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.

The Roots of Odinism in the writings of Alexander Rud Mills

So I did this interview about Odinism with WISHTV News in Indianapolis on September 19, 2023. You can read about it here. After hearing about the interview, my mentor said “So . . . you went on record that Odinism is a thing.”

I heard that more as a question and it sounded like this: “If Odinism is a thing, what kind of thing is it?”

That’s a really good question. 

I want to write a few posts that try to give an answer. I think that Odinism can be three things:

• a movement with specific history, idealogues, and groups, 
• a meme, a set of ideas that flow through the cultic milieu, and/or
• a monster, an imaginary onto which we project our fears

So here is Part 1: The Roots of Odinism in the Writings of Alexander Rud Mills

We can argue that Odinism begins with the Australian Alexander Rud Mills, 1885-1964. He was sympathetic to and influenced by Nazism and had met Hitler. He was aligned with and participated in pre-WWII British fascist groups as well as the nationalist Australia First Movement. He was detained by the Australian government during 1942 for his Nazi connections, fears that he supported a Japanese invasion of Australia, and because of his outspoken Odinism which he maintained his entire life even after his incarceration. Among Odinists, this imprisonment in an WWII Australian internment camp only adds to his allure as a Folk hero and the Father of Odinism.

Rud Mills has several works that have been influential in the development of Odinism. Let's look briefly at his pamphlet “The Call of our Ancient Nordic Religion” published in 1957. This is the most widely read of his writings. In this short book, he sketches out the ideological framework for Odinism,

The key move he makes is to detach his new Odinist religion from German nationalism – the German völkisch movement was closely tied to German nationalism, German identity, and German expansionism. Nazism was as well – Nazism, rooted in the German politics post-WWI was not so interested in uniting a pan-national “white race” as it was committed to advancing German superiority and subjugating all other nations under German dominance. In this pamphlet, Rud Mills separated his philosophy from the specific cause of German nationalism by looking farther back into the past. Odinism, he said, was the religion of all those with Nordic ancestry. He writes about “our Nordic ancestors,” and “our forefathers” referring to these ancient Nordic people. This shift made Odinism into a race-based international movement that can sell as well in Australia as in Britain and the United States.

What are the other seeds of this ideological framework found here?

• Nordic or Aryan superiority: In chapter two he claimed that Nordic or Aryan people were the progenitors of all the great civilizations from Greece, to Egypt, to India. “They built up fine and noble civilizations . . . [and made] wonderful contributions to the achievements of mankind.”
• Anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity: In chapter 3, he sets this Nordic faith up against both Judaism and Christianity. He writes that “'Greek' Christianity has made the people Jew-following nations. Christian preachers teach Jewish history, they call the Jews God's chosen people, and by so doing depreciate the history and spiritual values of their own nations. Even Chinese and Negroes are taught that Israel is the 'Holy Land'.”
• Esotericism: Odinism includes a strong esoteric component with practices involving the elevation of the mind to higher states of consciousness taking Odin's ordeal on the World Tree as a model, and the raising of oð, the psychic power of Odin, the frenzy and inspiration that is Odin within the practitioner. In chapter five, Rud Mills hints at Odinic esotericism when he writes, “The WONDERFUL Norse Gods - It is beyond the powers of man to conceive and wholly understand the great Being and Vitality, in whom and by whom man lives. Some men can understand more than others.”
• Centrality of Odin: In chapter five, he centers the All-Father as the heart of the Odinist spiritual pursuit,  “The All-Father was the great conception of the Nordic or Norse religion.” And Odin, he suggests, is the entity or the archetype by which humans understand and connect to the All-Father, “The greatest of the 'family' of the All-Father was Odin, Woden or Wotan. Odin was that of the All-Father which man in some measure may understand. . . ." He goes on to discuss other gods and the goddesses, such as Thor, the Mother Freyga who was embodied in Nature, and Tyr.
• Politics: Odinism offers a radical social critique of modernity. In chapter six, Rudd Mills outlines a sprawling worldview and ethic. He implies a sort of political autonomy that could be the basis for the tribalist philosophy that later Odinists developed as a model for an ideal Nordic society. “The ruling of one person by another person grows less under our Odinist direction, even as such ruling grows greater under religions which tend to make men 'robots and soulless automatons, ruled by ruthless non-spiritual men.” In his earlier writings, he leans more explicitly toward a fascist-type of organic statism or perhaps a caste system, “the endeavor under Odinism is to have every man in that place which is best for him and his gard in God, and best for that wider community of which he is a part,” (from his 1933 The Odinist Religion Overcoming Jewish Christianity). We also see here the incipient critique of modernity as a system that homogenizes humans, sucks the spirituality and vitality out of them, and reduces them to materialists and passive consumers. 
• Warrior Ethic: Odinism often talks tough, threatening direct and violent action to instigate a radical overthrow of what it sees as a sick modernity characterized by the homogeneity of globalism, spirituality-denying consumerism, and the weakness of democracy.  Rud Mills signals the warrior ethic of Odinism when he writes that “Force must be used, if necessary, to check and defeat the powers of Evil. The Son of Odin fought to the death. Tyr gave his right hand in the service of his fellows.”
• The Folk Awakening: Odinists and other folkish Heathens believe that Odinism is "in the blood" of white people, those with Northern European descent. It is an archetype that is imprinted in the minds of Northern European people, a structure of their brains and DNA. Drawing on Jung's Wotan essay, they believe that this archetype can be awoken or activiated--and that white people will return to their "native" religiosity and true nature. This idea draws on Jung's Wotan essay in which he describes Wotan as a "psychic force," that can be stirred back to life "that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity." In chapter eight, Rud Mills also forecasts the “Nordic Awakening” that so many Odinists and folkish Asatruar talk about. Once there were great men, noble and heroic, called Sons of Odin, “What men were ever so great as these men? What men ever thought so beautifully or so truly?” This nobility was obscured and lost by the coming of Christianity. That darkness, he writes, is coming to an end, "but the seed which those men, our very fathers, sowed is awakening again. The new day comes, because it is of the nature of Being that it comes. And we have seen, thanks to our Odinist forefathers, a light in the darkness which beckons us on to safety and to life.” Odinists tend to believe that this new awakening is occuring now and seek to call white people into white-only groups, united by Odinist religion, and organized to resist modernity its attack on "traditional Western culture."  
• Anti-Equality: In chapter nine, he forwards the argument against human equality - another core Odinist talking point. Odinists argue for the saliency of difference: differences among the "races" and differences between the sexes. They are quick to defend and maintain these distinctions as good and natural. Rud Mills states, "One resultant of the Plato-Socratian error is found in the constitution of the United States of America which states that, 'It is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal.' A stentorian conclusion too pathetic to laugh at. It is a logical consequence from an untrue source, and flatly contradicts all the experiences and the senses of man given him by God. In one aspect, it is a spurning of God's gifts to man. And what at first may appear laughable becomes tragic”.
• Anti-Miscegenation: Odinists believe that Western, aka European, society is being diluted, weakened by "race-mixing," for which Rud Mills uses the awful term "mongrelization." These days, Odinists call it "white genocide." White genocide is a conspiracy theory holding that the "white race" will soon cease to exist because of a deliberate plot involving immigration, multiculturalism, interracial relationships, and declining white birthrates. He writes that this belief in equality wars against human nature and leads to “human mongrelism” and an equality “measured by the most deficient unit of the species.” In his earlier collection of pamphlets, The Odinist Religion Overcoming Jewish Christianity, he writes, “Odinists do not marry persons racially distant from them. They understand the dangers of mongrelism and the mating of opposites.” He also includes a chilling pamphlet on eugenics. This makes the racist basis of this movement very plain. Odinism is a religion grounded in white supremacy. Note that this set of white supremacist, anti-miscengenation ideas of race-mixing, mongrelization, being a "race-traitor" do not come from Norse Paganism. They are ideas from social Darwinism, chattel-slavery, eugenics, and race-based Aryan facism that flow into Odinism as a distinctive tributary.
• Race Mysticism: Chapter nine ends with an explicit call to racial consciousness. Judaeo-Christian dominance, he writes, “has almost destroyed our connection with our own Father Spirit in God, our creator and our source of strength and life. Many of our people are unaware of their racial origins, and are taught to believe that race and breed are of no value as far as mankind is concerned. They are ignorant of their specific Gard or Place in God - in the scheme of things. Breed, they are taught,  is valuable regarding horses, cattle and animals but is not valuable for mankind.”