How the tradition survived

Willibald, writing the Life of Saint Boniface in the eighth century, records that Boniface felled a great oak at a place called Gaesmere, held sacred by the local population, and built an oratory from its timber dedicated to Saint Peter. Willibald gives no year; scholars generally place the felling about 723 or 724.

The location is usually identified as Geismar near Fritzlar, in Hesse, though the historian Thomas F. X. Noble has described it as still unidentified, and there are several places of that name in Hesse. The account is the saint's own hagiography and is therefore a partisan source, which is why the date is given as approximate.

In 772, during the first of his Saxon campaigns, Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul, a central column held sacred by the Saxons. The act is recorded in the annals of the reign.

Some ten years later, the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae set out law for the conquered Saxons. Its eighth clause reads that any Saxon who concealed himself unbaptised, refused baptism, and wished to remain a pagan was to be punished by death. The code forbade votive offerings to trees and wells. It is traditionally dated to the campaign of 782; the historian Pierre Riché calls it a "terror capitulary", and notes that the massacre of some 4,500 imprisoned Saxons at Verden in 782 may be read as its preface.

In July 1562, in the town of Mani in Yucatán, the Franciscan Diego de Landa held an auto de fé at which a quantity of Maya books — usually given as twenty-seven — was burned in a public bonfire, along with objects of worship. De Landa acted as inquisitor without authority from the bishop, and a complaint was later lodged against him in Spain. He was recalled, cleared, and subsequently became Bishop of Yucatán.

Four Maya codices are known to survive.

From the early seventeenth century the Archdiocese of Lima conducted a systematic series of campaigns known to historians as the extirpation of idolatry. The priest Francisco de Ávila acted as an inspector of idolatries, and presided over an auto de fé in Lima in 1609. The campaigns tried people for heresy, destroyed shrines and objects of worship, and suppressed the practices attached to them. The chronicler Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, a contemporary, criticised Ávila for depriving the native population of its objects of worship.

Under the Third Reich, practitioners of the runic traditions were among those imprisoned. Friedrich Bernhard Marby (1882–1966), a German writer on the Armanen runes, was held in the concentration camps at Flossenbürg, Welzheim and Dachau, a period given as eight years and three months, and was released on 29 April 1945.

The scholar Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke records that Karl Maria Wiligut, the Reichsführer's specialist in runic matters, censured Marby and Siegfried Adolf Kummer in a report to Heinrich Himmler for bringing "the holy Aryan heritage into disrepute and ridicule", and suggests this criticism may have led to Marby's harsh treatment. The length of Marby's imprisonment is given in the periodical Vor Trú; the circumstances are discussed in Goodrick-Clarke's Occult Roots of Nazism.

It should be said plainly, because it is often confused: the Reich took symbols and practices from these traditions while imprisoning the people who taught them.

Where the practice of the old religion was suppressed, it was not extinguished. It was carried in the forms that could not be taken away. It was carried in song and chant, and in the Galdr that could be sung while working. It was carried in heraldry, in the knotted and woven patterns that kept their shapes in plain sight, and in the names given to families, places and things. It was carried in poetry and in proverbs, in the verses that were repeated because they were worth repeating. It was carried in the household customs that had no doctrinal name, and so did not attract the attention that doctrine attracts.

This is the ordinary way a tradition survives a period of suppression: not by concealment alone, but by living in forms that the suppressing power did not think to forbid, or did not recognise for what they were. When the tradition was again practiced openly, it was found that these forms still held their meaning, and that the teaching had kept its substance in them.

The Wihinei is far older than any one teacher. The Holy Armanen Order is one of its custodians.

Willibald, Vita Bonifatii (8th century), on the felling of the oak at Gaesmere; English translation in George W. Robinson and others. On the location and date: Thomas F. X. Noble (2000); August Neander (19th century).
Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, clauses 1 and 8, in Dana C. Munro, Selections from the Laws of Charles the Great. On the code's dating and character: Pierre Riché, The Carolingians (1993); Ingrid Rembold (2018).
Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán; on the auto de fé at Mani in 1562 and the books burned, see the standard accounts of the Yucatán inquisition.
On the extirpation of idolatry in Peru: Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies; the 1609 auto de fé at Lima presided over by Francisco de Ávila is recorded in the Lima extirpation records. Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c. 1615).
On Marby: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism (1993), pp. 161–162; Vor Trú, issue 69.