Remember your ORIGIN!
“Heidnat” is not a word you will find in any ordinary dictionary. It was forged by Gerhard Hallstatt, (artist, heathen, visionary of Allerseelen) as a poetic compound of two German words:
– Heidentum (heathenry, the pre-Christian spirit; the etymology relates to the native grasslands of heathen Germania)
– Heimat (homeland, native soil)
In this essay, which is my favorite in his book Blutleuchte (and Jocelyn Godwin writes the same in his foreword to the work), Hallstatt names a feeling we all know but rarely speak aloud: the homesickness for something that may be irretrievable.
Hallstatt writes that Heidnat is like love, beauty, or silence; you often only become conscious of it through its loss. It emerges in mourning, like Atlantis or Hyperborea, and it survives as golden memory, ache and song:
"WOE BE TO him that has no home," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in a poem ("Vereinsamt"[ "Isolated"], ed.). Today, the notion of Heimat almost appears like an obituary, an emergency call, a notice of loss. The Austrian poet Georg Trakl called it the "Autumn soul." Heidnat - a sense of home - is like love, silence, and beauty: I am only able to appreciate it when it vanishes, perishes, when it only exists on a few isles and in a few dreams, in golden memories, a magic word and a magical place, a terra incognita, like Atlantis.” - Gerhard Hallstatt
And yet the modern world makes exiles of us all by training us to live precisely the opposite reality: homeless in spirit, deracinated in soul, global in flesh but unmoored in form. The system wants you unrooted, demoralized, and placeless, but to speak the word Heidnat is to defy this. It is to call forth a forgotten kinship between blood, land, and spirit as sacred remembering.
Heidnat means even more than the sum of these parts. It is not simply a place, nor a religion, nor a nationalism. It is a metaphysical homeland of the remembered presence of the sacred in soil, silence, and soul; a place not merely geographic but symbolic. It’s a land that exists at once in memory, dream, ritual, and longing. It’s a deep interior knowing that one belonged somewhere once, and must seek again. It is about a soul-form that once had a home in the world, and may still be called back. It is a grief remembered as beauty.
We know the spirit of Heidnat when we pass a stand of trees that speaks like no cathedral ever has. We know it in the scent of iron in the soil. We know it when silence falls the way it did in childhood, as heavy, golden, and whole.
Hail to the ones who still remember the shape of sacred land.