Knowing who you are is definitely important to traditional and archaic societies. This is the knowledge of your own origin from which the core of cultural identity is built, which includes understanding the kinship system accepted in this society and the marriage possibilities; understanding the system of “friend or foe” in relation to other tribes, settlements and folks; inheriting your place in the world and the structure of society through belonging to a class and an ancestral activity, etc.
In different cultures there is a gradation of the depth of knowledge of your ancestry on the paternal or maternal inheritance. In the Germanic-Scandinavian tradition, it is considered proper to know your genealogy as deeply as possible, up to the forefather Odin or Inga-Freyr. It is natural to the nobility, which always raises their kin or bloodline to the Gods. For an ordinary man, deep knowledge of his fathers and grandfathers is a key to the reputation and confirmation of property rights.
In more archaic and agrarian cultures the knowledge of ancestors is limited to those great grandfathers whom a man found alive, or whose biographies were told to him by his parents, or who appeared to him personally from the otherworld. And the kind as a whole merged into the summarized figure of the Ancestor(forefather) as a whole, into the mystical cult of the kind itself. Then speaking of “fathers” and “mothers” as a kind of categories, which include the known father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, great grandmother and great grandfather, and 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 this beast and his son may encounter it in person in the jungle. This is the confirmation of his origin from the world of the forest spirits, because animals were not perceived as only zoological populations and units, but as separate spiritual beings. So, the deceased ancestor could at the next step immediately be reborn into the “totemic” ancestor of the jaguar, thereby the lineage was though short, but qualitative and direct. For example, these are the indians runa in the Amazon forests.
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 the nations are descended. Such is the Tuisto of the Germans, who gave birth to Mann, according to Tacitus.
In our sorrowful days the question of your ancestry and deep belonging to large identities has become relevant again among the followers of modern paganism of various directions. One of the fashionable solutions to this problem are available DNA-tests, which specify the belonging to a population based on haplogroup analysis, from which it is possible to carry out ethnic localization of ancestors and, in the perspective, even to establish the habitat. Let’s consider what is wrong with this approach on contrasting examples.
Classical methods of genealogy reconstruction rely on the initial survey of living relatives about their ancestors, ancestry by kin/ethnicity and region. The mother’s maiden names are recognized, the paternal line is traced in the spacetime (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, often, exhaustive; in especially successful cases they allow to find out all necessary information without attraction of extra tools.
The argument against this approach is that the information from relatives may be inaccurate. In addition to natural failings due to the memory of older 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 of the many situations with ethnic immigrants from Ukrainians, Germans, and peoples of the Caucasus to Siberia, the Far East, and the north of modern Kazakhstan; repressed members of noble families or wives and children of “enemies of the people” during the Soviet era. The problem of an “unreliable source” in the form of relatives solves by cross checks and, often, a trusted conversation with the great-grandfathers themselves.
Opposite, scientific information from a tube is positioned as a source of inviolable reliability, which in its value overrides traditional ways of recognizing your past and roots. It doesn’t.
We can start with the old mishap of a popular American typing company that put a percentage of African roots in all results by default to not to dispute the theory of the African origin of mankind. Because in the network circles of the Western Alt-Right and their similar “right-wing” there are proponents of northern or multiple origins of mankind – these theories are declared “dangerous far-right conspirology.” With this example, we see that even at a elementary level, political appropriateness and political correctness affect science and knowledge-intensive services directly. In the sphere of pure business, tobacco market and pharmacology, examples of customized researches can be found many more times, which only confirms the well-known fact that scientific researches and journals are partisanship.
The next stone that falls out of the foundation consists in the subcultural component of those who use this method for their typing. This component is the social character of the interpretation of DNA test results or even as it often happens several tests ordered by different companies. If a person belongs to a conventional crowd of fans of Finno-Ugric heritage or fans of pan-Indo-European identity, he will rate his results sifting them through the prism of how much they match and fit him into the subculture or picture of the world to which he wants to belong. So the analysis becomes a source of legitimacy in the social group, which means that priority will be given to the analysis from that 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. There is a substitution of concepts, the chariot is put before the horse. Otherwise the person will be “discharged”. This shows that in the basis of such a specific case is not as much trust to the truth of science, but rather the desire or social mechanisms of belonging to a group(up to examples when haplogroups ciphers interwines into the pagan symbolism and agitation). In politics the most famous example is American democrat Elizabeth Warren, who proclaimed her native American belonging based on less than 1% of her DNA test results.
Another shaky rock is endlessly changing technologies and refining information. Ethnographers, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, linguists, etc. regularly clarify the picture and paths of migrations, localization of areas of residence of ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, circulation. of languages, frontiers where there was intensive mixing; they find new and not yet fit into the general picture of standings, cultural artefacts, migration paths, etc. To this are added revisions of theories and concepts in the conventional University, ergo clarification and academic revision of the established picture of knowledge, setting hypotheses and theories. So we are always dealing with an unfinished, dynamic map.
DNA analysis is summoned to localize the client on this map, specifying the most probable belonging. But the problem is that the technologies of blood or saliva analysis themselves are also improving; the information from the next analysis may be more detailed, more refined, more detailed, more exhaustive, along with corrections made by the same archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists. This is especially actual for frontier zones and white 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 typing always carry on the mark of time and the level of technology 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. We can’t exclude the factor of old equipment, poor quality equipment, non-observance of procedures, confusion of samples due to errors, etc.
As a result, only the general belonging to one or another group can be reliable, so to say “broad strokes” without narrow localization. But the same result can be achieved by researching the genealogical tree, appearance and dialect of your family. In terms of “Occam’s Razor” this would be involving unnecessary substances when there is a simpler and more reliable solution.
An argument that pops up frequently in this thread is appeals to the so-called “mysticism of blood” that preserves and carries the mystery of inheritance and belonging. Here, too, the progressive scale can be appealed to as a criterion for rejection. The existing blood mysticism manifests itself freely without any regard, consideration or need for any technological and biolaboratory crutches. You can ask the question that if the “voice of blood” sounded and affected people before, from ancient times and always, in all times, so how did it work without analyzes and separation by haplogroups? It is possible to hear the “voice of blood” without appealing to primitive biology, because it is an occurrence of a different, non-material register. Otherwise all people of the past will have to deny their statements 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” is accomplished 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 previously uncrossed realities?
We can imagine a situation when 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, and with a clear gesture will turn his eyes to this or that region, after all, will simply say “from the Pomors we came…”. And at the same time, the young man will have a printout of his tests on the hands. The probability that he will blindly believe the paper is ~100%, and his vision will be rationally explained by hot weather, bad sleep, intoxication, etc. So a truly revealed revelation will be destroyed 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 in various places during their lives – is 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 to study its traditions, he takes X as a point of reassembly of his identity and family genealogy (“it turns out we are all X!”), and so on. But after some time he makes another test and there, according to more recent and modern information, it turns out that the proportion of X is overestimated, in fact the proportion of Y or even Z is predominant or equal. This destroys and devalues all efforts to enculturate into X, time and effort are wasted; if the person is public, his reputation suffers. There are examples of such mistakes and throwing back and forth between ethnicities. In general, perceptions of your own ethnocultural identity become blurred and at the limit it may happen that a person continues to follow a false path, remaining in ignorance of the mistake. In part, this situation is similar to the endless debates on the Internet about phenotypes and photo typing, where under the same person “experts” can “justify” belonging to almost any “race”, “subrace”, etc. Needless to say that popular web 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 direct inheritance of language, culture, family history from parents and ancestors, and mystical revelation. There is a switch of sources going on. People trust not their parents and myths of language, but believe in faceless petri dish and soulless machines for DNA analysis, which have nothing relatable with a man and his ancestry. And the fact that the scientific method that is now being favored points us to a form of latent atheism and materialism as the basic lining of this whole movement.
But besides of 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 (often Indo-Europeian) values, etc. But at the same time, they reproduce absolutely non-pagan practices and methods that have been generated from within by the entirely antitraditional paradigm of modern knowledge and 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 hangs a rhetorical question without an intelligible answer.
Let us turn to myth and remember Ottar from the Scandinavian Song of Hundla. The young man Ottar is patronized by the vanadis Freya, having turned him into a boar to conceal his appearance, she turns to the giantess Hundla to help Ottar find out his origin. That is to ensure that Ottar gets what is due to him in an inheritance dispute. Hundla unravels Freya’s plan, but lists 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. Hundla refuses, but then gives the young man a drink with poison in it. Through Freya’s intercession, Ottar is saved.
This is a mythological and entirely traditional form of gaining knowledge: appealing to 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 dispute. For an old society and world of tradition, to imagine a cyning spitting into a test tube at a ting is ridiculous and laughable. In the song Hundla calls Ottar, who knows no kinship, simply “unintelligent”, but in this case the wise men, aces and vans, would suggest to Freya not to turn him from a boar back into a man and see what the result of the test would be. Because 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. Everywhere in Indo-European cultures the bodily level of existence is correlated with the maternal pole, with matter, 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 Odin-Vili-Ve brothers who are the “fathers” of humans, who before their gifts were simply logs discarded on the shore (in Aristotle it is wood that becomes the philosophical category of matter), that is blind material productions of nature. They become finally harmonious people of the middle world with the complicity of the Gods, and inheritance is patriarchal.
Turning to genetics and DNA-tests is the excavation not even of spiritualized corporeality, but of sub-bodily of purely material level. This is the way (method, technology) of establishing kinship within the framework of the female metaphysical pole of matter before her merging with the Heavenly Father. We will certainly obtain some knowledge, but it will be incomplete and parthenogenetic, generated without the Father, and thus again bastardized. We can say that this is quite transparent metaphysical matriarchy and chthonism, as confirmed by prominent European thinkers who directly identified the kingdom of technology with titanism (F. G. and E. Jünger), the decline of Europe (O. Spengler), and the oblivion of being (M. Heidegger).
Such knowledge has the character of a bastard and therefore illegitimate. And the problem here is not that this knowledge is supposedly true, but no one recognizes it as true. Bastard knowledge cannot in principle be true and legitimate. Recognizing it as legitimate means the destruction of sacred law and natural order, that is the transition to the decadence and degradation of the universe. It is not by chance that the fashion for DNA-determination of your roots is popular today, in the scientific and technological era, which is the final chord of the antitraditional degeneration of the world. In general, the increase of blind material density, coarseness, inertia, darkness, ignorance of the Divine nature and, as a consequence, folly and stupidity, is a fundamental characteristic of Kali-Yuga, expressed in the dominance of 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. Not the tradition, myth and mythopoetics, but the thin scientific lining on which they build their belonging. Although it is possible to justify the same belonging by other ways and arguments, much more traditional and strong. The problem is that such a path implies a total denial of the legitimacy of literally the entire worldview that these people have learned since school and within which their laboratory methods of confirming their legitimacy, identity, and status within the subculture function. That is, it is a path of radical tearing with the comfortable paradigm of knowledge (false), which requires a complete reassembly of the same identity, but on fundamentally different, sacrocentric grounds.
What is even more telling is that this approach is completely devoid of any mythopoetics., which is the core of 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, that the stones themselves melted into glass, and that the daughter of the Vans herself descended to help her faithful one? And for those sophisticated 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 of the people? For example, what to do those who want, through the establishment of a regional identity, to emerge from under the colonial discourse of the decaying modern culture of the metropole? What about those who are roundly orphaned?
First, to 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 their origin turned into textbook examples (Ottar) or into grandiose tragedies, as was the case with Oedipus.
Secondly, all the traditional methods are clearly described and suggested by the text. To them we can add the method of conscious mythologizing (not to be confused with fantasizing and inventing an origin from Nibiru), – that is turning through the head of the generalized Ancestor to the Divine source.
Hence the third thing that directly applies to orphans and those who have not had time to do the archaeology of the memories of the progenitors. If a person does not have any possibilities for authentic genealogy recovery, he has before him a unique opportunity to go all in, truly, requiring 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 son-starter of the lineage is the classic archaic primordial structure. It is corrected by the native language, which a person 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, which is clearly written by S. Borodai in his book “Language and Cognition” (Язык и мышление: Введение в пострелятивизм). Finally, obvious external signs, if any, also help. From here, for example, we can ladle the beginning of tribalism, a new kind and 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 very “Nordic fortitude”. To do this, you must make only three simple gestures: bow your head and look at the Earth, raise your gaze to the Father, and turn your inner gaze to the soul, thinking and language. To trust them as your parents and to show fidelis to the Gods.
As a conclusion, we can summarize that it is necessary and important to know your origin, but knowledge acts as a unity of form and content, and thus you must know in the right way, which leads to the Divine Parents and not to the chimeras of extra-traditional knowledge. There is a mythopoetic way out of any situation, albeit a difficult one, going against the inertia of degeneration, but surmountable and 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 about the search for their family, ancestral and sacred roots. We end this article in firm confidence in the chosen path.
Evgeny Nechkasov
Translated by
Jana Semenova
