Still More Tales From The Dark Side: Neo Nazis and Norse Mythology
First published in the February 3, 1999 edition of ESP Magazine
Christine Hall
It’s one thing when a group embraces a concept like Satanism to propagate their rather unpleasant and tasteless ideas. But at least when an organization calls themselves “Satanist,” the general public has some idea of what they are about, as if there is some sort of truth in their advertising. They may try to dress-up their ideas to make them intellectually palatable, but we pretty much know that they align themselves with concepts that most people consider bad or evil, because that’s what Satanism means.
It’s another thing entirely when a group or organization takes something that is basically positive and life affirming and uses it to propagate negative ideas that foster hate. Here in the south we are used to this, with organizations like the Klan and Aryan Nation hiding behind the banner of “Christian values” to disseminate racial hatred. Within the alternative spiritual community there are groups that do this as well, hiding behind the banner of Neo-Paganism to support claims of white supremacy. Although this has been a minor problem for the New Age community as a whole, it has been particularly troublesome for people who specifically identify themselves as Neo-Pagan.
The term Neo-Pagan refers to any group or individual who has turned to pre-Christian spiritual beliefs, usually European, and has attempted to update them to find guidance in our modern world. There are as many different types of Neo-Pagans as there are denominations within Christendom. Some draw on the traditions of the ancient Celts, others seek to revive the traditions associated with the Greek gods and goddesses. Since the 1980s, most have identified themselves as Wiccans, a practice that was developed in the 40s and 50s, and which tends to include all of the ancient European belief structures.
The vast majority such groups strive to be all-inclusive, and use the phrase “perfect love and perfect trust” as their guide. Nearly all of the Neo-Pagans that I have met have been color blind and strive to bring about gender equality, both between the sexes and between people with differing sexual orientations. However, there are some who use the mythology of the ancient Nordic people, the stories of Odin and Thor, to preach a gospel of racial intolerance.
In the late 1970s when Margot Adler was writing Drawing Down the Moon, the definitive catalog of Neo-Pagan beliefs, she specifically omitted the Nordic groups for this very reason. “I found myself in a quandary,” she writes in the book’s second edition. “Some of the information I received was from groups genuinely seeking a Norse Pagan path, but there were other groups clearly using Odinist symbols and mythologies as a front for right-wing and even Nazi activities. I even had a neighbor, around the corner from me, who was a leading member of a Nazi political party and who was communicating his religious ideas in the forum of the ‘Green Egg’ (a Pagan publication). His cramped apartment on Ninety-third Street was crammed with books - one wall was filled with Nazi regalia and literature; the other wall was filled with books on the occult, with particular emphasis on Norse and German (and Vedic) mythology.”
Many people within the Pagan movement think that Norse Paganism is filled with people with such beliefs, which is a thorn in the side of the serious seekers and flourishing organizations with a Norse and Germanic orientation. Alice Rhoades, an editor with “Boreas,” a journal of Northern European Paganism, says, “You will always find fringe people attracted to Paganism. Just as Witches have to contend with the occasional news report of weirdos torturing animals and calling themselves Witches, we in Norse Paganism have our own fringe types. There’s been a general assumption that the Norse religion is connected with the Nazis because the Nazis used Norse symbols. And Neo-Nazis sometimes get attracted to Odinism, because the trappings are the same.”
This reinterpretation of Norse mythology as a Nazi tool goes back to Himmler, who wished to revive to cult of the old German gods into a Nazi scheme. He was influenced by Alfred Rosenberg’s book Myth of the Twentieth Century, which became required reading in every school of the Third Reich. In it, he incorporated the Germanic myths with Greek and Indian mythology to form a grand “Aryan” system.
Writing about Rosenberg’s ideas in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, Carolyne Larrington says, “The future of the race lies in the hands of women, he goes on to proclaim, for if women do not maintain standards of racial purity, but instead give birth to ‘a nation of black and Jewish bastards,’ then Germany will disappear under a ‘tide of black art and Jewish pornography.’”
Again, this connection with Nazism has been most profound on those who are trying to revive the ancient Norse religion in an inclusive manner. Prudence Priest, the editor of “Yggdrasil,” a magazine of Nordic Paganism says, “How are we ever to reclaim the swastika - symbol both of Thor’s hammer and the wheel of the sun, and dating back thousands of years before Hitler’s perversion of it?”