The Armanen-Orden (AO; German for "Armanen Order", "Order of the Armanen") is was founded as a revival of the Ariosophical Guido von List Society by German occultistAdolf Schleipfer (b. 1947) and his then-wife Sigrun von Schlichting.[1]
The Armanen-Orden is a neopagan esoteric society and religious order reviving the occult teachings of Guido von List. Its internal structure is organized in nine grades, inspired by Freemasonry. The Order is openly ethnonationalist and racialist, and rejectsrace-mixing as a modern degeneration.Schleipfer had discovered some of List's works in an antique bookstore in the mid-1960s, and was inspired to found the runic and Armanist magazine Irminsul[2] in hopes of attracting suitable people for a revived Listian order. He was appointed the new president and continued to publish Irminsul as the "Voice of the Guido von List Society."
Schleipfer also attended meetings of a related organisation, the Gode-Orden (Gothi-Order), which propagated a similar mixture of occultvölkisch thinking. There he met his wife Sigrun Schleipfer, née Hammerbacher (1940–2009),[3] daughter of the völkisch writer and former NSDAP district leader, Dr. Hans Wilhelm Hammerbacher.[4] In 1976 the Schleipfers founded the Armanen-Orden (Armanen Order) as the reorganised Guido von List Society.[5] Since then, Adolf and Sigrun have served as the Grandmasters of the Order, although they have divorced and Sigrun now refers to herself as "Sigrun von Schlichting" or "Sigrun Freifrau von Schlichting". They also revived the High Armanen Order (HAO) and brought it to "an unprecedented level of activity".[6]
The Armanen-Orden celebrates seasonal festivities in a similar fashion as Odinist groups do and invites interested people to these events. The highlights are three 'Things' at Ostara (Easter), Midsummer and Fall (Wotan's sacrificial death), which are mostly celebrated at castles close to sacred places, such as the Externsteine. The author Stefanie von Schnurbein attended a Fall Thing in 1990 and gives the following report in Religion als Kulturkritik (Religion and Cultural Criticism):
…the participants meet in a room decorated with hand-woven wall hangings and pictures of Germanic gods, Odin and Frigga in this case… At one end of the room is a table covered with black cloth. On this a 4 ft. high wooden Irminsul, a spear, a sword, a replica of a sun disc chariot, a leather-bound copy of The Edda as well as ritual bowls and candles are placed. The participants are seated in a semi-circle in front of the table, the front row being occupied by Order members clothed in their ritual garb (black shirts for the men and long white dresses for the women; both have the AO emblem sewn on them)… after several invocations the 'spirit flame', symbolising Odin in the spirit world, is lit in a bowl filled with lamp oil. The purpose of this cultic celebration is the portrayal of Odin's concentration from spirit into matter. After a recital of the first part of Odin's rune poem () from The Edda, the "blood sacrifice" commences, in which a bowl with animal blood is raised to the beat of a gong and an invocation of sacrifice. Then Odin is called into the realm by the participants who assume the Odal rune stance, whisper 'W-O-D-A-N' nine times and finally sing an ode to Odin with the following words: 'Odin-Wodan come to us, od-uod, uod'. Wodan's sacrifice to himself is symbolised by extinguishing the flame.
In 1977 Sigrun Schleipfer founded the Gemeinschaft zur Erhaltung der Burgen (Society for the Conservation of Castles), which proclaims castles to be among the "last paradises of the romantic era" in this cold modern age and had as its primary aim the purchase and restoration of a castle for the Order. In 1995, the society finally acquired the castle of Rothenhorn in Szlichtyngowa(Poland), a run-down structure dating back to the 12th century, though most of the complex dates from the 16th century.
Over many years, Adolf and Sigrun have republished all of List's works (and many others relating to the Armanen runes) in their original German. Adolf Schleipfer has also contributed an article to The Secret King, a study of Karl Maria Wiligut by Stephen Flowers andMichael Moynihan, in which he points out the differences between Wiligut's beliefs and those which are accepted within Odinism or Armanism.[7]
Paul C. Bauschatz in 1976 suggested that the term reflects a pagan ritual which had a "great religious significance in the culture of the early Germanic people".[1] Bauschatz' lead is followed only sporadically in modern scholarship, but his interpretation has inspired such solemn drinking-rituals inGermanic neopaganism.
The ritual according to Bauschatz was always conducted indoors, usually in achieftain's mead hall. Symbel involved a formulaic ritual which was more solemn and serious than mere drinking or celebration. The primary elements of symbel are drinking ale or mead from a drinking horn, speech making (which often included formulaic boasting and oaths), and gift giving. Eating and feasting were specifically excluded from symbel, and no alcohol was set aside for the gods or other deities in the form of a sacrifice.[2]
Accounts of the symbel are preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (lines 489-675 and 1491–1500), Dream of the Rood and Judith, Old Saxon Heliand, and the Old Norse Lokasenna as well as other Eddic and Saga texts, such as in the Heimskringla account of the funeral ale held by King Sweyn, or in theFagrskinna.
Bragafull
The bragarfull "promise-cup" or bragafull "best cup" or "chieftain's cup" (compare Bragi) was in Norse culture a particular drinking from a cup or drinking horn on ceremonial occasions, often involving the swearing of oaths when the cup or horn was drunk by a chieftain or passed around and drunk by those assembled. The names are sometimes anglicized as bragarful and bragaful respectively.
That the name appears in two forms with two meanings makes it difficult to determine the literal meaning. The word bragr 'best, foremost' is a source for its first element. The form bragafull (but notbragarfull) can also be interpreted as 'Bragi's cup', referring to the Bragi, god of poetry, though no special connection to Bragi appears in any of the sources.
Snorri Sturluson in his Heimskringla, in the Saga of Hákon the Good, describes the custom of the bragarfull at feasts:
The fire was in the middle of the floor of the temple, and over it hung the kettles, and the full goblets were handed across the fire; and he who made the feast, and was a godi ['chief'], blessed the full goblets, and all the meat of the sacrifice. And first Odin's goblet was emptied for victory and power to his king; thereafter, Njörd's and Freyja's goblets for peace and a good season. Then it was the custom of many to empty the bragafull; and then the guests emptied a goblet to the memory of departed friends, called the minni ['remembrance'].
In Ynglinga saga section of the same work, Snorri relates:
It was the custom at that time that he who gave an heirship-feast after kings or jarls, and entered upon the heritage, should sit upon the footstool in front of the high seat, until the full bowl, which was called the bragafull, was brought in. Then he should stand up, take the bragafull, make solemn vows to be afterwards fulfilled, and thereupon empty the beaker. Then he should ascend the high seat which his father had occupied; and thus he came to the full heritage after his father. Now it was done so on this occasion. When the full bragafull came in, King Ingjald stood up, grasped a large bull's horn, and made a solemn vow to enlarge his dominions by one half, towards all the four corners of the world, or die; and thereupon pointed with the horn to the four quarters.
The Fagrskinna (a 13th century history of the Kings of Norway), has a similar account in respect to Svein Forkbeard, mentioning first ceremonial drinkings dedicated to the greatest of one's kindred, then to Thor or others of the gods. Then the bragarfull was poured out and when the giver of the feast had drunk this, he was to make a vow, to be also sworn by those present with him, and only then to sit himself on throne of the deceased.
A prose passage inserted in the Poetic Edda poem Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar relates:
Hedin was coming home alone from the forest one Yule-eve, and found a troll-woman; she rode on a wolf, and had snakes in place of a bridle. She asked Hedin for his company. "Nay," said he. She said, "Thou shalt pay for this at thebragarfull." That evening the great vows were taken; the sacred boar was brought in, the men laid their hands thereon, and took their vows at the bragarfull. Hedin vowed that he would have Sváva, Eylimi's daughter, the beloved of his brother Helgi; then such great grief seized him that he went forth on wild paths southward over the land, and found Helgi, his brother.
Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks relates that Hjörvard, the son of Arngrim, promised at his bragarfull to wed Ingeborg the princess of Sweden, and the legends of Ragnar Lodbrok relate that the Geatish jarl Herraud promised his daughter to anyone who could liberate her from a dragon or talk to her in its presence.
IF CHRISTIAN IDENTITY remains the major religious expression of
white Aryan racial identity in the United States, several new racial religions on
the American far right simply reject the Christian heritage of the West altogether. Regarding Christianity itself as a Jewish cultural product with its origins in the Middle East, the Odinist movement articulates an unabashed
racial paganism, invoking the gods of the Norse and Teutonic pantheons. By
reviving the festivals, rituals and customs of the ancient Indo-European peoples, they wish to break what they regard as the alien, imposed dominion of
Christianity after two thousand years. This spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan
ancestral gods is intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that
supports their tribal feeling and partial view of humanity.
Odinism today represents the battlefront of racist paganism in support of
a white Aryan revolutionary path in the United States with associated
branches and chapters in Europe, South Africa and Australia. Its devotees
practice imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal
fellowship based on Norse and Germanic models while embracing the ideals
of white supremacism and National Socialism. In this chapter we will trace
the German origins and history of Odinism in the English-speaking world
before focusing on several examples of the movement: Wyatt Kaldenberg and
his Pagan Revival network, which focuses on Odin’s warrior aspect and advocates a cult of violence; Jost Turner and his NS Kindred, which celebrates
Odin as a master of mysteries in a devotional cult of Aryan mysticism with
meditation and yoga; and the Wotansfolk movement of David and Katja Lane
with Ron McVan, which elaborates a full-blown Wotanist cult for the millenarian salvation of the endangered Aryan race.
The origins of Odinism as a self-conscious reconstruction of pre-Christian Teutonic beliefs lie in nineteenth-century Germany. Against a background
of burgeoning nationalism, völkischwriters speculated on the Germans’ spiritual resources in resisting Roman conquest and their recalcitrant conversion
to Christianity under Charlemagne. In his widely read novel, Ein Kampf um
Rom (1867), the historian Felix Dahn lauded the ancient Germans for their
257manly heroism, valor and defiance, in contrast to Christian humility, repentance and sense of sin. From the 1880s onward, the Germanic gods Odin,
Donar, and Thor became popular subjects of lithographic art by G. E. Doepler and F. W. Heine. In 1893 the Viennese folklorist Guido von List began
writing about the Wotanist priesthood and attempted to salvage its ancient
religion from the Norse sagas, with special emphasis given to Odin (Wotan)
and his runic wisdom. List’s early attempt to revive Wotanism through his
books and his High Armanist Order (HAO) was emulated in 1912 by a secret
nationalist group, the Germanenorden, which performed quasi-Masonic rituals based on the figures of ancient Germanic mythology.1
In 1911 Otto Sigfrid Reuter founded the Deutsche Orden and the
Deutschreligiöse Gemeinschaft (renamed the Deutschgläubige Gemeinschaft
after 1918) as Germanic religious groups dedicated to a god closer to national
identity. In 1924, members of these groups and the Jungborn, a league within
the German Youth Movement, combined to form “Die Nordungen” as the
leading neo-Germanic religious circle of the Weimar era. Otger Gräff, a leader
of the Youth Movement, explained the role of ancient Germanic mythology
in this new religiosity: “Donar and Baldur, Loh and Froh are but names by
which the Teuton signified the divine mystery he felt within himself.” The ancient Germanic gods were no antiquarian constructs but rather archetypes
accessible to contemporary Germans who realized their true spiritual identity. The first issue of Nordungen declared: “Balder-Sigfrid still lives today in
the best of our people, his essence of sunlit liberation is alive in all our longings and ambition, and who would deny that Wotan, the eternal wanderer and
Faustian seeker of experience, is still alive as once in Nordic man?”2
During the 1920s many völkisch and Youth Movement groups followed a
neopagan cult with solstice festivals and pious invocations to the Germanic
deities as archetypes and forces of nature. The new deutschgläubige faith
was elaborated by numerous writers, including Jakob Wilhelm Hauer,
Bernhard Kummer, Alfred Conn and Adolf Kroll, who sought to define
Germanic religion as an innate spirituality, inherited from one’s racial forbears, a living counterpart of the homeland, one’s blood, feeling and thinking.3
It was thus irreconcilable with the universalist claims of Christianity
to absolute truth. However, German neopaganism in the Weimar era usually recognized that a naive revival of the ancient Wotan cult was impossible for modern man. It rather sought a synthesis of German spirituality
from the Norse sagas and the Icelandic Edda, together with the German
mystical tradition and the idealist philosophy of Kant, Schelling and
Fichte.4
In his famous essay on neo-Germanic spirituality, Carl Gustav Jung
characterized this restless quest for a new Germanic spirituality as the
258 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMeruption of the archetype “Wotan”, as a “living and unfathomable tribal
god” among the Germans after the First World War.5
In the following account of racial paganism in modern America, I am
heavily indebted to Mattias Gardell, who has allowed me to make use of a
chapter in his forthcoming work, Gods of the Blood: Race, Ethnicity and the
Pagan Revival, to be published by Duke University Press. According to
Gardell’s research, Odinism began its modern career with the establishment
of the Odinist Fellowship in 1969 by Else Christensen. Born at Esbjerg on the
Danish west coast in 1913, Else Oscher was involved in revolutionary unionism and politics in Copenhagen during the 1930s. She was eventually attracted to the left-wing Strasserite wing of the emerging Danish National Socialist Workers’ Party, and in 1937 married Alex Christensen, who had served
as a senior aide to the party leader later ousted in 1933. Following the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1940, Alex was briefly imprisoned as a dissident. In
1951 the Christensens emigrated to Canada, where they settled in Toronto.
Else Christensen’s interest in racial radicalism brought her into contact with
Willis Carto, a leading figure of the American far right, and James K. Warner,
New York organizer of Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. Carto introduced her
to the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, Oswald Spengler’s American eulogist
and author of Imperium. Abandoning the idea of using Odinism as the religious counterpart of National Socialism in America, Warner gave Christensen
his Norse material, which included the writings of Alexander Rud Mills.6
Mills was an Australian lawyer and Nazi sympathizer who promoted a
racial pagan religion within the context of the British Empire of the 1920s. In
his most influential book,The Odinist Religion: Overcoming Jewish Christianity (1930), he described how the Nordic races had built the civilizations of
Sumeria, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome. Weakened by “foreign immigration
and miscegenation,” these racial paragons then absorbed the false Jewish-Platonic idea of a transcendent God and eventually progressed to the Christian
belief that all men were created equal.7
Mills sought to restore the racial vigor
of the pre-Christian English people through his Anglecyn Church of Odin,
which was intended to replace all British-Anglican-Christian insitutions with
an Anglo-Saxon racial religion. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mills helped create small Odinic polygamist colonies in Australia, Great Britain, South Africa
and North America, but these pagan communes probably soon lapsed. In the
1950s, Mills launched the First Church of Odin, again with little lasting success.8
Mixing Odinism with occult and Masonic notions, Mill’s writings remained his only tangible legacy, which Else and Alex Christensen discovered
in the early 1960s while immersing themselves in the writings of Yockey and
Spengler.
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 259Following Spengler, Yockey had argued that all cultures follow an organic pattern by passing through the successive phases of birth, growth,
maturity, fulfillment and death. Each culture has a soul that determines its
religion, science, art, politics and morality throughout its life span. Races
are the raw material for cultural expression, differing in their degree of will
to power. Anticipating the future fulfillment of Western culture in a powerful Eurasian imperium, Yockey expected to see the emergence of a robust,
white Western race.9
However, this outcome was presently frustrated by the
spiritual malaise of the West, which Yockey elaborated as the pathologies of
culture-parasitism, culture-distortion, and culture-retardation. Cultureparasitism denotes the presence of alien groups that cannot participate in
the historical destiny of a culture. Yockey believed that black and Asian
peoples in the West replaced an unborn indigenous white population, thus
depriving the Western culture of proper raw material for the fulfillment of
its destiny.10
Yockey saw the Jews as the most dangerous form of parasitism in the West,
namely culture-distortion, when “outer life-forms are warping the Culture
from its true Life-path.”11During the Middle Ages, the Jews had remained secluded in their ghettos, an inert organism outside the mainstream of Western
development. But once Western culture reached its maturity in the age of rationalism around 1750, the Jews sensed their opportunity. With their distorting ideas of materialism, economics and usury, and opposition to absolutism,
they undermined the spirit and traditional elites of the West. Seeking their
own advantage and emancipation, they furthered democracy, equality, feminism, capitalism and socialism during the nineteenth century.12 As a colony
of Western culture, America had been especially vulnerable to this influence,
which was exacerbated by high levels of Jewish immigration from the 1880s
onward. Succumbing to this culture-distortion, America was subverted from
its historical destiny and was induced to intervene in Europe when Hitler initiated the first phase of the new authoritarian Imperium.13
Yockey saw the defeat of the Axis as a terrible lost opportunity for Western
revival. Writing in 1948, he noted that “a deep yearning is going through the
western world to be free from the dirt and uncleanness of party-politics, classwar, financial usury, and the complete absence of the heroic spirit.” The future
state form, he was certain, was the resurgence of authority. Honor, religion
and a stern socialism will sweep away the distortions of democracy, money
power and finance capitalism. This new racial state will undertake a massive
war for the survival of Western civilization, while its “new, total, political, organizatory, authoritarian Imperialism [. . .] will plant the Western banner on
the highest peaks and the most remote peninsulas.”14
260 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMElse Christensen’s ideas for an Odinist revival of Aryan culture were directly inspired by her reading of Yockey, Mills and Jungian psychology.15 She
agreed with Yockey that Western civilization was in a late degenerate phase,
undermined by Christianity, capitalism and communism. Noting Yockey’s
emphasis that “disease to a culture can only be a spiritual phenomenon,” she
believed that only a religious antidote could arrest and reverse the current decline of the Aryan West.16 This remedy lay in Mills’s revival of Norse paganism as the primordial expression of the Aryan Folk Soul: “The role of Odinism is clear—the pathogens must be destroyed, and healthy organisms raised
to serve the purposes of Aryan spiritual liberation and all-round advancement.”17 Christensen identified the seeds of an Aryan cultural revival in “the
subconscious elements of Urd,” interpreted in Jungian terms as the genetic
transmission of the collective unconscious. By plumbing the archetypes of
the racial unconscious, white people could discover their ancestral wisdom.
Race and religion are thus organically related. The source of Odinism is thus
biological, and “its principles are encoded in our genes....Odinism embodies [. . .] the reality of multifaceted struggle [to defeat our enemies] and fulfill
our destiny.”18
According to Gardell, Else Christensen became the most public voice of
Odinism in the United States from the early 1970s onward, regularly publishing The Odinist newsletter and traveling widely from her base at Crystal
River, Florida. During the 1980s she established a prison outreach ministry
in the state, but the Odinist Fellowship tended to focus on literature and
ideas rather than ceremonies. Besides the celebration of Hitler’s birthday,
only four seasonal meetings were held with a ritual Norse sumbel (drinking
ceremony). Her politics remained left of center. Her call for Aryan religion,
freedom, consciousness and self-determination was embedded in a program for “retribalization,” with the decentralization of authority to small,
local self-governing units of free Aryan individuals.19 She praised the early
left-wing nationalist ideology of Mussolini and the Strasserite element in
National Socialism, and saw totalitarian government as a betrayal of both
movements’ original revolutionary promise. Her anarchist tendencies are
always colored by racial collectivism, whereby the individual’s needs must
be subordinate to tribal welfare. “Man is a social animal, capable of self-realization only within a community of racial and ethnic kin.”20As racial purity was a paramount requirement, all race mixing was strictly forbidden in
these free Odinist communes.21
While Christensen was advancing her racial Odinism in the 1970s, the
alternative movement of Ásatrú, more concerned with the practice of rituals and Norse magic, was started by Steve McNallen in Texas. Ásatrú is an
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 261Icelandic word meaning “belief in the Æsir (gods).” Their memberships often
overlapped, but by the end of the 1970s, the political divide between Odinism
and McNallen’s Ásatrú Free Assembly (AFA) had become acute. The presence
of racists and Nazis was an embarrassment to McNallen and other AFA members, whose racial pride was secondary to an exploration of spirituality. In
1978 he demanded that all AFA members forgo Nazi uniforms and insignia,
but the underlying political tension in the organization eventually led to its
demise in 1987. Successor organizations were Mike Murray’s Ásatrú Alliance
and Edred Thorsson’s Ring of Troth. Mike Murray had been a young member
of Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, then joined Christensen’s Odinist Fellowship, eventually serving as vice-president, before coming to the ritual spirituality of the AFA. His Ásatrú Alliance has disowned racial affiliations, although
individual Odinists continue to interact with the Alliance in its magazine Vor
Trú and at Althings (annual gatherings). By contrast, the Ring of Troth is
aligned with the wiccan and neopagan communities, where multiracialism is
not at issue.22
McNallen’s attempt to weed out Nazis from the AFA led to more radical initiatives in the Odinist movement. Among those who left were Jost Turner,
whose NS Kindred is the subject of later discussion. Other former AFA
Aryanists Sigi Hubard, Tom Paget, Wyatt Kaldenberg and others built the
Greater Los Angeles area chapter of the Odinist Fellowship. Tom Paget invited
Tom Metzger, a notorious white racist then leading the White American Political Association, to speak at the chapter’s Folk Moot, after which Metzger was
a frequent guest at Odinist meetings. However, Else Christensen thought Metzger too racist, and members of the Arizona Kindred also wanted the Fellowship to be pro-white but not hostile to colored races and Jews. With Christensen urging restraint and a low profile, racist Odinists within the Los Angeles chapter wanted less ambiguous allies: Redbeard formed the racialist Thor’s
Hammer Kindred; Elton Hall broke with the Arizona Kindred and formed the
Jomsviking Kindred; Tom Paget and Wyatt Kaldenberg joined Metzger’s newly
formed White Aryan Resistance (WAR). Wyatt Kaldenberg became editor of
Metzger’s periodicalWARand promoted Odinism through his articles.23
Gardell informs us that Wyatt Kaldenberg was born in 1957, the son of a
Mormon family in a small California town. His early left-wing political involvement with the Young Socialist Alliance was soon overlaid with racial
awareness through fights with black fellow students, including Black Muslims. Impressed by the black separatist creed of the Nation of Islam, Kaldenberg sought a white racial religion for himself. He joined the AFA in the late
1970s but was disgusted by McNallen’s stand against Nazi sympathizers and
quickly gravitated toward Tom Metzger’s combative racism. Kaldenberg’s
262 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMWARarticles spewed a stream of abusive misanthropy and violent rhetoric to
promote a white revolution. His pagan worldview is essentially Manichaean,
seeing history and politics as a cosmic battle between the divine Aryans and
demonic, unnatural forces of Judeo-Christianity. The Aryans once lived in
harmony with nature and a golden age prevailed, but Judeo-Christianity
plunged the world into a dark age. The Aryan race is identified with the Earth,
life and nature, while the mud races are “death,”“the decay of winter” and “the
maggots which feed on life.” The Aryans must defeat this darkness, otherwise
winter will reign for an eternity.24
Pagan Revival started in the early 1990s as an irregular, untitled, open
typewritten letter distributed to friends and fellow pagans. After a short phase
as an e-zine on the Internet, Kaldenberg began publishing the magazine as a
pulp paper tabloid in 1998. The periodical is described a “a voice of the Eurocentric polytheistic communities,” whose main goal is to promote the religion
of Ásatrú, which worships the living gods and goddesses of the Norse pantheon, including Odin, Thor and Frigga. Articles range from scholarly comparisons of the ancient Germanic, Zoroastrian and Vedic pagan religions to
an economic analysis of the growing Hispanic population of the southern
United States. Interspersed with these varied reprints and outside contributions are popular reviews of white power, industrial and metal music and
zines, and a busy section containing Kaldenberg’s extensive e-mail and postal
correpondence on religion, politics and sex.
Kaldenberg’s own vicious tirades and macho language in articles and
published letters are clearly targeted at alienated youth seeking a straightforward justification for violent acts against Jews and colored people. “We
must kill all who threaten our survival. We must crush dissent,” Kaldenberg asserts. “Mass murder is a sad thing, but Nature dealt the White Race
a raw hand. If we do not remove the dark ones from our land, then sooner
or later, all White nations will end up as dark as India.”25 He castigates
Christianity for renouncing aggression, violence and conquest. As an alien
Jewish import, Christianity has emasculated the pagan Aryan peoples by
alienating them from the vital forces of their own gods and goddesses.
“White people are so fucked up that we have demonized our native belief
system and glorified the fables and mythology of foreigners . . . the deranged rants of the termite Jesus devour the structures of our inner self.
Christianity is the theology of self-hating. . . . Praise Jesus and his cult of
universal brotherhood. Thanks to Jesus, soon we won’t even have a White
race.”26 He blames the Jews for Christianity, which has killed off 300 million European pagans over two thousand years. Faced with such an enemy,
he has little use for Holocaust denial, and asks, “Why we didn’t grease the
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 263Jews sooner?” The Holocaust should rather be celebrated: “Auschwitz and
Dachau [should be] religious shrines because evil died there.”27
Despite the left-wing inspiration of his youth, Kaldenberg despairs of the
majority, even of whites. His ideal society is structured on an ancient Viking
meritocracy with a ruling caste of Jarls, or warriors, with “the courage to fight
and die to defend the Volk.” From their ranks, all royalty and aristocracy were
selected, so that “the greatest Aryan men and women had the freedom to excel
to the top of society.” The middle caste was the Karls, or workers, who did not
fight but were the silent white majority of their day, “the mindless White
sheep herd.” Beneath them were the Thralls, a criminal slave caste.28Kaldenberg’s Aryan revolution has no time for folksy, egalitarian moots. Power must
be concentrated in the hands of the aristocratic warrior elite: “Our principal
adversary in the battle for White survival is the White majority. . . . Only the
rule by a tribal council made up of the best, most active, and most devoted
will free the sheep from the tyranny of themselves. . . . The masses will always
be sheep, waiting to be exploited by someone. . . . The White sheep herd were
born to serve The Illuminated Ones.”29
Kaldenberg’s Odinism, unlike the Ásatrú movement from which he defected, has little spirituality and few ceremonies. His vehement rejection of
Judeo-Christianity on political and sexual grounds leads to the celebration of
Odinism chiefly as a cult of aristocracy, power and the propagation of the
white race. As “the Pagan law of tooth and claw made our race great,” Kaldenberg directs most of his polemic against the liberal, cowardly and pusillanimous whites who are not prepared to work, to fight for space and to win suitable Aryan mates for the multiplication of their race. His rails against Christian Identity for fatally misdirecting the energies of Aryan revival toward a
false Jewish cult. However, given the armed superiority of the established authorities, he discourages the millennial insurrection of The Turner Diaries as
a suicide mission. More recently, he has endorsed the idea that Aryan revolutionaries should form a new corporatist elite, suggesting that Odinists take up
capitalism, invest in the stock market, and thus control the means that control the masses. “Whoever controls the Blue Chip companies controls America. Who controls America, controls Europe, NATO, and the United Nations.
Who controls the United Nations controls the Earth.”30 Ultimately, only
power and numbers count for Kaldenberg.
Jost Turner was a communal Odinist pioneer and also articulated a racialist Odinism that places great emphasis on spirituality and consciousness-raising. According to Mattias Gardell, he established his National Socialist Kindred during the 1980s on a folkish “back-to-the-land” Odinist commune
called Volksberg in the mountains of northern California. In his teaching
264 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMknown as Aryan Kriya, Jost combines Aryo-Vedic beliefs, Norse mythology
and Hindu Tantrism to direct the spiritual evolution of the Aryan individual
in accordance with racial archetypes. Born in 1946, Jost served for two years
in a combat role with a reconnaissance platoon of the 101st Airborne in the
Vietnam War. Embittered and traumatized, he returned to his native California in 1967 and began exploring occultism and oriental religions at the height
of the “flower power” era. At this time, he encountered the Autobiography of a
Yogi by Swami Parmahansa Yogananda, an Indian who had led a Hindu mission to the United States during the 1920s. Jost trained in Kriya yoga with Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship and lived for two years at an ashram in
Northern California.31 By the mid-1970s Jost became interested in Norse paganism and occult National Socialism and was involved with the Ásatrú Free
Fellowship. He married Stephen McNallen’s sister-in-law and the families remained close even after Jost left the AFA.
Jost sympathized with the hippies’ idea of “dropping out” and destroying
the system by non-participation. When hippies began to form self-sufficient
communes in the country, Jost was impressed by their mastery of homesteading, animal husbandry, and craft skills. Deciding to break with urban society, Jost and his family joined the commune movement and learned these
same skills. The hippie communes embraced an idealism based on left-wing
solidarity, oriental religion and a tolerance for drugs. Jost regarded their lack
of discipline and the rise of marijuana cultivation with its easy profits as the
chief factors that eventually destroyed both the ideals and the community
spirit. Once the former utopianism embraced a readiness for armed resistance
to outside interference, a defensive attitude led to an alliance between armed
hippie cultivators and right-wing revolutionaries. In this world of outlaw
rural enclaves, Jost saw the seeds of a back-to-the land movement for racially
conscious whites:
Today, the mountains are waiting for a new back-to-the-land movement, one
imbued with a true idealism, and a sound spiritual philosophy. This time it
will not be the pressures of White middle class materialism that will spur a
back-to-the-land movement. This time it will be the awesome pressure of
mass non-white immigration, and White second-class citizenship.
All of the elements for building an Aryan Folk community are here. The
time is now ripe. There is little future for White youth in any city. The cities are
becoming more and more non-white. Economically, it is getting more and
more difficult to survive in the city. The social welfare system is becoming
more and more anti-white. The schools are sorely anti-white. Today, the disenfranchised Aryan youth are beginning to stir. The Skinhead movement is a
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 265reaction to the growing non-white terrorism, and White indifference. It pains
me to see our youth in government prisons for smashing a few degenerate
heads in a futile attempt to fight back against overwhelming oppression. How
much more useful it would be to put their energy into hewing themselves a
homestead, and ultimately an Aryan community, out of the unsettled mountains. . . . Why not take up the old hippy slogan to “drop out,” and begin by destroying this anti-white system by non-participation?32
Jost lived for two years among the scattered barns and teepees of the hippies, but in the mid-1980s he began to lay the basis of the Volksberg commune, a folkish utopia for his National Socialist Kindred (NS Kindred) based
on Odinist principles. Located on a symbolic 88-acre plot in the hilly forests
of northern California, Volksberg achieved economic self-sufficiency through
farming and handicrafts, providing a small Wotan School for the commune
children. In Jost’s view, National Socialism was a modern revival of Aryan
tribalism structured along the lines of decentralized communalism. But this
collective vision was no mere peasant idyll, since Jost believed that such new
Folk-communities were the bridges to a more highly evolved species of Aryan
mankind. Only these Übermenschen (supermen) could lead the world back
into harmony with Nature and toward the golden age envisioned by Adolf
Hitler.33 In this way, Jost’s thought elaborated Else Christensen’s idea of the
awakening archetypes to include New Age notions taken from yoga and Hinduism. During the Volksberg years, the NS Kindred published numerous
tracts on National Socialism and racialist Odinism, with a growing emphasis
on self-development.
Inspired by Savitri Devi’s devotional work,The Lightning and the Sun, Jost
regarded Hitler as a semi-divine religious leader who had indicated the Aryan
spiritual future in the higher collective of the Folk. Like Savitri Devi, Jost also
embraced Hitler as an evangelist of love.“His words, his actions, his entire existence is testimony to his selfless love of his Folk. . . . Everything that he did
was done for the benefit of the Folk. The welfare and higher evolution of the
Folk is the only reason for the existence of National Socialism.”34 Jost’s eulogies of National Socialism as a selfless religion could easily be describing an
idealized form of Christianity or Hindu Vedanta. He attributed the failure of
National Socialism to the selfishness and materialism of the unregenerate
Aryans rather than the Jews and regarded Hitler as a martyr whose sacrifice
to these negative forces should awaken the Aryans to their real destiny. Once
the Aryan discovers true love, he clearly sees that the enemy images of colored
races, international finance and the Jews are “all just symptoms of a deadly
disease of selfishness.”35 This equation of National Socialism with a religion
266 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMof selflessness shows how far Jost had managed to combine his Odinism with
the teachings of Yogananda.
Disappointed with the poor quality of recruits to the Volksberg commune,
Jost abandoned the name “NS Kindred” in 1995 and concentrated his efforts
on publishing books on Aryan Kriya. His system of Aryan spiritual self-development was based on the tantric Hinduism of Yogananda, Norse mythology, and the Hindu-Nordic ideas of Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, whose
ideas had begun to spread in the pagan subculture by the early 1990s. Jost
claimed that Yogananda’s autobiography and ideas had been edited by disciples to gain acceptance in liberal America. Jost declared that Yogananda was
not anti-Hitler and supported the non-interventionist America First Movement during the Second World War. He upheld the Korean War against communism and “foresaw the massive problems” of multiculturalism.36 After
reading Savitri Devi’s account of Aryan Hinduism, Jost was convinced that
Kriya sprang from kindred blood. Its teaching reflected Odinism, while its
“path of accelerated evolution was what was symbolized by the allegories of
Wotan, Thor, Yggdrasil.”37
Gardell writes that Jost pursued the story of Yogananda’s own guru, Babaji
Nagaraj, a supposedly immortal Aryan siddha (self-realized divine being).
Legend records that Nagaraj (“king of the serpents” signifying mastery of
Kundalini) was born in a.d. 230. Practicing kundalini yoga, he achieved the
highest state of human evolution, physical immortality and divine enlightenment at the age of sixteen. Supposedly still alive today, Nagaraj leads an
ashram of fellow immortals in the Himalayas. According to Jost, this ashram
was the secret center sought by Miguel Serrano during his years in India.38
Many gurus, besides Yogananda, claim to have been sent by Nagaraj to teach
mankind the consciousness-raising techniques of Kriya yoga. Through his
own practice of Kriya, Jost came to feel that Nagaraj was now directing him
to take up the struggle against the forces of the dark age, or Kali Yuga. After
receiving instruction in the original 144 Kriyas (practices) by another American disciple of Nagaraj, Jost was told to open an Aryan Kriya path “especially
for Aryanists, Odinists, National Socialists, and other true heirs to the ancient
Aryan science of accelerated evolution.”39
Like Savitri Devi, Jost understood history in terms of the Hindu Puranic
divisions of time, but his system was more complex, involving two interacting cycles. The equinoctial cycle comprised two sets of four yugas, first declining then ascending over a period of 24,000 years, while the galactic cycle
takes an awesome four million years to complete. The Satya Yuga, or golden
age, corresponds to the Norse Axe Age, the Treta Yuga to the Sword Age, the
Dvapara Yuga to the Wind Age, and the Kali Yuga to the dark or Wolf Age.
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 267According to Jost, the last equinoctial Satya Yuga reached its climax around
11,500 b.c., when Aryan supermen created the ancient civilizations of Egypt,
Europe and South America, characterized by pyramids and megalithic monuments. The last equinoctial Kali Yuga lasted from a.d. 500 to 1600, with the
Renaissance marking the renewed ascent of the Dvapara Yuga. However, this
ascent is frustrated by the superimposition of the galactic time cycle, whereby
we are now entering a coincident galactic Kali Yuga lasting 400,000 years. This
has the effect of retarding planetary evolution by four hundred years, so that
selfishness and materialism are still more dominant than they would normally be in the ascending Dvapara Yuga.
This imminent upswing of the equinoctial cycle recalls Savitri Devi’s apocalyptic expectation of the end of the Kali Yuga. But Jost also argues that Aryan
man can even surmount the vicissitudes of the galactic Kali Yuga stretching
far into the future, thanks to the ancient science of accelerated human evolution developed by Babaji Nagaraj in a former golden age. “Even during the
dark ages of this earth men and women of sufficient physical development
could, by self-effort, attain super-consciousness in their life time.” Anticipating the galactic Wolf Age, Nagaraj and his brotherhood of immortal siddhas
also remained on earth “to preserve the ancient Aryan science” for a future revival of the race, which Jost is now undertaking.40
Aryan Kriya is based on the precepts of classical yoga involving a set of
moral requirements to purify body and mind through correct body posture
(asana) and meditation (dhyana). In the Yoga S¯utras of Patanjali, these prescriptions are summarized as a list of eight “limbs”: (1) abstention, comprising non-violence (ahimsa), truthfulness, non-theft, celibacy and non-greed;
(2) observance, comprising cleanliness, contentment, austerity, self-study and
attentiveness to God; (3) posture; (4) breath control; (5) sense withdrawal;
(6) concentration; (7) meditation; (8) contemplation. However, Jost differs
from Patanjali and most yoga teachers by claiming that celibacy is a Christianized distortion of true Aryan Kriya during the dark age.Ahimsa has also
been wrongly interpreted to mean one should harm no living creature. Jost
claims that one must be prepared to take up arms in a revolutionary war
against the oppressors. In the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita, “we may be compelled by duty to harm or kill [but] it is important that our mind be kept clear
of hatred, animosity and any desire for revenge.”41
The regime of Aryan Kriya involves daily baths, a macrobiotic diet, and a
rural life-style in harmony with nature. The Aryan should practice various
yoga techniques that recall Miguel Serrano’s Hindu-Aryan yoga of swastikaspinning chakras. Seated in the “swastika posture” (swastikasana), the adept
can rouse the kundalini energy at the base of the spine and circulate it
268 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMthrough the chakras by concentrating on images of the runes or the swastika,
and by chanting mantras like aum for the sixth chakra, called the Eye of
Wotan. Daily practice of these techniques together with a natural diet will
eliminate all disease, prevent aging and raise one’s level of consciousness.42 Its
goal is the self-realized Aryan man-god who is “One with Wotan.” This selfdevelopment toward the highest state of human evolution also has a cosmological significance. Aryan man is a microcosm corresponding to the macrocosm of the sun and the twelve houses of the zodiac. The spiritual advance of
the microcosm has a beneficial effect on the racial group and the outer world
during the galactic Wolf Age. Jost recalls that the ancient Aryan siddhas
“recognised that humans of high evolution were absolutely indispensable to
keep the planet from degenerating into chaos and complete destruction during the dark ages.”43
By translating notions of white supremacy into a discourse of spiritual
evolution, yoga and the teachings of ancient Hindu-Aryan masters, Jost offers
a form of racial Odinism closely related to the millennial piety of New Age religion. Only the Wolf Age could obscure the cosmic truth that individuals and
races are unequal, with the immortal Aryan masters representing the peak of
evolution. Through Aryan Kriya, Jost offers a means for Aryan individuals to
realize their higher spiritual evolution and thus transcend the present dark
age. “The siddhas are counting on all of us to use this technique to advance
our own evolution so that we can advance the evolution of the world and pull
it up from its tailspin into degeneracy.”44Aryan Kriya was hardly launched before Jost died of cancer in 1996. However, this mystical form of Odinism survives in the practice of small groups in the United States, Canada, Western Europe and Scandinavia. The ardent young Swedish National Socialist and former COTC supporter, Tommy Rydén, has also translated Jost’s works into
Swedish for distribution through his DeVries Institute (named for Arnold
DeVries, the co-author of Ben Klassen’s Salubrious Living).45
Founded by David and Katja Lane and their friend Ron McVan in 1995,
Wotansfolk is a highly prominent racial Odinist group in the United States
today. Following his conviction for the homicide of Alan Berg while a member of the Brüders Schweigen, David Lane was sentenced to 190 years’ imprisonment. The notoriety of the group and his enormous sentence have
combined with his prolific output of revolutionary writings in prison to make
him perhaps “the best known White political prisoner in the world today.”
David Lane also coined the 14 Words motto,“We must secure the existence of
our people and a future for White children,” based on the rising tide of color
in global population. Repeated in all Wotansfolk literature, this credo has now
spread throughout the magazines and music of the racist underground across
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 269the world. With a background in music and the creative arts, Ron McVan
joined the couple’s 14 Word Press at St. Maries, Idaho, in 1994 and has since
been a seminal influence in the development of the Wotansfolk religious philosophy. Through tireless correspondence and the publications of the 14
Word Press, Katja Lane has created a successful prison outreach program with
hundreds of prison kindreds in the United States. A website set up in 1995,
and subsequently expanded, has enabled Wotansfolk to establish kindreds in
many foreign countries.
David Eden Lane was one of four children born to an itinerant farmworker
in 1938 at Woden, Iowa (hence his pagan nom de plume, Wodensson). By
1943 the father’s desertion and family poverty had put the children in an orphanage, where young David was adopted by a traveling Lutheran minister
and his wife. Subjected to endless hours of services, prayers and Bible studies,
Lane early rejected Christianity and regarded his adoptive father as an “obnoxious buffoon.” During the 1960s he became increasingly disenchanted
with mainstream political parties and the betrayal of American commitment
to the Vietnam War. A brief association with the John Birch Society introduced him to a conspiratorial view of politics and media power. By 1978 he
was convinced that the Western nations were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy,
which seeks the extermination of the white Aryan race in order to dominate
the inferior races. Lane’s thought was thus primarily racialist, as a response to
the Jews’ alleged goal of their racial dominion and Aryan extinction. He lost
his Colorado real estate broker’s license by refusing to sell homes to colored
people in white areas, a penalty he attributed to Jewish power, and in 1981 he
attracted the attention the Anti-Defamation League by distributing thousands of copies his leaflet “The Death of the White Race” in Denver and surrounding towns.46
David Lane’s political education was strongly colored by Christian Identity. His natural sister, Jane Eden, was engaged to the Pennsylvania state leader
of Aryan Nations, and she also worked for Richard Butler’s church in Idaho.
Lane subsequently became involved in Aryan Nations as Butler’s “information minister.” Lane’s “The Death of the White Race” leaflet and his booklet,
Under This Sign You Shall Conquer, a study of “true Christianity and racism,”
were distributed by Aryan Nations. He also attended Pete Peters’s Laporte
Church of Christ, an important Identity congregation near Fort Collins, Colorado. Lane first met Robert Jay Mathews at the Aryan Nations world congress in July 1983 and was sworn into the Brüders Schweigen at its inauguration on 22 September 1983. Lane also introduced Mathews to his mistress,
Zillah Craig, and brought Mathews to Peters’s church.47 In June 1984 Alan
Berg, a Jewish radio talk-show host notorious for his baiting of far-right
270 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMgroups, was shot at his home in Denver by members of the Brüders
Schweigen. Lane was an early suspect and was captured on 31 March 1985.
He was tried in Seattle with other Brüders Schweigen members accused of
counterfeiting and of Berg’s murder and given forty years for racketeering
and conspiracy. In November 1987 he was convicted in a federal court in
Denver of violating Alan Berg’s civil rights by killing him and given another
150 years.48
Constantly radicalized by his struggle against racial integration and the
federal authorities, Lane sees the world in apocalyptic and Manichaean terms.
After the Seattle trial, Lane defined The Order’s mission in Identity terms as
the battle between the divine seedline and the Devil’s progeny.49 Protesting
that he was innocent of involvement in the Berg killing, Lane is convinced
that he was the victim of the government’s perjured hearsay testimony and
that he was given a double jeopardy arraignment for the same offense. During his years in high-security prisons at Marion, Ohio; Leavenworth, Kansas;
and Florence, Colorado, Lane penned his Aryan revolutionary works to show
how the Zionist American establishment was using racial integration, backed
by the media, education and a punitive justice system, to demoralize and destroy the white race. During these years, his writings increasingly moved away
from Identity toward a racialist pagan viewpoint, which sees the natural laws
of the universe as divine. These laws are essentially defined as the preservation
of one’s own race, and a race is judged superior or inferior by its will and ability to survive. A people that allows racial aliens to dwell in its midst will perish through racial interbreeding as “no race of People can indefinitely continue their existence without territorial imperatives in which to propagate,
protect, and promote their own kind.”50
Besides this deistic naturalism, Lane also wrote on the Western esoteric
tradition, utilizing numerology and such occult devices as initiate schools and
secret knowledge to trace a hidden heritage in the history of religion. Druids,
Egyptian priesthoods, Pythagoras and Plato, the Christian Gnostics, Cathars,
Knights Templar, Rosicrucians and other Hermetic philosophers are all
deemed initiates or heirs of the mystery religions that had flourished in the
first millennium b.c. as Odinism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. These mystery or pagan religions pursued a deeper knowledge involving the abstract principles of natural law, while the vital forces of the universe
were personified in the gods and goddesses of their various pantheons. Disaster struck in 325 when the Romans, under Emperor Constantine, colluded
with the Jews to adopt the universal religion of Christianity throughout the
empire. The Jews usurped and distorted the wisdom of the ancient mystery
schools in order to erect a spiritual tyranny for all time and places in which
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 271they would be recognized as “God’s chosen people.”51 Lane uses numerology,
the “coding system” of the King James Bible (allegedly written by Sir Francis
Bacon) and magic squares to decipher the true universal scheme hidden in
the Bible and in pagan mythologies.
Lane’s overriding concern remains the defensive assertion of white racial
survival. He rails against the liberal multiracial and race-mixing policies of
the white nation-states in North America, Europe and Australasia, while colored races already account for over 90 percent of the world population. Lane
states that only 8 percent of the world’s population is white, and only 2 percent is white female of child-bearing age or younger, a crucial statistic for the
reproduction of the race. Seen in the context of global demography, the inevitable result of affirmative action for so-called ethnic minorities and racial
integration in the remaining white homelands is genocide for the white race.
In Lane’s view, the white race is being denied white ethnic states by the denial
of white schools, white neighborhoods, and any other white organizations for
maintaining their biological and cultural identity. Racial integration inevitably leads to an increase of interracial matings each year, which will lead
to white racial extinction if unchecked.52 The 14 Word credo is his incessant
response to this planned assault on the white race. His militant racialism has
earned him the unqualified praise of Colin Jordan as an “[exemplary] warrior
for the survival and revival of the White peoples of this world.”53
Always resisting invasions of racial aliens, the Aryan race has created a civilization comparable to their earlier Roman empire. “The White race has suffered invasions and brutality from Africa and Asia for thousands of years,” declares Lane, “so the attempted guilt-trip placed on the White race by civilization’s executioners is invalid under both historical circumstance and the
natural Law which denies inter-species compassion. . . . All races have bene-
fitted immeasurably from the creative genius of the Aryan people.”54Lane vil-
fies America under its Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) for a deliberate policy of white genocide over many years. He interprets the Second World
War as a Jewish plot to use “the white men of America and England . . . [to destroy] the racial basis of our ancient European homeland.” Nazi Germany was
actually attempting to perform its historic function as defender of the Aryan
race, just as it had repelled invading Moors and Mongols during the Middle
Ages.55The ensuing Cold War with the Soviet Union was a mere hoax to “use
America’s racially integrated military to mix races near bases all over Europe
and America.”56
Lane frequently cites the harrowing examples of enforced racial integration in the United States, such as the 101st Airborne’s use of bayonets to integrate Southern schools, and the police’s use of clubs to beat the white moth-
272 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMers of South Boston when they protested the integration of their neighborhood schools. The government is said to sanction homosexuality and abortion to depress white births. Young white females are constantly bombarded
by race-mixing propaganda, affirmative action displaces whites from employment and taxes impoverish the whites while financing the breeding of
colored races. Summoning images of innocent white children bused into lawless black ghettos, the decay and criminality of urban America and white
flight to the suburbs and country towns, Lane concludes that America is no
longer a white country. While the government admits a figure of 70 percent
white, Lane thinks that with Hispanics, Jews and illegal aliens, America may
just still be 50 percent white. However, in another generation, America will resemble Africa and other colored areas of the world. “The day is coming, if
there is not a revolution soon that American police and military powers
under the command of the Jews and comprised of Negroes, Mexicans, Orientals and vicious race traitors will attempt to murder the last true White
men.” In an apocalyptic vision recalling medieval Mongol hordes with herds
of captive women, Lane predicts “the last true White women and children will
be carried off for recreation and sport.”57
Backed by its global economic and military power, the United States has
become a catalyst to re-create the world in its own multiracial image. Indicating the telltale Zionist mottos on the Great Seal of the United States, “E
pluribus unum” (one out of many), and “novus ordo seclorum” (new order of
the ages, or New World Order), Lane relates how America has intervened militarily to enforce this order in the Southern states, in Latin American countries, in Italy, twice in Germany, and in Korea, Vietnam, Libya, and Iraq. Eastern Europe under communism was long isolated from the liberal multiracial
experiment of the West, but now intervention has begun in Yugoslavia. Lane
condemns the “anti-White slaughter of innocents in Serbia” and quotes General Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander during the war in Kossovo,
as saying: “Let’s not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place
in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a nineteenth-century idea
and we are trying to transition into the twenty-first century, and we are going
to do it with multi-ethnic states.”58Lane considers it no coincidence that a Jew
should express this American determination to mix and destroy the integrity
of every race and nation on the globe to create the New World Order.
Turning to religion, Lane believes that the white race cannot share gods
or religions with other races. Alien gods destroy a race’s sense of uniqueness
and also its capacity for survival. Abandoning Christian Identity, he believes
Wotanism is the best religion for the white race today. Using terms from
mythology and Jungian psychology, Lane declares that Wotan is the best
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 273representation of the creative force and folkish needs. “Wotan awakens our
racial soul and genetic memory. He stirs our blood.” Religion should serve the
paramount goal of racial survival. Lane contrasts the New Testament’s “Ten
Commandments for Racial Suicide” with Wotansvolk wisdom for Aryan
man. To “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth” (Matthew 5:5),
he answers,“Fortune smiles on a people whose visions are brave, bold and determined.” Concerning sex, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her
hath committed adultery in his heart” (Matthew 5:28), Wotansvolk rejoins,
“If our males do not lust after our women strongly enough to fight to the
death for women and territory, then we as a race will perish.” “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you” (Luke 6:27) is countered with,“Smite
your enemies and the enemies of your people with the hammer of Thor. Feed
their bodies to vultures in the market place, that your next enemy depart in
fear.” For Lane, religion is ultimately a political weapon: “Render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s” (Mark 12:10), to which Wotansvolk replies, “Cut
off ZOG’s head and feed it to the dogs. Government beyond the consent of
the governed is tyranny and theft.”59
While David Lane supplies the driving political ideology of white survival
behind Wotansvolk, Gardell’s research shows that Ron McVan has developed
its artistic, devotional and philosophical content. Born in Philadelphia in
1950, McVan moved in the world of rock music and worked as an artist. Religiously motivated, he was drawn to Buddhism until he read Ben Klassen’s
booksNature’s Eternal ReligionandThe White Man’s Bible. This encounter led
to his involvement in white racialism. He contributed articles and artwork to
the Church of the Creator (COTC), later editing its periodical,Racial Loyalty,
and becoming martial arts instructor of its paramilitary White Berets at the
COTC headquarters at Otto, North Carolina. While McVan shared Klassen’s
anti-Christian mission, he found Creativity shallow and started a Wotan’s
Kindred in the Pacific Northwest in 1992. In 1994 McVan moved to St.
Maries, Idaho, to work with the Lanes’ newly established 14 Word Press, and
in 1995 the three founded Wotansfolk as an Odinist movement to foster the
spiritual awareness of Aryan identity and destiny.
According to McVan, Wotanism is rooted in the white race’s genetic character and collective identity.“Our ancient, White ancestors understood that to
ensure our heritage and racial survival, expansion and advancement we must
initiate means to galvanize our Folk Consciousness. Allegories and myths
were developed along with a variety of archetypical gods which best represented Nature’s Law and the collective unconscious of the Folk. Foremost and
most consistent among all these archetypes was the Teutonic God, Wotan.”60
Describing Wotanism as “the inner voice of the Aryan soul,” McVan relates
274 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMhow the irruption of the Wotan spirit united and transformed the German
people with an “amazing and almost instant iron will and productivity” in the
1930s. The Wotan spirit has been notably quiescent in the decades following
1945, when a deliberate genocide of the white race, its culture and traditions,
was launched in multiracial states. However, McVan sees a “metamorphosis of
the gods” taking place in our time,“a calling of the blood.” Because all Aryans,
to a greater or lesser degree, still retain an element of Wotan consciousness,
this spirit is their protectorate and strength and “the surest means to unify our
common purpose and destiny.”61
Wotansvolk sees its mission as a continuation of the earlier efforts of such
individuals as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Guido von List and Carl
Gustav Jung to restore the Aryans to their potent collective unconscious.
McVan cites Lanz von Liebenfels’s claim that the Knights Templar were an
armed guard of Ariosophy until their suppression by the Church in the fourteenth century. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, many völkisch
groups had sprung up to foster the “ancient Teutonic, Gnostic wisdom and
ritual practice.” This revival of Teutonic mythology was enhanced further by
Wagner’s inspirational music and Nietzsche’s heroic philosophy, which cast
new light on “the long-suppressed Aryan consciousness.” McVan recounts
how Wotanism and Ariosophy were rediscovered by Guido von List and Jörg
Lanz von Liebenfels, and their example was followed by Karl Maria Wiligut,
Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Theodor Fritsch and Dietrich Eckart, who forged
a new Aryan self-consciousness among the Germans in anticipation of National Socialism.62
Wotansvolk’s inspiration in the work of Carl Gustav Jung is primarily attributable to his famous essay of 1936, in which he described the Wotan archetype as an autonomous psychic factor producing violent and restless effects in the collective life of the Germans. Jung recalled the earliest signs of its
outbreak before 1914 in the German Youth Movement with its sun worship,
solstice rituals and pagan symbolism. After 1933, Jung saw the enthusiastic
masses of the Third Reich as being seized by the full flood of the Wotan archetype after centuries of its repression.63 In a letter written to Miguel Serrano
in 1960, Jung expanded on the perennial potency of the Wotan archetype:
When, for instance, the belief in the god Wotan vanished and nobody thought
of him anymore, the phenomenon originally called Wotan remained; nothing
changed but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand
scale. A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of
whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in
reality never died, but has retained his original vitality and autonomy. Our
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 275consciousness only imagines that it has lost its Gods; in reality they are there
still and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back
in full force.
Turning to the postwar present, Jung then commented that the weakness of
orthodox Christianity and the challenge of communism placed the world in
a similar spiritual predicament to pre-Nazi Germany in the 1920s, “i.e. we are
apt to undergo the risk of a further Wotanistic experiment. This means mental epidemy and war.”64
Wotansvolk literature approvingly quotes Jung on Wotan but omits any
mention of his dire warnings after the Nazi era. In this respect, Wotansvolk
identifies with an early Jung who supposedly drew inspiration from contemporary irrationalism and völkisch nationalism. In his controversial books,
Richard Noll has related Jung’s early intellectual development to the neoromantic intellectual climate of German fin-de-siècle culture, when pessimistic notions of decline and decadence were matched by Nietzschean calls
for rebirth and renewal. Following explorations of spiritualism and Theosophy, Jung became interested in the Aryan-Mithraic religion and the solar mysticism of German völkisch nationalists.65 Jung borrowed evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel’s theory that the stages of individual development recapitulated the evolution of the human race in order to articulate his own
evolutionary theory of the unconscious. To Jung, fantasies and dreams
recorded the prehistoric and ancient religious experience of mankind. In
1909 Jung set about excavating the unconscious of his Swiss and German patients in the light of ancient Aryan mystery religions and their solar symbols.
If Jung initially had regarded the eruption of the unconscious strata of the
mind as a pathology, by 1916 he believed that the conscious mind could only
be revitalized by cutting through the repressive Christian overlay of European
civilization to the archaic pre-Christian levels below.66
Wotansvolk celebrates Jung as seen by Noll: the rediscoverer of the Aryan
mysteries of the European peoples, especially the Germans, before the imposition of an alien, Semitic Christianity that severed them from their primordial sources of life, their gods, myths and archetypes. Using Jung’s imagery of
archetypal eruption, McVan claims that “Jung predicted that the Aryan race
would soon enter a resurgent age of Wotan, who would rise within the folk
conscious mind of his people, like a dormant volcano to new activity.” Only
through a spiritual act,“in which the White race rediscovers its myth and legend,” can Aryan man survive as a species.67 Gardell shows how most of
McVan’s work is directed toward this rediscovery. He has re-created full
Wotanist rites of blot (ceremony) and sumbel (toasting). His artistic talent
276 NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISMhas fashioned mead horns, Thor’s hammers in brass and silver, oak and antler
rune staffs, spiral armbands and other runic jewelry, all retailed through the
14 Word Press to Wotansvolk kindreds worldwide. His distinctive artwork
featuring Viking warriors, Wotan and ancient megalithic ceremonial sites
adorns the pages of 14 Word Press publications, including the monthly
newsletter Focus Fourteen. His impressive wooden sculptures of Norse gods
and goddesses, wolves, dragons and ravens are scattered over the headquarters site at St. Maries, together with a wooden temple (Hof) dedicated to the
memory of Guido von List.
Besides his digest of Wotansvolk wisdom,Creed of Iron (1997), McVan has
also authored and illustrated numerous pamphlets on the mystery of the
blood, Old Norse poems, Wagner and Jung. Wotansvolk religion offers a spiritual and ceremonial dimension in support of Lane’s strident insistence on
Aryan power, propagation and survival, and it is notable in this context that
the 14 Word Press has issued its own edition of Ragnar Redbeard’s Might Is
Right. But Wotansvolk also recommends song, dance and meditation to bring
Aryan man and woman into harmony with cosmic energies. McVan also
revives the esoteric notion of the Odic force, first discovered by Karl von
Reichenbach (1788–1869), to show how Aryans can fully realize their creative
potential.68 McVan’s most recent publication, Temple of Wotan: Holy Book of
the Aryan Tribes (2000), is a lavishly illustrated large-format repertoire of
Wotanist sacred rites, art, poetry and runes, and it includes the full text of C.
G. Jung’s “Wotan” essay. This Wotanist “bible” is dedicated to Miguel Serrano,
who also supplies the foreword. Here Serrano dilates on Wotanism as the
original religion of the divine Aryans. He recalls the Externsteine in Germany
as a major shrine and the importance of the Germann SS in reviving the cult
at the nearby Wewelsburg. The volume also contains reprints of the Jung-Serrano correspondence, including the prophetic letter already quoted.69 In
Wotansvolk, Serrano appears to have found a major promoter in the Englishspeaking world. The 14 Word Press has recently published the first Englishlanguage edition of Serrano’s The Golden Chain: Esoteric Hitlerism.
In its racial focus on immigration and white submergence, latter-day
Wotanism sees the loss of white ethnic identity as the main consequence of
globalization. Wotansvolk rejects metropolitanism and large-scale industry as
the causes of congestion, immigration and race mixing, pollution, and rampant crime. Led astray by rationalism and materialism, modern man feels that
he must ceaselessly consume manufactured products so that the machines
that enslave him may grow. Wotansvolk demonstrates its tribalist antipathy
toward economic liberalism by arguing that folk community living is the sole
antidote to disorders of life in overpopulated and polyglot cities. Cooperation,
NORDIC RACIAL PAGANISM 277kinship and constructive emotions, along with a simplified unstressful lifestyle, are essential factors for the development of a healthy race. “The world
struggle for the future is only now just beginning. As the sickness of this lost
society becomes too much to bear, the need for neo-tribalism and a return to
our folk gods will become ever more apparent. To this, the Aryan path of
Wotanism [. . .] provides a dynamic storehouse of ancestral knowledge and
ethnic identity.”70 In its opposition to cities, liberalism, and international capitalism, Wotansvolk revives the idyll of rural völkisch utopias sought by early
twentieth-century German pagans.
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