A few thoughts on Kill BIll

A publicity shot from Kill Bill 1 in which the Bride
fights the Crazy 88s with her Hatori Hanzo sword

Have you ever been mad enough to kill? I had a friend who had been badly betrayed by someone she loved. She told me had to confront that feeling--the absolute fury that rose up as the desire to kill her betrayer, a physical urge so strong that it was all she could do not to act on it.

I had never seen the Kill Bill movies until this past weekend (December 9-10, 2023). It has recently been streaming on Amazon Prime so I watched through both parts 1 & 2. As I was watching the last half of Kill Bill 2, my wife was in the room wrapping Christmas presents. This is not her kind of movie, so she had her back to the screen although she couldn't help turning around now and again to watch. After it was over, she asked "What is the movie about?"

Well, that is a good question.

Back in the early 2000s, Kill Bill had made its way into Evangelical discourse on the culture wars. They weren't asking "what is this movie about," but instead told us that it signaled the moral bankruptcy of "the world," the godlessness of American society that had kicked God out of the culture and lost its way. 

Kill Bill was released in 2003, I was pursuing my MDiv at that time at a conservative Christian seminary and leading the youth group at a very traditional southern baptist church in rural Kentucky, neck deep in evangelical culture. I vaguely remember hearing about the movie and I am sure that I even talked about it in a sermon or a teaching lesson something in which I held up Kill Bill as a sign of moral depravity, the example of how bad the culture and our society was becoming, a moral cesspool of vulgarity and violence. I don’t remember where I heard this or picked this up specifically- on the internet, in someone’s sermon, a book on youth culture, classes at seminary? I’m not certain. But I picked it up somewhere and then just mindlessly repeated it -- there is no doubt in my retrospective memory that I was part of the Evangelical echo chamber, parroting this nonsense about Kill Bill, a movie I hadn't seen and knew nothing about. No doubt it simply a way to fit into the tribe, to feel certain and self-justified about how better “we” were than the rest of the world. This is the average Evangelical approach to cultural critique - talking about media that you really don’t know anything about or haven’t thoroughly investigated; ignorantly repeating the sound bites, what you’ve heard just to signal that you are as morally righteous as the next guy, that you are some sort of spiritual expert, by reducing complex things to stereotypes and simplicities.

Why didn't these Evangelicals pick up on the theme of family? Isn't this a pro-family movie, though embedded in a violent (and cartoonish) revenge story?

Now after watching Kill Bill on Amazon Prime, I think the real reason that Evangelicals had such a knee-jerk reaction to the movie had more to do with Evangelical misogyny and sexism than anything else. 

The movie is about a woman who has escaped an abusive, controlling, manipulative relationship. She is pregnant and about to be married to new, seemingly loving if somewhat common, man. All she wants to be is a mom and a wife (the character's name is the Bride). But instead she is attacked, left for dead, abused and violated in horrific ways, betrayed and abandoned. The opening sequence accentuates her forsakenness and helplessness in the face of violent betrayal. In her desperate condition -- no one --  no one is there to support, comfort, or help her. There is no compassion towards her at all. Every other character simply wants to cause her pain and kill her. She is all alone. Scene after scene in these movies elaborate on the social violence and misogyny against women that we tolerate. (Only the retired sword maker Hatori Hanzo comes to her aid and treats her with dignity, and empowers her for revenge.)

And this Evangelical critique also shows no compassion. These pastors and youth pastors who denigrated this movie could instead have come to the side of the Bride. The critique could have been and should have been thus: "No woman should be treated this way. We repent of our own misogyny and abandonment of women. We no longer want to be part of the problem, but will support and serve women instead of abandoning and abusing them."

When one is abandoned, betrayed, and forsaken, when one's power and dignity has been taken--one has to stand up for herself. I am just thinking of my friend who was also alone in her betrayal. So the Bride's acts of revenge are her attempts to acknowledge the wrongs done to her. She will not be put aside, eliminated, buried alive. She will hold others accountable for their sins and try to make some justice for herself since there is no one to help. The Bride's savagery is the wrath of God enacted on the wicked.

But a strong woman fighting back against her suffering, against her abusers, against the unfairness of the society woman that has used and abandoned her -- I think that made Evangelicals uncomfortable. 

The Revival of Else Christensen

Ancestral altar for Else Christensen, Baldrshof

In the 1980s, the early Odinist and Asatru groups picked up steam. 

The leaders were male, very charismatic, high energy people who took up the mantle (so to speak, that's a Christian metaphor I guess) and pushed the movement forward. Meanwhile, Else Christensen was aging, becoming more isolated after her time in prison. Gradually her significant role in organizing, networking, and influencing the movement declined. 

The Folk Mother faded into the background. You could find her picture on the internet. Occasionally she was mentioned in passing in the writings of the Odinist organizations that grew out of her influence, like the Odinic Rite and the Asatru Folk Assembly. 

Both of these organizations developed a more religious framework for Odinism.  Both these organizations adopted Christensen's approach of subterfuge--being indirect about their white supremacist racial/political leanings. While maintaining Christensen's racial orientation and political aspirations for developing white-only communities, their discourse was much more religion-focused. Direct talk about race and racial politics was pushed into the background, out of public view.

At the same time, this second generation was truly more religious in their interests and focus.  McNallen was a committed ritualist for whom the Norse Gods were very real. He developed a great deal of the early Asatru religious ritual material. Heimgest of the Odinic Rite was a committed esotericist, who used the esoteric reading of Norse myth, meditation, and other magical techniques in the development of a mystical approach to enhancing the Aryan consciousness and folk soul.

An interesting development is the recent revival of Christensen's legacy by the new Asatru Folk Assembly under the guidance of Matthew Flavel. In 2019 the organization announced a more official recognition of Christensen, raising her profile as an ancestor of faith and founder of the movement. In 2021, the AFA launched a day of remembrance for Else Christensen. Spear-headed by the Baldrhof district, the day of remembrance involved simultaneous ancestral blots to Christensen. In the past two years, these efforts have grown into a larger event called Elsefest. Elsefest is a weekend dedicated to building up Christensen's legacy as the Folk Mother among the members of the AFA and especially with the new generation of children. Elsefest involves teaching sessions about her philosophy, crafting memorial objects about her, and performing rituals in her honor. This is clearly part of the shift towards a more Odinist orientation under Matthew Flavel's leadership--as in, more clearly and directly racially oriented and leaning toward the racist radical right. The day of remembrance puts the AFA forward as an Odinist organization. It reconnects and realigns the AFA more explicitly with Christensen's mission to revitalize the Aryan spirit through developing white-only communities and "tribal" cultures.

Odinism and Else Christensen

If we take Alexander Rud Mills as the progenitor of modern Odinism, let's look at the "Folk Mother" Else Christensen and her legacy. 

In the mid-1960s, Else Christensen discovered Rudd Mills' pamphlet "The Call of our Ancient Nordic Religion" (Gardell, Gods of the Blood, 167). I briefly discussed the pamphlet here. 

Rud Mills seeems to have been a source of inspiration for Christensen that focused her work through this Norse lens. She came to see the pre-Christian European past as the source of values and ideas that would foster white/Aryan renewal. 

Or more precisely - attaching her political/social critique to Odinism had a legitimizing effect on her work for her audience -- imprisoned white men and far right activists. But incidently, it also tapped into the burgeoning Pagan movement although this wasn't her initial target audience. 

She did more than retrieve Rudd Mills from obscurity. She was influential in bringing together a new socio-political-religious confluence of ideas that created American Odinism (Calico, Being Viking, 141). In addition to tapping into Mill's writings and his dream of an Anglo-Saxon Church of Odin, she was in dialogue with Francis Yockey's Imperium and the Traditionalist and European New Right movement that included Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler. She also brought Odinism in touch with the radical right politics of the United States including the American Nazi Party and its leader George Lincoln Rockwell. These various tributaries shaped Odinism as a new white racial politics that saw the West threatened with cultural and spiritual degradation and sought to revive the Western, European, "white" soul through a spiritual awakening to its pre-Christian roots. 

Odinism from its very start presented itself as a superior alternative to Christianity. This stance goes back to Rudd Mills. While the racial opponent was the Jews, the ideological opponent of Odinism has always been Christianity--Christianity is the foreign (Middle Eastern) ideology that seduced white people, Europeans, into a racial and spiritual confusion that has resulted in the decline of the West and the dilution of Ayran superiority. This position comes through to the contemporary period, even in the Odinist critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. (See my paper "Heathenry and White Nationalism" on Academia.edu.)  As Gardell puts it, Odinism was "a vehicle for racial rejuvenation" (Gods of the Blood, 171). A significant part of Odinism has always been the fight or "struggle" they might say for Aryan rights, Aryan religion, Aryan self-determination, etc. Odinism stands up for the white race and they would claim everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Hitler as heroes in that racist cause (Gods of the Blood, 172) 

Blot at Else Christensen's grave,
2021 AFA Day of Remembrance

The early American Asatru movement in the 1970s was substantially influenced by Else Christensen. Many of the early founders of Norse Pagan groups had personal relationships with her.  If a group recognizes Else Christensen as the Folk Mother - they are working with this tributary we could call Odinism. This includes Stephen McNallen and the AFA; the Asatru Alliance led by Michael J Murray aka Valgard Murray; Heimgest and the Odinic Rite under his leadership; Max Hyatt and Wodan's Kindred and Wodanesdag Press. 

Christensen's influence was embedded in the ideology of Odinism through her personal relationships with these early leaders, her voluminous personal correspondence, and her newletter The Odinist. According to the Heathen History podcast, The Odinist was published in 151 issues from 1971 - 1992 and was focused mainly on right-wing racist political and social analysis and commentary on current events. "Very little content that you could actually call religious." It seems that Christensen was simply not very religious and was much more interested in social and political questions of "Aryan spiritual liberation." However, her writings comprise a large body of ideas that circulated through the early years of Norse Paganism. In addition, she began her Odinist Fellowship as a prison ministry by establishing study groups in three Florida prisons. Through her correspondence, visits, and newletters, Odinism began spreading within the US prison system--a religion or at least a philosophy of white empowerment inspired by an imagined Norse-inspired past. 

It may be important to point out that Odinists are not Pagan Reconstructionists. Reconstructionists try to recover the practices and worldviews of ancient Pagan peoples in order to provide a type of authenticity and legitimacy to contemporary Pagan religions. Reconstructionists study the ancient primary texts, often using the original languages, and make use of current academic research and archaeological discoveries to better understand what the elder or arch-Pagans thought and did. 

This is definitely not what Odinists are doing. Odinists are inspired by a particular imagined Pagan past, often an era of Viking battle glory. We should note that the sources used by Odinists are often from the Völkisch movement--the racial German nationalist movement from the turn of the 20th century that also invoked a romanticized version of the Germanic & Norse pagan past to legitimize Germanic military expansion and the genocidal repression of non-Germanic people.

As the Heathen History podcast points out, her ideas and influence were quite broad - while all of it came from the racist perspective of white supremacy, she critiqued globalism, believed in the importance of smaller "tribal" human communities and economies, was concerned with environmentalism, and valued individual freedom and self-expression. Odinism - as developed by Else Christensen looks like a philosophy, a social critique, and a socio-political agenda.

Several scholars, including myself and Being Viking, are quoted in this wikipedia article on Else Christensen.