Wotan redivivus

Wotan redivivus describes the proposed return of an ancient Germanic god through modern people and movements, not simply a deliberate revival of old religious customs. The idea’s decisive force lies in its reversal of agency: in Carl Gustav Jung’s account, people do not necessarily choose to restore a pre-Christian worldview; they may instead be swept up by an archetype that has become active again. The book sets this interpretation beside later revivals of Norse religion, while stressing that contemporary heathen practitioners are not thereby connected to Black Metal.

Meaning and scope

The discussion begins from the wider late-twentieth-century revival of pre-Christian religions. Such revivals are presented as more than antiquarian interests: the old religions can exert a powerful attraction, and northern gods may stir feelings that resurface among descendants of their former worshippers. The phrase Wotan redivivus gives that resurgence a distinctly Jungian interpretation. What returns is not necessarily a consciously reconstructed doctrine but an inherited, instinctual force acting through modern consciousness.

That distinction matters to the argument. A movement may take shape through people who believe they are making new political or spiritual choices, while the interpretation offered here sees older archetypal patterns working beneath those choices. The account does not establish such possession as an independently verified cause. It presents Jung’s controversial explanation as a way of understanding how a pre-Christian figure might become newly influential in a society that considered itself to have moved beyond the past.

Jung’s account of “Wotan”

In March 1936, Carl Gustav Jung published an essay entitled “Wotan” in Neue Schweizer Rundschau. Written a few years after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the essay argued that the Nazi movement resulted from mass possession by the god Wotan. In Jung’s reading, the movement’s emergence was not merely a political phenomenon: it also expressed the renewed activity of an ancient religious archetype.

Jung traced elements of the heathen revival to German writers, especially Nietzsche. He regarded such figures as having been seized by Wotan and as transmitting aspects of the god’s archetypal nature. The volcano image in the essay makes the logic vivid: a force long treated as dormant can erupt again, unexpectedly, within a country believed to have outgrown the Middle Ages. The old god’s return is thus figured as a break in the modern story of steady progress, not as a simple restoration of an intact ancient faith.

The essay also described Jugendbewegung, or Youth Movement, sacrifices of sheep to Wotan at the solstice. Jung used these practices to illustrate what he understood as Germany’s movement away from Christianity under the ancient deity’s influence. He predicted that, although the 1930s displayed Wotan’s more furious qualities, other aspects of the archetype would appear in the years or decades ahead: ecstatic and mantic characteristics as well as frenzy. His account therefore treated the contemporary moment as one phase in a longer, changing manifestation.

The Wild Hunt and archetypal return

Carl Gustav Jung later said that both Nietzsche and he himself had experienced dream visits from the ghostly procession of the Wild Hunt. The book identifies the German tradition with Oskorei, linking the dream image to a wider northern European motif. This detail extends the argument beyond public movements: archetypal resurgence could, in Jung’s view, be encountered in personal dreams as well as in collective history.

The Wild Hunt also gives the idea a form suited to the language of possession. The returning past is not described as a quiet inheritance but as a spectral procession that appears to the dreamer. At the collective level, Jung saw the old god’s force moving through a political movement; at the personal level, he recalled dream encounters with the Hunt. These are elements of Jung’s interpretation as reported in the book, rather than proof that an ancient deity literally caused either experience.

Modern heathen revival

The book finds a parallel, though not an identity, between Jung’s account of atavistic religious force and Stephen McNallen’s experience of attraction to Norse religion. In the late 1960s, McNallen felt drawn to investigate the religion of the heathen Norsemen. His discoveries inspired him to compose worship rituals for Norse and Germanic gods and to seek others who shared the same spiritual path.

McNallen founded the Viking Brotherhood, which later evolved into the Ásatrú Free Assembly. He then found that people in distant parts of the Western world had experienced a similar Odinic pull at roughly the same time, without knowing of one another. Groups devoted to the gods of Northern Europe arose in England, Iceland, and the East Coast of the United States, alongside McNallen’s efforts in Texas. The book emphasizes the apparently simultaneous and uncoordinated character of these developments; it does not claim that Jung’s theory proves why they occurred. It suggests that the Jungian explanation of Wotan redivivus is as reasonable as any for their organic, synchronistic pattern.

Relation to Black Metal

Interest in ancestral religion also grew in Norway and Sweden. Draupnir was recognized by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization, while groups including Bifrost held regular gatherings and offered blot, or symbolic sacrifice, to the old deities. These examples show that modern heathen practice had an institutional and communal presence beyond private spiritual attraction.

The book explicitly rejects a specific connection between these religious practitioners and the Black Metal scene. Public assumptions that the two were linked had instead become a serious liability for the heathen groups, making it harder for them to dispel negative impressions of their religion. Vikernes’s frequent public discussion of his own heathen beliefs further complicated that task. In this context, Wotan redivivus names a proposed pattern of religious and archetypal return; it does not make every contemporary expression of Norse religion part of the same political or musical phenomenon.