Germanic heathen tradition

Germanic heathen tradition appears in the book both as a modern reconstruction of pre-Christian Northern European religion and as a powerful language for remaking the present in the image of an ancestral past. Its gods, legends, and symbols offered Black Metal musicians an alternative to the Satanism of the scene’s beginnings; for Varg Vikernes and Absurd, they also became a framework for claims about nature, inherited identity, and political purpose. The book follows that transformation while distinguishing individual artists’ declarations from the activities of contemporary Ásatrú organizations, which it says have no specific connection to Black Metal.

From Satanic provocation to ancestral myth

The musical shift is especially clear in Bathory. As the band developed, its music slowed, its songs grew more elaborate, and its subject matter moved away from the horror-story simplicity of its earlier Satanic imagery. Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, marked a decisive turn. Its cover replaced the previous record’s horror imagery with Peter Nicolai Arbo’s painting of the Oskorei, the Wild Hunt of Scandinavian and Teutonic folklore: an airborne host of riders above a scene on earth. The image introduced a sound that retained the band’s raw aggression but directed it through more arranged songs, clearer vocals, and more considered lyrics.

The album’s opening instrumental, Odens Ride Over Nordland, evokes Odin’s ride across the heavens on Sleipnir, while its final song invokes the Norse gods and the freedom associated with an ancestral world. In the book’s account, this was not merely a change of visual theme. Bathory had turned from what the author describes as childish and foreign Satanism toward a heathen mythological inheritance imagined as belonging to its forebears. The tapping of ancestral archetypes would become an important resource for the generation of Black Metal that followed.

The Oskorei makes that resource particularly legible. Folklore described the ride as a company of the dead moving through the midwinter darkness, a time when the dead were believed to return. Stories associated its passage with danger, and described crosses above doors or steel placed above stalls as protections. The book observes that some details of these legends later seemed to recur in the behavior and imagery of Norwegian Black Metal adherents, including before Nordic mythology became an explicit focus for many of them. It presents this resemblance as striking, not as proof that the musicians consciously derived their conduct from folklore.

Gods as archetypes and inheritance

Vikernes described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and presented the Norse gods not as supernatural beings but as archetypes of the Northern race. In his account, their names preserved a memory of what had once existed, and renewed attention to them could awaken an inherited heathen identity. He also connected this conviction to his justification for church burnings, describing them as a means of making Odin present to the public. The book therefore shows heathen symbolism moving beyond music and interpretation into a political explanation for action.

Absurd developed a related account of myth, although its members emphasized a distinct German identity. In the interview excerpted in the book, the band associated archetypes with DNA and the collective subconscious, while allowing that they might instead exist in an enduring force beyond the individual. It treated gods as Germanic ideals: Donar, identified with Thor, represented the armed and industrious peasant, while Wotan was associated with kingship, occult knowledge, and leadership of the Wild Hunt. These interpretations make the deities exemplary figures in a contemporary worldview rather than objects of straightforward supernatural belief.

For Absurd, myth also carried an ethic. The band argued that Germanic mythology offered a way of life and was an inheritance that could not be denied. It interpreted the relation between people and place as formative: shared descent and landscape together shaped a folk and its customs, while religious and cultural patterns were presented as signs of historical kinship. Its appeal to ancient myth thus joined religious language to a claim about belonging and collective identity.

A political reinterpretation

Absurd connected this account of inheritance to explicit racial nationalism. Its interview invoked a Blood and Soil cosmology, described interest in genetics and eugenics, and claimed that an individual gained historical significance through belonging to a long ancestral chain. The band also advanced a speculative story of racial origins, prehistoric conquest, and a lost Thule or Atlantis. These assertions are reported as the band’s ideology, not established history. Its language of archetypes and ancestry served to present a modern political program as the recovery of something primordial.

The political implications are especially clear in the band’s interpretation of National Socialism. Absurd described it as an expression of Germanic being and invoked Carl Gustav Jung’s account of the Wotan archetype to explain the movement’s force. It paired an idealized picture of the White Man as constructive with an antisemitic opposition between Aryan and Semitic wills. It also endorsed political heathenism, praised Vikernes’s attempt to combine Realpolitik with heathenism, and supported the Pan-Germanic Heathen Front program. Here, myth functions not simply as atmosphere or heritage: it supplies a vocabulary for racial hierarchy, political allegiance, and a desired social order.

Absurd nevertheless framed its development as clarification rather than a change of orientation. It said that the band had always valued its origins and identified its music as German Black Metal, while describing its earlier Satanism as superficial. It rejected classical Satanism as a product of medieval Christian demonization and said that the nihilistic glorification of violence and extermination no longer held particular significance for it. The account thus distinguishes the band’s changing emphasis from a claimed continuity in its national and ethnic commitments.

Revival, resemblance, and separation

The book places these Black Metal interpretations alongside a broader modern revival of Ásatrú. It describes Ásatrú as a modern term for the revival and reconstruction of Norse and Teutonic Northern European religious beliefs. In Norway and Sweden, it notes, interest in ancestral religion had grown sufficiently for Draupnir to be recognized by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization; groups including Draupnir and Bifrost also held regular gatherings featuring blot, or symbolic sacrifice.

That parallel did not amount to an organizational link with Black Metal. The book expressly states that Nordic religious practitioners had no specific connection to the scene, and that public assumptions to the contrary had harmed them by making it harder to dispel associations with Satanism. Vikernes’s frequent public statements about his heathen beliefs contributed to that difficulty, even as his own account treated the gods as shared archetypes waiting to be awakened. Germanic heathen tradition therefore occupies two sharply different positions in the book: a living, organized religious revival that sought separation from Black Metal, and a contested repertoire of ancestral symbols that musicians and political activists recast as proof of identity, destiny, and authority.