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.

Runic Astrology

I actually checked the book out of
my local library and read it.

 Lister, Richard. The Book of Runic Astrology: Unlock the Ancient Power of Your Cosmic Birth Runes. London: Hay House, 2023.

There is a tension that exists between popularization and dilution -- not only in religion. Insiders often object to and resist the popularization of their tradition, whatever it may be. 

Should interested newbies be required to cross a high bar by working their way into a tradition through learning, training, and experience? Or should a tradition be made more accessible--simpler, diluted-- so that newbies can more easily enter it?

Back in October, a friend sent me this article from the Daily Telegraph, "How Viking Runes Can Transform Your Life" - a marketing piece for Richard Lister's book "The Book of Runic Astrology."  Lister is doing this for Norse Paganism--presenting it in a way that is easily accessible to those who are outside the tradition but intrigued and interested.

This isn't new. Astrology has been part of pop culture forever. But as Norse Paganism has become trendy through shows like Vikings, interest in runic astrology has also grown. A few books have been published (two of which I have written about here and also available here). Even Vogue Scandinavia published an article on "reading your viking birth runes" and you can't get more pop culture than Vogue, right? Great stuff. With his new book and marketing savvy, Lister is making a play to be the popular expert on runic astrology.

And that makes sense. Lister is not a scholar of Old Norse or religious studies. He isn't a Heathen religious leader or gothi (goði). He is a holistic life coach who developed this system to do astrology readings with a Norse flair. His Norse Paganism isn't an artifice -- according to the book he has twenty years of experience doing viking historical re-enactment and a long personal history with Norse religious practice. In fact, Lister opens and closes his book by recounting two personal spiritual experiences he has had with Odin, the God of the runes. Given his Norse Pagan credibility, Lister is also an eclectic spiritual practitioner whose focus is working with people and their problems. And one form of guidance he offers is astrology with a Norse aesthetic. 

This is Norse Paganism crafted for the global consumer culture of late-modern individualism. Wyrd is not "fate" in Lister's interpretation. Rather it is a "guideline that we can influence," he writes, that is "always consensual." "You do you boo," he sums up (10). In Lister's approach, runic astrology is a tool that anyone can use to read the energy of the Wyrd, the "pattern and path laid out for us by the Norns," and navigate one's Runic Star Path to "co-create the life you want." 

In a sort of media-savvy makeover, Lister engages his niche market by overlaying traditional (Greco-Roman) astrology with aspects of Norse religion. The runic calendar of 24 runes of the Elder Futhark maps onto the astrological calendar of 12 zodiac signs. The names of Norse Gods are substituted for the usual names of planets and heavenly bodies. The elementals are loosely connected with figures from Norse myth. And the houses of the zodiac become Norse Stamme, "branches" of the world tree Yggdrasil. 

The power of Lister's approach is its simplicity. Even an astrological idiot like myself could easily get my free astrological birth chart from a website and use Lister's charts to find my birth runes. Lister calls this the "Runic Star Path" - quite catchy, right? : Gebo is both my Sunna soul rune  and my Manni emotional rune (Sun and Moon signs respectively.) Raidho is my Jord rune - the rising sign, or "rune of practical purpose" according to Lister. And Tiwaz is my Nordir or luck rune, equivalent to the North Node. Once you have these four runes, Lister provides his own set of descriptions to help you interpret your life journey. This transposition of astrology into a Norse timbre is topped off with a sprinkling of Old Norse neologisms--my favorite is glóa stigr the “Glowing Path Makers” (34), Lister's term for the three main birth runes. 

While reading this book, I definitely realized that my understanding of astrology is woefully lacking. I don’t really understand it and haven't spent much time on it. However it is an important dimension of Paganism and Pagan cosmology. Weren’t almost all the elder Pagan cultures in dialogue with the heavens? Tracking its changes, sensitive to its energies, aligned with its powers? There are hints in the Old Norse sources of astrological/astronomical sky lore in Pagan Scandinavia. Beyond Europe, astrology in Hindu religious culture goes back thousands of years. And there are fascinating discoveries regarding MesoAmerican astrology.  That said, not all Pagans use astrology. It is simply there as part of the cosmology, available as a spiritual resource. Even among the elder Pagans (arch-Pagans), some cultures and times would have made more of astrology than others. All religions change and consulting the stars undoubtedly would have waxed and waned as a popular practice.

Beyond the historical frame, astrology is congruent with the cosmologies of Pagan religions and the worlds of many powers they describe. Both polytheism and animism involve cosmologies in which many powers operate. Like these ontological systems, astrology is about living in an interconnected world – where all these powers interact and influence each other. These polyvalent interrelationships are sometimes referred to as correspondences in magical practice – things and qualities that are connected, influence each other, represent and resonate with other entities. Astrology is one type of interrelationship – a recognition that the movements and relationships of cosmic bodies influence our lives.

Lister's system is not particularly compatible with earlier presentations of runic astrology. For instance, there are few similarities with Nigel Pennick's book Runic Astrology. Even basic aspects like the God-planet associations are different: Lister associates Neptune with Ran while Pennick went with Aegir. Of course, Pennick's book is so complex to be almost impenetrable by the average person--as Lister mentions in this great interview "Change Your Life With Runic Astrology.". There is no attempt to connect this to archaeo-astronomy or actual Norse cultural knowledge of the heavens. As Lister makes clear, his astrology is about magic more than "maths" - "This is more than just rune maths and planet maths. It's trusting your intuition, your insight and your heart. Trust your feelings as you build Runic Star Paths for yourself, your event or your clients. This is where power is to be found. Right there. In you. Your heart will lead you to victory" (232)

For more on MesoAmerican astrology: An old but good article on the complex Mayan cultural relationship to Venus: Aveni, Anthony F. “Venus and the Maya: Interdisciplinary Studies of Maya Myth, Building Orientations, and Written Records Indicate That Astronomers of the Pre-Columbian World Developed a Sophisticated, If Distinctive, Cosmology.” American Scientist 67, no. 3 (1979): 274–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27849219. 

Additional Sources:

Claim Your Magic by Magin Rose

Donald Tyson, Runic Astrology

S. Kelley Harrell, Runic Book of Days: A Guide to Living the Annual Cycle of Rune Magick

Nigel Pennick, Runes and Astrology

Harry Holland, Viking Astrology: Unveiling the Secrets of the Norse Runes

Kevin Rowan-Drewitt, Astrology of The Runes

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.

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.”

Odinism and the Delphi Murders: My Interview with WishTV news

On September 19th, 2023 I did a quick interview with Kody Fisher, a reporter with Channel 8 WishTV news in Indianapolis about Odinism. See the video below. 

The Delphi murder case is a horrible and tragic story. One of my students who is from southern Indiana said that she grew up with these murders as part of the trauma of her childhood world. 

So my heart goes out to the families of these young women, all those who were impacted by these murders, and who continue to live without resolution through the legal process of this case. 

Two young teenage girls, Libby and Abigail, had gone for a walk on Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, IN on Feb. 13, 2017. They disappeared from the popular trail and were found murdered in the woods the next day. One of the girl's cell phones was recovered with a "43-second video that showed Abigail walking on the Monon High Bridge toward Libby while a man wearing a dark jacket and jeans walks behind her. The man can be heard ordering the girls 'down the hill.'"  

The case has gone unsolved, but in October 2022, a man named Richard Allen was arrested in connection to the case. There is significant evidence that points toward Allen's involvement including his own confessions, security video placing him and his vehicle at the scene, and a bullet recovered from the scene which matches a handgun found at Allen's home although they believe a knife was used for the murders.

The twist in the case - and the reason for my interview - occurred on September 18, 2023 when Allen's defense team released a 130+ page memorandum alleging that the murders were part of an Odinist ritual human sacrifice. According to Fox News, the defense memorandum claims that "overwhelming evidence in this case supports the following … Members of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists, ritualistically sacrificed Abigail Williams and Liberty German." 

Religion professor breaks down Odinism and its connection to the Delphi murders

So the reporter reached out to me because of my book Being Viking and my expertise in this area of Norse Pagan Heathen religion. He wanted to know what Odinism is - the defense memorandum uses the term "Odinites," which is a term I've never encountered and showed a glaring lack of familiarity. And he wanted to know if Odinists could have ritually sacrificed these girls as part of a religious rite of human sacrifice.  

I don't particularly want to be defending Odinists, but here I was giving an interview and finding myself pushing back against unsubstantiated allegations that "Odinites" had ritually sacrificed two young white girls years ago in Indiana.

On the surface, the evidence seems to weigh against Heathens. The reporter kept coming back to the fact that Heathens do make sacrifices as part of their ritual cycle. There is both textual and archaeological evidence that ancient Pagans engaged in some human sacrifice.  And he was really interested in Reconstructionism--contemporary Heathens and Pagans who want to restore or revive ancient religious practice as closely as possible for contemporary times. I discuss reconstructionism throughout Being Viking, check the index, but specifically on pages 38-44. Additionally in the last few years Odinists have been tied to various acts of violence and murder. Therefore, as the reporter implied, why not human sacrifice?

The most obvious answer to this question is that Pagans have universally and explicitly rejected human sacrifice. Please see my essay "Do Heathens Practice Sacrifice" in the upcoming release from Equinox Press, Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes, edited by Suzanne Owens and Angela Puca. Reconstructionists have been clear that some things from the past should be left there and not revived. Human sacrifice is at the top of that list. Heathens and Pagans of all stripes have roundly rejected the sacrifice of human beings.

Heathens do make offerings to spiritual beings: Gods, ancestors, spirits of nature. Almost universally, these offerings consist of libations of mead, an offering of sacred beverage charged with the prayers of the faithful, and poured out in honor of the Gods. While the term "sacrifice" may be used, and the Norse religious term "blot" is more directly connected to sacrifice, Heathens and Pagans are more likely to call these gifts or offerings. And while some Heathens have engaged in animal sacrifice, this has been practiced only rarely and with the greatest ethical care. For more on animal sacrifice in Heathenry, see Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America, chapter 6, "Animal Sacrifice and the Blot."

As odious as Odinism is, there is simply no evidence that Odinists in America have ever practiced ritual human sacrifice. Odinism has been around for a hundred years, if you start counting with Alexander Rudd Mills. And in all that time, Odinists have not practiced or advocated for ritual human sacrifice. Odinism does use warrior imagery and presents an aggressive picture of itself. Some Odinists have perpetrated criminal acts of political and racially motivated violence and murder. In fact, if you told me that there was another report of an Odinist attacking a Muslim woman on a train somewhere, I wouldn't be shocked. But to engage in ritual human sacrifice - that would be an aberration even for Odinists. 

Now, as one of my mentors told me, "Never say never." After pushing at all these different angles, the reporter finally said, "But you can't rule it out, right?" That is where he quotes me saying "There are crazy people everywhere." People have excused their heinous actions by claiming that "God told me to do it." The larger context of that quote is this: If someone wanted to claim that Odin told them to sacrifice a human being, then there would be resources in the historical record of Norse Paganism that they could make use of. Just as the Bible and the Qur'an have passages that could be and have been used by criminals and immoral people to justify violence, murder, and mayhem. But that act would not be in keeping with the norms for the contemporary religious practice of Heathenry. That person would be a criminal - not someone living out a religious practice in a socially acceptable way.