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The Feral Feminine in Culture and Legend
So researching my epic length piece on female warriors, pre-christian sexual politics, and the unique development of north european culture I got really into Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle after stumbling on Arthur Rackham’s gorgeous illustrations to the english translations of the text of the operas ( Link 1, Link 2)
Read the full piece here:
And one of the things that immediately jumped out to me, even beyond everything listed in the long piece, is how weird and unique the sexual politics of Pagan Germanic culture is.
Sure it’s Wagner, it’s not a primary source. It’s a 19th century romantic composer interpreting several different legends of pagan era Germany and Scandinavia, as record by Christian monks and scholars 100s of years after the fact. So academically not the most accurate thing to draw conclusions from, however if you subscribe to any blood memory, or spirit of a people, or eternal culture theory… it’s almost better.
This is the version of the tale that’s survived and been refined across first oral, then written traditions, then preserved by Christian monks, then revived by high victorian romantics into one of the most celebrate and popular operas of all time. If there’s anything we could learn about the eternal character of North European women, sexuality, and sexual politics (and by extension modern sexual politics, we’re all North Europeans now) it is here.
And damned… what a datapoint.
What follows is a MeToo story on hyperborean crack.
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The Female lead Brunhilde starts out as a Valkyrie who disobeys her master/father the god Wotan (Odin) in a matter of divine importance so as to save a mortal man. For her disobedience Wotan strips her of her divine nature and curses her to sleep on the earth as a mortal woman until such a time as the first man to find her wakes her, then she is to be his wife. However, taking pity Wotan lays out an magical wall of fire to guard her so no coward, only a great hero, would ever succeed. (end opera 1/3).
20-ish years later Siegfried, the son of the man Brunhilde saved, finds her (she hasn’t aged a day), and perfectly fearless he braves the fire to wake her, where-upon they fall in love (end opera 2 of 3)… then taking leave for more adventure Siegfried takes off promising to return and remember their undying love. Where-upon he meets the King Gunther and his sister Gutrune, who seduces Siegfried and makes him forget Brunhilde. Making friends with Gunther, Siegfried conspires with him that Gunther should have Brunhilde for a wife (given she’s the best woman he can think of for his friend), but there’s a problem… Gunther cannot brave the fire, he’s not fearless like Siegfried. So Siegfried, conspires to impersonate Gunther using his magic, brave the fire again, seduce Brunilde again, get her to consent to marry him in the Guise of Gunther, spend the night using his sword to divide himself from Brunhilde. Then in the morning swap back, Siegfried Married to Gutrune, Gunther to Brunhilde… The plan worked perfectly.
Then Brunhilde found out.
Learning the trick had been done to her, she conspires with Siegfried’s enemies to have him killed, falsely accuses him of rape, and successfully maneuvers him into admitting to lying in an oath he wasn’t even aware was a lie… so that his fearless perfect life can end with a stab in the back.
So you may ask: Having avenged herself does she settle-down with her new husband?
Hell no! You think you could fill the shoes of Siegfried you curr, you coward, you beta-cuck?! You will NEVER be Siegfried.
Instead she gives the mother of all angry speeches denounces Gertrude and everyone else of the court to their face, and then rides Siegfried’s horse onto his funeral pyre determined it is better to die with Chad, than live with Brad.
THE END.
Of the entire opera Cycle. No more.
The Fat lady has sung.
Your 4 day trip into the German mountains to experience 3 and a half Operas over as many days and a combined 15 hours total has concluded. Go Home.
I’m Sorry bros, the hoes have always been like this.
Even in the mythical past of high Germanic mythology… the hoes were like this.
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Oh and also there’s some stuff about a cursed magic ring forged by ancient powers that lets it’s bearer rule the world… and a dragon that has to be slain, and conniving little monstrosities who want the ring, and a conflict with the giants, and the death of the Gods of Valhalla, and three creepy sisters who prophesize the future… but that’s all the background text for this moment.
Brunhilde is the main Character. She’s the only character to appear in all 3 main Operas, she’s the one who makes all the deciding choices.
And she is disobedient, melodramatic, spiteful, conniving, vain, murderously jealous, and utterly unwilling settle for the man who would actually have her…
She embodies all the traits that the “RedPilled”, “manosphere”, and “Traditionalists” despise about modern women.
She is maybe the most extreme example of a Psycho-Bitch BPD Alpha-Widow in all of fiction.
She is also the most celebrated woman in all of German literature.
Heroism and the Feral Feminine
Remember how I said there was also a whole lot of complicated magical and divine entanglements with the entire story?
Well every single one of Wagner’s magical entanglements serves to recontextualize Brunhilde’s behaviour… She doesn’t just disobey Wotan to save a mortal man, that mortal man is Wotan’s son, whom Brunhilde knows Wotan truly does not wish to die… likewise Siegfried forgets her not because he never truly loved her, but because of a magic potion slipped into his drink that MAKES him forget her. Likewise her charging onto the funeral pyre not only results in her dying with Siegfried, but she wears his magic ring of power whilst doing it, resulting in the Rhinemaidens overflow the banks of the Rhine to reclaim it, redeeming the world of the ring’s curse and drowning the villainous Hagen who dives into the river to try and claim the ring.
Her choice to die with Siegfried redeems the world, in the way Frodo FAILED to willingly part with his one ring in Tolkien’s 3 and a half work cycle.
Friendship, faith, mercy, duty… All of that failed and it came down to a Tolkien-esque eucatastrophe. All of Tolkien’s faith was weaker than Wagnerian Psycho-bitch rage-quitting.
But even taking out the Wagnerisms and going back to the various Eddas these elements of Brunhilde being wakened, tricked, conspiring in Siegfried’s death, and then dying with him and being burnt on his funeral pyre, all that appears in the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, and the Völsunga saga.
This is really WEIRD!!!
The most celebrated female lover in Germanic myth, maybe the most celebrated woman in Germanic history (if we don’t count British Queens) is a woman who flies into a murderous rage and actively conspires to murder her true love/perfect man of destiny who’s scorned her.
In any other culture in the world Brunhilde would be considered a harlot, a psychopath, a slut who allows herself to be tricked, a murderous schemer, a mad woman, a false rape accuser, a woman who disobeys father and husband.
In the modern world she’d almost certainly be medicated if not involuntarily committed as a danger to herself and others.
And yet this image of her riding Siegfried’s steed onto the funeral pyre is amongst the most celebrated moments in all of European culture. Google “Brunhilde Funeral Pyre” and you will quickly see handbags, prints, and pillows sold with this image on it, it so still speaks to people.
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Part of this is the religious symbolism. For those of you who’ve not yet read my long piece on Feral Aryan Femininity, viking and ancient Germanic funerals for great warriors regularly included the sacrifice of a horse and a loyal slave girl, to accompany fallen warriors in the afterlife. The young girl would even VOLUNTEER to be burnt with her master. the Chief warrior asking “which of you shall die with your lord?” And Her responding “I”.
Robert Egger’s the Northman recreates the final sequence of the ritual for those who haven’t seen it:
So the religious significance should be apparent.
Brunhilde by riding Gane (her/Siegfried’s horse) onto the funeral pyre is living out the ideal of the Germanic funeral, willingly ascending the pyre to die with her lord, so that she and the stead might accompany her love into the afterlife.
However in every other respect, it is an inversion of the viking funeral practice.
We learn from Ibn Fadlan’s Risala (see my deep dive in Feral Aryan Femininity) that the women sacrificed were almost always slaves, and that their sacrifice is preceded by 9 days of drunkenness and sexual debauchery with the men of the tribe.
As I unpack in the longform piece, the general effect of the sacrifice ritual is to kill off the socially suggestible, sexually promiscuous, weak-willed, and neurotic. Basically it served to prune off the captured slave and lower status women who would produce daughters who would submit to slavery instead of, what the Germanic women were supposed to do, kill themselves and their families before being willing to submit to sexual servitude and slavery. (Thus both disincentivizing slaving raids against them and making them potentially dangerous and fanatical auxiliaries and camp followers for the semi-nomadic Germanic tribes).
Brunhilde was the opposite of these slaves who were being pruned off. In Wagner she is literally a divine Valkyrie, in the Eddas a Valkyrie or warrior woman, and the historical Brunhilde, depending on the theory, whether she’s based on the visigothic queen Brunhilda of Austrasia or the feuding wife of an Ostrogothic general, a vicious and proud noblewoman, fully embodying the Pagan Germanic ideals.
Brunhilde charging onto the funeral pyre, not after being pressured, or tricked, or tempted, or drugged, or dragged… but in full sober power and prideful fury, refusing to submit or be a spouse to any but her ideal one true love, it is a moment where the rituals and mythologizing of the Germanic and wider viking human sacrifices, and the the ideal which all those sacrifices are covertly supposed to breed into the actual biological body of the people, it is the moment those intersect.
Far from being an undesirable BPD Psycho-Bitch, Brunhilde embodies everything that the Pagan Germanics valued in women: what the Romans would dub the Furor Teutonicus.
Far from the redpill/manosphere desire for women who are submissive, meak, obedient, realistic, quiet, nice, cute, modest… The people who’d become the nobles of basically all of Northern Europe were selecting for willfulness, pride, cruelty, fury, rage, frigidness, shrewishness, choosiness, obstinacy, dramaticness…
This violent insistence on the correct mate and ONLY the correct mate, combined with the recurrent willingness to kill and die sooner than accept any less, IS the ancient northern european ideal.
The emotional, violent (often literally) BPD Alpha-Widow is northern European women behaving CORRECTLY, according to possibly Millenia of selective breeding.
Indeed “Boyfriend stabbing” is the only crime where you see white women offend at a rate comparable to black women with shockingly little hispanic, asian, or non-african brown representation.
And indeed society and the courts are shockingly conciliatory towards their violent outbursts, much as royal court was to Brunhilde.
This feminine violent pridefulness is of course contrary to what every other civilization selected for, thus why the only other group significantly represented are of African ancestry, who had no large institutions and cultural forces making such selections.
But what jumps out to me is how much European culture CELEBRATES THIS!
One can arguably see echoes of this back to the Greek fascination with the mythical Amazons and the legends of Medea… the Greeks certainly didn’t select for this but they were fascinated the Barbarians around the Black Sea seemed to.
But even in the 19th century, in the prim and proper Victorian age… Wagner was romanticizing this Feral Feminine Fury.
This is the ideal that produced white femininity. This choosiness, pridefulness, and refusal to accept unacceptable arranged marriages, something that’d be considered villainous in other cultures, but is consistently celebrated as the peak of female virtue in post-Roman European cultures.
And it worked… this deference given to free, violent, women’s sexual choice (the slave’s only choice was volunteering for the pyre or not) produced the most successful strains of European Civilization.
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But what is remarkable to me is that is was esteemed. It was not Brunhilde’s sense of duty, morality, mercy, or charity that saved the world and returned the evil ring from whence it came, but her uncompromising love and fury.
Wagner saw in the BPD Alpha Widow the redemption of the Gods and the salvation of the European spirit. And dozens if not hundreds of generations saw the same.
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
I will now use this to justify my attraction to “toxic” women
I wish some of the old school pulp fantasy writers like Robert. E Howard could have seen some of the stuff in this sphere. This way of interpreting history and mythology really reminds me of him.
Also reading this oddly made me want to read Jane Eyre. This Norse stuff sounds like the exact opposite of the British Christian conception of ideal womanhood.