Immanentism

Because folkishness embraces thrownness, what is given and near, it treats the sacred as in the world, not behind or beyond it. It refuses to outsource the meaning and stakes of life to another realm. This is one of the deepest fault lines between the folkish archaic and axial worldviews.

The folkish alternative to axial transcendence is worldliness in the older sense: the world as inhabited and morally charged, alive with significance. Under the archaic spiritual paradigm, the divine and the human are radically immanent to one another. The sacred interpenetrates the near and the ordinary: field, hearth, threshold, river, ancestor mound, boundary stone. These are sites of relation and power.

In such a world, religion naturally gravitates toward cult rather than doctrine; orthopraxy over orthodoxy. The point is to maintain right relation between folk, land, gods, and ancestors. The ancestor cult is the paradigmatic European folk religion.

Because the land, waters, seasons, and fertility of a place are bound up with sacred and ancestral order, care for them cannot be a lifestyle preference but a religious duty. And because sacred order must be renewed season after season, folkish religion tends toward cyclical rather than linear time. Ritual and recurrence bind a people into the same sacred order their forefathers inhabited.