In December, 1996, Robert Wright wrote a piece in Time magazine for a cover story titled Jesus Online. His article wasn't about Christianity though. It was called Can Thor Make A Comeback? Obscure Religions -- Half Forgotten Or Half Invented -- Are Flourishing On The Web.

NOTE: you need a paid subscription to access the full text on the Time site. As of 10 minutes ago, I'm a paid subscriber. If you're not, the text and graphic links above will give you only a bit of the story. If you're a Highbeam Research subscriber, you get Time plus another 2,999 publications and documents. I didn't mean for this to be an advertisement, only an explanation. So shoot me already.

"The point here," Wright wrote, "is not that a major Asatru comeback is in the cards. Thor's best days are almost certainly behind him (though no fewer than 12 Asatru Websites are listed in the Yahoo! Web-indexing service)."

Granted, that article was written nine years ago, but today Yahoo lists 154,000 hits for Asatru, and Google lists 206,000. Which gives us to believe that, comeback or not, it's sure growing -- whatever the hell it is. Nine years ago, even nine months ago, I'd never heard the term. Something closer to nine days ago, I began to get a clue. It seems that Asatru has a lot to do with Norse gods and Icelandic Eddas and the good old ways of those good old boys from the frozen wastes of (stop me if you've heard this before) Northern Europe. Roughly speaking. Which is appropriate, as they were all rough speakers themselves back in those fabled times of yore. It is thought, by those who practice what they imagine to have been the old pre-Christian religion of Asatru, that its progenitors had a certain atavistic vitality, uncomplicated by a lot of wasteful abstract ideation. Warring on weaker tribes, wenching in the mead halls -- it was a simpler life, even if its simplicity and closer proximity to nature also meant closer proximity to an early grave. But no matter. It was a warrior culture. All brave lads and true. Sorta like Led Zeppelin. And lasses who lived to serve their brawny men and feed them and love them till the goats came home. Yeah, I can see the appeal.

Especially, perhaps, in contrast to that wimpy Jesus some Time art director took as the demographic average of American opinions as to what the Son of God must have looked like in his prime. To me, it looks as if he might have taken one too many ludes. Looks like the dude's about to nod. Whether or not that image bears any resemblance to the historical Christ, demographics, as we know, never lie. If the Time editors did their homework -- and you can bet they did -- this is how traditional America envisions the soul of Christianity.

However, another large and growing part of America these days is feeling a bit more feisty, a bit less turn the other cheekish, a bit more inclined to... well hey, you saw the shots coming out of Abu Ghraib... call it sado-masochismo -- with a down-home heaping helping of xenophobic racism thrown in for good measure. Yeah sure, there are gentle throwback New Age hippies prancing around Maypoles and plaiting flowers into their braids and calling themselves pagans. But there's an altogether other camp of pagans out there that, let's just say, you really wouldn't want to run into on a moonless night in some militia infested Federal forest preserve.

That's just my own jaundiced view, of course. So let's hear from a professional for a change. This passage takes us -- eventually -- back to my musings above, but it does so via certain highly twisted permutations of American Christianity itself.

The Ku Klux Klan is but one of a staggering variety of racist organizations that compete and at times cooperate with one another within a broader white supremacy movement. Many of these organizations are loosely linked by their adherence to Christian Identity theology. As Blee (1998) describes it, "Christian Identity is a quasi-theological network of between two and three hundred churches across the nation linked by Christian Identity Family Bible Camps and radio shows that preach that Anglo-Saxons are the lost tribe of Israel and the Jews and African Americans and other people of color are inferiors sent to earth as a scourge from God." According to this belief system, Eve was impregnated with two seeds. Cain and the Jews are believed to be the product of a seed planted by Satan, while members of the "white" race are descendants of Abel, who was born of Adam's seed. Nonwhites, while they are not believed to be direct descendants of Satan, are viewed with disdain and considered to be less than human (Southern Poverty Law Center 1998).

Not unlike many mainstream conservative religious belief systems in the United States, Identity Theology constructs an absolute dichotomy of good and evil and promotes a belief in absolute moral standards. Unlike mainstream religions, however, evil is presumed to be located within individuals based on their ascribed characteristics. Identity theology constructs a violent tension between the presumed descendants of Cain and Abel, and it legitimates even the most violent actions that may be directed toward Jews and toward racial and ethnic minority group members.

In recent years new radical religious belief systems have gained strength within the white supremacy movement, challenging the privileged position of Identity Theology among American racist organizations. Most notable among these are the Church of the Creator (COTC), also called "Creativity," and racist adaptations of the Norse pagan religion Odinism and its offshoot Asatru. Like Identity Theology, COTC and racist pagan religions demonize Jews and racial and ethnic minorities, while encouraging followers to prepare for a race war. They are critical of Identity Theology's ties to Christianity, however, and have a close affinity with Nazism.

from: Structured Ignorance and Organized Racism in the United States
by Rory McVeigh
source: Social Forces, 1 March 2004.
via: HighBeam Research

To recap and retreat to McDonald's for a very early breakfast before the crosses burst into flames on my front lawn: those 12 Asatru websites Time magazine found on Yahoo in 1996 have grown to 206,000 mentions as reported by google today. Run another google search for Asatru Nazi, and the intersection of the two terms yields nearly a thousand page references. Granted, many are arguing that Odinism and Asatru bear no relationship to Nazi racism, but methinks that's a whole lotta ladies protesting way too much. Now search once more for +"Anglo-Celtic" +(racism | racist) and you'll get 15,400 hits.

Among them is another piece from the Souther Poverty Law Center, titled A League of Their Own. The sub-slug reads: "The League of the South, a group at the center of the neo-Confederate movement, says it's not racist, but the evidence shows otherwise." Here are some verbatim clips by and about J. Michael Hill, founder and president of the League.

• [Hill] says people other than white Christians would be allowed to live in his South, but only if they bow to "the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions."
• [The League of the South] has steadily grown more powerful, to the point that it is now at the nexus of the neo-Confederate movement. It's ideas about the "Anglo-Celtic" nature of the South are now nearly universally accepted by pro-South groups...
• "The destruction of states rights in the South," Hill wrote in 1998, "was the first necessity leading to forced policies undermining the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and its institutions."

The question that keeps turning around in my mind is what THAT Anglo-Celtic has to do with THIS Anglo-Celtic? I mean it must be coincidence, right? But you know what them crypto-mystical New Age white folks always like to say: As Above, So Below.

As for so many others, the Stoned Age began for me circa 1967 C.E. For some, it lasted well into the '90s. Others never came down at all. (You know who you are. Presumably.) One such is Ralph Metzner, far-famed for his predilection for powerful psychedelics and extreme weirdball theories of anthropology. One of Metzner's books, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe, is prefaced by Marija Gimbutas. Who's she? I was ever so hoping you'd ask...

Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994)

Lithuanian-born US-based archaeologist whose feminist theories challenged traditional views of society in prehistoric Europe. She proposed that Stone Age Europe was a peaceful and harmonious place, where men and women were equals and worshipped life-giving goddesses, in particular the great Mother Goddess; the invading Indo-Europeans brought a male-dominated society and warlike gods.

Gimbutas' radical ideas are treated with considerable scepticism by most scholars in the field, but they have been adopted with enthusiasm by many feminists. Works include The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991).

from: Gimbutas, Marija (1921-1994)
source: The Hutchinson Encyclopedia, 2003
via: HighBeam Research

It's no secret that I love Amazon. Some people do not, but look: look at the incredible wealth of knowledge that's there in addition to the books. Knowledge contributed by mere mortals, like you and... well, I was going to say me, but nevermind. I'm going to quote this reader review of Civilization of the Goddess in toto. It's that germane. It's that good. Rose Nunez, I love you.

Lovely, beautiful bunkum, November 30, 2003
Reviewer: Rose M. Nunez (Eugene, OR United States)

When I was a brand-new starry-eyed goddess worshipper, I adored every gorgeous drawing, every elegant photograph in this lavish book. The story that these images claim to narrate, that of a peaceful, matriarchal utopia, sensual and celebratory, made my heart sing and gave me hope that we might someday return to the "old ways." Gimbutas reads the sherds and statues and decorated pots as symbols of the goddess. Thus, slashes = rain = water = primordial symbol of the goddess. Triangles = vulvas = primordial symbol of the goddess. And so on.

Unfortunately, Gimbutas is guessing, or, more charitably, seeing meanings she wants badly to believe. She presents no evidence for her interpretations; she simply shows us a picture of a pot and tells us what she has decided it means. If you think the evidence must be SOMEWHERE (that's what I thought), even if in another book, or a series of articles, guess again. Most archaeologists and anthropologists who are familiar with her (including many female scholars) reject her theory. They point to evidence that directly contradicts Gimbutas' vision of a pacific agrarian utopia: These people had weapons, they had armies, they had male gods who were aggressively sexual. Gimbutas simply selectively ignored evidence that didn't fit her thesis. She committed other violations of scholarly integrity too numerous to list here. Type "Gimbutas" into Google and you'll find several web sites belonging to archaeologists and anthropologists who are saddened by the public's rush to embrace her blatantly revisionist view of the neolithic.

Despite this book's scholarly bankruptcy, I have to rate it three stars. It is gorgeous, and there's no reason to discredit the pictures -- just the spellbinding and utterly mistaken story Gimbutas claims they tell.

Last night I came across this introduction to Metzner's Well of Remembrance book. I found it interesting that he went to such pains to explain that his interest was way way different from what got those nasty old Nazis sniffing around the same general subject.

I approached the study of Germanic mythology with considerable anxiety, since I was aware of the massive taboo against this topic. This taboo was created by the fact that the Nazis appeared to have been deeply involved in an attempted revival of ancient Germanic religion and practices. Like most people I had an almost visceral revulsion against any belief system even remotely associated with the Nazis' genocidal ideology. Yet my study of Germanic myth did not find any resemblance to the paranoid racism that was central to the Nazi worldview. Basically, it appears that the Nazis appropriated certain themes that they claimed to have found in Germanic myth, and combined them with illusory assumptions about Aryan racial supremacy, for their own ideological, propagandistic purposes. One could say the Nazis laid a curse on Germanic mythology.

Nevertheless, I found that I needed to delve into the psychological origins of the Nazi ideology, in order to separate the distortion from the reality, and try to undo the curse that they laid on ancient Germanic religion and mythology. I describe the results of this inquiry in the prologue, "Aryan Ancestors and the Nazi Distortion", and invite readers who wish to untangle this convoluted thicket of perverted reasoning to read this prologue before proceeding with the mythological material.

Metzner continues, further on, to argue that Gimbutas' conclusions "although not uncontroversial, have been echoed by many other scholars, including Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Riane Eisler, Elinor Gadon and Merlin Stone." (Hmmm. Merlin Stone... I wonder if that's his real name.) The scathing emphasis, above, is of course mine. Eliade, though the most scholarly of the bunch, is a strange pick in this context. The following quote -- warning: strong stuff -- is Eliade speaking to Mihail Sebastian, the guy in the picture.

"The Poles' resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Germans' sense of scruple. The Germans have no interest in the destruction of Romania. Only a pro-German government can save us.... What is happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate."

-Mircea Eliade, in a 1939 conversation recorded by Mihail Sebastian in his Journal.

from: Fascism's mythologist Mircea Eliade and the politics of myth by Tony Stigliano
source: ReVision, 1 January 2002
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2002 Heldref Publications

It's worth mentioning here that ReVision, far from being hostile to New Age sorts of ideas, is focused largely on an audience to whom Eliade has been something of a god. This article must have been unsettling to many readers -- as I hope it is to you. The piece continues...

Mircea Eliade... is popularly known as the author of Shamanism (1954), a study that has provided the basis not just for inquiry into premodern practices but for the use of those practices in a modern context. Eliade was a Romanian comparative mythologist who helped create the discipline of the history of religion. He designed and elaborated a mythological project that was instrumental in providing a mythic basis for the Romanian fascist movement from 1919 until 1940. Eliade's project involved a profound rejection of the universal rationality of European Enlightenment philosophy, which he saw as eroding humanity's connection to the "divine." Eliade himself served the Axis government in Bucharest as an attache in fascist Portugal. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Eliade held that myth was originally based on race and ethnicity; this would change when he took his position at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s. His scholarly work there into the late 1960s was an ostensibly apolitical extension of the same work he had done from the 1920s to 1940 in Romania and from 1945 to 1951 in Pads. Yet after 1945 he continued to work underground for right-wing extremists.

This has gone on long enough for one morning -- it's already after 6am on the East coast, so I'd better post this soon. But just one more, OK? The writer, Mary Lefkowitz, is well qualified to review Gimbutas' notion of an idyllic primordial matriarchy.

For all the artistry of Gimbutas's work, one cannot help feeling that the conclusion with which she ends is really the assumption with which she began. In her reconstruction of prehistoric goddess religion, alternative and un-archetypal explanations are not accepted. Instead the Jungian template is everywhere. And so we are given statements of astonishing range and certitude, such as this one: "The Great Goddess existed for at least 5,000 years before the appearance of Classical Greek civilization. Village communities worship her to this day in the guise of the Virgin Mary." Never mind that a continuity so complete amounts to a loss of the historical sense. According to Gimbutas, this continuity was a real historical phenomenon, and "is no mere coincidence."

Such spectacular connections between such different phenomena need to be proven. They cannot be merely assumed to have been direct or inevitable. But the situation is no different in The Language of the Goddess, in which Gimbutas's ideas about the Goddess are elaborated in greater detail, and in a beautifully illustrated book. This book comes with a brief preface by (who else?) Joseph Campbell. In his own work, Campbell employed archetypes to explain the meaning of myth; that is to say, he felt intellectually free to interpret one mythology by means of another, so that he came to feel that he was devising nothing less than a schematic "grammar" of human thought.

from: The twilight of the goddess: feminism, spiritualism, and a new craze by Mary Lefkowitz
source: The New Republic, 3 August 1992
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1992 The New Republic, Inc.

All right, so I lied. But this is the last one. Promise. In another review, this time of Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, Lefkowitz writes:

...this Goddess is celebrated in Wicca and in several New Age cults, as well as in a lively popular literature. The authors of books about the Goddess take it for granted that her existence has been confirmed by the discovery of prehistoric artifacts. Joseph Campbell, who is regarded many people in the U.S.A. as an authority on all ancient mythologies, stated that Gimbutas' work provided a "lexicon of the pictorial script" of Goddess religion. According to Campbell, Goddess religion was an expression of "that primordial attempt on humanity's part to understand and live in harmony with the beauty and wonder of Creation" in contrast to the story of creation in Genesis, and the "manipulated systems of the West". As he saw it, rediscovery of her religion addressed the "need in our time for a general transformation of consciousness."

But could a religion that so precisely met the needs of the twentieth century C.E. have existed in the twentieth century B.C.E.? Certainly not in the form that Gimbutas, Campbell, or any of their predecessors imagined it.

OK, so it was more than you wanted to know. It's more than most people want to know. But I think this stuff is important -- and it's far from common knowledge. Why is it that New Age and Nazi interests (in both senses, perhaps?) seem to overlap? And the deeper I look, the more they appear to. Though both camps revile each other noisily, they seem to share some deep longing for a lost purity of purpose, of blood, of will, of power. And both tend to look for it in the "Indo-European," the "Aryan," the "Anglo-Saxon," the "Celtic," in the rough area of the Northern European "races". All of which are entirely mythical. And all of which are, not so coincidentally, "white."

Oh yeah, it's all so spiritual, baby.