Robin's Nemeton
The Old Mystery remains- and also remain we, to eat and drink,
To sleep, to wake and love. We place our hands on this Land
And wonder at the secrets buried below."
You've reached the website of Robin Artisson, vision-seer, polytheist, author, holistic healer, and philosopher of types. This site has been created to act as an informational source for news on Robin's writing endeavors and his efforts to share his perspectives on the modern revival of traditional pre-Christian European religious beliefs and spiritual worldviews. What are those beliefs and worldviews? They are new ways of seeing that are born in some very old ways- and they are enjoying a renaissance in the modern day.
A New Way of Seeing that is born from a Very Old Way
At the hidden core of western civilization lies the wisdom of the ancient pre-Christian world. While modern
mainstream religions enjoy a great degree of outward expression, the interior of each man, woman, and child
runs deep and strong, back to the earliest of times in which human beings engaged in spiritual activities.
Underlying our daily lives is a living stream of ancestral wisdom that speaks to us from a time long before
the birth of modern religions like Christianity or Islam.
The ancient peoples of Europe enjoyed the same sort of diverse animistic and polytheistic beliefs as we see among the intact cultures of modern tribal peoples worldwide; once, they knew their precious Gods and Goddesses as living beings who did so much for the people of the world, and who could be experienced in every aspect of human life. They could also be experienced through the natural world's many sacred phenomenon. The bonds created with these powerful beings, as well as other important spiritual beings (such as the spirits of ancestors and the spiritual powers of the landscape that surrounded the communities of old Europe) helped our ancestors to forge successful societies and to live in strong awareness of the sacred.
Today, a call has been heard by many to reconsider the old ways of seeing the world, and to reconstruct and revive- in a modern context- the spiritual beliefs, practices, and worldviews of those ancients, as a better way of finding new meaning in life, and living in wisdom and wholeness. The field of "Pre-Christian Religious Reconstructionism" is a broad term used to refer to the work of many fine people today who are respectfully endeavoring to do just that, within the cultural context of the various historical peoples of Europe and other parts of the world. The old wisdom mingled with a new world can lead to a better world.
Robin's work is devoted to rediscovering and reviving old paths to wisdom and birthing new worldviews (based on older worldviews) that people can use to live lives of wholeness, without the harmful modern religious and social assumptions that cause so much damage to the world and strife between people.
From Holiness to Wholeness
To "be whole" as a person, to feel perfectly at home in this sacred and beautiful world and to live in
harmony with the many powers seen and unseen that surround us, is the greatest blessing of the Old Ways. To
be whole is to be holy. Those who follow the Old Ways find a great source of holiness
within its rites and ancient stories- and while most people have their own modern understandings of what
"holiness" is, a short study of the word's origins reveals much.
The pre-Christian meaning of the word "holy" is not easy to determine, but it was probably "that which must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated". It was connected with the Old English hal (implying health) and the Old High German heil which meant "health, happiness, good luck". The word "holy" as we know it now derives from Old English halig which means "holy" and was adopted during the times of conversion to be equivalent to the Latin word sanctus.
The goal of the modern polytheist is to discover holiness in the world and in the self, and to live in "wholeness"- which means, on one level, to be happy, healthy, and blessed by good luck- but also to experience oneself as a part of a whole- the sacred whole that we call this world. Such an experience breathes new hope and power into the lives of people who for so long have felt "cut off" and afraid of the uncertainties of modern life. This sort of health is the true goal of all healing, on any level.