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The History of Ásatrú, Heathenry and Norse Paganism
Modern Heathenry is a Reconstructed Religion, which means for a long time it had no history.
Reconstructed here just means that at one point, we know that these religions existed. We have documentation of their existence both from primary and secondary sources as well as artifacts indicating that these faiths were practiced by a large number of people over a long period of time.
It also means that at some point, these religions weren’t practiced, at all–and not for a very long time.
The religions that were Heathenry were no longer practiced after the 12th Century as far as we can tell.
As far as we can tell, our religion was no longer practiced in the world after the 12th Century. There are no records of secret practices, or families who passed down the faith in an unbroken line leading back to the ancient times. While some elements of Paganism might have survived the demise of the religion itself through folktales, holiday traditions, or local customs, there is nothing that tells us what about them was Pagan–or why they mattered. While some people today claim that they have such lineage to secret traditions (not all that uncommon a claim to hear in Paganism in general), we have no way of evaluating the truth of those claims.
The Ancient Way
This is the largest span of time, from the time the Germanic Religions start to differentiate themselves from other Indo-European religions (Romantic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic, Hindu, etc) to the end of the conversion period and the Viking Age. The recorded history here is actually quite scant and the only records we have of Germanic religion are from people who never practiced it whether they were records from Pagan historians in the Roman Empire like Tacitus, Muslim travel writers and adventurers like Ibn Fadlan or Medieval Christian politicians like Snorri Sturlusson.
The religions they described seeing or experiencing or that they were reporting on were very different depending on the time or place they were encountered. The religion of the people Tacitus encountered in the forests of Germany in the 2nd Century CE was of a different kind than the one Snorri Sturluson reports as having been practiced in Iceland in the 11th Century, though they appeared to share some similarities in terms of who they thought the Gods were, what they thought the Gods did and how they managed their relationships with those Gods.
Unlike other Indo-European religions like Hellenism, Zoroastrianism or Hinduism: Germanic religion was never written down anywhere. No one left any notes of their own. So while this period is vast, its records are slim. This is one reason why today you see so much variety in belief and practice. There are no firsthand accounts of what people believed or why they did they things they did.
This is why so many of our holidays have agricultural reasoning behind why we celebrate them: because whatever real story was behind them was completely lost. In absence of any real story, theorists figured that the holidays must have been connected to the agricultural cycle of plantings and harvests.
Since nothing was written down, nothing was passed on and the whole religion was replaced by the 12th century, there are very few verifiable points of agreement.
The Romantic Revival
This was the period of history that came about 600 years after the Viking Age and the last conversion of the Germanic Pagans in Scandinavia. Nationalist authors and poets, seeking images and characters to animate the independent, emotional and naturalistic themes in their art, sought out not only classical characters from Greco-Roman myth, but Gods and heroes from the Norse and Germanic legends as well.
This romantic revival also includes a period of misinformation about what exactly Pagans were doing and what the religion was–and was infused with white nationalist, chauvinist and anti-semitic beliefs. There were some scholars who simply didn’t know any better, and then there were theorists who capitalized on the lack of information to create a story of their own.
This is where you saw the rise of early Odinists like Alexander Rud Mills and Germanic occultists like Guido von List fusing a romantic fiction of an “Aryan” religion and the trope of the Viking warrior with the colonial myth of the “noble savage” and the virulent antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th Century.
This is also where you see the rise in the occultist adoption of the runes and the rune poems as a basis for different systems of magic and mystery traditions. Some of these adaptations of rune-lore are harmless (though often kooky or deeply misinformed) but others have deep roots in antisemitic and white nationalist beliefs, especially those promoted by von List.
This period ends with the horrific results of this romantic nationalist myth-making: the incorporation and infusion of a fictional and idealized Germanic religion and its symbols into the ideology and symbology of the Nazi Party through groups like the Thule Society and the Ahnenerbe. These repurposed myths and symbols were then used to justify and promote some of the most inhuman crimes every perpetrated in history.
It is not only a deep shame that Heathens bear due to this history, but this shame continues to this day as some claiming the mantle of Ásatrú refuse to renounce the disgusting ideologies of white nationalism and anti-semitism that brought this shame upon us, our history and our symbols.
The Modern Period
This is the era in which we live and practice. The organized religions that make up modern Heathenry only began to organize in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Some of them, like the Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland and Bifrost in Norway were formed by liberal counter-culture “hippies” who emphasized the environmental and tolerant aspects of Paganism to create the foundation of their practice. In America and England, while there were certainly hippies, the early organized Ásatrú movements were dominated by conservative and reactionary elements like in England with Odinic Rite and in Canada and the United States with the Odinist Fellowship and The Viking Brotherhood (Later the Ásatrú Free Assembly).
Thanks in part to the contributions and influence of “Retro-Heathenry” through Theodism and currents within the national organizations like the Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship (ADF), Heathens starting in the late 90’s started to examine archeology, anthropology and medieval history instead of just reading the Eddas. At some points it was almost like you had to become an amateur medievalist in order to practice the religion.
This new “Reconstructionist” movement proved beneficial because it helped cut through the misinformation of the Romantic Revival and got people back in touch with what the religion may have looked like at different periods of time and in different places. What it showed was that instead of some kind of “universal white religion” that Germanic religion was a constantly evolving and changing group of generally related religions.
Reconstruction lead further to the acceptance of modern interpretation, synthesis and innovation. The diversity of traditions in ancient times is now reflected in a wide range of beliefs and practices of generally related faiths known as “Heathenry.”
Understanding our history is important, but we are not obligated to recreate the past.
Our only obligation as Heathens is to understand the past, not to recreate every detail of it. This is not Viking or Medieval re-enactment. Those are fun activities to do, and it’s fun to go to a Renaissance or Viking festival and swig mead and eat turkey legs, but that’s not our faith. We aren’t obligated to dress like, act like, or recreate the social structures of Medieval society.
But we should understand that history and also understand the genesis of some of the mistaken ideas about our faith or even the mistaken ideas that some believe are part of our faith.
Our goal is as it always has been: to have a harmonious relationship with our Gods, the spirits in the world around us and our communities. Whether our understanding of that harmony comes from looking to the past, or to searching our own internal feelings of connection, that goal remains the same.
