Folkmother Else Christensen 1913 - 2005

***This article was first published in “The Odinist” by Else over 40 years ago. Asatru has grown not only in numbers but in understanding of our ancestor’s practices since that time. It is important to know where we came from and to honor the pioneers of our faith, so we can continue to move forward in knowledge and strength.***

HEROIC VITALISM

As we have seen, the idea of Aryan Hero Worship has been warped by the culture distorters, and so has our cognate idea of Aryan Heroic Vitalism. The need of our disoriented and demoralized folk for an infusion of Will from the latter concept is critical, and our blood enemies have tried - with diminishing success - to destroy this ideal in an attempt to block the revitalization of our people. Heroic Vitalism invests the core of our race-soul, for it is the quiddity, the stuff of our inborn motivation, and, and the key to developing and unleashing our tremendous personal and collective power. Our task as Wotanists is to clarify the true meaning of Aryan Heroic Vitalism so that we can proceed to popularize it and so that we can proceed to popularize it and encourage more of our kinsmen to express their native souls through it.

Culture distortion has taken its toll even among the best Inklings, and therefore our method in this essay will be to first explain genuine Aryan Heroic Vitalism, then to discuss how and why it has been twisted; like pathologists, we shall begin by studying and learning about healthy, normal life forms, then shift to deceased examples.

To begin, according to our World View, the Universal Will, The Force, in 20th century terms, is in and of All, and is in and of Aryan Man; this Force, or spirit-energy is the Will and Reason of the Cosmos coherent within us, and its ever more evolved form engines our minds and bodies and is the source of our drive, or 'vitalism'.

The Aryan Idea of 'vitalism,' or The Force considers that spirit, energy and reason exist in a single harmony in the racially pure and more-evolved man. In 'Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans,' Professor Gunther observes that to Aryans "...God is again and again regarded as Reason ruling through world phenomena".

Our Aryan vitalism, which impels both the general upward evolution of the folk group and the universe, is a mystic union of the soul, body and mind; it is the transcendent Life-Force operating harmoniously within and through an Ingling. The outpouring of cosmic vitality from within is therefore ordered and controlled by Reason, or perhaps by super-rational means, and this applied energy is at all times guided and channeled by the intelligence. The intellect summons, marshals, aims and disciplines our up thrusting vitalism, and makes it all the more potent and effective, thereby preparing conditions for a new, more powerful cycle of action.

The explosion of Aryan Heroic Vitalism can be explained by comparing it to the explosion of gasoline vapor in an automobile engine cylinder: a certain spark ignites the fuel droplets and causes a wild, omni-directional release of energy which is instantaneously catapulted and channeled by the cylinder walls and head so that the piston is pushed downward to deliver effective power. In like manner, our ever-evolving Reason always harnesses our ever-growing vitality, concentrating and focusing it to achieve maximum efficiency. Aryan Heroic Vitalism is 'ordered power', directed in accordance with natural law, or the World Order; it has always been considered by us as the quintessence of 'reason ruling through phenomena' and the triumph of physical force and mental exertion.

At its root, our Vitalism is a wild, berserker force, tamable and usable only by us; it is a primitive, elemental kinetic energy far greater, far mightier than that of any other people: our survival and success in the terrible Ice Ages, the Stone Age, and our historical European-American era prove this. In our Vitalism, primitive, savage forces are organically fused with advanced Reason to produce dynamism of both mind and muscle. This is the Vital Power we must re-master, maximize and put to optimal use if we are to stride onward to the creation of a new Aryan Epoch.

Further analysis reveals that the Faustian Will has its source in Heroic Vitalism, for the urge for infinite movement, for eternal progress and evolution is effectuated and stimulated by this animating force. The Faustian Will desires to evermore strive for betterment, refinement and greatness; in Goethe's poetic terms, we Aryans are fired by the desire to continually become higher and greater beings, or to always move forward in an infinite succession of truly progressive growth changes. Nietzsche called this spiritual-physical current The Will to Power, the cosmic Will within to evolve as a species, and to attempt to go beyond one's self to attain the next level of superiority nor greatness. To do this in the face of Destiny and every other obstacle, requires bravery and daring, and only a heroic attitude will suffice to motivate these ventures. Thus Heroic idealism is incorporated with Vitalism to yield Heroic Vitalism, the awesomely powerful driving force of our Aryan Soul.

Here, too, we observe our Master Morality in operation, for our essential force propels us to ever gain mastery over ourselves and our world, not in the material sense of taking political power or controlling other human beings as the culture distorters so falsely claim, but for the idealistic purpose of becoming better, more perfect beings in and of ourselves. While a slave morality teaches its victims to accept the status quo and to allow one's self to be ruled from without by whatever or whomever happens to exert authority, our Aryan Master Morality, enlivened by heroic Vitalism, stimulates each person to always move himself forward - to grow - and to contribute to the overall evolution of his folk. Our ethos demands that one attacks his Destiny with the utmost courage and effort, and Heroic Vitalism is the means by which this is done.

It is plain that Heroic Vitalism is an ennobling, refining force that both expresses and increases the potency of our folk. We must once again appreciate Vitalism and cultivate it in ourselves and others so that we gain the personal and collective strength which enables us to master ourselves and to crush our enemies.

Having gotten an understanding of genuine Aryan Heroic Vitalism, let us now examine what the culture distorters have done to this concept.

For untold thousands of years, our Aryan folk were motivated by Heroic Vitalism, and enshrined this ideal in poetry and myth, but when our unfortunate forebears were afflicted with Christianity, this pathological condition caused them to partially abandon the Idea. Since then, it has taken centuries for our folk to recover; but this recovery accelerated during the early 19th century to the extent that the folk was close to breaking loose from Judeo-Christianity and its obverse form, finance-capitalism. During the middle and late 19th century, we Aryans were well on the way to 'Re-attaining the Beginning' (in the words of Clark Ashton Smith); on the European continent, Teutonic and Scandinavian myths were being collected and translated, and in England, William Morris and William Hope Hodgson were producing modern translations of Icelandic and other sagas.

It was at this point that the culture distorters became alarmed, and set about killing off the latest upsurge of the Aryan Soul. The chief culture distorter, and the person whose deformed ideas have become the definition of our Aryan Vitalism was Henri Bergson, a French national of mixed Aryan and Jewish parentage.

Perhaps reacting instinctively against our noble, life-promoting Aryan values, Bergson devised the notion of elan vital, the grotesque concept of an irrational, chaotic force which supposedly motivates human behavior, and all of evolution. Like Freud, Bergson attributes base and ignoble causes to our states of being, and also received extensive publicity for his unsupported claim.

Thanks to this perverse notion of elan vital, Vitalism became understood to be nothing but a frantic, frenzied impetuosity; through the efforts of various schools of thinkers and publicists, the original Aryan aristocratic ideal was corrupted into the idea of incoherent, uncontrolled convulsions or paroxysms. Man became the slave or powerless victim of these sub-rational impulses, and thus Aryan conceptions to the degraded figment promoted by alien charlatans and culture distorters.

Since that time, the false principles invented the sociopath Bergson have been accepted as truth and have led to a tragic misunderstanding of the Aryan Soul, especially by Aryans themselves. Bergson's distortions actually reached to the core of our existence, for by logical extension, heroic Vitalism signified that one was crazed, demented or insane. Heroes and Aryan Heroism were stigmatized as mania in disguise. In projecting the dark, devolved chaotic forces that rule consciousness, Bergson attempted to impose his own inherited primitive disorder upon us Aryans. We can discern that this approach is but a version of the smear technique of calling an opponent 'sick' or 'mentality unbalanced' in order to vilify him and avoid having to rationally refute his position. And Aryan Heroic Vitalism became synonymous with lunacy, dementia and total absence of reason.

This inversion of true, ordered Vitalism has had the partial effect of turning a Life Force into a death force, of debasing our culture and depriving our folk of the truth about their natural soul.

Bergson's distorted notion of elan vital, the spurious 'Heroic Will,' has done much to dissolve our mind and put us into cultural and physiological disarray. The twisted ideas of Bergson, Freud, et al. have been employed during the 20th century to put our folk out of order, to confuse and mislead them, while spreading the malicious idea that the mind that conceives of Heroic Vitalism is a farrago, a mess.

Like the false idea of submission and subjection to greatness misrepresented as 'Hero Worship', Bergson's spurious and pernicious notion concerning Vitalism is nihilistic and poisonous. It, too, aims, not at the enhancement of the cosmic spirit within man and Nature, but at the annihilation and denial of the Universal Life Force. In these two malicious ways, the culture distorters have attempted - unsuccessfully now that Wotan is on the attack - to debase and reduce the Aryan Affirmations tp a negation.

Having discussed the what and the how of the matter, let's turn to the why. The general purpose for twisting and denaturing our native resurgent folkish instincts and intellects from reaching full potency and effect. But viewed across the ages-long history of our folk, these insidious measures are but a desperate stopgap, a panicked temporizing to halt the unstoppable forward march of the Aryan Folk. At another level, the foe's strategy is to disperse, or diffuse our Heroic Vitalism, that is, to scatter it, rendering it harmless.

This mechanism operates in three principal ways, and so we shall examine how the general delaying tactics function. First, the distortion deprives many Inklings of the truth about themselves and their Folk, and misleads them into behaving in a frantic, uncontrolled manner since their having been deluded into thinking that this is the one and only 'way' their Vital and Heroic energies are expressed. Such people are beguiled into squandering their resources and into wasting themselves in futility. Such individuals soon become burned out and despondent, if not completely self-destroyed, and are of little help to their folk.

Second, the sorry example of the once healthy, but misguided and exhausted failures discourages others from even attempting to cultivate and use their inborn drives. Thus, the weakening of Vitalism removes untold numbers of would-be participants from the battle, and promotes a general distrust of our own, inner impulses and character.

Third, the public at large is fooled into condemning Aryan Heroic Vitalism, or ridiculing it as something symptomatic of mental deficiency or disease, and certainly not something to be admired and even less experimented with or tolerated in others. In this way, wide-scale support and sympathy for Vitalism is undercut and pre-empted.

And, as alluded to above, the corruption of vitalism introduces 'slave mentality' into our consciousness: In Bergson's view, man is a slave at the behest of chaos and confusion rather than a nobly-evolved being working in partnership, in organic harmony, with the vital Universal will. Man is misconceived as an empty creature incapable of resisting or taming the irrational, disorderly forces which rule him; while our true Vitalism ennobles Aryan Man into an aristocrat-warrior, the culture distorters have subtly degraded him into a beast enslaved to the whims and random vagaries of primal chaos.

Bad as all this culture distortion has been, however, it has fallen short, and the correct definition of Aryan Heroic Vitalism is being understood by a growing fraction of the worldwide Aryan population. The good native spirit and intelligence of our Folk has repulsed the Bergson sally, and a new, strengthening wave of folkish consciousness is carrying the message to our kinsmen everywhere. The culture distorters, to their horror, are no longer able to obstruct us from understanding ourselves and from 'reattaining the beginning'. Consequently, a tremendous revivification and remoralization of our Folk is gathering momentum, and we are recovering our inner power. Heroic Vitalism is the pulse of our force, and the newly-discovered truth about it is re-animating and invigorating our Folk. As various culture distortions are identified and resolved, the true underlying concepts and ideals are being made effective once again and put under our control. For better or for worse, we are successfully struggling to learn the truth about ourselves and to reorder ourselves to win the global biological battle for human survival and supremacy.

A synergetic effect is re-occurring between Hero Worship and Hero Vitalism, and our inherited dynamism, push and thrust are being reasserted. With the progressive restoration of our self-understanding and of our fighting Will, we are becoming a dynamic, forceful people whose energy and pressure are beginning to take effect. The synthesis of Heroism and Vitalism is producing an even more bold and mettlesome Folk, determined to regain its lost spiritual freedom, and to go beyond this struggle and construct a new Aryan civilization. As the edifice of lies and distortions crumbles to the ground, our Folk is rebounding to a vigor our state of health and is readying itself to burst out with an all-transforming idealism that will forever free our Folk from the mind-destroying Bergsonian system and make us the masters of our own Destiny. .....K.L.H.

(From Else Christensen's "The Odinist" periodical issue #50 1980)