Modern Norse pagan revival

Modern Norse pagan revival is the contemporary renewal and reconstruction of pre-Christian Northern European religious practice, described in the book as both an independently developing spiritual movement and a potent source of cultural imagery. Its significance lies partly in that distinction: organized Ásatrú communities existed beyond Black Metal, even as musicians and public debate made the old gods newly visible—and often confused religious revival with Satanism, criminality, or racial politics.

Ancestral religion and cultural inheritance

The book presents the revival not as proof of an uninterrupted religious tradition, but as a modern return to beliefs and symbols understood by their adherents as ancestral. Ásatrú, glossed as loyalty to the Æsir, is described as a modern effort to revive and reconstruct the religious beliefs of Norse and Teutonic Northern Europeans. The account also notes that some adherents regard Christianity as an alien faith imposed on their forebears. That opposition gives the revival a historical and political charge: the past is not simply studied but invoked as a source of identity and spiritual authority.

Music helped make this inheritance newly legible. Bathory’s early records drew on Satanism and horror, but the band’s direction changed as its music developed. With Blood Fire Death in 1988, Bathory turned from the childish and foreign Satanism of its initial inspiration toward the mythological legacy of its own forebears. The cover depicted the Oskorei, the Wild Hunt of Scandinavian and Teutonic folklore, while the album’s music joined raw aggression to more orchestrated compositions and more considered lyrics. The book identifies this turn toward ancestral archetypes as an important influence on the Black Metal generation that followed.

Bathory continued this exploration on Hammerheart, released in 1990. The record approached the mindset of a Viking Age practitioner of Ásatrú from a more personal perspective. In this musical context, religious revival became not only a matter of organizations and worship, but also a way to imagine how an earlier worldview might be inhabited in the present. The book treats this use of inherited imagery as influential without suggesting that musical representation and religious practice were the same thing.

Archetypes and the language of revival

The book sets contemporary heathen interest alongside the idea that old religious forms may return through forces people do not fully direct. Carl Gustav Jung’s 1936 essay Wotan proposed that people could be seized by the archetype of an ancient deity rather than consciously deciding to revive an earlier worldview. Jung connected this process to Germany’s movement away from Christianity in the 1930s and predicted that different aspects of the Wotan archetype might emerge over time. The book presents this as an interpretive explanation, not a demonstrated cause of modern religious revival.

A more personal account appears in the story of Stephen McNallen, who is generally credited with sparking the contemporary revival of Ásatrú, or Odinism, in the English-speaking world. In the late 1960s, McNallen felt drawn to investigate the religion of the heathen Norsemen. He composed rituals for the Norse and Germanic gods, sought others with a similar spiritual interest, and founded the Viking Brotherhood, which later evolved into the Ásatrú Free Assembly. He subsequently found that people in distant places had experienced a comparable pull at roughly the same time.

The book notes that groups devoted to Northern European gods also appeared in England, Iceland, and the eastern United States without knowledge of one another. It leaves the coincidence open to interpretation, suggesting Jung’s idea of Wotan redivivus as one possible explanation. The contrast is important: McNallen’s account begins with conscious inquiry and organization, while the archetypal account describes a broader, partly involuntary attraction. Neither explanation is presented as settling why the revival took hold.

Religious organizations and practice

In Norway and Sweden, interest in the indigenous religion of the forefathers had grown sufficiently for organized groups to become publicly recognizable. Draupnir was acknowledged by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization. Draupnir and Bifrost held regular gatherings that included blot, described in the book as symbolic sacrifice to the old deities. These details place the revival in the sphere of organized religious life, rather than treating it as only a musical style or an individual aesthetic.

The book explicitly distinguishes these Nordic religious practitioners from the Black Metal scene: it states that there was no specific connection between them. That separation did not prevent public association. The assumption that heathen organizations were linked to Black Metal became a serious liability for groups trying to dispel negative impressions of their religion. Their need to explain what they were not was itself evidence of how strongly public understanding had been shaped by the more sensational image of the scene.

Vikernes and the contested public image

Varg Vikernes’s public declarations helped blur the distinction between organized Ásatrú and Black Metal. He described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and framed his justification for church arson as an attempt to make Odin present in people’s souls. He also presented the old Northern deities as archetypes of a Northern people and heathenism as an expression of inherited nature. These statements joined religious revival to his own racial and political ideas; the book does not present them as representative of the broader heathen organizations.

The consequences of that association were not confined to public labeling. When Draupnir expressed frustration at repeatedly having to deny any common ground with Black Metal and Satanism, Vikernes interpreted the situation as a form of Christian persecution. The account points to the mismatch: his frequent statements about heathen belief were among the factors that made the distinction harder for other practitioners to communicate. The same religious language could therefore serve one person’s self-presentation while imposing reputational costs on communities that rejected the association.

Growth, media, and significance

The book’s account also records a wider rise in interest in Nordic religion in Norway. One interview response describes that interest as having grown rapidly over the preceding five years and refers to amusement parks with areas devoted to the old Norwegian religion. The speaker calls it a major movement in Norwegian spiritual life and larger than Satanism. This is an interviewee’s assessment, rather than a quantified measure, but it reinforces the book’s portrayal of heathen revival as broader than the Black Metal milieu.

Media coverage often obscured such distinctions. In its account of the 1993 Black Metal headlines, the book describes teenagers adopting shifting identities associated with being evil, including Nazi, Satanist, and Odinist labels, while some acted against people or property. Coverage helped create the impression of a large-scale Satanic assault on Christians, prompting fearful reactions from police and church congregations. The book thus shows how a distinct religious revival could be drawn into a sensational public narrative even when the religious groups themselves denied a connection.

It also describes a feedback loop between publicity and subcultural status. An interviewee who initially doubted that the media had fanned the Black Metal crimewave later reconsidered, arguing that mass coverage helped Vikernes build street credibility and a near-mythological public image. Attention intensified competition over who would become the scene’s dominant personality. This does not establish that media coverage caused the revival or the crimes; it shows instead how publicity altered the setting in which religious and ancestral imagery circulated. Modern Norse pagan revival emerges as a plural phenomenon: organized worship, deliberate reconstruction, musical inspiration, and politicized self-mythology overlapped in public perception, but the book repeatedly cautions against treating them as interchangeable.