Since this is Pagan Values Month, I’ve tried to put together a post on just that. This is my third post of the day, so apologize for the sudden string (if you’re interested, there is below this a petition from MoveOn.org about clean energy, and photos of my landscaping project).

For Heathens, ancestry is very important. We might almost say it’s central. So much depends upon not only who you are, but where you came from. None of us can say we “know” our ancestors. Most of them are long dead. But it is there actions that have placed us on this Middle Earth (Midgard), providing us with our “starting locations”.

In the old days, it was your lineage that told, not your credit score. Your word, your honor, was critically important. If you were the son of an outlaw, it diminished you. We still haven’t escaped the idea of “guilt by association” though to most of us it probably seems backwards. But in those days such things had to matter. We didn’t have any way to check credentials or do background checks or “vet” a person. But if you were the son of an honorable man, whose deeds were known, it put you in good stead with your fellows. I suppose the idea must have been that a good man would not raise a “thug” or a ne’er-do-well.

In our American West – and I think this is the true origins of our sense of individualism – it really didn’t matter who your family was. Many people changed their names. They forged new identities, new lives, based on their own actions. This sort of rugged individualism is sometimes thought of as Heathen but only if you’re speaking of the Viking Age, when society changed drastically. In older Heathen society, family did matter. Name mattered.

So the value I want to stress is ancestry.

Is ancestry a value? Yes. We, as Heathens, desire to honor our ancestors. We wish, when our time comes, to go before them with our heads held high. To have honored them through our words and deeds, and to be worthy ancestors of those who follow us on Midgard.

If you honor your ancestors, if you value what they have done, you will strive to be less selfish, to be more conscious of the ripple effect of your actions. You are not only living in accord with a lineage, but you are continuing it, and passing it on. You are inheritor and progenitor both. It isn’t the selfish idea of rewards but a sense of selflessness, of duty.

Certainly, good reaps good and bad reaps bad. Certainly we believe that we are rewarded for our good actions. Actions performed on behalf of the family, clan, or in the wider sense, community, bring rewards. And this is good. But our actions help all. They are not focused on the self at the expense of the community because what helps the community is good; what hurts it is evil.

And if you remember ancestry, if you remember to think about the lineage of those you deal with, you can avoid much evil. Remember, you are affected by those with whom you come into contact. Associate with good people, not with bad, not with those with a bad reputation. You do not want their bad orlog to wash over you. There are outlaws, even if they haven’t been put into a prison, they have placed themselves outside the bounds of the community, the innangarðr, and by their actions have put friends, family, and community aside. I do not think such an outlaw, such a niðling, can go, head held high, before his ancestors.

So this rugged individualism isn’t really much of a good thing for a traditional-sort of Heathen. Remember your ancestors. Remember their deeds, for though you may die, the memory of your deeds will not be forgotten, and that is how you will be judged by those who come after. And that is as should be.