A heathen tribe should offer you meaningful things like a real identity, mission, loyalty, brotherhood, and hospitality among members. Within our tribe we strive for a lifestyle that embodies the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of being both a warrior and a heathen. In modern life, many psychological difficulties come from the lack of having tribal (close knit and loyal) affiliations. It’s this lack of belonging, which many veterans and online heathens are missing, and indeed long for. Be honest, governments, companies, and most organized religious groups, are part of the cold modern world and can never provide you with the kinship and strength offered by a tribe of fellow warriors.
Be part of a heathen tribe – if not ours then go find one or make one. Being part of a tribe entails sacrifice – usually your time and energy. Sometimes it takes all you got, but it’s worth it. Nothing good ever happened from just sitting around - you must go make it happen. If you care about everything and everyone and a thousand FB pages you are wasting your time. Save your time, energy, and silver to what really matters: your family and those groups that deserve your loyalty and which reward you with loyalty in return and provide you with identity and purpose. Especially, those of you who have been in combat – many of us have been there too. We get it. In a heathen tribe you should celebrate life’s events and honor births, marriages, victories, and the death of members.
Being part of a real heathen warrior tribe means stepping away from the “lone wolf” heathen sub-culture that some of those in our faith have. A tribe offers what money cannot buy. It’s not enough to watch “Vikings,” buy a Mjolnir, and get a cool Helm of Awe tattoo by yourself if that’s all you do. As much as those may be fun, that’s acting like a consumer not a heathen. In the wild, lone wolves may be aggressive, but they are never as strong as a wolf pack and they must hunt sick and small prey and scavenge. If they are weak there is no one to defend them. The heathen tribe is stronger than the lone heathen. Some lone-wolf heathens are simply avoiding being honest with themselves, their friends, and their families about their true heathen identity. They won’t tell people that they believe in the Old Ways and the Old Gods. It’s easy to maintain this façade in a basement on a computer, but they won’t expose it to the light of Sunna. They need to return visibly to the faith of our ancestors and fight and drink and feast honorably in the company of those who have also done so. If you are a military heathen and that’s you then email us – you need to belong and maybe we can help.
We all need to surround ourselves in the tribe with like-minded positive and strong warriors who will give us energy and not suck it from us. We need those who will encourage us to do amazing things. We do Viking combat, archery, shoot, conduct ruck-sack marches and will be sailing and rowing on the Viking ship we are building in 2020. We plan on doing group hunting and extreme activities like skydiving, scuba diving, and Glima as part of some of our elite programs. We are going to Iceland and Norway in 2020. We balance the physical, the spiritual, and mental aspects of our heathen warrior lifestyle. We emphasize fitness and being prepared. Too many veterans let themselves go physically as a sort of recoil from years of military discipline after they get out of the service. We want to help tribe members and veterans get fit and even stronger. No excuses. In our tribe we honor greatness amongst ourselves and the greatness of our Gods and Goddesses. We do not honor mediocrity. If that’s your thing we aren’t the right tribe for you. If you are in a heathen group or tribe doing awesome stuff great! If not, then why not?
Our tribe is not just focused on Virginia, but wherever there are military heathens. We are growing in the US and internationally through our Society of Gungnir. With these Spear brothers and Spear sisters we break the mold of online heathen groups and will establish real relationships at gatherings in the US and overseas and by visiting with each other.
“It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning. It’s about why—for many people—war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
Midsummer Viking combat training