Know Thyself: Between Forefather and Petri Dish
by Askr Svarte
Askr Svarte argues that true knowledge of one’s ancestry, identity, and kinship is a spiritual quest guided by myth, faith, and initiation, not a DNA test result serving technological society and subcultures.
Knowing who you are is genuinely fundamental to traditional and archaic societies. It means knowledge of your own origin, from which the core of cultural identity is built, and includes understanding the kinship system accepted in society and hence the possibilities of marriage; understanding the system of “ours” vs. “other” in relation to other tribes, settlements, and folks; inheriting your place in the world and within the structure of society through belonging to an estate, an ancestral occupation, etc.
Different cultures have different gradations in the depth of knowledge of one’s ancestry in accordance with paternal or maternal lines. In the Germanic-Scandinavian tradition, it is considered proper to know your genealogy as deeply as possible, all the way back and up to the Forefather Odin or Inga-Freyr. This is typical of the nobility, who always trace their lineage to the Gods. For an ordinary man, deep knowledge of his fathers and grandfathers is key to the reputation of his pledge and to the confirmation of property rights.
In more archaic and agrarian cultures, knowledge of ancestors is limited to those great-grandfathers whom man encountered still living, or whose biographies were told to him by his parents, or who appeared to him personally from the otherworld. The lineage as a whole merged into the generalized figure of the Ancestor or Forefather, into the mystical cult of the ancestral line itself. Then “fathers” and “mothers” are spoken of as categories which include one’s known father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, great-grandmother and great-grandfather, as well as those whose names have already been erased by the time.
In archaic tribes which trace their ancestry to animals, a deceased ancestor is frequently reincarnated as a beast, and his offspring may encounter it in person in the jungle. This serves as confirmation of his origin from the world of the forest spirits, because animals were not perceived as merely zoological populations and individuals, but as separate spiritual beings. The deceased ancestor could, at the next step, immediately be reborn into the “totemic” ancestor of the jaguar, and thus the lineage was, albeit short, qualitative and direct. Such, for example, is the case of the Runa Indians in the jungles of the Amazon.
The classical Indo-European structure of human origins is the family: Father-Heaven and Mother-Earth give birth to the first man or brothers from whom descend the peoples. Such is Tuisto of the Germanics, who gave birth to Mann, according to Tacitus.
In our sorrowful days, the question of one’s ancestry and deep belonging to greater identities has once again become relevant among the followers of various currents of contemporary paganism. One fashionable solution to this problem is presented by ubiquitously available DNA-tests which specify one’s belonging to a population based on haplogroup analysis, from which it is possible to locate ethnic ancestors and eventually even establish their ancestral zone of inhabitance. Let us consider what is wrong with this approach on the basis of contrasting examples.
Classical methods of genealogical reconstruction rely on an initial survey of living relatives about their ancestors, ancestry by kin/ethnicity and region. The mother’s maiden names are identified, the paternal line is traced in space-time (archives, registry offices, church books, censuses, etc.), the etymology of the surname is deciphered if possible, etc. These methods are known from the deepest antiquity and are often exhaustive; in especially successful cases, they allow one to find out all the necessary information without involving extra tools.
One argument against this approach is that the information provided by relatives can be inaccurate. In addition to natural shortcomings due to the fading memory of elderly people, living ancestors may knowingly hide important details of family and ancestral history if they are related to periods of persecution, repression, and ethnic cleansing. For example, this is the case in many situations with ethnic minorities resettled in Siberia, Russia’s Far East, and northern Kazakhstan, such as Ukrainians, Germans, and the peoples of the Caucasus, as well as with members of noble families subject to repression or the wives and children of “enemies of the people” during the Soviet era. The problem of an “unreliable source” in relatives can be solved by cross checks and, often enough, a trusting conversation with one’s great-grandfathers themselves.
On the opposite end, scientific information from a test tube is positioned as a source of inviolable reliability. The value of such is supposed to override traditional ways of recognizing your past and roots. But this is not true.
We can start with the old mishap of a popular American genetics profiling company that put a percentage of African roots in all results by default in order to not compromise the “out of Africa theory.” Because there are proponents of Northern or multiple origins of mankind in the online circles of the Western Alt-Right and similar “right-wingers,” these theories have been declared “dangerous far-right conspiracy theories.” With this example, we see that even at the elementary level, political expediency and political correctness directly affect science and knowledge-intensive services. In the sphere of pure business, the tobacco market, and pharmacology, we can find many more examples of “customized” research, which only confirms the well-known fact that scientific researches and journals are biased.
The next stone that falls out of the foundation consists in the subcultural component of those who use this method for their genetic profiling. This component is the social character of the interpretation of DNA test results or even, as often happens, the multiple tests ordered from different companies. If a person belongs to a conventional crowd of fans of Finno-Ugric heritage or pan-Indo-European identity, he will assess his results by sifting them through the prism of how much they match and fit him within the subculture or picture of the world to which he wants to belong. Thus, the analysis becomes a source of legitimacy within the social group, which means that priority will be given to the analysis from one company that shows parameters closer to the target group. A person turns to this or that Indo-European tradition not because he speaks its language, thinks in its categories, and was born in it, but only if the test tells him that he has the right to do so. Here we are dealing with a substitution of concepts: the cart is put before the horse. Otherwise, the person will be “crossed off the [subculture’s] list.” This shows that the core of the matter is not about trust in the truth of science so much as the desire for, and social mechanisms of, belonging to a group (and this goes all the way down to cases where haplogroup ciphers are intertwined with pagan symbolism and agitprop). The most famous example in politics is the American Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who claimed Native American identity based on less than 1% of her DNA test results.
Endlessly changing technologies and data refinement also make for shaky ground. Ethnographers, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars are regularly amending the specifics of the overall picture and paths of migrations, the habitation zones of ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, the circulation of languages, the frontiers where there was intensive mixing; they find new cultural artifacts, migration paths, and so on which don’t yet fit into the general picture. This is compounded by revisions of theories and concepts in the conventional University, ergo, the clarification and academic revision of the established picture of knowledge, the posing of hypotheses and theories. So, we are always dealing with an unfinished, dynamic map.
DNA analysis is supposed to locate the client on this map and indicate their most probable belonging. But the problem is that the technologies of blood or saliva analysis themselves are also always improving; information from the next analysis might be more detailed, more refined, more in-depth, more exhaustive, along with corrections made by the same archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists. This is especially relevant for frontier zones and blank spots. This is the well-known trap of technologies: what was current yesterday is already obsolete today, which means that what seems perfect today is already obsolete tomorrow. Therefore, the results of DNA profiling always carry the mark of time and reflect the level of technological development, which can be compared to the development of the quality of photography from blurred silhouettes to good quality light, sharpness, and color balance, which can radically change the captured picture and its perception. Nor can we exclude the factor of old or poor quality equipment, non-observance of procedures, confusion of samples due to errors, etc.
As a result, only general belonging to one or another group can be reliable — only the “broad strokes,” so to speak, without any narrow identification of location. But the same result can be achieved by researching one’s genealogical tree, the physical appearance and dialect of one’s family. In the terms of “Occam’s razor,” this would be involving unnecessary substances when there is a simpler and more reliable solution.
One argument that frequently pops up on this topic is the appeal to the so-called “mysticism of blood” that preserves and carries the mystery of inheritance and belonging. Here, too, one can turn to the progressive scale as a criterion for rejection. Blood mysticism manifests itself freely without any regard, consideration, or need for any technological and bio-laboratory crutches. One can pose the question: if the “voice of blood” resounded and influenced people before, since ancient times, across all times, then how did it work without haplogroup analyses and distinctions? One can hear the “voice of blood” without turning to primitive biology, because it is an occurrence of a different, non-material register. Otherwise, one would have to deny the claims of all people of the past as “scientifically unreliable.” From the point of view of pure academic science, the claims of “blood mysticism” are nothing more than esoteric nonsense. Authentic “blood mysticism” happens at all times, without science and test tubes, and pure science completely denies it. Therefore another question hangs in the air: why mix these two hitherto uncrossed realities?
We can imagine a situation in which a young man, eager to know his roots, will see in a dream or literally in reality a God or, even better, his distant ancestor who, with a clear gesture, will turn his eyes to this or that region, and ultimately will simply say, for example, “we came from the Pomors…” And at the same time, the young man will have a printout of his tests at hand. The probability that he will blindly believe the paper is ~100%, and his vision will be rationally explained as caused by hot weather, bad sleep, intoxication, etc. Thus, a truly disclosed revelation will be debunked and discarded in favor of scientism.
In the meantime, the price of a test error – and those who love this approach will repeatedly take control tests at various points over the course of their lives – means a mistaken identity with all the consequences.
Let’s imagine a young man who gets a test and the results tell him that he is dominated by X. This young man begins to immerse himself in X’s culture, studies its traditions, and takes X as the reassembly point of his identity and family genealogy (“it turns out we are all X!”), and so on. But after some time, he takes another test and there, according to more recent and current information, it turns out that the proportion of X was overestimated, that in fact the proportion of Y or even Z is predominant or equal. This destroys and devalues all his efforts to enculturate into X, leaving only wasted time and effort. If this person is a public figure, his reputation suffers. There are examples of such mistakes and ensuing tossing back and forth between ethnicities. In general, perceptions of one’s own ethnocultural identity become blurred, and it ultimately might happen that a person continues to follow a false path, remaining in ignorance of the mistake. This situation is somewhat similar to the endless online debates on phenotypes and profiling on the basis of photos, where “experts” can “substantiate” one and the same person’s belonging to almost any “race”, “subrace”, etc. Needless to say, popular online applications for determining ancestry by photo work on the principle of a random number generator.
Test tube data and interpretation is also an unreliable source, many times inferior to the direct inheritance of language, culture, and family history from one’s parents and ancestors, and inferior to mystical revelation. There is a substitution of sources. People trust not their parents and the myths of their language, but believe in faceless Petri dish and soulless machines for DNA analysis, which have nothing in common with the human being and man’s ancestry. And there is the fact that the scientific method currently in favor points us in the direction of a form of latent atheism and materialism as the basic lining of this whole movement.
But besides the science-based arguments, this approach is generally an anti-traditional form of knowledge. It is a fact that the fashion for DNA tests is widespread among people who pretend to be pagans, who declare the importance and priority of the archaic, the sacred, traditional values (often Indo-European), etc. But at the same time, they reproduce absolutely non-pagan practices and methods that have been generated within the entirely anti-traditional paradigm of modern knowledge and the industrialized world. Instead of seeking the empirical experience of the sacred, they choose a path that leads in the exact opposite direction. The absurdity and paradoxicality of such behavior leaves a rhetorical question in the air, the answer to which is silent, or rather inaudible to them.
Let us turn to myth and recall Ottar from the Scandinavian Song of Hyndla. The young man Ottar is under the patronage of Vanadis Freya, who, upon turning him into a boar to conceal his appearance, turns to the giantess Hyndla to help Ottar find out his origin. This is to ensure that Ottar gets what is due to him in an inheritance dispute. Hyndla unravels Freya’s plan, but she does list all of the young man’s long lineage. Freya asks the jotun to let Ottar taste “memory’s beer” so that he can memorize such a long list of forefathers. Hyndla refuses, but then gives the young man a drink with poison in it. Ottar is saved by Freya’s intercession.
This is a mythological and entirely traditional form of gaining knowledge: appealing to the Gods, spirits, seers, etc. Let’s imagine that instead of passionately appealing to Freya with gifts and petitions for help, Ottar would simply send his saliva for a test and present some haplogroup or paternity test results in the dispute. For ancient society and the world of tradition, to imagine a Konung spitting into a test tube at the Thing would be ridiculous and laughable. In the song, Hyndla simply calls Ottar a “fool” for not knowing his kin, but in our “DNA case” the wise men, Aesir, and Vanir would suggest that Freya turn Ottar back into a man and see what the result of his test would be. The Gods are no strangers to fair humor over the insolent hubris of a man who seeks to circumvent or deceive their order.
There are also metaphysical arguments. Throughout Indo-European cultures, the bodily level of existence is correlated with the maternal pole, with matter, with Mother Earth. The paternal principle is life, form, spirit and/or soul (not separated in some cultures), breath, mind, law of measure, and inspiration. In Germanic-Scandinavian mythology, it is the three brothers, Odin, Vili, and Ve, who are the “fathers” of humans — before their gifts, humans were simply logs discarded on the shore, i.e., blind material products of nature (recall that in Aristotle, wood becomes the philosophical category of matter). They finally became harmonious people of the Middle World only with the participation of the Gods, and inheritance henceforth proceeds along patriarchal lines.
Referring to genetics and DNA tests means excavating not even the level of spiritualized corporeality, but the sub-corporeal, merely material level. This is the way (method, technology) of establishing kinship within the framework of the feminine metaphysical pole of matter before the latter merges with the Heavenly Father. We will certainly obtain some knowledge, but it will be incomplete and parthenogenetic, generated without the Father, and thus once again bastardized. We can say that this is quite transparently a case of metaphysical matriarchy and chthonism, as is confirmed by prominent European thinkers who have directly identified the reign of technology with Titanism (Friedrich-Georg and Ernst Jünger), the decline of Europe (Oswald Spengler), and the oblivion of Being (Martin Heidegger).
Such knowledge has the character of a bastard and is therefore illegitimate. The problem here is not that this knowledge is supposedly true, but that no one recognizes it as true. Bastard knowledge cannot be true and legitimate in principle. Recognizing it as legitimate means the destruction of sacred law and natural order, passing into the decadence and degradation of the universe. It is not by chance that the fashion for DNA-determination of one’s roots is popular today, in the scientific and technological era, which is the final chord of the anti-traditional degeneration of the world. In general, the increase in blind material density, coarseness, inertia, darkness, ignorance of the Divine nature and, as a consequence, folly and stupidity, is a fundamental characteristic of the Kali-Yuga, which is expressed in the dominance of the guna tamas. And the zeal with which this methodology is defended indicates that science as a whole is literally a “sacred cow” to such people, only turned inside out and dissected. They build their identity and belonging not on tradition, myth, and mythopoetics, but on thin scientific lining. Meanwhile, it is possible to substantiate and justify one’s belonging by other ways and arguments which are stronger and much more traditional. The problem is that the traditional path implies a total denial of the legitimacy of literally the entire worldview that people have been taught since school within which their laboratory methods of confirming their legitimacy, identity, and status within the subculture function. That is to say: it is a path of a radical rift with the comfortable paradigm of (false) knowledge, which requires a complete reassembly of the same identity, but on fundamentally different, sacrocentric grounds.
What is even more telling is that the DNA approach is completely devoid of any mythopoetics, which is the core expression and perception of the sacred in archaic societies, and not only in Indo-European societies. Moving saliva or blood through tubes, spinning in a centrifuge, analyzing and printing a table against the background of scurrying students and graduate students in white coats – this is not even prose, but boring vulgarity and banality. Is it comparable to the heat that Ottar unleashed on Freya’s altar, melting the stones themselves into glass, and the fact that the daughter of the Vanir herself descended to help her faithful human? For those versed in myths and poetry, it is obvious that, besides the question of genealogy and inheritance, the erotic line peculiar to Freya is also woven into the song.
Still, a legitimate question remains: What are people supposed to do? Or rather, how are people supposed to be? For example, what about those people who, through determining their regional identity, genuinely want to get out from under the colonial discourse of the decaying modern culture of the metropolis? And what about people who are actual orphans?
First, one must accept the given, stoically and obediently, for as the Latin wisdom says: fate leads the obedient and drags the disobedient. Classical literature knows examples when orphanhood and ignorance of origin turned into textbook examples (Ottar) or grandiose tragedies, as was the case with Oedipus.
Second, all the traditional methods are clearly described and suggested by the traditional texts. To them we can add the method of conscious mythologizing — (not to be confused with fantasizing and inventing an origin from Nibiru) — by turning to the Divine source through the head of the generalized Ancestor.
Hence the third point, which directly applies to orphans and to those who have not had the time to do the archaeology of the memories of their progenitors. If a person does not have any possibility of recovering their authentic genealogy, he still has before him the unique opportunity to go all in, truly, which requires serious courage and effort. Namely, in this situation, he always has Father-Heaven above his head and Mother-Earth under his feet; thus, he becomes the first ancestor for himself and his further lineage. He himself is their direct son — always. Mother, Father, and the son who initiates the lineage — this is the classic, archaic, primordial structure. It is adjusted by one’s native language, which one has internalized since childhood. That is, if a person speaks Russian, German, or Italian, he speaks one of the Indo-European languages, which means that his thinking is structured by the corresponding categories, as is clearly described by Sergei Borodai in his book Language and Cognition [Iazyk i poznanie. Vvedenie v postreliativizm]. Finally, obvious external attributes, if there are any, also help. From here, for example, we can derive the beginning of tribalism, a new lineage with its hereditary tradition.
In the Homeric cry, “The great Gods made me an orphan, now I am my own first ancestor!”, there is sincerity, truth, poetry, and openness to the difficulties of fate — the actual “Nordic fortitude.” To this end, you only need to commit three simple gestures: bow your head, look at the Earth and raise your gaze to the Father, and turn your inner gaze to the soul, thinking, and language. Trust them as your parents, and show fidelis to the Gods.
To conclude and summarize, it is necessary and important to know your origin and ancestry, but knowledge is a unity of form and content, and thus you must know in the right way, which leads to the Divine Parents, not to the chimeras of non-traditional knowledge. There is a mythopoetic way out of any situation, albeit a difficult one, one that goes against the inertia of degeneration, one that is surmountable even without crutches.
On the whole, we have conceived this article not as an invitation to discussion, but as an imperative declaration of proper guidelines for all those who are asking difficult questions in search of their family, ancestral, and sacred roots. We end this article with firm confidence in the chosen path.
Translated by Jana Semenova, edited by Jafe Arnold.
READ MORE by Askr Svarte: Gods in the Abyss: Essays on Heidegger, the Germanic Logos and the Germanic Myth, brought to you in English by Arktos: