Over recent years, I have pondered the issue of how to name pre-Christian Germanic religion. Our ancestors did not need to apply a name to their religion because it was accepted that all members of their community were already an integral part of their real-world spiritual community by virtue of being born into the clan, tribe, or folk group. The terms 'Germanic heathenism', 'Germanic paganism', or 'Germanic polytheism' are all retrospective terms, and by using them ourselves, it causes us to put an unnecessary psychological distance or barrier between us and our ancestors.
'Heathenry', 'Asatru', 'Wodenism', 'Odinism', 'Wotanism', et cetera are all modern-day terms that are used by practitioners of our religion as self-descriptors. The problem with 'Asatru' is that it immediately implies that the follower is relating to the religion in a particular place and time period, a thousand or so years ago in Old Norse-speaking communities, while the majority of followers live outside of the far north and are a product of the 20th or 21st centuries. The same also may be said about practitioners of 'Vanatru'.
'Wodenism', 'Odinism', and 'Wotanism' all imply that the follower is a worshipper of the god Wotan, Wodan, Woden, Odin, which may not be the case; his primary allegiance may be to a different deity. It also implies a form of monotheism and the granting of a supremacy to the god, which our ancestors may not have granted. The problem here is our overreliance on the Old Norse written sources and our framing the gods into a hierarchical 'pantheon' like the ancient Greeks and Romans, which, in my opinion, is a serious error. I will explain my thinking on this particular issue in a future article.
The term 'Odinism' originated in 1841 with the publication of the book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History by the Scottish historian, Thomas Carlyle. This term was then taken up by the Australian, Alexander Rudd Mills, in the 1930s, who founded the First Anglecyn Church of Odin in Melbourne in 1936. Whether he was familiar with Carlyle's work, I do not know. The next major use of the term was by the Odinic Rite, which was founded in England in 1973 by John Yeowell, known as Stubba , and John Gibbs-Bailey, known as Hoskuld. The Odinist Fellowship was founded in 1988 by Ralph Harrison, known as Ingvar, and Mr Harrison was formerly a member of the Odinic Rite. Likewise, Woden's Folk was founded in 1998 by Wulf Ingessunu, a former member of the Odinic Rite. These are the three main Odinist/Wodenist groups that operate in England today, and all three have folkish elements of belief.
The group Asatru UK was founded by a number of Facebook members in 2013 and describes itself as 'inclusive' and stresses that it welcomes people regardless of 'gender, sexuality, or ethnicity'. We can conclude from that description that it is most certainly not folkish but universalist, placing it at the opposite end of Woden's Folk on the heathen spectrum.
So, back to the question of what we should call our religion? In recent years, I have taken an interest in Balto-Slavic mythology and pre-Christian religion. Modern-day practitioners of that reconstructed religion call it 'Rodnovery', the etymology of which translates as 'native faith', making it an ancestral and thus folkish religion. Indeed, it is often called Slavic native faith in the English-speaking world. It embraces all the Slavic peoples and gods. Thus, I see no reason at all why we should not use a similar term for pre-Christian Germanic religion, id est Germanic native faith.
Germanic native faith thus embraces all folkish interpretations of the religion, regardless of region and time period and avoids the notion of an hierarchal pantheon, something which in my opinion, is an alien concept to the Germanic folk soul and would rid us of some of the negative baggage and harm that has been done to our religion by American 'white supremacists' over the years.
