Hidden Gods: The Period of Dual Faith in England,

680-1980
John Yeowell

Foreward

In presenting this short account of the period of dual faith, the era during which the essence of
indigenous paganism of the English people was preserved within the church, I would like to
reassure my non-English friends that in confining the narrative to England and the English there
is no intention to slight the countries of which they are citizens. I have chosen my own country’s
progress, from conversion to disillusion, because it is my main interest and because any wider
treatment of the subject would require rather more space than I have at my disposal.

Historically and ethnically the English represent one of the mainstream branches of the north
European peoples. Their direct ancestors came from northern Germany, Denmark and Norway
and large numbers of new nations in distant parts of the world: in Australia and New Zealand, in
South Africa and in North America. The story of English Odinism therefore is also a part of the
story in those countries.

Emergent Christianity

Boris Pasternak once described Rome as ‘a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered
peoples.’ He was implying that the decadent capital was a kind of distribution centre for alien
gods and strange religious rites. It was indeed. Pagan Rome was the breeding ground for a
wide range of beliefs and its citizens were more or less accustomed to the rebarbative and
bizarre practices that were sometimes performed there in the name of religion. But when a
particular sect, which had shifted its centre of operations from colonial Judea, claimed to
represent the only true religion, accused everyone else of worshipping false gods and made a
number of startling dogmatic statements including the assertion that a long-dead rabbi called
Jeshu ben Joseph had been the Son of God, even sophisticated Roman eyebrows must have
been raised.

The idea of monotheism, of belief in one god, although new to Rome must have been familiar to
imperial administrators who would have encountered it among the Jews. when the Jeshu or
Jesus sect introduced the belief to Rome in opposition to the state religion, which supported the
principle of polytheism, the authorities were understandably hostile to the group whose
teachings they saw as a threat to their own authority and privileges. So the Jesus sect was
persecuted and the blood of the martyrs soaked the Roman earth.

With the Edict of Milan in 313 and the reversal by the Emperor Constantine of official hostility
the Jesus sect emerged from the shadows and became the church, ‘Catholic, Roman and
Apostolic’, its organization cast perhaps inevitably in the Roman mould, its deity effectively the
imperial Caesar-God. The church’s first action was to consolidate its position as the dominant
religion by demonstrating its intolerance, forcibly suppressing the local paganism while at the
same time accommodating itself to many of the pagan ideas and practices. As one learned
contributor to the ​Catholic Encyclopaedia ​puts it, ‘The God of the Christians was indeed a
jealous God who tolerated no other gods beside him. The Church could never acknowledge that
she stood on the same plane with other religious bodies.’ Throughout its history this lack of
toleration was to be a constant hallmark of the church. The story of the subsequent conversion
of Europe unfolds thereafter as a history of aggression directed against largely unsophisticated
peasant populations, a period of activity that can be viewed in retrospect as a shadowy zone of
trickery and deception, aided in many instances by the gullibility and collaboration of local kings
and tribal elders.

The culminating event in the church’s early development took place on Christmas Day in the
year 800 with the coronation in Rome of Charlemagne. It was one of the most significant
happenings in all European history. This virtual restoration of the Roman Empire, and with it the
confirmation of the church’s temporal as well as spiritual power, enabled Pope Boniface VIII to
proclaim without fear of being contradicted, ‘I am Caesar! I am Pope!’ From that day forward the
church pursued its career as the religio-political power that was to control Europe and to exert
influence over a great part of the world for centuries to come. Thereafter no western emperor
was considered legitimate unless he had been crowned and anointed at Rome by the Pope.

The Coming of the English

At the time of the church’s blossoming in Rome, Britain was still a Roman province peopled by
the Celtic Britons. Although there is evidence of Christian activity in Britain as early as the first
half of the third century, few records exist and only two indubitable churches of the period, at
Silchester and Richborough, have so been identified. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the
country must formally have become Christian following Constantine’s concordant with the
church in 313. In the remaining years of that century, the Roman presence was gradually
reduced and by 410 Britain had been completely abandoned by the legions. There followed a
period of widespread unrest amounting almost to anarchy until, in about 430, English
mercenaries (Saxons, Jutes, Angles) were invited over from north Germany to restore and
maintain order.

By the time they arrived there remained not much more than a lingering tradition of Christianity
in Britain and only in the extreme west and north of the country did the British church still
manage to maintain some form of organisation. Because missionaries had not yet penetrated
their German homeland (and would not do so for another century-and-a-half) the new-comers
were virtually untouched by Christianity. Within a short time they had consolidated their
occupation of the country, had given it a new name and a new language and had introduced
their own religion in which worship was directed to Odin and other gods of the northern Asgarth.
The attitude of the displaced Britons towards their new rulers remained less than friendly for
many years and the British church refrained from missionary effort among the English as a
matter of policy: ‘To this day,’ wrote Bede, ‘it is the manner of the Britons to ignore the faith and
religion of the English, and to hold no more communion with them than with the heathen.’ So
Odinism flourished in the land and when in 597 Augustine and his Italian friends landed in Kent
with a more aggressive brand of Christianity only a ruined church dedicated to St. Martin was
left in Canterbury to remind them of former attempts to evangelise the area. And because
Paganism is a religion of toleration and hospitality there was no opposition to the strangers.
Bede’s editor, Dr. J.A. Giles, refers to ‘the humanity and kindness’ with which Augustine was
received. Perhaps, in this instance, the kindness was misplaced.

The Dark Age

Christian apologists were at one time fond of explaining that the missionaries came to save the
English people from savagery and squalid ignorance and that sources for the indigenous
paganism are almost non-existent solely due to the illiteracy of the people and their lack of
culture. They invented ‘the dark age’ but this, as the mass of evidence revealed by modern
historical and archaeological research has proved, was a fabrication based on restructured
history of a magnitude that has only been equalled in our own day by certain professors of
dialectic.

Grattan and Singer cite ​Lacnunga ​(Early English medical remedies) as evidence that the state
of literacy in England was very different from the picture created and nurtured by church
propagandists. Michael Alexander, lecturer in English at Stirling University, is convinced that
anyone reading ‘The Dream of the Rood’, ‘The Battle of Maldon’ and other early English poems
‘will discard … any idea that between the fall of Rome and the revival of learning, Europe was a
battleground where ignorant German armies clashed by night’ and would realise ‘that the
darkness of the age was deliberately maintained by Benedictine monks.’ Professor Tolkien
dismisses the so-called dark age in forthright terms in a letter to John Masefield, written in 1938,
when he refers to ‘the erroneous imagination that Chaucer was the first English poet, and that
before and except for him, all was dumb and barbaric … I do not personally connect the North
with either night or darkness, especially not in England, in whose long 1200 years of literary
tradition Chaucer stands in the middle rather than the beginning.’

The philologist Wilhelm Grimm describes the church as coming to northern Europe ‘escorted by
a foreign language which excluded the slighted mother-tongue from almost all share in public
worship.’ Reading and writing became a clerical monopoly and clerics, for the most part, were
literate only in Latin. So it was hardly to be expected that they would spend their days recording
the virtues of a religion that they were trying so hard to exterminate. Odinism was in any case ill
equipped in a theological war of words.

The high state of efficiency of the church’s intricate structure caught the English quite
unprepared. Their own religion had no comparable organisation because such an organisation
had never been necessary, they had no professional priesthood (the pagan gothar were usually
local leaders and heads of family) and because Odinism was an organic natural religion, they
possessed no written formularies. The missionaries on the other hand were the heirs to many
years’ experience of proselytising. They used every artifice to present their religion as
something that was in practice not so very different from the old familiar faith except that it was,
of course, very much better. They were able to make extravagant promises, promises that were
impossible to match let alone disprove: for instance, that all who accepted baptism would be
rewarded with riches in heaven. It was an attractive package and not surprisingly their
arguments frequently prevailed. So the English, followers of a religion that consisted of doing
rather than of talking, fell for the practised sales patter and managerial superiority of the Italian
missionaries.

The Conversions

People sometimes speak of ‘two thousand years of Christianity’ as if England, or Europe, had
been Christian for all that length of time. but , as Grimm says, the countries of northern Europe
‘forsook the faith of their fathers very gradually and slowly.’ The conversion of the English is
usually said to have been total by 681, when the kingdom of Sussex capitulated. It was in reality
not completed until the tenth century or later. The reasons for such unsteady progress are to be
looked for partly in the innate conservatism of the English character but are to be found mainly
in the continuing arrival in the country of pagan kinsmen from Germany and Scandinavia,
especially during the two centuries of viking activity when those believing pagans reinforced and
encouraged renewal of Odinist observance in the areas where they settled. It should not be
forgotten that even at the commencement of the viking age (c. 800) virtually the whole of
northern Europe was still pagan.

In their campaign the missionaries recognise the importance of first capturing the minds of the
rulers of the seven kingdoms, the heptarchy, into which the country was then divided. The fact
that in England the paths of the new religion were made comparatively smooth was in every
case due to the role played by the local ruler. The missionaries were further greatly assisted in
the consolidation and extension of their gains when in the eighth century a new concept of
monarchy was formulated by the church which involved the introduction of a ritual anointing of
the king. This served to enhance the political powers of the clergy both as the administrators of
the anointing and as confers of the crown and sceptre, the symbols of kingship. As Professor
Chaney has pointed out, Christianity thus ‘linked the destiny of king and kingdom not only with
the worship of God but with obedience to his priesthood’.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that the conversion of England was carried out
entirely by persuasion and deception although it is true to say that the English were mercifully
spared some of the distinctly bizarre methods used in securing the salvation of the
Scandinavians. The Odinists ha their martyrs and this illustrates the great contradiction that lie
at the heart of the religion which in action denies the faith it preaches, the message of ‘peace on
earth’. The emissaries of the Prince of Peace often went forward over the corpses of those who
were reluctant to join them.

In general, however, the progress of conversion followed the pattern that had served the church
so well when dealing with pagan Rome. the missionaries knew that the less obvious the break
that was necessary with the theological, as well as political, background of the local population
the less hostile would be the latter towards the new religion. In the remarkable letter in which
Pope Gregory discusses the methods to be followed he advises that the people be won over ‘by
steps and degrees and not by bounds’ and that Odinist altars are accordingly not to be
demolished but are to be adapted for Christian use ‘in order that when the people see that their
own sanctuaries are not being destroyed they may banish their error from their hearts and,
knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely assemble at the accustomed places’.
The ruse was moderately successful. But although the people saw no reason why they should
discard their own faith. So that many of them went on worshipping the old gods long after they
were supposed to have been converted to Christianity.

It took the church a long time to drive the native paganism underground. The early penitential of
Theodore, a Greek Archbishop of Canterbury, the penitential ascribed to Bede and numerous
references in the Early English law books all provide incontrovertible evidence of continuing
paganism in England, as does the legatine report to Pope Adrian in 789. Even as late as 871,
almost two hundred years after the alleged conversion of the last Englishman, Alfred the Great
was bemoaning the fact that not a single man south of the Thames was capable of
understanding the services of the church. Once Christianity was firmly established, however, the
church had no hesitation about erasing the memory of the pagan origin of many of the ideas
and practices that they had assimilated. What the missionary could, he repressed. What he
could not repress, he either adapted or ignored. What the missionary tried to repress became
witchcraft, which was a perverted form of paganism. What he judiciously ignored survives to this
day in the folk festivals at the great changes of the season and in the minds and hearts of the
people.

Survivals

After the conversion to Christianity, pagan worship became superstitious custom. Odinist
festivals such as Midsummer and the Yuletide celebrations at Midwinter continued as Christian
holy days as St. John’s Day and Christmas. The new religion was helped by the superficial
resemblance of many of its usages to the old ways and their appearance of compatibility with
many fertility rites and observances such as the charming of the plough, the blessing of rivers
and the sea, with prayers for good seasons, rain and general fertility of the earth, with
thanksgiving at harvest and rejoicing at Easter (which is still called by the name of a Germanic
fertility goddess).

There are many obvious affinities between Christian and Odinist mythology, a fact that played a
considerable part in calming local anxieties. In the Christian ritual, says Mircea Eliade, the old
mythology is ‘barely camouflaged under a hagiography; a cosmology that is half Biblical and half
pagan’. The truth of this is borne out in the story of Christ as related in the Gospels, which is
essentially the story of Baldur, the dead god of summer who is resurrected in the springtime
each year. At his crucifixion, Christ is also a reflection of Odin, who hung on a tree for nine
nights. A well-known tradition of the early church depicts Christ as having died not on a cross
but on a tree and in this he is identical with the Green Man, a figure once common to the
English May Day rites. There are plausible connections, too, between this image of the Green
Man, the story of the English folk-hero Robin Hood (the red-masked Roben Hode, the one-eyed
rover strewn with green twigs) and that of Hother, whose shooting of Baldur occurs in accounts
of recurrent seasonal conflict in the Edda. the poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’ in its portrayal of
the crucifixion clearly draws upon the Odinist myth of Baldur, the White God. the young hero
mounts ‘the marvellous tree’ and is mortally wounded: ‘The warriors left me standing laced with
blood. I was wounded unto death with darts.’ Like the blind god Hother who cast the dart of
mistletoe that killed Baldur, Longinus the centurion who pierced the side of Christ with his lance,
according to tradition, also blind.

After they had been displaced it was necessary for the pagan gods to be shown as being
incapable of bestowing quite so many benefits as the true God. But they were still not pictured
as entirely without power. They were credited with mischievous influences, perverted into devils,
sorcerers or giants who had to be overcome (but who still came in handy for frightening any
backsliders or others who were slow to conform), elves were transformed into angels and
priestesses into witches. Nature itself did not escape for it was regarded by the church as the
hiding places of the old gods who, it was believed, still lurked in woods and wilderness. This fear
left the way open to the impersonal study of nature by science and to its eventual, frequently
disastrous, exploitation by commerce.

The enormous mass of folklore which has such deep roots in the hearts of the English people to
this day proves that Odinism continued to possess vitality. The names of the gods found a
resting place in the days of the week, in place names, oaths, curses and protestations.
Remnants of Odinist god-myths are found in folktales, nursery rhymes, games and idiomatic
phrases. They survive in superstitious beliefs about certain holy places and wells, of holy trees
and plants, about the weather, numbers, signs and demonic beings. Villages continue to elect
their May Queen, the Maid Marian of English legend. The maypole, the towering Irminsul or
Yggdrasil, is decorated with garlands and ribbons and set up on the village green and morris
dancers prance through the streets, feet tapping, bells ringing. Sometimes the participants
proceed through the town with a dancing hobby horse or a furry dance lures townsmen and
visitors alike to the incessant rhythm of music (it is not long since a version of the Helston furry
dance tune reached the top of the pops).

All these survivals demonstrate a form of historical continuity, a bond of union between the life
of the people in Odinist and in Christian times, and are reminders of the time before recorded
history when our ancestors were discovering the round of the seasons and their dependence on
the renewal of vegetation for their existence. Over all the land the rites are seen even if they are
no longer understood. The hand of our fathers reaches down to us through the ages and even
the ritual of the church may still embrace a few graceful reminders of England’s ancient faith.

Odin Lives!

In spite of every effort by the church authorities it is possible to see the spirit of Odin at work
throughout the whole of the Christian era, from 681 when the last of the English was officially
gathered into the fold, right down to the present day. For whatever the individual may be forced
by various pressures to conform to, there is nothing that can ever destroy the presence of Odin
as manifested through thought and inspiration. The discoverers, inventors, scientists, soldiers
and seaman and the men they taught and led were distinct from the men of prayer who shut
themselves up in their monastic cells and their episcopal palaces and opposed with all the vast
power at their disposal anything and any idea which might cause people to think that perhaps
they were in error. Original thought and learning were denounced as magic and real progress
depended for its survival on the heretics and nonconformists. When someone suggested that
there might be people living on the opposite side of the earth the bishops said, no that is not
possible because no such race of people is recorded in holy scripture among the descendants
of Adam. It was left to the Englishman James Cook to confirm the church’s error by discovering
Australia and New Zealand.

The Christian religion was imposed on the English people but Odinism survived in the heart of
the new religion and conferred on Christian practice and intellectuality its indelible imprint.
Christianity made most headway when it took over old beliefs and usages and although Odinism
survived in spirit within the church there were differences in the ethical outlook of the two
religions. Pagans were positive, cherishing pride and courage, freedom and self-reliance, while
the church preached the negative virtues of humility and forgiveness, the laws of ‘thou shalt not’
and the strange doctrine of possession by evil spirits, which required the services of a priest to
exorcise demons. Indeed, the new convert found himself hemmed about by devils and was
forever girding his armour of good deeds and prayer, chastity and austerity.

It was one thing for the new religion to prevail but it was quite another matter for it to overcome
the complex culture beneath Odinism and still more difficult to substitute a vague formula about
loving one’s neighbours for the ancient pagan concept of honour and family. The Christian’s
all-purpose excuse that ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ and that therefore people should be
meek and humble and submit to all sorts of troubles and indignities because such is ‘the will of
God’ was one of the more harmful precepts of the new order.

Pagans had always made the most of life but after their conversion they learnt that it was more
virtuous to abstain from whatever gave pleasure: from food and drink, from physical love and
even from companionship, deprivations that taken to excess could only result in diverting natural
appetites into abnormal channels and inflict moral deformities on the individual. Now they were
told to admire and to imitate the saints, the hermits, the virgins and the self-flagellants.
Under paganism, women had been not less privileged than men. Now they were regulated to
the back pews or to the cloister. The sexes were separated to the extent of instituting a male
celibate priesthood which seemed to regard sex as an embarrassing aberration on the part of
the creator. The church not only sought to separate man from woman but did its best also to
separate him from God, so that it was perhaps inevitable that in the long run God should
become almost irrelevant. The personal relation became restricted to an increasingly
transcendent God who was somewhere ‘up there’, out of sight and out of reach but who was
nonetheless always ready to mete out justice to those who would not believe in him.

In the centuries that followed the conversion paganism may have seemed dead but,
nevertheless, even clergymen sometimes exercised the old virtues and often displayed
considerable moral and physical courage in doing so. Pagan traditions were frequently
tolerated, if not actually encouraged, by the lower orders of the clergy even so late as the middle
ages. Michael Dames [in ​The Silbury Treasure, ​1976] cites the existence of a pregnant earth
goddess (possibly Freya) in the carved decoration on the twelfth century font in Winterbourne
Monkton Church, in Wiltshire. ‘This,’ he writes, ‘confirms the belief of many historians, and the
evidence of contemporary documents, that the village clergy often acquiesced in, or actively
supported, the preference of the pagan community.’

The first indigenous Christian clergy in England were almost certainly found from among the
former gothar of the old faith and it may be assumed that many of them carried into their new
calling some at least of the beliefs of their fathers. In the church’s early days, the fact that large
numbers of foreigners had to be appointed to English bishoprics suggests indifference or
resistance on the part of the native clergy and intelligentsia on a massive scale. The English
clergy were often less than enthusiastic about many aspects of the new religion and hardly gave
much more than lip service to the laws of celibacy. On one occasion, Alcuin was even obliged to
remonstrate with the Bishop of Lindisfarne on the matter of the clergy’s choice of literature:
‘When the priests dine together, they should read nothing but the word of God,’ he wrote, ‘It is
fitting on such occasions to listen … to the discourses of the Fathers, not to heathen poems.’
This continuing affection for the old northern poetry was such that one English bishop went forth
from mass in disguise to chant the deeds of a sea-king. The common people themselves
sometimes showed resentment at being deprived of the ancient religion as they did when some
monks at Tynemouth got into difficulties with the wind and tide and their rafts looked like being
carried out to sea. The country people watching from the shore said it served them right; they
had robbed men of the old ways of worship and now nobody knew where he stood.

However subdued the people may have appeared there was always the ative pagan instinct at
work just beneath the surface. It is discernible right through history and it was irrepressible. If we
examine the lives of some of the ‘great Christian gentlemen’, those exemplars of honour and
chivalry so beloved of the Victorians, the paganism in their characters soon becomes apparent.
The case of Gordon of Khartoum may illustrate. His statue in London shows him with Bible in
hand although he was, according to a recent biographer, ‘not above adapting from the good
book fairly freely when it suited his purpose and he frequently misquoted’. And again: ‘He never
belonged to any particular sect; his religion was more or less manufactured by himself.’ He even
paraphrased, no doubt unconsciously, the Edda: ‘Whilst I live I value health; and if you have
that, as far as the world goes, you are rich.’ Compare that with ‘Havamal’: ‘These things are
thought best: Fire, the sight of the sun, good health with the gift to keep it, and a life that avoids
vice.’ After that it should hardly surprise on to learn that Gordon was once described by his
distinguished contemporary, W.T. Stead, as being possessed of ‘the wrath of the Berserker’,
like most of his compatriots who professed a superficial Christianity, when it came to the crunch
England and the Union flag occupied a larger place in his heart than the Cross and the Bible.

There are countless similar instances of outstanding men and women who were in all essentials
Odinist while being nominally Christian. Oates of the Antarctic, for instance, was another hero in
the pagan, not Christian, mould. For as a suicide his remains would not even have been
accorded Christian burial. In the days of England’s greatness it was the ever-present influence
of pagan courage and daring, rather than Christian prayers to the Almighty, that inspired the
nation and secured its protection and prosperity. ‘Rule, Britannia’, the eighteenth century song
that embodied the country’s pride as mistress of seas and almost became a second national
anthem. (‘When Britain first at Heaven’s command arose from out of the azure main…’), evokes
the vision of a sacred land mass arising out of the sea by divine order. But it is a pagan and not
a Christian vision. The crypto-paganism of many English writers and poets, notably of Charles
Kingsley, Robert Southey, Shelley, D.H. Lawrence, Bulwer-Lytton, Felicia Hemans, S.
Baring-Gould, William Morris and Rudyard Kipling, and artists such as Burne-Jones and Val
Prinsep, also contributed greatly to the later revival of interest in the old gods.

To summarize, the English have always been fundamentally indifferent to the Christian religion
to such a degree that they were prepared to ignore its essence while upholding its externals.
Certainly, they were willing to give it their support and their respect when it was at its zenith and
was essentially a fighting, patriotic, public-spirited and optimistic religion (as it still is in some
parts of Europe). It presents a very different picture today.

The Decline of Christianity

The decline of mainstream Christianity must be attributed largely to the ambivalent attitude of
the various sects to political terrorism and to the general air of permissiveness that pervades
their contemporary teaching. In particular the acquiescence of the Church of England in clerical
sodomy (the Anglican Gay Priests’ Association and the Gay Christian Movement) and its
general assumption of a role that is seen to be more political than spiritual, in which its agencies
(the British Council of Churches, Christian Aid, etc.) dispense political subsidies, calling them
charity. It has long been the case that political propagandists have sought to use clergymen to
give an air of authenticity to their statements, for it is obviously a help to seem to have God on
your side.

The disenchanted descendants of those who were baptized ​en masse ​by monkish zealots are
now disowning their questionable heritage in their thousands and their tens of thousands. Many
of them, seeking and wandering in the spiritual wilderness, now provide profitable fodder for
commercial gurus and other religious pretenders. Christian clergymen, opportunist as ever,
have read the portents and see their church’s future not in Britain or in Europe but in Black
Africa and in Latin America and their instinct informs them that the fashionable political hue of
that future will be crimson. A special prayer composed for use on Mission Sunday, which is
celebrated annually in Catholic churches throughout Africa, contains the request ‘that the
Church in Africa may be wholly Catholic and uniquely African’. That is quite unambiguous. It is
conceivable that church congregations in England might at one time have been asked to recite
a similar prayer applied to England and the English. But not now.

Just as the primitive church accommodated itself to pagan beliefs and practices so today’s
church seeks detente with the agencies of dialectical materialism. After a praiseworthy period of
confrontation with communism the Catholic church performed an abrupt U-turn. Leaders of the
Soviet state were welcomed to the eternal city by a smiling Pope and a communist
fellow-traveller, Cardinal Seper, was installed as chief advisor to John XXIII. Elsewhere
clergymen and nuns joined and sometimes led guerilla gangs, cardinals and bishops in both
parts of Ireland queued up to pay their respects to imprisoned terrorists and Jesuits and
members of other religious orders pushed the new ‘black liberation theology’ for all they were
worth. All the signs combine to show that contemporary Christianity shares with Marxism a
belief in the historical imperative, whether based on the New Testament or on the Communist
Manifesto. Christ has evolved into a trendy social reformer and God the Father has been slain
by his own followers and has been reborn as the Invincible Proletariat.

Jack London once said that from the Christian viewpoint ‘the Northland is unregenerate
because it is so cold there’. And he added, ‘Fear of hellfire cannot be bred in an icebox’.
Northern Europe has indeed become the elephants’ graveyard of the church, the Bermuda
Triangle of Christianity. In parts of Scandinavia the church is now all but extinct and it is surely
more than poetic justice that this latest area of Europe to succumb to the missionaries should be
the first to reject a religion that is now returning to the continent of Africa, close to the point
where it originated as a group of disaffected Jews nearly two thousand years ago. Christianity
can now be seen as having occupied but a short and rather untidy period in a long history of
mankind and the hope that is sometimes expressed by its apologists--that the decline is, like all
previous church crises, only temporary and local--is likely this time to prove vain.

Odinism’s Second Spring

The survival of Odinism in England is to be seen against the background of achievement in the
fields of scientific and geographical discovery, of territorial conquest, of sporting and similar
competitive activities, of the Arts. the virtues that are exercised in such spheres are, by and
large, those of paganism and the men and women who practise them are the doers as distinct
from the prayers whose sights are forever on ‘the next world’ and ‘the life to come’.
It is true that the church is today considerably less prayerful and a great deal more active than it
used to be. But its actions are mostly negative actions insofar as England and the English
people are concerned. At one time there was an almost total lack of toleration in the official
Christianity and it was mainly those who followed the old religion who were easy-going,
frequently to their own disadvantage. For them toleration was both a strength and a weakness.
Now the church, rather belatedly, has discovered the virtues of toleration as if they were
something new and its acolytes behave like a lot of clerical cats on a hot tin roof. Almost
anything goes- except support for English interests. Whatever is of least benefit to our people
then be sure the church will support it. It will tolerate almost anything or anybody that seems to
militate towards the weakening of English cultural homogeneity and the unique identity of the
English and related peoples.

Faced with this challenge the English people are re-asserting their belief in themselves and their
kind by separating from the church and rediscovering their indestructible birthright in the religion
of their fathers. Although here and there individuals had been seeking these spiritual roots for
fifty years and more the reemergence of Odinism was hardly noticeable until the 1960s. Several
attempts were made at forming Odinist communities but it was not until 1973 that the first
indications of a determined effort aimed at the permanent revival of the native paganism were
signalled by the formation in London of the Odinist Committee. By 1980 the Committee’s work
had progressed to the point where it was possible to restore the ancient worship of the Odinic
Rite has since promulgated the organisation through which it must operate and approved the
liturgy which acts as a ritual statement of Odinist’s beliefs.

The religion of Odinism spent thirteen hundred years, more or less, hibernating within the
church. It seems to have disappeared much as a stream that vanishes underground to
resurface elsewhere. Its appearance will enable the English people to find again its lost identity
and with it the possibility of balanced spiritual and material survival and fulfilment. Such aims in
today’s world are almost certain to arouse hostility and Odinists will then once more find
themselves misrepresented, outcast, persecuted. Time may not be on their side but one thing is
certain: that Odin will be with them, always. For the gods of the north are no longer hidden.

Publications quoted in the text

Alexander, M, ​The Earliest English Poems, ​Penguin 1966.

Carpenter, H, ed, ​The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ​Allen & Unwin 1981.
Catholic Encyclopaedia, ​New York 1907.
Chaney, W.A., ​The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, ​Manchester 1970.
Dames, M, ​The Silbury Treasure, ​Thames & Hudson 1976.
Elder Edda, ​trans. P.B. Taylor & W.H. Auden, Faber 1969.
eliade , M, ​Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, ​Collins 1968.
Garrett, R, ​General Gordon, ​Barker 1974.
Grattan, J.H.G., & Singer, C, ​Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, ​Oxford 1952.
Grimm, J, ​Teutonic Mythology, ​1883-88 reprinted by Dover, New York, 1966.
Chronology

● 410 - ​Roman excavation of Britain, followed by chaos.

● c. 430 - ​The English arrive in Britain to restore order: ‘The fire kindled by the hands of
these pagans, proved God’s just revenge for the crimes of the people.’
● 597 - ​Augustine arrives in England, describes the people as ‘a barbarous, fierce and
unbelieving nation’.
● 601 - ​Pope Gregory writes to Mellitus about converting the English: ‘It is impossible to
efface everything at once from their obdurate minds.’
● 616 - ​Odinist revivals in Kent, Essex, Middlesex parts of Hertfordshire.
● 633 - ​Odinist revivals in Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Yorkshire
and Lancashire.
● 640 - ​Eorcenberht of Kent orders destruction of Odinist altars.
● 665 - ​Odinist revivals in Essex, Middlesex and parts of Hertfordshire.
● 681 - ​Conversion of Sussex, last of the pagan kingdoms.
● 789 - ​Pope Adrian laments ‘the continuing paganism of the English’.
● 851-c.926 - ​Renewed Odinist (viking) settlement throughout England.
● c. 890 - ​Pope Formosus complains that ‘the nefarious rites of the pagans have sprouted
again’ among the English.
● c. 960 - ​Conversion of Denmark
● 1000 - ​Conversion of Iceland
● 1060 - ​Odinist hof at Uppsala, Sweden, demolished.
● c. 1100 - ​Conversion of Sweden.
● 1120 - ​The ‘last relics’ of Odinism destroyed at Smaland, Norway.
● 1643 - ​Manuscript Edda, ​Codex Regius, ​discovered in Iceland.
● 1770 - ​The Edda translated into English by Thomas Percy.
● 1973 - ​The Odinist Committee formed in London.
● 1980 - ​The Odinic Rite restored.

First published by Raven Banner Editions 1982, reprinted 1995