Oct 13

Oct 13 Raven Age: Animism, Conspiracism, & Songs Of Power / Rune Rasmussen

Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, historian of religion and founder of the Nordic Animism project, returns to the podcast to discuss animism and the Raven totem flag project he, and others, have created to define and symbolize humanity's role in the climate disrupted present we find ourselves in.

Through years of in-depth research into the history and contemporary practice of animist religious/spiritual traditions the world over, Rune has unique insight into the nature of the numerous crises the world finds itself in presently. In our first discussion on this podcast, he framed the global climate crisis through the myth of Ragnarök, famously depicted in the Old Norse poem Völuspá. In this interview, I ask him to help us understand, though a mythic lens, the roots of the widespread proliferation of conspiracist thinking (endemic within the United States) in our “post-truth” era. How has modernity produced this crisis of meaning in the Western world today? What value can animism provide, not only in identifying the source of this crisis, but also in rooting ourselves in a world that is undergoing climate cataclysm and civilizational rupture?

Video Segment:

Bio:

Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, Ph.D., is a historian of religion, educated from the Universities of Uppsala and Copenhagen. He has lived in many countries and done fieldwork in a number of contemporary (primarily Afro-descendant) religions, but since childhood he has had Nordic religion as a strong field of interest. Today, Rune is working on applying contemporary developments in anthropology to rethink the way we address Nordic religion both in terms of scholarship, but also as a reservoir of cultural knowledge for environmental activism and sustainability sensitization.