I watch a lot of people first-time reacting to my favorite types of music that they've never been exposed to before. Metalheads reacting to punk. Boomers reacting to grunge. GenZ reacting to 90s pop. Rappers reacting to hippie anthems.
But nothing beats white people experiencing Heilung for the first time.
They mirror my own first reaction: stunned shock and spiritual revelation.
It's a moment of instant decolonization by tapping into to some long-locked tribal memory that is OURS, not someone else's. It's decolonizing not by telling us what we can't have, but by showing us what we lost — and how we can bring it back.
Heilung is recreating, as best they can, what our Norse, Germanic, and Celtic ancestors might have practiced, the music they might have sung, the rites they might have honored, the worldview they most likely espoused. All of that died when the Christian invasion erased our cultures over the centuries, and they forced us into a life that is still alien to our natures. Yet with each violent wave they proudly declared we'd been "civilized."
No. We'd only been domesticated and robbed of our birthright of knowing Mother Nature, hearing our own instincts, and sensing the spirits who live everywhere.
Heilung digs deep into a vein, not where there is hidden a satanic Balrog (though our programming might make us worry this music has summoned a demon). Instead we find a resurrection of our own ancestral soul lying dormant within us.
And these YouTubers have this spiritual awakening right on screen.
🧵
[added thread emoj]
[Blanket Caveat: This turned into a long thread, so I'll just say, I don't caveat a whole lot, I don't explain many of my terms or how I've arrived at the assumptions and claims that I make, and I probably don't properly connect all the dots. This topic could be a paper, and would be, if I did all that. I just wanted to get the broad strokes down.]
And I know neopaganism is a thing, and I've practiced it both solo and with others, but Heilung really puts in the work, the research, the energy, the spectacle, to make it feel real what it might have been like to sit around a fire where the elders were preparing for a raid, acting out a divine scene, or appealing to the harvest spirits, knowing you're at the mercy of inhuman powers far beyond your control and understanding.
There are many paths out of authoritarian Christianity. And those paths have shifted over the centuries. Time was, your only other option wasn't atheism, it was deism, an enlightenment version of god as a scientist-creator who abandoned the universe after creating it. Now it's atheism, and from there you may end up at suburban paganism-lite, or a secular philosophy. Or you can look to various world religions.
Every one of these routes is some form of colonized or colonizing.
But Heilung is decolonized.
There is nothing about the culture Heilung displays on screen that is stolen from some entirely different People. (Obviously they had trade with and raided one another and nearby regions, but they didn't systemically colonize the way The Roman Empire and later Roman Christianity did.) Heilung gives us something that is 100% ours.
Their name means "Healing," and I could write a thesis on why that is true for me.
It takes me beyond deconstructing, into reconstructing, a space I'm less comfortable with.