Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung is presented as a psychologist whose theories of the collective unconscious and inherited archetypes offer one way to understand why ancient religious images can return with force in modern societies. The book’s account moves from the recurrence of mythic patterns in individual minds to Jung’s controversial interpretation of the Nazi movement as a mass resurgence of the Germanic god “Wotan.” It treats that interpretation as Jung’s theory, not as an established explanation of political history.

Archetypes and Inherited Images

In discussing Varg Vikernes’s claims about Northern gods as ancestral presences, the book turns to Jung to show that such ideas have a broader intellectual analogue. Jung argued that people inherit not only personal memories but also primordial images: enduring forms of imagination through which myths and legends can recur across generations. Those images, in his account, are not simply conscious ideas chosen by individuals. They may become active in a group’s cultural life and shape how people experience inherited traditions.

The book cites Jung’s 1928 work Two Essays on Analytical Psychology to explain this account. Jung used the recurrence of motifs in myths and legends as evidence for inherited patterns of imagination. He also pointed to mental patients who reproduced images and associations found in older texts, treating those parallels as evidence that such material could appear without direct, conscious transmission. The claim gives his theory a psychological dimension: the past may return not merely because people study it, but because familiar patterns remain available within the human imagination.

Jung’s image of archetypes as riverbeds helps express this cyclical quality. A riverbed may become dry when water has left it, yet remain available for water to find again. In the book’s presentation, that metaphor makes the return of old religious forms less like the recovery of a continuously maintained institution and more like the reactivation of a latent pattern. It also clarifies why a revival might feel spontaneous to its participants even when its symbols come from a distant past.

“Wotan” and the Nazi Movement

Jung developed his most politically charged application of this theory in “Wotan,” an essay published in March 1936 in Neue Schweizer Rundschau. Written a few years after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, it interprets the movement as the result of a large-scale possession by the ancient god. The book emphasizes the scale of Jung’s claim: he was not describing a handful of people consciously adopting a pre-Christian religion, but a national political movement being swept up by a powerful archetypal force.

Jung traced elements of the heathen revival through German writers, with Nietzsche especially important to his account. In his reading, these writers were seized by Wotan and transmitted aspects of the god’s archetypal nature. He described the ancient storm-and-frenzy deity as awakening after a long quiescence in a country that had assumed it had outgrown the Middle Ages. The volcanic image makes Jung’s interpretation one of sudden return: a force thought dormant erupts into modern public life, rather than surviving as an openly continuous faith.

The essay also connects this proposed return to the Youth Movement. Jung discussed reports of sheep sacrifices to Wotan at the solstice and interpreted them as part of a broader movement away from Christianity. He believed Germany was being led from Christian forms of life through possession by the ancient deity. The account therefore joins religious symbolism to political change, while leaving the reader with Jung’s own interpretive framework rather than a simple equation between ancient worship and modern politics.

Prophecy, Dreams, and the Wild Hunt

Jung did not describe Wotan’s influence as having a single, fixed character. He thought Germany in the 1930s was under the sway of the god’s more furious attributes, but predicted that other aspects might appear over the following years or decades. In particular, he anticipated more ecstatic and mantic expressions. That forecast extends his argument beyond an explanation of the immediate political moment: if an archetype can manifest in different forms, its return is a developing process rather than a one-time historical episode.

The book also recounts Jung’s later conviction that both Nietzsche and Jung himself had dreamed of a ghostly procession known as the Wild Hunt, the German equivalent of the Oskorei. This episode links personal dream experience to the larger theory of collective images. Jung understood the procession not just as an individual dream motif, but as a figure with a place in a wider cultural inheritance. The distinction between private experience and shared tradition consequently becomes permeable in his account: an old image can appear in a dream and still belong to a pattern extending beyond the dreamer.

Revival and the Book’s Interpretation

Jung’s account is set beside the modern revival of pre-Christian Northern religion. The book describes contemporary efforts to revive such religions as sometimes driven by an instinctive attraction, and presents Jung’s theory as one possible explanation for why related impulses might arise in different places. Its discussion of Stephen McNallen, credited with helping spark modern Ásatrú in the English-speaking world, recounts how he began investigating heathen Norse religion in the late 1960s, composed worship rituals, and founded the Viking Brotherhood. Groups devoted to Northern European gods also appeared in distant places without, according to the account, having knowledge of one another. The book calls a Jungian explanation of “Wotan” redivivus as reasonable as any, while acknowledging that the synchrony is difficult to explain.

This framework also sharpens the contrast between Jung’s interpretation and Vikernes’s presentation of heathen religion. Vikernes describes the Northern gods as archetypes belonging to the Northern race and treats renewed recognition of them as a return to ancestral nature. Jung’s theory gives the book a way to discuss the structure of that claim—the imagined survival and reawakening of inherited religious forms—without treating Vikernes’s assertions as proof of Jung’s account. Jung’s importance here is therefore both intellectual and interpretive: his theory connects modern religious revival to recurring images, while his reading of “Wotan” demonstrates how consequential, and controversial, that connection can become when applied to political history.