Political heathendom

Political heathendom names a modern political use of pre-Christian religious identity: heathen traditions become a language for ancestry, cultural belonging, and opposition to Christianity and the existing order. In the book, the idea is associated especially with Varg Vikernes, whose presentation of Norse archetypes and ancestral continuity made religious revival inseparable from nationalist politics. Its development is traced through Black Metal’s changing imagery, while the account also makes clear that the political claims of scene figures should not be confused with the beliefs or organizations of heathen practitioners generally.

From Satanic Rebellion to Ancestral Religion

Early Black Metal drew on Satanism and black-magic imagery associated with Venom. The book describes those beginnings as an adolescent revolt against the adult world and Christianity, expressed through horror-story lyrics and deliberately provocative symbols. The later movement toward heathenism was not simply a change in musical subject matter: it redirected rebellion toward an imagined inheritance rooted in Northern European ancestors.

A key musical landmark in that transition was Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, released in 1988. Its cover depicts the Oskorei, or Wild Hunt, while the music channels raw aggression through more elaborate arrangements, clearer vocals, and lyrics with greater reflection and ambiguity. The opening instrumental evokes Odin riding through the heavens; the album’s closing title song again invokes the Norse gods. The book presents this turn as a rejection of the band’s earlier, more childish Satanism in favor of ancestral myth, a source of archetypes that would become central to later Black Metal.

Bathory’s 1990 album Hammerheart pursued the shift more personally, imagining the outlook of a Viking Age practitioner of Ásatrú. The book explains Ásatrú as loyalty to the Æsir and as a modern revival and reconstruction of pre-Christian Norse and Teutonic religion. That religious identification could carry hostility toward Christianity, understood by adherents as a foreign faith imposed on their ancestors. These musical developments provided an influential vocabulary for later heathen identification, but they do not by themselves establish that all musicians or listeners shared one political program.

Vikernes and the Political Use of Heathenism

Vikernes framed Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and explained the church burnings as an effort to awaken ancestral archetypes in the people. In his account, the Norse gods were not merely figures in ancient stories: they represented the Northern race and an inherited nature that his contemporaries had forgotten. He presented the recovery of heathen belief as a return to that nature and as a way to kindle it in others. The book thus shows how mythic language could be made to serve a contemporary political and cultural project.

An interview with the German band Absurd makes the political synthesis explicit. Its speaker praised Vikernes for combining Realpolitik with heathenism and endorsed the Pan-Germanic Heathen Front program. The same passage situates that endorsement within a broader rejection of Christianity as alien to a claimed Teutonic consciousness. Political heathendom, in this formulation, is not simply private religious observance: ancestral religion becomes a basis for political alignment and an instrument for challenging the status quo.

The book also describes a wider movement among some Black Metal musicians away from Satanism and toward indigenous heathen traditions, often coupled with nationalism. Its analysis treats this not as a uniform conversion but as a recasting of Satanic rebellion in ethnic and cultural terms. The author argues that some adherents understood Satanism through archetypes associated with their own heritage, rather than through cosmopolitan occult borrowing, and interprets this as a move toward a culturally grounded form of Satanism. That is the author’s account of the ideological shift, not evidence that heathen religions as a whole are inherently Satanic or nationalist.

Nationalist Programs and Exclusion

The political content is particularly visible in Napalm Rock’s stated aims. The group described its goal as a pagan and nationalist European empire and identified with revolutionary nationalism and mainly Celtic and Druidic paganism. It sought to persuade nationalist youth, skinheads, and metal listeners that political music could include Black Metal, Death Metal, Industrial, and Hardcore, rather than being confined to Oi and Rock Against Communism. Its program also urged listeners to support bands it considered pagan or nationalist and rejected much of the wider music culture as politically unacceptable.

Napalm Rock’s account of pre-Christian belief tied religious revival to national and ethnic belonging. It argued that Europeans should recover the religions of their own origins, preserve cultural and spiritual roots, and observe Celtic festivals such as the solstices, equinoxes, Beltane, and Samhain. It presented that recovery as resistance to the New World Order and Zionist domination, while treating religions such as Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism as alien to Europeans. The book therefore records not only a call for cultural continuity but also an exclusionary politics that defines who belongs by ancestry and religion, and disparages music associated with groups outside that definition.

Religious Practice and the Limits of Association

The book distinguishes politicized Black Metal rhetoric from organized Ásatrú practice in Norway and Sweden. It reports growing public interest in indigenous religion, notes that Draupnir had been recognized by the Norwegian government as a religious organization, and describes regular gatherings by Ásatrú organizations such as Bifrost, including symbolic offerings to the old deities. It states explicitly that these practitioners had no specific connection to the Black Metal scene. Public assumptions that they did were a serious liability, making it harder for them to dispel negative impressions of their religion.

That separation matters because Vikernes’s frequent public statements about heathenism helped create the very association that independent practitioners had to contest. The book presents political heathendom, then, as one influential and highly publicized appropriation of ancestral religion—not a synonym for Ásatrú or for contemporary heathen practice generally. Black Metal itself is also described as a scene whose beliefs and outlook matter alongside its sound, but whose ideological boundaries change over time and are shaped by prominent personalities rather than a settled rulebook. Political heathendom is significant within that shifting history because it turned ancestry and myth into explicit political claims, while its conspicuous association with the music scene also burdened religious groups that rejected that association.