Odinism and the Monstrous

This is an AI generated image made by DeepAI.org
with the prompt "haunted forest."

We live in a haunted age, a world of monsters. For all the technology and rationalism, the monsters lurk all around us. Have there ever been so many monsters?

Monsters are stories we tell and pictures we paint, literary or cinematic constructions that embody the fears and perceived threats that we can't otherwise name. Monsters haunt the pages of books, movies, media, true crime podcasts, government propaganda and campaign speeches, courtrooms and unsolved murder cases, all woven from the haunted threads of our own cultural failures and horrors, the dark fairy tales and monster stories of our own society.

In his article "Monster Culture: 7 Theses," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that the monster's body is a cultural body. "The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment— of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to  be read: the monstrum is etymologically 'that which reveals,' 'that which warns,' a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement." (Monster Theory Reader, 38)   

The monster stalks the edges of imagination – the monster is the misanthropic rage, the moral desolation, the savage inhuman strength, the will to destroy without reason or purpose, a barbarism that would shred the sinews of civilization if we let it in. So it must be displaced--we must have an Other to take it on.

Monster theory is a type of literary analysis that deconstructs or decodes monsters into their constituent parts - not flesh and blood of course -- but into the social, cultural, religious, and psychological forces from which they emerge.

The Delphi murders – savage, unexplained, unsolved – of course they slip into the realm of the mythic, the realm of the monstrous. The conjecture posed by the defense has more akin with True Detective than to anything based in the factual evidence of the case. The defense distracts us - points us away from the defendant and toward the monstrous Other. Odinism – this shadowy vague threat – becomes a convenient place to displace our fears. 

What do we know about Odinism? What does the average person know about Odinism? Nothing--it is a blank slate, a shadow upon which fear and terror and blame can be thrown. Cohen points out that "the monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond— of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within" (Monster Theory Reader, 41).  So Odinism--already so strange, so bizarre, so enigmatic--comes forward as a monster. Clothed in the unknown, a vague, ambiguous, shadowy threat that provides a hook upon which to hang the fears, the unresolved nightmare, the senseless and savage violence of this horrible event that only a faceless monster could have perpetrated. 

In an immediate sense, it siphons off suspicion from the defendant -- accurate enough to be possible but vague enough to be unprovable. The defense has tried to build a narrative from the vague evidence that could be interpreted as pointing toward Paganism. This evidence--a bloody mark on a tree imaginatively reconstructed as a Fehu rune, the girls' bodies posed in runic shapes or as the hanged man Tarot card, a jumble of sticks thrown across the bodies that are supposed to be a runic sigil? It is the same "witchy" aesthetic that anyone could have picked up from watching the first season of True Detective or the latest folk horror movie.  

Enough perhaps to raise doubt, to raise new questions that will at least spin off into more months of delay, perhaps even rise to the level of reasonable doubt. Monsters can do this--in a scape-goating kind of way, they distract us, pulling our attention away from the immediate and casting it onto the vague, the distant, an imagined rather than a real evil. We can blame the monster rather than ourselves or one of our own.

To some extent we don't even need Odinism to be real - we don't need or want too many facts and details, we don't desire to focus in too much. To some extent we just need Odinism to be the monster, the placeholder for all the violence, savagery, misanthropy that we cannot make sense of or accept otherwise.

This monstering of Odinism is complicated for Norse Pagans, Heathens, and Pagans. Why? 

On one hand, Pagans participate in this monstering. It is a strategy to define contemporary Paganism as socially acceptable. It establishes a dichotomy between good Paganism and bad Odinism. It clearly distances Paganism from any association with racism, violence, sociopathic behavior. That's what the Odinists are. 

This is one of the unfortunate but ongoing stereotypes of all Pagans - that they are evil, demonic, engaged in human sacrifice, consorting with the devil, you name it.  Setting up Odinism or other categories as the Monstrous enables contemporary Pagans to say - we are not that. I remember being at a Contemporary Pagan Studies session a few years ago at the AAR conference and hearing the phrase "those racist Heathens" thrown about in a vague way - no one seemed to know who "they" were, - just a vague shadowy evil presence out there somewhere -  just that "we" weren't them.

But this monstering of Odinism may not work -- it might drag other Pagans along with it. Odinism as a religion of child sacrifice, runes, witchy symbols, violence, and evil may just cast its monstrous shadow over the rest of Paganism in the minds of the average American consuming this true crime material. Beware of creating monsters.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. "Monster Theory: 7 Theses." In The Monster Theory Reader. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Mittman  Asa Simon.  Dendle  Peter. The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. United Kingdom: Ashgate  2012.