In the beginning was the void. The void separated into fire and ice, a pair of opposites like yin and yang. Fehu, fire, was energy. Isa, ice, was matter, the primal pattern, like the crystal formations of ice. These two opposites dynamically recombined. Bang! Thus, the universe began.
From this came Hagalaz, the hail seed, and from the seed grew the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil. The Nine Worlds are the fruit of its branches.
The first self-aware being was Audhumla, the Sacred Cow. Audhumla found the pattern of the gods and the giants frozen in the ice. She licked them awake and fed them with her milk. The gods and giants intermarried, and birthed more gods.
The gods slew the first giant, named Ymir. Odin and his two brothers made Midgard, this Middle-Earth, from Ymir's body. The trinity of Odin and his brothers found the first human man and woman, Askr and Embla, already in a pattern, as driftwood on the beach. They sculpted them, woke them up, and gave them life.
At this point the history recounted in our mythology joins up with the history known to secular society. Waves of migration across Europe brought the Indo-Europeans from the east. Asatru myth tells of the First War, in which the Gods of the People from the East, the Aesir, fought against the Gods of the People of the Land, the Vanir. It started when the Aesir tried three times to kill the witch Gullveig and she rose from the ashes each time. The two sides made peace and their peoples became one people. Some of the Vanir went to live among the Aesir in Asgard, and some of the Aesir went to live among the Vanir in Vanaheim. The gods who live in Asgard are the gods of Asatru.
The first Northern European settlements date to about 11,000 years ago, or 9,000 BCE (Before Common Era), although central Europe, including modern-day Germany and France, was inhabited at a much earlier date. Most of what we know of the People of the Land comes from physical anthropology. During the Ice Age, both men and women were buried with their weapons, particularly spears, and with amber carved into beads, animal shapes, and double-headed stone axes. (In the Viking Age, the double-headed stone axes from the Stone Age were considered sacred objects called Thunderstones, and influenced the shape of Thor's Hammer.) Red ochre, a form of iron ore, was sprinkled over the bodies. In the later part of the Stone Age, men were buried with axes and women with amber necklaces. Deliberately broken, sacrificed pottery and animal bones attest to ritual sites of the sacred feast, sometimes accompanied by deliberately broken drums.
Some scholars think the People of the Land were a peaceful matriarchy. However, if the First War is a cultural memory of when the People of the Land met with the Indo-Europeans, then the memory indicates both sides engaged in warfare with each other. the Vanic war goddess Freya is no less warlike than the Aesiric war gods Tyr and Odin. Therefore, the People of the Land were not pacifists—they were merely people who had not yet made war until then. the Indo-Europeans had already participated in wars before arriving in Northern Europe. Since we call this event the First War, it shows this story is from the perspective of the People of the Land. Therefore this may be the cultural memory of the People of the Land. Both cultures contributed to the beliefs and values of heathenry.
During the Bronze Age, rock carvings of symbols, particularly ships and dancing women in string skirts, were created in coastal areas. The light clothing depicted in the rock carvings indicates a warm climate. Agriculture and sea trade both flourished. Mound burials became more elaborate and bog burials preserved clothing and grave goods of food, herbs, and carved wood in the mummifying peat bogs. During the Bronze Age, the People from the East arrived in Europe and became the Indo-Europeans. They brought with them well-developed traditions of gods and beliefs, which they integrated with the gods and beliefs of the People of the Land. Similar gods are found among all the Indo-European peoples. The Rig Veda, a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns, speaks of a sky god, a thunder god, a sea god, a fire god, a mother goddess, and of a giant sacrificed to shape the world. The giant Purusa is like our giant Ymir. they have a primal cow, Yama, and we have a primal cow, Audhumla. The fact that we indicate the cow as a primal being rather than a bear indicates that this part of our mythology looks back to an agricultural rather than a hunter-gatherer stage of civilization.
The Rig Veda predates the migration to Europe. When Western scholars first spoke of it in the 1800s they were influenced by the accepted date of the biblical creation of the world and of the date of the Flood. The god forms of the modern day Hindu religion show us the oldest well documented Indo-European tradition. The names and stories changed during the migration and when the People of the Land blended with the culture. For example, Sanskrit Parjanya is associated with Thor both as thunder gods and linguistically through the name of Thor's mother Fjorgynn (also called Jord). The Indo-European concept of wyrd, or orlog, is similar to karma and the idea of reincarnation. Asatru has this concept in common with modern Hinduism. Asatru has dual beliefs about what happens to the soul after death; we call it the “multipartite soul” and believe some pieces are reborn and other pieces go on to an afterlife with the gods or an afterlife in the grave mound or elf mound (the line between those categories is fuzzy). This dual belief probably stems from the blending of the beliefs of the two peoples.
The climate turned cold again in the Iron Age. People abandoned the string skirts and brought their farm animals into their houses in the winter. Some moved south to follow the warm weather and encountered the Roman Empire. The Germanic peoples became more warlike and began practicing human sacrifice. The animal sacrifices at sacred feasts happened during the time of year when livestock would normally be slaughtered for the winter. The human sacrifices may have been condemned criminals, prisoners of war, or the diseased. Archeological evidence from a bog mummy that had its head bashed in and its throat slit showed traces of ergot poisoning in its tissues, which means some humans may have been sacrificed because they were ill.
Rome and Germania had many military conflicts, but they also engaged in commerce. Many Germanic mercenaries served Rome. The first written records of heathen practices are by Romans and Arabs of this time period. The Romans equated Tyr with Mars, God of War; Odin with Mercury, God of Death; Thor with Jupiter, King of the Gods; and Freya with Venus, Goddess of Love.
The barbarian conquest of Rome began a golden age of heroic tales for the Germanic peoples, but it was also the beginning of the end for heathendom. In the far north, in Scandinavia, people carved impressive runestones and continued in the heathen ways; in the areas now called France and southward, the age of conversion had come. The first Germanic people to convert to Christianity were the Goths. They believed in what the Catholic Church called the Arian Heresy, which, like the paganism of their ancestors, said there was no intercessor between man and God.
The conversion of Europe was a long, slow process of political and economic maneuvering, alliance by marriage, missionary preaching, force, and other means. The church studied and recorded heathen practices in order to co-opt and undermine them. Many pagan holidays and practices were adopted into Christianity.
Driven from the continent by the combination of political tyranny, religious persecution, shrinking available farmland, population growth, and the practice of primogeniture inheritance that left younger sons without economic opportunities, heathens sailed west hoping for economic success by creating farmland out of wilderness. Heathens settled in Iceland, then Greenland and coastal North America, which they called “Vinland.”
This was the Viking Age, from the 8th to the 11th centuries, when the longship ruled the seas and pirate kings founded the nation of Russia. Bards composed the great Sagas. Trade routes by sea and river stretched from the Arctic to Africa, from islands west of England to Kiev and Constantinople. The most important export of the heathen peoples was linen cloth, which was mostly produced by women. The keys worn prominently by housewives symbolized their ownership of households and lands. Men did not have keys to their houses, because the wives lived on the lands year-round, while the husbands were often away at sea.
In the Viking Age, the names of the gods took on their familiar forms. Many of the Vikings were Christians. Despite this, Viking raids continued to hit Christian settlements. Christian priests and monks were literate during a time when that was rare in Northern Europe, so they documented many Viking raids against churches and monasteries.
The Vikings were unparalleled sailors, but on land the church's march north was unstoppable. Before the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, there were already some Christian converts among Germanic tribesmen. In the beginning of the age of conversion, counted from the reconversion of the Arian heretics in the 6th century, most converts were true believers in the new religion of Christianity. By the end of the age of conversion, which ended with the conversion of the Baltic countries in the 15th century, the last holdouts converted due to threats and economic and social pressure.
For kings and the wealthy, being Christian brought great advantages: trade and military alliances with other Christian nations. So they commanded their peoples to convert. One by one, the nations of Europe became Christian. In the year 1000, even Iceland, the last bastion of religious freedom for heathens, officially became a Christian country.
With kings' law on their side, representatives of the church in medieval Europe executed all who refused to convert. They also killed a great many Christians who disagreed with the church in various ways, along with many people who were innocent of the charge of witchcraft or heresy. The Inquisition's special targets were Jews and witches, but nearly anyone could be “proven” to be a witch, even devout Christians. Pagans were told their gods were devils and they must renounce Satan or be tortured to death, and all their goods and lands would be confiscated, so their children would starve to death. Unsurprisingly, the whole continent became nominally Christian.
Heathen practices did not completely die out, as some practices went underground. All across Europe people continued to celebrate the old holidays in the old ways, sometimes giving them new names or merely declaring the holiday associated with Christianity in some way without even changing the name. This is how Christians came to celebrate Easter, festival of the Dawn Goddess Ostara. Belief in elves and other pre-Christian entities continued under Christianity.
The names of the heathen gods continued to be honored openly as the days of the week were named after them.
Sunday is Sun Day/Sunna's day, Monday is Moon Day/ Mani's day, Tuesday is Tiw's Day/Tyr's day, Wednesday is Wotan's Day/Odin's day, Thursday is Thor's day, and Friday is either Frigga's day or Freya's day. (There was a time and place in history when there was no distinction between those two goddesses.) Saturday is named after Saturn, who is a god, but not one of ours. The old name for Saturday was Laugrdagr, Bath Day. (In modern Asatru, some Asatruars give Saturday to Loki. Others consider it an unassigned day.)
After Iceland converted, the Eddas and Sagas were written. Previously, heathen society primarily had an oral tradition. Interest and pride in the old ways continued, which gave rise to fairy tales and influenced Christianity. The old Arian Heresy, based on pagan notions of a personal relationship between humans and the divine, rose to the surface with the Protestant Reformation. The Northern peoples rejected the intercessory power of the church and the absolute authority of the Pope. At the same time, science arose and created an educated class other than priests.
With the economic and political power of Rome and its church broken, a resurgence of heathen consciousness and interest in folk customs spread slowly across Europe and the New World. The word Asatru was invented by Scandinavian antiquarians in the 1820s or 1830s. Folk tales and fairy tales were collected and published. Things Germanic became fashionable in Britain in the 1840s when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, a German. Several different popular and occult movements and organizations arose, which drew from the material of ancient heathenry.
Art and culture increasingly reflected Germanic pagan symbols and ideals, until the mid-1930s when the symbols were hijacked by an evil tyrant and used as propaganda to justify his imperial ambitions. Adolf Hitler identified as a Christian, said that Christianity was the foundation of the morality of the folk, and that bringing back Wotan would be foolish. Some of his followers who were into the occult made use of heathen materials as well as other cultures' materials. Two visionaries created their own systems based loosely on heathen cultural ideas, the well-known occultist Guido von Liszt who created his own rune system, and SS general Karl von Wiligut whose visions led him to consider heathens who honored Odin to be the equivalent of Satanic heretics. He sent the SS on a witch hunt and heathens were rounded up and killed as “politicals”—wearing the same black triangle as communists and lesbians. This was a terrible setback for heathendom, not only because those few who openly professed heathenism died, but also because the blasphemous perversion of Germanic symbols by the Nazis resulted in the persecution of heathens who displayed those symbols after the defeat of their killers.
Even in the United States, where religious freedom is included in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, there was official government-sanctioned discrimination against people wearing runes or other identifiably Germanic symbols in the latter half of the 20th century. The US military forbade its soldiers to have Thor's hammers or to have tattoos of runes or other heathen symbols, and this discrimination did not end until the turn of the millennium. Police in various American cities were given training pamphlets on how to look for “cult crimes” by searching a house for runes, although they did not single out Asatru; the Taoist yin and yang symbol, the Wiccan pentacle, and Hebrew writing were also considered evidence of cult crimes. They distributed this disinformation to mental health agencies to encourage counselors to classify their clients who belonged to minority religions as cult victims in need of deprogramming.
Ironically, much of the resurgence of heathen consciousness in the English-speaking world can be credited to a Christian, J. R. R. Tolkien. While Hitler was using Germanic symbols to rally support for his wars of conquest, Tolkien was writing a heroic saga of the triumph of good over evil, using Germanic mythology and symbolism to honor the individual hero, in contrast to the authoritarianism of Hitler, whom Tolkien hated. Tolkien was the foremost scholar of heathen lore in his day, and he consciously set out to create a myth that would cause the re-emergence of what he called the noble Northern spirit. In The Lord of the Rings, he introduced the public to the idea of runes, and invented words still used by Asatruars today, such as wight to mean “a spirit.” His depiction—and spelling—of elves and dwarves remains the standard in modern heathenry.
Starting in the 1970s, Asatru made steady gains in the legal realm and in acceptance and tolerance by the wider society. In the United States, Asatru stood on the shoulders of Wicca, which paved the way for other pagan religions.
In Iceland, Asatru is flourishing once again. At the time when Asatru in the United States (and later, England) was piggybacking on Wicca to find legal protection, Asatru in Iceland (and later, continental Europe) stood on national pride, familiarity with the literature, and continuous folk practices. Iceland made Asatru one of its official religions. In 2015, the official Icelandic state supported Asatru religious organization, the ÁsatrúarfélagiÐ, built an Asatru temple.
In England, the most prominent heathen sect is called Odinism, which is also the name of a different sect in the United States. In continental Europe, heathen revivals of national traditions are known by names such as Heithi, Forn Sed, and Forn Sidr. Icelandic and European heathenism are generally seen as very nature-oriented, while American Asatru is second only to Native American practice in directly honoring the spirits of the land.
Heathen groups other than Asatru have also been growing in the United States. Theod is Anglo-Saxon heathenism and differs from Asatru in that it has a king instead of a parliament, and the only way to join it is to become a member's thrall, a concept at which most modern Asatruars shudder. (In the old days, a thrall was a slave, but in modern Theod it is more like an apprentice or novice.) However, it is still a heathen religion, and Theodish scholars have much to say about heathenism that also applies to Asatru.
The reconstruction of heathenism has been a scholarly process as heathens try to filter the written stories to disregard late or foreign additions to find the original pagan meaning of the surviving Sagas, fairy tales, charms, and poetry. This is the reason that up until the 21st century, it was hard to find writings about Asatru that were not filled with footnotes and words from a dozen different dead languages on each page. But literary and linguistic scholarship and physical anthropology can go only so far toward recreating the elder religion. In recent years there has been more emphasis on subjective experience and personal insight to fill in the gaps and to make Asatru more relevant to our ordinary lives, as befits a living religion.
In the United States, a nationwide organization emerged, and then it split over the question of who could join and be Asatru. This schism created the two major sects of Asatru in America: the universalists and the folkish. Universalists held that anyone could be an Asatruar. Folkish believed that only the descendants of historical heathen peoples could be Asatru. Several large national Asatru organizations arose, some universalist and some folkish. Some folkish organizations were dedicated to specific nationalities and historical cultures. Others used a modern United States construction of whiteness as a membership criterion; some of those were white supremacist. Mainstream Asatru excluded white supremacists from organizations and gatherings.
Until the internet age, most Asatruars did not encounter white supremacists, who were developing separately from mainstream heathenry. Supremacist organizations were often based in prisons and revolved around gang culture. They had a radically different view of heathen gods and mythology than mainstream Asatru, because the roots of the prison culture Baldur Rising movement could be traced to the visions of the Nazi prophet Karl Maria Wiligut, who was an enemy of mainstream heathenry.
In the new millenium, Asatru is growing rapidly. There are many Asatru and heathen organizations in the United States and other countries, and a new kind of heathen community on the internet. The internet brought American Asatruars together with Icelandic Asatruars who read a lot of the core books of the ancient heathen literature in their native language, and with European heathens who had access to a different set of knowledge and folk traditions.
A generation has passed since the early Asatru internet groups. The internet enabled the fragmentation of Asatru into small groups outside of the large organizations of the 20th century. Many younger heathens reject the historical re-enactment and academic roots of some of the established organizations and instead embrace a modern solitary Asatru that does not recognize folkways as a part of heathenry. This is the new division I call “modernist.” In the previous generation, Asatruars did both the folkway and the religion. I call them “traditionalists.” Those who do only the folkway and not the religion are not practicing Asatru, they are just engaging in their cultural traditions. Those who do only the religion and not the folkway are modernist Asatruars. Those who began as traditionalists and then adopted some but not all modern ways are modernized traditionalists.
The internet enabled American Asatruars to advance the reconstruction of Asatru via recent scholarship to the point where some of the practices adopted by earlier generations were abandoned in favor of new views. Practices borrowed from Wicca were scrubbed away in favor of more authentic practices.
Although the internet allowed heathens to find each other and learn from each other, it also led to a problem with trolls and white supremacists trying to take over heathen spaces. Internet groups and forums that are not actively defended against trolls and spammers can be taken over by them, and the same thing happens when forums don't reject neo-Nazis and white supremacists. No doubt some of the supremacists who try to get into Asatru groups don't even know they are hostile invaders; some of them just see runes and other Germanic-looking symbols and think they've found a home. I manage my forum with the help of a dozen “Trollslayers.” Out on the wider internet, I fight against neo-Nazis via the Heathen Visibility Project, which you can read about on my blog Gnosis Diary: Life as a Heathen, or through the Project's hashtag #heathenvisibility.
American Asatru split between folkish and universalist in the 20th century, but in the 21st century it split into more sects. In addition to a split between traditionalists and modernists, there are splits over which gods to include in Asatru. There are now also groups that either reject or embrace Loki, and by extension his followers. Those who reject Loki often employ trolling to drive followers of Loki out of common spaces in Asatru groups. Some followers of Loki are retreating to welcoming spaces, where they are evolving into a new sect, called Lokeans.
Those who try to get others to stop worshipping Loki are known as Nokeans. Despite the new name, their religious roots go to the Baldur Rising movement, and from there back to Wiligut. They have simply substituted Odin's brother Loki for Odin as their version of a heathen devil figure. Mainstream Asatru does not have a devil.
Due to online trolls, many women retreat to women-only spaces, and they may also develop into separate sects with their own symbols, rituals, and objects. These groups are developing separately from the rest of Asatru, with their own group gnosis (group gnosis is modern lore created by the religious experiences of the group members). Organized groups of godspice (nuns) may eventually develop into separate sects.
The task of 20th-century Asatru was reconstruction, and the task of 21st-century Asatru is to fit the reconstructed religion into modern life and the wider society. However, the work of reconstruction can never be finished as long as there are more discoveries in archeology and other sciences on which reconstruction is based.
The internet has both connected us as never before and fragmented us as never before. It has enabled almost anyone to read current scholarship in multiple fields and access copies of original source material that were previously known to only a few specialists. What we know about the heathen past is expanding rapidly, and so is what we know about contemporary folk traditions that are based on the heathen past. Even as we learn more about the past, Asatru is going forward as a modern religion.