Are you still Asatru if you are not recon? What is the difference?

Answer 1

Ahhhhh oh hard one. And you'll get different answers from different people.
There are those Asatru who have no issue with dual trad or altering outlooks. No, these people are NOT Asatru in MY mind. Asatru translates into True to the Aesir. Not True to the Aesir and Isis and Athena. Keep in mind this is only MY opinion.
MOST Asatru ARE recons. It IS a recon path. We are attempting to reconstruct the way of our ancestors, which would make sense since we practice ancestor worship. By being recon (still all my opinion here) we are honoring our ancestors. Now obviously we can't do everything they did. Sacrificing horses is probably illegal and most people don't keep cows anymore for offering. I know my back yard isn't big enough. So yeah we aren't doing blood sacrifices, but that doesn't mean we haven't kept the CONTEXT in our blots. They still hold the same MEANING and THAT'S what's important.
In saying that Heathen is recon this of course opens the door to what recon IS. I know Theodist who are rather sure that THEY are recon and other paths aren't. I know Folkish who think the same thing. I'm recon and I'm technically niether. I'm just plain ole Heathen. But I am all about doing it the way it WAS done, not how *I* think it should be. I think in doing so you honor the ancestors and honor the gods the way they were meant to be.
I respect the opinion that things have changed over the last 1000 years and our worship might have changed IF they had been able to worship uninteruppted. BUT it WAS interrupted. Therefore it DIDN'T change.

This whole post is complete UPG by the way. LOL

Answer 2

Short answer..yes

Long answer, reconstructionists seek to accurately reproduce in fine detail everything about the lives of our ancestors, their clothing, their spiritual lives, their languages, their hunting techniques, their building techniques, their worldview, the whole lot. Other Ásatrúar tend to focus more on just the spiritual aspects.

Personaly I'm more of a modernist than a recon because I believe that nothing remains unchanged for 1000 years, our societies have changed, our languages have changed so it's reasonable to assume that the practices of our ancestors would also have changed over the same length of time (we already know that the beliefs and actions of heathen people during the Viking age were different to earlier people living in the same places). This means I retain the reverence of the Aesir and Vanir and I remember and respect my ancestors but at the same time I value the modern world and the modern outlook and I don't see it as a conflict of interests, after all if you only look backwards you don't see what's ahead of you (and we know our ancestors were always looking forwards, even Woden himself was obsessive about the future)

The previous statement of course does not invalidate reconstructionism, to be honest without the tireless efforts of recons to preserve our history and heritage the way they do chances are a lot of that knowledge would simply be lost to antiquity, and for that they deserve credit.