Carl Jung–Nazism and Wotan

Carl Gustav Jung’s interpretation of National Socialism through Wotan recasts political upheaval as the return of an ancient archetype: in Jung’s account, a dormant religious force could possess individuals and, on a larger scale, a movement. Published in 1936, his essay treated the resurgence of heathen imagery and the movement away from Christianity as manifestations of that force. The book uses this argument to illuminate the recurring pull of Northern myth, while keeping Jung’s interpretation distinct from proof of a direct historical link to later religious or musical movements.

The 1936 Interpretation

Jung published his essay Wotan in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau in March 1936, a few years after the National Socialists had come to power in Germany. He argued that the movement was the result of possession by Wotan on a massive scale. In this account, an ancient god of storm and frenzy, long apparently dormant, had become active again in a society thought to have left the Middle Ages behind.

Jung traced elements of the heathen revival through German writers, giving particular attention to Nietzsche. He regarded Nietzsche and other writers not simply as advocates of ideas, but as people seized by Wotan who transmitted aspects of the god’s archetypal nature. The argument therefore treats political and cultural change as more than a conscious return to an old religion: it may also be an involuntary expression of forces that modern people do not recognize as their own.

Ritual, Possession, and Prediction

Jung described Youth Movement members sacrificing sheep to Wotan at the solstice and read these practices as signs of Germany’s movement away from Christianity. The essay’s central explanatory idea was possession: an ancient deity’s archetypal power could manifest through contemporary people and collective conduct, without requiring them to understand themselves as worshippers of that deity.

He distinguished the furious features of Wotan’s influence in Germany during the 1930s from other aspects of the archetype that might emerge later. Jung predicted that, over the next few years or decades, more ecstatic and mantic qualities would also appear. The prediction broadened his account beyond a single political moment, presenting the archetype as capable of changing expression over time.

Jung later said that he and Nietzsche had each experienced personal visits in dreams from the ghostly procession of the Wild Hunt, which he identified as the German equivalent of the Oskorei. This dream material connects his discussion of Wotan to a wider body of Northern European legend: the god’s return is linked not only to public movements and ritual, but also to an apparition associated with the dead and the midwinter season.

Later Echoes and Limits of the Connection

The book sets Jung’s archetypal interpretation beside later uses of Northern myth without claiming that Jung caused them. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, brought the Oskorei to the foreground through its cover image and helped make ancestral myth a major source for the Black Metal scene that followed. The album’s shift from the band’s earlier Satanic imagery toward heathen myth offers a cultural echo of the return-of-the-archetypes theme, not evidence of a direct Jungian influence.

Varg Vikernes likewise described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and presented the Norse gods as archetypes of the Northern race, with heathen identity rooted in inherited nature. His language resembles, in broad outline, the idea that ancient religious forms can reappear through modern people. But the book presents this as a parallel in the use of archetypal and ancestral language, not as proof that Vikernes derived his beliefs from Jung.

The distinction matters because modern heathen practice and Black Metal are not treated as one movement. In Norway and Sweden, growing interest in ancestral religion included organizations such as Draupnir, recognized by the Norwegian government, and Bifrost, which held regular gatherings and symbolic sacrifices. The book explicitly notes that these practitioners had no specific connection to the Black Metal scene, and that public assumptions of such a link made it harder for them to counter negative impressions. Jung’s account thus serves as an interpretive framework for the possible recurrence of old religious imagery, not a warrant to collapse separate groups, beliefs, and histories into a single phenomenon.