and visits the nations in her car" (Church and Brodribb's translation, in the Good Works Library). The Anglii are the English. In our Twelve, Freedom is the Earth. ↩
³⁷ In his 1917 lecture "Science as a Vocation," Max Weber named the mark of the modern age the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung), a word he borrowed from Schiller. In On Mythopoeticism (September 2025) I wrote: "There is no story we spin of this world that is not myth." In Tianmu, our answer is re-enchantment. ↩