Shale Vaughn was in a dark place in her life. Everything was falling apart, from her relationships to her finances, and there seemed to be no end in sight. So, like many people in her situation, she desperately prayed for help. “I was kneeling in front of my altar, and I was a mess. Things were really wrong,” she says. It wasn’t a gentle supplication, either. She was sobbing, screaming, and swearing, demanding answers. She needed a response.
And she got one. But it wasn’t from the Christian God that most Americans would pray to. Nor was it even from Freyja, the Norse goddess to whom her entreaties had been addressed. Instead, while deep in a meditative trance in the middle of her prayer, she felt the room grow cold. A presence settled next to her, and she felt firm, fatherly fingers dig into her shoulder. She looked out of the corner of her eye to see who her visitor was, afraid of what she might see. She saw what looked to be an old, grey-haired man with a wide-brimmed hat casting half of his face in shadow.
“‘I wouldn’t let her see you like that,’ the man said,” Vaughn recalls him saying in a deep voice that she felt rather than heard. He continued: “‘Pick yourself up before she finds you like this.’”
Startled, Vaughn snapped out of her meditative trance and looked around. There was no one there, but she stopped crying and became calm anyway. She knew that her visitor was Odin, the All-Father, and that it would be a very poor decision to disregard the advice of the leader of the gods.
Although not always so direct or dramatic, moments like this are hardly unfamiliar to Shale Vaughn and her husband, George Vaughn. For them, the names Freyja and Odin are far more than names from Norse myth—they’re promises. Shale has sworn an oath to serve Freyja, Norse goddess of love, sex, beauty, death, and war. Odin, the general of the gods who would sacrifice the life of a mortal for the greater good (earning him the sobriquet “Betrayer of Men”), commands the loyalty of George. The Vaughns are Ásatrúar, which means “faith in the Æsir (ey-sir),” and their gods predate the Christian faith by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
Sitting on the Vaughn’s altar remains a jar of mead from Yule 2013. Mead is often offered to the gods for special events, especially at Yule.
It would be difficult to discern their beliefs from a glance, however, at least if the viewer only had popular cultural portrayals of Norse culture and religion like Beowulf and horned Viking helmets to go off of. Both are normal-looking, middle-aged IT workers. Neither of the Vaughns are adorned in helmets, nor are they covered in piercings. Though both are certainly fond of mead, they don’t have drinking horns perpetually in hand. Necklaces bearing religious symbols, though present, are tucked out of sight beneath shirt collars. Only a small tattoo of a valknut, a symbol of three interlocking triangles signifying devotion to Odin barely visible on George’s arm gives any visual indication of his faith, and perhaps only to someone skilled in semiotics.
“It means ‘Insert spear here,’” he jokes, a reference to Odin’s traditional demand for great sacrifice from his followers.
The Vaughn home also fails to provide much in the way of signs of their beliefs. A flat-screen television sits in one half of the room, a coffee maker the other. Two cats chase each other around the house and aside from one of the cats having a dietary fondness for the hair of sitting guests, nothing is particularly strange about them. Nor do the Vaughns have emblems of their faith—in their case, a stylized image of Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, representing the god of thunder’s protectiveness toward humankind—hanging around the house, a stark contrast to many Christian homes. There’s a reason for that, Shale says.
“We don’t really worship our gods,” she says. “It’s more of a partnership… I do something for you, you do something for me.” And, as George points out, unlike a monotheistic faith, as a follower of a polytheistic religion like Ásatrú, you work with a multitude of gods; Odin may be the All-Father, the leader of the gods, but he isn’t the only god or, in terms of human interaction, necessarily the most important one either. There are many gods within the Æsir (nomadic gods of humanity) and the Vanir (gods of nature and agriculture), the two houses of the Norse pantheon, and each has a vital role to fill within Ásatrú.
The Age of Valkyries
These Norse gods were feared far and wide for centuries after the fall of Rome, courtesy of their followers who left Scandinavia in search of new lands and new riches: the Vikings. They struck terror into the hearts of men and women from England to Anatolia. Sightings of the ornate carved dragon heads of the distinctive-looking longboats they rowed were enough to send entire cities into a panic. The Frankish emperor Charlemagne counted them as one of his greatest enemies and the emperors of Byzantium sought to recruit them as elite mercenaries and bodyguards, forming the Varangian Guard. Mighty Christian kings, upon hearing of the arrival of Viking longboats on their shores, would pray not only for absolution from sin, but also salvation and deliverance from the fury of the ruthless Northmen.
This, at least, is the story that popular culture tells about the pre-Christian Scandinavians and their gods. From the History Channel’s series Vikings, which follows the story of semi-historical Viking king Ragnarr Loðbrók, to the accounts of Viking raids chronicled by Catholic monks in now ancient tomes, the focus is almost always on the fearsome savagery of Odin and his kin. Though there’s an element of truth to that, it’s far from the entirety of the story.
“It didn’t start out that way,” says Shale, explaining that originally the Norse people encountered other Europeans through trade routes, not raiding parties. “It turned bad … when the priests started trying to convert them.”
These attempts at proselytization, sometimes through force by Christian leaders, began when Norse visitors stopped to trade. Being from Scandinavia, a land known for its harsh climate driving its inhabitants to become warriors, the Norse traders were independent-minded and not appreciative of any sort of coercion. “It didn’t end well,” George says with a grim smile.
A Modern Faith
Over time, the raids subsided. Christianity crept north into Scandinavia, the Norse kingdoms within England and Ireland were invaded and absorbed, and the old gods and old traditions were replaced by new ones. The age of the Vikings came to an end. But in some places their gods persevered. One such place was the Norwegian colony of Iceland, which only Christianized in the 1100s, hundreds of years after much of the rest of Europe, and even then only nominally. Icelandic sagas and poetry would keep the traditions and stories of Thor and Odin, Freyja and Freyr, and the other gods alive until the counterculture movement took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. Interest in the Norse faith would be reborn with a new vigor, but not quite as it had been in the times of old.
Although there had always been respect for the old traditions and gods within Iceland, much had been lost by the time Ásatrú enjoyed its modern revival. In some cases, over a hundred generations had passed since the Icelandic families of those returning to Ásatrú had followed the old gods, leaving little in the way of familial memories of rituals or traditions that had once been followed. In a way, the religion was entirely new; new followers’ interest was born out of spiritual calling, not a previous relationship with the gods. In all cases, the new followers of the old ways had to research and rebuild their faith from the ground up, especially specifics of ritualistic and ceremonial practices.
George Vaughn displays his valknut tattoo as well as his Mjölnir pendant.
“We have these accounts saying, ‘We sacrificed and offered mead to the gods and celebrated,’” says Shale, “But there’s very little saying ‘We offered this sacrifice by preparing for it this way, or we honored this god through by going through these steps.’” Some things, she says, like the role of Yggdrasil, the spiritual tree that connects the nine worlds of Norse belief together, or the importance of mead as the drink of the gods and the literal blood of the poet god Kvasir, were well-preserved in Icelandic texts. Other aspects of the faith had to be extrapolated based on information gleaned from incomplete sources.
What guidance the modern Ásatrúar did have in rebuilding their religious customs came primarily in the form of the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, two manuscripts written in Old Norse in Iceland during the 13th century. Preserved in Icelandic monasteries until the modern day, together they offer a comprehensive look at the original Norse creation stories, gods, and famous heroes; an invaluable resource to Ásatrú. In addition to the Eddas, Ásatrúar also had access to rune stones: large, ornately painted megaliths with Futhark characters—the ancient runic alphabet of the Scandinavian people—etched into their faces. Rune stones, often erected at ancient burial sites across Scandinavia, Britain, and Ireland, told the life stories of people of importance in Scandinavian societies, including spiritual deeds. Perhaps even more importantly, some of them were erected to honor a well-known goði (priest) or gyðja (priestess), offering a direct insight into how positions of spiritual stature were honored and remembered.
Fractured Paths
In part because of the incomplete picture of how the religion of the Old Norse worked in the pre-Christian era, divisions have formed in the Ásatrú community. The main two divisions in the community come in the form of the “universalist” and “folkish” movements. Universalist Ásatrúar, George explains, tend to borrow traditions from other pagan faiths when they find it complementary to Ásatrú beliefs or in order to fill holes left by incomplete records. Folkish Ásatrúar, by comparison, try to be as faithful as possible to the version of Ásatrú described in the Eddas, rune stones, and other forms of documentation. They also differ in views on ancestry, with folkish followers viewing direct lineage to a Nordic culture as a necessary prerequisite to being Ásatrú. Universalists, on the other hand, believe than anyone drawn to the faith can call it their own. Despite the dichotomy, there is some fluidity in the camps.
“Shale and I consider ourselves to be pretty folkish in our beliefs,” says George. “But if [for example] someone was ethnically and culturally Japanese, but was really into Thor and was a good Ásatrú, then I would have no problem with that.”
Shale nods in agreement. “If Thor or Odin decides to call on someone, who am I to second-guess their judgment?” she says, noting that she has known of several kindreds (a term referring to small communal groupings of Ásatrú) that had very devout members of other ethnicities not only participating fully in the faith, but serving as goðis or gyðjas.
Peace is also often kept between the two camps by the Ásatrú idea of frith, a concept that can be loosely translated as a dedication to peace and mutual respect between followers of the faith regardless of theological differences. On the fringes of the folkish camp, however, there is a serious threat to the stability of the Ásatrú community, and the very concept of frith. Many skinheads and neo-Nazis, while proclaiming Aryan supremacy, also claim to follow the Æsir and Vanir. Many of these racially motivated adherents follow the lead of occult groups like the Thule Society, a secret organization in Nazi Germany that included some elements of old Nordic religions in its doctrine and counted many high-ranking members of the Nazi Party as members.
Though these outliers call themselves Ásatrú, gyðja Jane Ruck vehemently disagrees with their claim to the religion.
“That goes against everything that Ásatrú is,” she says, adding that the Ásatrú faith encourages its adherents to act with personal integrity and strength, something that is completely at odds with any form of racial supremacy movement. “That’s Hitlerism, not [Ásatrú].”
Ruck, former leader of the Northern Way Ásatrú Ministries in Lebanon, Oregon, a religious non-profit dedicated to ensuring religious freedom rights for Ásatrúar, has seen upfront what damage racism in the guise of Ásatrú can cause. In particular, she says, it makes law enforcement view other members of the faith as criminals; it tarnishes the entire community with the unfair reputation of being associated with hate speech. This, in turn, hurts individual Ásatrúar directly, especially those behind bars.
“I got into the prison ministry business because there was this woman who asked… that she be granted the same access to her clergy that other inmates were given,” Ruck says. “The response she got was, ‘Why don’t you just wait until you get out?’ But she was persistent.”
That persistence paid off, and the prison chaplain eventually called Ruck and asked her to come perform a service for the woman. When Ruck arrived, she found that two other prisoners wanted her help as well. After that, her ministry continued to grow: others heard of her services, and she eventually became one of the main sources for dozens of prison chaplains in Oregon and the broader Northwest and beyond when prisoners requested Ásatrú religious services. Though she has since retired from the ministry business, Ruck continues to support the Ásatrú community, and stresses that, although it may be small, it’s still vibrant and a very important part of the lives of Ásatrúar across the world—the fact that so many prisoners sought her services alone is proof of that.
The fact that people like the Vaughns and Ruck exist and dedicate so much of their life to their faith speaks to the truth of her words. Despite the fact today’s world no longer fears carved dragon heads atop longboats, and Odin no longer receives the amount sacrifices he once commanded, the modern Ásatrúar are living proof that, though perhaps diminished, the old gods are not forgotten.
