Mattias Gardell

Mattias Gardell is a scholar of religious anthropology whose work connects the study of radical religion with the political subcultures that sometimes surround it. In examining Varg Vikernes and theories linking Aryan identity to extraterrestrial origins, Gardell shifts attention from whether such claims are credible to how they acquire credibility within communities already suspicious of mainstream knowledge.

Identity and Research

Gardell is a lecturer in religious anthropology at the University of Stockholm. His research has focused on new and emergent religions, including Wicca, and he is the author of a book on the Nation of Islam, Countdown to Armageddon. The range of these subjects situates his work across movements that differ in doctrine but invite close attention to how religious and political ideas take shape.

For a later research project, Gardell spent a year travelling around North America and interviewing figures associated with neo-Nazi and Ásatrú movements. He described these as milieus that sometimes overlap, particularly in the case of Vikernes. That overlap made Vikernes a useful point of reference for Gardell’s discussion: the question was not simply how an individual arrived at an unusual belief, but how racial politics, religious identity, and alternative cosmologies could meet.

Stigmatized Knowledge

In an interview about Nazi interest in UFOs, Gardell considered whether such ideas might serve as a tactical route for spreading National Socialist ideology beyond its existing adherents. He treated that possibility as difficult to measure rather than as a universal explanation. Ernst Zündel, he suggested, illustrated how a propagator of National Socialist ideology might use claims about hidden or suppressed knowledge to reach an audience otherwise outside the movement.

Gardell described Zündel’s central political project as Holocaust revisionism. In Zündel’s account, Jewish control of the media and education explains why most people accept that the Holocaust occurred. To find listeners receptive to that claim beyond National Socialist circles, Gardell reasoned, a propagator would seek people willing to credit ideas widely rejected by others. Belief in a hollow Earth inhabited by a technologically advanced superior race, whose members sometimes visit the surface in flying saucers, could indicate an audience open to that kind of argument. The example makes the connection strategic as well as ideological: one marginal belief may help identify people receptive to others.

Gardell also proposed a broader explanation for why UFO theology could appeal to Aryan revolutionaries. Both UFO believers and white National Socialist racists, he argued, may treat as valid forms of knowledge that universities and mainstream society reject or ridicule. For a person already invested in one stigmatized claim, its exclusion from accepted institutions can be read not as a reason to dismiss it but as evidence that it contains something important. Gardell connected this openness with receptivity to alternative medicine, lost-world theories, parapsychology, alternative religions, and alternative science. He presented this as a possible explanation for a pattern, not as proof that every adherent shares the same motives.

Vikernes and the UFO Ideas

Gardell placed the UFO theories associated with Vikernes within this wider history rather than treating them as wholly unprecedented. Fascination with extraterrestrial connections and Aryan extraterrestrial origins, he noted, reaches back to the 1940s and 1950s, even as such ideas had become more prominent in the circles he was discussing. A claim can seem novel within a particular combination of heathen identity and National Socialist politics while drawing on a much older repertoire of speculation.

Vikernes, according to Gardell, explained the development of his ideas through what he called deep intuition, understood as knowledge arising from the blood. Gardell connected the notion of blood carrying inherited information to ideas common in Nazi circles and observed a possible comparison with Carl Gustav Jung’s collective unconscious. But he did not treat the comparison as evidence that Vikernes had discovered UFOs through racial memory. He questioned that account by pointing to the presence of UFO ideas in Vikernes’s surrounding environment: it was difficult to imagine that the conclusion about flying saucers from Sirius arose from inherited knowledge alone when UFOs were already part of the world around him.

That surrounding world included political and publishing contacts. Zorn 88, described as an orthodox Hitlerite organization and later renamed the Norwegian National Socialist Movement, published Gjallarhorn, whose editor Erik Rune Hansen was also the organization’s secretary. Hansen had publicly claimed to have seen a UFO, and the magazine carried articles with an esoteric slant. These details make Gardell’s challenge to a purely inward explanation concrete: claims presented as arising from blood or intuition also circulated through identifiable political milieus and publications.

Significance of the Analysis

Gardell’s account draws a distinction between accepting a belief as true and explaining the social conditions that make it persuasive. His analysis does not reduce UFO theology to a cynical recruitment device, nor does it treat it as an isolated private revelation. Instead, it traces how distrust of mainstream institutions can link different kinds of rejected knowledge, and how existing political settings can give those ideas channels of circulation.

The result is a contextual reading of Vikernes’s claims. Their apparent originality does not erase older precedents; their appeal cannot be explained by doctrine alone; and the language of inherited intuition does not place them beyond social influence. Gardell’s contribution is to show how a cosmology can be both personally presented as deep or ancestral and sustained by a wider environment of political ideas, publications, and shared suspicion of conventional authority.