By far, my favourite music genre is Nordic folk.12 Groups such as Heilung (which means Healing), Wardruna, Kalandra and others seem to chant a sort of primal organic unity with Nature and the natural world.

Their Norse lyrics, rhythms and tones help to celebrate what to me is a philosophical profundity, namely, that we come from an almost unimaginably long and deep natural heritage. That we are in a way living fossils, born a long time ago out of the stuff of the Universe: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and a tincture of other elements such as sulfur, calcium and phosphorus. Just like all fellow creatures are born similarly and without any divine preference. Yes, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, dancing together in an unchoreographed concert of randomness to make me me and you you.

This musical subculture is pagan, ostensibly not Christian. My own prior Evangelical and Catholic Christian experiences would have had none of this. After all, I was to have been in this world but not of this world, right? I was taught that this world in all its alleged brokenness is no mirror to the putative glorious post-death world in which any unity we may enjoy is at once otherworldly, post-worldy. What a misfocus, I say.

So as I allow myself once again to be immersed into a Wardruna Helvegen moment, I contemplate my own cosmic unimportance, and I reflect on how so much of this natural world is still physical, unbroken, and awe-worthy.

And that is the allure of paganism.

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1. 1 I declare this to be my own work, entirely. In particular, no AI was used in any research, analysis, synthesis, writing, nor typesetting of this work. In short, AI was not recruited at any time in this work. Errors and inaccuracies are therefore proudly my own.
2. 2 Disclaimer: I am not a believer in Norse mythology.

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