Dismayed at the ongoing erosion of support for Germanic studies at most universities across the Western world, Flowers has recently unveiled his latest project: the Woodharrow Institute. After all, English is a Germanic tongue, and our society – fragmented or decayed as it now may be – owes its true origins as much, if not more so, to northern Europe than to Athens or Rome. Underlying all of his work is a belief in the profound importance of traditional Germanic thinking and the eternal relevance of its mythological expression. He was an original member of Stephen McNallen’s seminal organisation the Ásatrú Free Assembly (which still exists today as the Ásatrú Folk Assembly), and in 1979 founded his own initiatory group, the Rune-Gild, dedicated toward the serious exploration of the esoteric and innermost levels of the Germanic tradition, as well as the greater Indo-European culture of which it is but one branch. Unlike many who possess academic credentials, Flowers was never content to relegate his interests to a purely intellectual level, and thus he has long been active in the contemporary revival of Germanic heathenism, variously called Odinism or Ásatrú (a coinage derived from Old Norse, meaning “loyalty to the gods”). He has also written Lords of the Left-Hand Path,a lengthy study of darker occult currents, and an innovative analysis of ancient Greek magical texts entitled Hermetic Magic. Kummer’s Rune-Magic, or the writings of Karl Maria Wiligut ( The Secret King: Himmler’s Lord of the Runes) all shed scholarly light on these topics. His interest in Germanic topics extends not only to the distant past, but also into more recent and controversial manifestations, such as the völkisch period at the turn of the 19th century or the esoteric aspects of the Third Reich, and his translations of Guido von List’s Secret of the Runes, S. Under his own name he also published less speculative material, for example Fire & Ice, about the German magical order the Fraternitas Saturni, and his translation of the Galdrabók, a medieval Icelandic grimoire. His books on the Runes and Germanic magic ( Futhark, Runelore, At the Well of Wyrd, Rune-Might, Northern Magic, The Nine Doors of Midgard, and A Book of Troth) have become classics of sorts, and although they are aimed at the occult book market, they reveal a depth of understanding and degree of knowledge that is unusual to find in this genre. in 1984 with a dissertation entitled Runes and Magic: Magical Formulaic Elements in the Elder Tradition(later published by Lang, 1986).In the mid-1980s Flowers also began a more public writing career under the name Edred Thorsson. It was in the early 1970s that Flowers heard this word audibly whispered in his ear, and since that time he has tirelessly pursued a path of understanding its implications.įollowing graduate work in Germanic and Celtic philology under the esteemed professor Edgar Polomé (1920–2000), Flowers received his Ph.D. For Flowers, this quest is summed up in a single word, RUNA, which is the old Gothic language form of “rune” and was equivalent to the Greek term mysterion(“mystery”). For more than a quarter-century he has dedicated his energies toward unraveling the mysteries not only of the ancient symbolic alphabet of the Runes, but also of the deepest realms of the Germanic myth and culture from which they arose. Stephen Flowers, who is the rarest of breeds: a scholar with spirit, one who is single-minded yet open-minded. In this atomised environment, anyone extolling a cohesive vision that is marked by traditional values – not to mention high standards – automatically becomes an anomaly. In the world of popular culture this translates into dazzling distractions and endless ephemera, while in the world of academia it engenders over-specialisation and an unspoken refusal to even attempt to understand the “bigger picture,” especially from a metaphysical perspective. One of dominant paradigms of modern society is fragmentation. This article was published in New Dawn 77 (Mar-Apr 2003)
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