commensurate. In fact, they have contributed to a complex field of images and discourses navigated by fascists in search of proving and testing their individual ideologies. Perhaps no spiritual persuasion has become more important in this field than Odinism.
The most influential person to cobble together a Norse fascism in the United States was Else Christensen, born Else Oscher in the western coast of Denmark in 1913. Christensen participated in the revolutionary undercurrents in her country in the 1930s, which included rowdy clashes between different factions vying for political power, from Trotskyists and Stalinists to national socialists and anarcho-syndicalists. Initially, Christensen aligned herself with the latter, but she soon moved toward the Strasserite faction. She eventually married Aage Alex Christensen of the Danish National Socialist Workers’ Party, which maintained a National Bolshevik bent.
After the war, Else Christensen reached out to international white power activists like David Duke and an Odinist named Alexander Rud Mills. Influenced by Mills and Yockey, Christensen asserted that in the unconscious mind of European people resided “the wisdom of our pre-Christian forefathers which we today call Odinism, and which expresses the essence of our folk on the moral and religious plane.”199 With this kind of strangely liminal Odinism of the unconscious, Christensen sought to cover racist ideas with a more acceptable patina in order to disguise their inherent fascism.
Christensen created the Odinist Fellowship in 1969 to teach the “lesson” of Nazi power: that Hitler failed because he quashed the Strasserite faction and joined the right wing. She based her own ideas in part on the work of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos’s Spanish organization Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (Union of the National Syndicalist Offensive). Christensen opposed “reactionary Francoite authoritarianism” because she believed that Aryan freedom is essentially anarchist and communal in a specifically folkish way. She called on “Aryans” to “retribalize,” since a “certain form of socialism is inherent in tribalism.” So, Christensen’s formulation of Odinism declared that it would honor “the diversity of Nature, including the natural variations of human beings,” without relinquishing white supremacism. 200
Christensen was clear about the tactical strengths of her approach. “You have to go in the back door!” she exclaimed. “[N]obody could put a finger on what we said, because we said it in such a way that it couldn’t be clamped down at. We still have to do that.… Everybody knows that the Jews rule the whole damned world, so you cannot fight their combined power. You need to watch your step.” As scholar Mattias Gardell notes: “Self-sufficient, ecologically sustainable, monoracial tribes would, Christensen suggests, be a practical method for redefining American federalism and for establishing an Odinist union of Aryan republics.”201 One of Christensen’s principle forms of outreach became a prison ministry, which enabled Odinism to spread throughout the prison population. Yet the Odinist Fellowship was more intent on racial awareness than rituals and practice.202
Rivaling the Odinist Fellowship, another heathen named Stephen McNallen created the Asatru Free Assembly in 1976 with a very similar, though distinct and sometimes oppositional, range of ideas. More interested in spirituality than national socialism, McNallen developed the Asatru Free Assembly into a movement focused more clearly on religious rituals, assemblies, and meetings. However, McNallen maintained the “metagenetic” discourse of ethnic Odinism, and even borrowed from Carl Jung’s essay “Wotan,” in which the latter sees Hitler as the personification of the Wotan/Odin archetype in the German people’s collective unconscious.203 McNallen warns non-Aryans to stay away from Asatru:
I think they are sadly deceived if they try to take on my ancestors. They need to look to their own ancestral line. For me, joining any ancestral religion is not as simple as deciding you’re going to join the Elks Lodge or you’re going to join the local bridge club. You’re not just joining something that exists right there in that moment in time. What you are really joining is something that includes a whole line of ancestors. The ‘we’ that we see now, is just the tiny tip of the iceberg. But to take on our soul, to take on that which is an intimate part of us, is to take on all of those ancestors as well. I don’t think that you can just do that arbitrarily. I can never be an American Indian. I can never be a black man. I don’t want to be any of those things. I want to follow my ancestors and my way. Likewise, I would strongly encourage them to do the same.204
While clearly advocating Asatru as a racial movement, McNallen also attempted to clear his movement of open Nazis, banning uniforms and insignias from their meetings, leading to new splinter groups with more explicitly white supremacist politics.205
Yet Gardell argues that the apolitical stance of McNallen’s later group, the Asatru Folk Assembly, has “political implications…revolving around a call for decentralization in terms of radical localism, tribal communalism, and Jeffersonian republicanism.” These politically ethnonationalist positions highlight the notion that “Body, mind, and spirit were shaped by life in artificial urban environments. At war with himself, alienated man embraced the universal notions of religion and politics that now threaten to destroy the remnants of every organic native culture on the face of the earth.”206
From the giant nationalist engines of World War II-era fascist states that sought the “total mobilization” of masses of people, fascists returned to what they imagined to be its pure forms, based on innate, mythical, and ancestral elements—both the local rootedness of culture and the transcendence of spirit. What remains consistent through the different, often feuding, ideological systems is a frequent reference to the individual’s power over the crowd—a kind of wolf character preying on the unsuspecting sheep who do what society commands. Like the wolf pack, the “tribe” remained a perfect form to carry these ideas—which may be why fascism has emerged prominently in communities organized around avant-garde music niches like neofolk and noise (with its obvious roots in futurism). However, the “warrior aristocrat” of Evola and the Odinist soldier of Christensen would not restrict themselves to music and art; instead, they would leave a trail of blood across the remainder of the twentieth century, from Italy to Argentina to Colorado. It is to this legacy of infiltration and murder that we will turn in the next chapter.
169 See Julius Evola, “Il mito Marcuse,” in Gli uomini e le rovine (Rome: Volpe, 1967), 263–69; Roger Griffin, “Revolts Against the Modern World: The Blend of Literary and Historical Fantasy in the Italian New Right,” Literature and History 11, no.1 (Spring 1985): 101–24.
170 Julius Evola, “Cose a posto e parole chiare,” La Torre, April 1, 1930.
171 Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington, ID: Indian University Press, 1989), 119–20.
172 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey & the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia), 356–57.
173 Ibid., 257.
174 Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins, trans. Guido Stucco, ed. Michael Moynihan (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007), 166–67.
175 Letter from Evola to Dino Alfieri, September 1937, quoted in Dana Lloyd Thomas, Julius Evola e la tentazione razzista (Brindisi: Giordano, 2006), 144. Also see Staudenmaier, “Antisemitic Intellectuals in Fascist Italy,” in Intellectual Antisemitism from a Global Perspective, ed. Sarah K. Danielsson and Frank Jacob.
176 Julius Evola, Doctrine of Awakening,
