“Wotan”

“Wotan” is Carl Gustav Jung’s 1936 essay on the return of an ancient Germanic god as a force in modern history. The book presents it as a controversial attempt to explain the Nazi movement through archetypal possession, then follows the essay’s resonances into heathen revival and Black Metal. Its importance lies not in establishing a direct chain of influence, but in offering a powerful interpretive frame for the way old religious images can be reanimated, claimed as ancestral memory, and attached to modern movements.

Publication and Central Argument

Jung published the essay in March 1936 in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, only a few years after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. He argued that the Nazi movement resulted from a large-scale possession by Wotan, the old god of storm and frenzy. In this account, the political upheaval was not simply a conscious return to pre-Christian belief: an archetypal force could seize people and express itself through them, even when they did not understand their experience in those terms.

Jung traced part of this revival to German writers, particularly Nietzsche, whom he regarded as having been seized by Wotan and transmitting aspects of the god’s archetypal nature. The essay’s image of a supposedly dormant deity erupting into a society that believed itself to have outgrown the Middle Ages gives its argument the shape of a historical reversal: modernity does not necessarily leave ancient forces behind; it may provide them with new forms of expression.

Possession, Dreams, and the Wild Hunt

Jung extended his account beyond political movements. He later disclosed his conviction that both Nietzsche and he himself had experienced personal visits in dreams from the ghostly procession of the Wild Hunt, the German counterpart to Oskorei. The essay’s theory thus connects public upheaval with visionary experience: the archetype may appear as collective historical force, but also as an image encountered by individuals.

The book places this idea beside Scandinavian folklore about Oskorei and the midwinter return of the dead. The overlap is not presented as proof that Jung’s theory explains either the folklore or later events. Rather, the recurring image of a spectral company in motion makes the essay part of a wider pattern in which old religious figures and processions return in altered settings. That pattern becomes especially suggestive when later Black Metal adherents invoke Nordic ancestry and myth.

The Youth Movement and the Essay’s Prediction

Jung described sacrifices of sheep to Wotan by members of the Jugendbewegung at the winter solstice. He interpreted such acts as evidence that Germany was being drawn away from Christianity through possession by the ancient deity. In his account, the god’s more furious qualities were then dominant; he predicted that other, more ecstatic and prophetic aspects might emerge over the following years or decades.

This prediction matters to the book’s later discussion because it supplies a vocabulary for thinking about religious revival as more than a deliberate reconstruction. Contemporary people may consciously seek a pre-Christian worldview, but Jung’s theory allows for a different possibility: archetypal images may exert an attraction that feels older and less voluntary than an individual choice. The book presents that as an interpretive framework, not as a demonstrated explanation of modern religious movements.

Later Heathen Revivals and Black Metal

The essay appears in a discussion of renewed interest in Northern European religion. In Norway and Sweden, groups such as Draupnir and Bifrost held gatherings involving blot, or symbolic sacrifice; Draupnir had been recognized by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization. The book stresses that Nordic religious practitioners had no specific connection to the Black Metal scene, and that public assumptions of such a link caused those groups difficulty. Their activities therefore provide context for religious revival, not evidence that they influenced the bands.

Within Black Metal, however, the turn toward heathen themes became increasingly visible. The cover of Bathory’s Blood Fire Death depicted the Wild Hunt, and the book describes its appeal to ancestral archetypes as a major influence on the genre that followed. Burzum and other bands later made Norse religious themes central to their music. Jung’s essay helps illuminate the resemblance between these cultural developments and his account of archetypal resurgence, but the book does not establish the essay itself as their source.

Varg Vikernes gave this ancestral reading a more explicit and political form. He described the Norse deities as archetypes of the Northern race and represented heathendom as a recovery of ancestral nature. He also justified church burnings as a way of making people see Odin and awakening the god within them. These were Vikernes’s claims about his actions and beliefs; they should not be confused with Jung’s analysis or with the beliefs of independent heathen organizations.

Folklore as Portent

The book returns to Jung’s prediction of a prophetic aspect of Wotan through an obscure Oskorei tale collected by Kjetil A. Flatin in Tussar og trolldom in 1930. In the story, two men fight with knives during a Christmas gathering; after one is killed, the Oskorei arrives, takes the dead man, and leaves a burning torch behind. Unlike accounts in which the procession carries off someone living, this one begins with a death already accomplished.

The author reads the tale as an ominous allegory when set beside later events involving Grishnackh, Euronymous, and the fires surrounding them. The comparison is deliberately suggestive: it makes folkloric motifs seem to anticipate modern violence, without demonstrating that the legend caused or predicted it. In this way, “Wotan” serves less as a final explanation than as a bridge between Jung’s theory of archetypes, the persistence of Northern myth, and the modern appropriation of that past.