Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious

Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious provide a way to read recurring mythic images not simply as deliberate revivals of the past, but as forms that may re-emerge through inherited human imagination. In the book, this framework links Norse heathen imagery, the folklore of the Wild Hunt, and the symbolic language of Black Metal, while leaving open whether their resemblance reflects a shared psychological source or a modern reuse of ancestral traditions.

Archetypes and inherited images

Carl Gustav Jung described primordial images as powers of imagination inherited alongside personal memories. These images, in his account, help explain why motifs from myths and legends recur, and why people may reproduce associations already present in old texts without consciously copying them. He treated them as more than ideas: they could be felt as well as thought, and might seem to lead lives of their own. The image of the riverbed captures the model: a form can remain after its visible contents have disappeared, then become active again when conditions return.

This account makes cultural recurrence possible without requiring a continuous chain of conscious teaching. It also makes the archetype an interpretive proposition, rather than merely a name for a repeated symbol. The book uses Jung’s model to ask whether archaic images could surface in a modern generation, not to establish that every resemblance between old folklore and modern behavior proves an inherited psychic cause.

Wotan and the return of heathen imagery

Jung applied this theory to Wotan in an essay published in 1936, several years after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. He argued that the political movement could be understood as a mass possession by the archetype of Wotan, the old god associated with storm and frenzy. In his account, writers including Nietzsche had been seized by aspects of this archetype and had transmitted them. Jung also recalled dreams in which he and Nietzsche encountered a ghostly procession resembling the Wild Hunt, the German counterpart of Oskorei.

Jung extended the argument to the Youth Movement, describing reports of sheep sacrifice to Wotan at the solstice and interpreting the movement away from Christianity as another expression of the old deity’s return. He predicted that the furious attributes he associated with the period would not be the only ones to emerge: more ecstatic and mantic aspects might appear in subsequent years or decades. The book presents these claims as Jung’s controversial interpretation, not as a neutral explanation of the political events themselves.

The idea of Wotan redivivus also offers a comparison with modern heathen revival. Stephen McNallen recalled being drawn to investigate Norse heathen religion in the late 1960s; he composed rituals, founded the Viking Brotherhood, and later saw it evolve into the Ásatrú Free Assembly. He found that groups dedicated to Northern European gods had formed independently in England, Iceland, and the eastern United States, alongside his efforts in Texas. The book notes that a Jungian explanation of this apparently simultaneous revival is plausible as an interpretive possibility, while acknowledging that its organic and synchronistic character is difficult to explain.

Black Metal and the Wild Hunt

The book finds a particularly charged point of comparison between Black Metal and the folklore of Oskorei. The old accounts describe a riding company of the dead passing through the midwinter darkness. Fights and killings were associated with places where the procession stopped; it might consume food and drink, or carry away people found outside after dark. Protective practices included making the shape of a cross, lying with arms outstretched in that shape, placing crosses above doors, or setting steel above stalls. The folklore connected the ride to the seasonal belief that the dead returned at Yule.

That dark, ghoulish tradition had an earlier presence in the music scene than the later turn toward explicit Nordic mythological themes. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, placed a depiction of Oskorei on its cover: an airborne host of Valkyries on black horses, with Thor above a scorched landscape. The album’s opening instrumental evoked Odin riding Sleipnir across the heavens. As Bathory’s music developed from the horror-centered Satanism of its earliest records, it took up ancestral heathen mythology instead. The book treats this change as influential: the tapping of ancestral archetypes became important to the generation of Black Metal that followed.

The resemblance between the Wild Hunt’s imagery and the scene’s later appearance, demeanor, statements, and lyrics is presented as striking, but not as proof of direct transmission. The book also complicates the suggestion that Black Metal’s heathen references belong only to an urban subculture. Many musicians came from small rural communities; Varg Vikernes, for example, emphasized that he was from a rural area outside Bergen rather than from the city. These details make the relation between folklore, place, and modern identity less simple than a contrast between rural tradition and urban music would suggest.

Revival, appropriation, and limits

Vikernes described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and invoked Odin when explaining the purpose he attributed to church burnings. He presented the Northern gods not as conventional deities but as archetypes of the Northern race, bound to ancestry, nature, and memory. In his account, making his interpretation visible could awaken heathen identity in others. The book reads this as an atavistic motive: an attempt to activate an ancestral image in the present. It does not, however, make his statements equivalent to Jung’s theory or establish that the proposed psychic mechanism is real.

Organized heathen practitioners in Norway and Sweden provide an important counterpoint. Draupnir received recognition from the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization, while Draupnir and Bifrost held gatherings that included blot, or symbolic sacrifice. The book states that these practitioners had no specific connection to the Black Metal scene. Public assumptions of a link, it notes, became a serious liability for the groups, and the repeated need to disavow common ground with Black Metal and Satanism made their position harder to explain. Vikernes’s frequent public statements about his own heathen beliefs contributed to that confusion.

The concept therefore does two kinds of work in the book. It gives a vocabulary for examining why old images might recur and why modern movements might experience them as more than decorative references. At the same time, it draws attention to the difference between a psychological interpretation, a consciously constructed appeal to ancestry, and the independent practices of religious organizations. The parallels invite investigation; they do not erase those distinctions.