If I Had a Hammer

Years ago I wrote an entry in another blog, which seems like another life ago, about the esoteric symbolism of the hammer. It came about that I began to really think about the hammer when I bought my first pair of working hammers. This was about three years ago to the date of this entry when I quit my job working in Special Education in Naples and went to work for the Family Business. Really, I returned to working for the family business. I was raised into it, and I thought I needed to go elsewhere to prove myself.

Turns out working for/with family is a far greater testament to your character than working for/with expendable strangers. It’s true, by the time I quit Special Ed. my co-workers were no strangers. More than some of them wanted to include my wife and me in their post-scholastic lives. Go figure. At any rate. When I quit Naples I bought two hammers. I bought them for twenty dollars, along with a tape measure which did not last very long on the job sites.

I still have the hammer. It’s rusty now. It rusted overnight during a demolition job for a pet owner. Turns out if your dog unloads enough pee in your subfloor, than the nitrous and ammonia content can strip the oils off your nice, sheened hammer and make it into an antique. When I bought it, though, it had a smooth red and black contoured handle terminating in a thin neck and flat head with several slots for ripping nails. The face was waffled, for extra nail bite, and the claw was sharp for the option of splitting 2xs.

I liked the way this hammer looked in my hammer loop. I liked the way it felt in my hand. I liked the way I could destroy scrap with it. I liked the way I could rip nails. It is a nice hammer. Now, because I do more finish work these days I have less occasion to use her, but I have her yet, for I engraved this hammer with the Odal Rune and the Fylfot Cross. That makes her special. After a month of carrying this hammer it had occurred to me that the hammer is a status symbol.

For many years I had alternatively been aware of and in possession of the Thor’s Hammer pendant. I took it for granted, too. Just like my hand hammers. See now, long ago after my faith in Catholicism was eviscerated, evaporated and vomited up into what eventually became my surrogate religion of Völkisch Identitarianism , I took the Hammar Sign up again. It was an empty gesture, then. There was no real transcendent belief there like the attempt had been through Catholicism. It was a question of O.R.I.O.N., if you catch my drift. I had purchased a Hammar in the shape of an Anglo-Saxon helmet which terminated in a Celtic knotwork. It was a beautiful piece that, as my dead spirituality came back to life, served me well.

(Note: I use two spellings here on, Hammar when referring to the religious symbol, and hammer for the mundane object.)
Eventually my mother bought me a Hammar from the internet which she gave me for Yuletide in the year I married my wife. At that stage I hung up my A-S Hammar and considered it consecrated by way of my wedding. I took up my mother’s gift to me. It was in the shape of a goat head which terminated in an anvil shaped, flat Hammar with Runes inscribed which I could not read because they were distinct from the Elder FuÞark and Anglo-Saxon FuÞorc, which are the only other alphabets I can read besides the Roman alphabet which replaced the above Runes as English.

So there you have it. The Hammar was the cultural symbol I wore in direct rebellion against my loss of Christ. Now. Before I was Christian, I had still called myself a Pagan. But that was before I had lost a religion. Years passed. Eventually I managed to harness my anger, temper the more hostile sympathies that can come with the Red Pill. The Hammar that hung around my neck began to feel more like home and less like a reminder of all that we’ve lost.

It dawned on me that nothing we speak of as lost is actually lost. When it comes to Asatru there is a woefully often spake sentiment which goes; the Viking age is over, dude, bringing Asatru back is just LARPing. False. Dressing up like a douchebag is LARPing. A philosophical revival of an earnest tradition is social science. History is hinged on such revolutions. Eventually I learned through studies what was not immediately obvious what my mother’s Hammar said. The Runic inscription read HIVRUN, which my studies told me referred to heavenly secrets and was akin to “natural law,” or “eternal law.” This for me was an epiphanic moment, as for all my life my philosophical yearning has been dedicated to finding a sense of just that – natural law and eternal purpose.

After a time, after years of struggle I decided that I would offer a sacrifice. I offered up the Anglo-Saxon Hammar and an Oath Ring that had shattered, along with written Runes that I stained red with my own blood, taken from my own flesh. The last piece of the offering was the knife I used to let that blood go. I sealed them in the ceiling that I had hung in my bedroom. What was written in those Runes I shall not repeat, but to paraphrase, they were a prayer asking the Gods to grant me the children I had waited for years to help my wife create. It was not the first time I had offered blood. Once before I made a blood offering during a time in which I was quite awkwardly in love. Several other times I had stained Rune Sets I had hewn. However, after the lovelorn sacrifice I began to lose my faith even in the blood and honour paganism that only Nationalism offers. So this new act was one of faith, perhaps the first honest leap of faith made by myself in many a year. Within a week of doing this thing, four years of infertility and miscarriages was replaced by two faint pink lines on a pregnancy test.

I then hung that Hammar given to me by my mother around my neck, and I have not removed it since. My own Wyrd has seen it fit to shape these things around my life, and say what I shall of my own spiritual doubts, the narrative fits. I hang the Hammar, and it has blessed me. Yes. The hammer is a status symbol. The hammer is more than a hammer. Any of you reading that subscribe to the Archetype Theory, you will relate. It is just another one of those pieces of information that you log into your consciousness. There it sits in the shelves of your brain, collecting dust, until one day someone knocks the hammer off the shelf.

A status symbol. When I first wrote on it, I was a subcontractor. Now I have a few of my own clients. Someday I shall have more. When I began this trek I was fearful. And I still am. But now I know I am worthy of the way I chose to take. Once I was afraid of being called a coward for following in my footsteps. As I grow older I find that living life is wading through the broken families other people’s failures have created. It is no cowardice to keep things in the family, today, it is an act of bravery that should not go unnoticed. The end of family loyalty was the beginning of the end of racial fealty, the open door to the end of the civilised world.

My hammer was the physical representation of my willingness to gamble. I threw away the safety of the System and traded it for self-employment. I sacrificed a mediocre future for a future I could control, where I would be the arbiter of my own success. By purchasing that hammer I had locked myself into a position. Sure, I could go crawling back to the American Education System and beg to be let back into the Goy Plantation and slave for shekels.

But I won’t.

I purchased my hammer, and in so doing I purchased a type of freedom. It was the first piece of equipment I used my own money to invest in my own future with. After that, every nail I buried in every stud, plank and sheet was in reality a nail in the coffin that tied me most intimately to ZOG. I put a nail in a coffin that houses uncertainty. Burying uncertainty can be extremely satisfying. Whenever I ripped a nail with that hammer, I was tearing a chunk out of the years of indecision that were foisted on me during my High School and College years. It buried an unhappy youth that was forged in what is left of ‘Murica, and upon that grave helped build a new man.

Ah, see now that is only MY hammer. For me, the surface object is always best understood by the form and shadow. In this, I would have made a good Greek – but alas alack, I am yet but an Anglo. It would strike the modern audience odd that I should invest so much thought in so taken for granted an object. After all, to most men and women, a hammer is just a Carpenter’s tool. Loud, noisy – crude. They own their own hammers, pieces of garbage they bought for less than ten bucks at a crappy Family Dollar. Sure. This is a limited scope, but we’ve said it here before – society suffers egregiously from a deep lack of imagination. Allow me to take you back again to the Nordic Fatherlands, a place of considerable cultural debt for many men of Teutonic blood.

If there’s a brain behind your eyes, you’ll have noticed a resurgence of men (and women, I suppose) wearing Thor’s Hammers. Admittedly, popular culture has done much to rekindle entry levelism as regards the Torshammar. You have the grievously, almost embarrassingly modernist Marvel adaptations of Thor which have produced fan boys who of a sudden read five pages of a Freya Aswynn book (sorry, lady) and decide they’ll give a Blot. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal have helped, I’m sure many young men have taken up the Hammar upon seeing Johann Hegg of Amon Amarth wear one to be killed in that awful Viking movie there. However, before all that then there was the boom in Asatru. I became aware of Asatru in the early 2000s. By 2010 I considered myself Asatruar. After my brief fling with Catholicism that had my religious world end in 2012 I was a Folkish Odinist again. In that decade I went from seeing Hammars only online to seeing them in my Hometown, and even, oh pride, in neck tattoos. (METHNOSTATE, NOW!) Remember, I live in Maine – with due process in Minecraft, of course. Not where you would expect to see this.

What remains is that the Hammar is a very nearly universal subconscious symbol, now. It represents an active rejection of cultural Christianity for most. And on a deeper level, it hearkens back to a time in White folk traditions where rugged manliness was not politically incorrect. Granted, infiltrators sense this and try to make that fake and gay, too, which takes us down a rabbit hole I will not ever penetrate again: the Folkish/Universalist debate. There are arguments on both sides. Both have a voice. You make a choice. My choice was Folkish. If Coloureds want to take up the Hammar, fine. I won’t stop them. It is their prerogative. However, whom I share troth with is my choice, and that should not be begrudged me. That is the only answer I have time for now, amicable divorce between incompatible parties. That aside, let us digress.

The kneejerk assumption is that the Hammar is a manly symbol. Sure. The assumption is that because mighty Donner swung the Hammar we should therefore resume it. Fair. The assumption is that because Þunor smashed Etin-Kin with the Hammar we should pay homage. Also fair. The assumption is that Asa-Tor was a God of violence, and the implication is that his symbol is that of rebellion against decadence and stagnation. Unfair. The Hammar is more than a tool of violence, then and now. Few Heathens I know think to ask if the Hammar should be considered more than a tool of virtuous violence, therefore I know damned fewer Normies bother. If they did there may be a chance those snot-nosed brats at the SPLC , ADL or whatever wouldn’t have put the Hammar on their index of retarded hate symbols along with every other single folk identitarian symbol White folk can cling to.

We know that in Norse culture that the Hammar was a constructive as well as destructive symbol. Why not? A fair motif in Nordic life was the creation/desolation cycle. Polarities were the stuff of life for us, then. The Hammar was a symbol with many layers. It represented masculine energy and might have been considered a phallic symbol. The Hammar was used variously to bless crops and marriages, and even to bless fertility. You shall know that Thor was not actually a God of War, this was the purview of Tyr. Thor was a God of Nature who happened to wage war against chaos that upsets order. There *is* a difference.

As to the big man. Thor was a Farmer’s God. He was responsible for the changing weather: thunderstorms were believed to be shout-outs from the God. They were seen as blessings or curses depending on your temperament and how you read the auguries. He was called upon for harvest blessings. He was asked to preside over marital sessions. Yes, his popularity is exemplified by his smashing of Jotnar (giants, Etins) but this is not the source of his power. It helps to remember that the Jotnar were themselves archetypes, symbols. They represented variously unevolved deity, a sort of savage alternative to Gods that were by some worshipped. They also represented forces of nature; personifying chaos, violence, unpredictability. The Gods, by proxy, and especially Thor, can be seen as representing directed energy. This ability to harness kinetic energy is what separated man from Nature. Animals worked as tools, but mankind could entool nature.

A classical storybook illustration of this is Thor’s journey to the east. On a quest to the heart of Giant-Land, Thor happens upon a starving family of peasants. Thor expresses some generosity in offering one of his goats to feed them. But there is a condition! They must not break any of the goat’s bones. They eat the flesh of Thor’s goat, and the bones are laid upon a skin. However, a small boy, Thjialfi cannot resist trying to suck the marrow from one of the leg bones. He breaks the bone in trying, says nothing, and hides the bone in the blanket. Later, Thor uses his Hammar to bless the bones, and the goat arises fresh and whole with flesh and blood. And a limp! Thus, Thor takes Thjialfi under his wing in recompense, Thjialfi being the fastest runner. This story is a dramatic symbolisation of the fertility cycle. Life and death are associated with summer and winter. The Gods control the ebb and flow of food. Thus Thor controls the harvest.

Thor most likely only became a War-God as Odin did, during the Viking era. When starvation and the necessity for Lebensraum produced the Viking Raids, the Gods had to evolve to accommodate and excuse increasing adventure and violence. The previously shamanic Odin with his wide brimmed hat and robe with spear became a helmeted warlord with sword and mail. Thor’s Hammer ceased to be a fertility symbol and a ward over tribal borders and instead became a symbol to lead ships to new lands.

In the years of my wearing the Hammar I have had plenty of time to think about it. Why would the Hammar be used as a wedding consecration? Well. As time marched ever onward, the farmer (one of the oldest productive trades) produced the carpenter. As the age of vagabond nations ended and sedentary tribes began, houses became important in a way they were not before. Houses became permanent fixtures. The Axe and Hammar, Europe’s oldest religious symbols, were also Carpenter’s tools. This is no coincidence. They built houses. In fact, in the Norse lands, the Hammar was the direct evolution of the Axe which throughout the Hellenic and Slavic lands had been a de jure religious fetish. Hammers built houses, Axes build ships. Axes planed wood, Hammers shaped structures. They gave shelter, they made families their homesteads.

Homesteads were important. Some of the most important Runes, such as Fehu and Othala, deal with residence and money – mobile and immobile wealth. Homesteads were a point of pride for the Nordic Race, they prefigure in Sagas eminently. They were passed from generation to generation. In fact, I want you to familiarise yourself with the totality of the Greek concept OIKOS. Othala was much like this to the Norse. A prescription wherein the house was itself an archetypical symbol, not only a mere four walls but also all it held and all it stood upon. The household was the family, the servants, the pets, the tools and holdings as well as the land the family owned. A hammer was more than a hammer because a house was more than just a house. It was a home. And in a way, that all hinged upon the hammer. The Hammar.

So you can see the Hammar as a symbol of all that went before it. An evolutionary symbol, layers of meaning contained in a simple image. That is the role of a symbol. As time passed many elements of farming culture became conflated with building culture. Norse men had to both farm and build, but in time, records show that farming ceased to be the preference of the Nordic man – in stark contrast with the Roman man. Still, in Nordic society a man both grew and built, he guilt to grow. It is therefore fitting that the Norse would have associated the Hammar with positive, constructive things. After all, a hammer builds things up. A marriage is a build-up of personal relations. The marriage is a symbol of two people building a life, together. Their marriage in turn builds many lives: the Hammar was used to consecrate the fruits of marriage, too: children. So like a good harvest, marriage was placed under the watch of Thor. So with the growing season, it was expected a marriage would have fruit to bear. In that time, for the Folk Soul, national psyche, it was a fitting analogy, an apt narrative.

It is true, there were auxiliary Goddesses whose function it was to steward marriage. You had Var and Tru whose names inVARiably referred to fidelity and TRUth. These Goddesses however were aftermath. You swore oaths on their bosoms hoping you would never be visited by them again. For these Goddesses were more like Nemesis, in that they repaid dishonesty with ill fortune and bad luck. You gave your oath hoping you would never be called upon to answer for indiscretion.

But that was then. They tell me this is now. Asatru, you might say, never truly died. But it was truly born when you fast forward to the Victorian Era were the first stirrings began. The Folk Soul of the White man was evoked, a craze for things Viking erupted. This eventually led to the coining of the term Asatro. Else Christensen had begun an Odinist Church by the time WWI had ended. England, Australia and even the United States had dissident factions attempting to bring us back to our roots. Unfortunately, WWI and the defeat of Germany temporarily halted the resurgence of this ancient faith. However, this cessation was a popular appeal. In relative secret, the stirrings of the Nordic religion continued until they erupted again through WWII where they reached fantastically psychedelic heights of speculative science. We know the sad result of that wasted war. Asatru would have to wait until the 60s to gain momentum. In the 1980s the footwork to mainstream this revitalisation began. Torshammar again hung from European necks. However, in those days, we are told, not so much thought was given to the why but for the how. Time moved on. And it brings us back to the early 2000s and up when even Normies began to redevelop a mere familiarity, if not affinity, for the thing. It did not take long for White Nationalists to assume the Hammar as a symbol of resistance against being erased by globalism. And of course, there were the counter-efforts of children who were more interested in stealing another child’s plaything who chose the Hammar as a Universalist spooning symbol. So it goes.

What we’re left with is a symbol of: fidelity to old, or reclaimed traditions, a nod to an honourable past, and a statement of rebellion, a cultural debt. We have a symbol of construction, and a symbol of destruction. A tool to patrol the borders and send out explorers. That is enough for me.

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