We believe that Ralph Metzner's book THE WELL OF REMEMBRANCE is very important reading.
It should be a great help in the very difficult task of exorcizing the "curse" which the Nazi leaders managed to place on the mythology and spirituality of ancient Europe. The combination of half-baked "scholarship" and intentional distortion which the Nazi politicians subjected it to in order to use it to further their own political, decidedly NON-spiritual, ends --- is rivaled ONLY BY MODERN DAY POLITICIANS' TWISTING AND PROSTITUTING RELIGION (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and you name it) to further theirs.
Of course it has been ever so: a too gullible people's highest and most sublime inclinations are regularly perverted by unscrupulous "leaders" and used to enslave and oppress them, and then others.
Many ancient insights, beliefs and practices are presently inspiring the hearts and minds of millions right here in the US, as well as world wide. The Old Gods are, indeed, awakening! Ralph Metzner's book is one of the most important tools in the struggle to guide this marvelously rejuvenating energy into a great leap forward in human consciousness, instead of yet another holocaust.
As history has shown time and again, it could go either way.
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Excerpts from Ralph Metzner's THE WELL OF REMEMBRANCE (Shambala Books):
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from the Introduction:
....It was a revelation when I heard Marija Gimbutas describe, in her Lithuanian accent and calm, deliberate voice, the peaceful, matricentric (NOT matriarchal), egalitarian, artistic, aboriginal Europeans and saw her slides of the almost overwhelming profusion of Goddess figurines that remain from these cultures. Some days later, while meditating on what she had related, I received this image: a wise, friendly, scholarly woman walks into my house and calmly informs me that underneath the basement of my house is another house, one much larger, much older, and much better furnished and appointed than the one in which I lived. These peace-loving, artistic people, not just the warlike Indo-Europeans, are also our ancestors. Although the ancient Goddess religions were suppressed, there would have been much intermarriage, trade, and other processes of cultural blending that continued for centuries, even millennia. I realized that to find a nondominating, nonwarring social system is not then a hopeless task of developing historical heritage; rather, it is a task of remembering something we once knew and practiced.
Indeed, if the beginnings of patriarchy, warfare, and the suppression of the Goddess religion coincided with the invasions into eastern Europe of the Aryan warrior-herders around 4000 BCE, and the Old European cultures flourished around the seventh and eighth millennnia BCE and back into the Paleolithic, then our ancestral roots in these ancient cultures are actually much deeper and the morphogenic fields of these cultures stronger than those of the Indo-Europeans who supplanted them. Perhaps then the rediscovery of the civilization of the Goddess by a large and growing number of women and men in our time may signal the ending of a six thousand-year-long cycle of domination by the patriarchal Indo-Europeans. Perhaps this is the reason Ashley Montagu called the publication of Marija Gimbutas's book THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODDESS " a benchmark in the history of civilization."....
from the PROLOGUE
THE NAZI CURSE ON GERMANIC MYTHOLOGY
....When I began to look into the mythology of my Germanic ancestors, I encountered a wall of anxiety and resistance, both in myself and in others with whom I shared my interest. The resistance centers around the assumed association between Nordic-Germanic mythology and the ideology of the German National Socialists. I observed that this perception was held by Germans and non-Germans alike, and that my own uneasiness about this association was not in the least mitigated by my awareness of being only half German. It was as if to engage this mythology was to open a gate onto a slippery downward slope of ideas that ended in the genocidal "final solution." For many, similar disquiet applies to the music of Richard Wagner, a known anti-semite who was admired by Hitler and who wrote operas based on Germanic myths, and to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose concept of the Ubermensch ("superhuman") seems uncomfortably close to Nazi ideas about Aryan racial superiority. In view of these associations, a mythology that interested Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Nazis is understandably suspect. I felt compelled to try to understand the nature of this association, and would like now to share with the reader the process of this disturbing but unavoidable inquiry.
I concluded fairly soon that close, unbiased examination does not support the view that Germanic myth, supplemented by Nietzsche's philosophy and Wagner's operas, was the mass-psuchological motivational impulse for the genocidal holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. In searching for writings that would document the supposed psychological affinity of Nazi ideas with Germanic myth, I found nothing beyond assertions, with little or no evidence to support them, that such an affinity exists. In discussions with friends in Germany who expressed uneasiness about engaging with Germanic myth, I argued that we should not let the Nazis' perverse misappopriation of this mythic complex alienate us from the rich and beautiful mythology of our ancestors. It became clear that the discomfort with Germanic myth was only part of a much larger complex of difficult and highly charged feelings about Germany's recent past, and that these feelings needed to be confronted.
Swiss writer Margaret Burri has written a study of Germanic mythology in which she attempted to disentangle the mythology from the distortions that derive from the associations with Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Nazis. The assumption that Nietzsche's philosophy, supposedly based on Germanic myth, is aligned with the Nazi ideology is a distortion both of Nietzsche and of Germanic myth. Nietzsche was trained as a classical philologist, who based his ideas about "master morality" and "slave morality" on Greek and Roman literature. It has been proven that he had only minimal acquaintance with Nordic literature, mythology, or sagas. Nietzsche's concept of the "superhuman" had nothing to do with assumed superiority or dominance over others. Rather, it was the statement of a psychological ideal of self-mastery. In scattered passages, Nietzsche uses characteristically inflated and dramatic language to describe the Germanic warriors who overcame the Roman legions during the period of the great migrations, speaking of them as "magnificent blond beasts," aggressively lusting after plunder and destrution and taking pleasure in killing and cruelty. There is nothing uniquely Germanic about the cruelty and destructiveness of men in war, however, and the Nazi ideologues who appropriated such passages took pains to screen out Nietzsche's scathing attacks on German nationalism and his condemnation of anti-Semitism....
....The conclusion that emerged for me from my reading on the origins of Nazism was that Hitler and his followers basically appropriated certain themes and symbols they claimed to have found in Germanic prehistory and myth for their own idological, propagandistic purposes. Although they claimed that these cultural themes were part of the ancestral genetic heritage of Nordic Aryans, in actuality this claim was based on a fantastic mishmash of racial and occult speculation that has no basis either in the facts of genetic biology or in the religion and worldview of the ancient Germanic people.
As far as mythology itself is concerned, one will search in vain among the poems of the EDDAS and the medieval sagas for any traces of such concepts as RACIAL PURITY, MASTER RACE, BLOOD AND SOIL, or even SUPERMAN. Rather, these slogans, products of a twisted and insecure mentality, were given a kind of pseudoreligious veneer by the Nazis, as part of their program of mass indoctrination. The consequences of the Nazi regime's racist policies have led to the continuing demonization of the Germanic gods and goddesses in many people's minds. It is almost as if Germanic religion and mythology were cursed through the Nazis' misrepresentations and misappropriations. Thus, it appears as if the myths and the Germanic ancestors themselves are somehow the source of the evil that was done in their name....
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