Wotansvolk

This article is about the white supremacist movement. For the Germanic mystical concept of Guido von List, see Wotanism (Guido von List). For the worship of Wotan, see Wotan (disambiguation).

Wotanism

Founder
David Lane, Ron McVan, Katja Lane
Regions with significant populations
American Mountain States, Europe
Religions
Heathenry (Nordic racial paganism)
Scriptures
The "Fourteen Words", "88 Precepts", Hávamál

Wotansvolk (English: "Odin’s Folk") promulgates a form of white nationalist modern paganism and it was founded in the early 1990s by Ron McVan, Katja Lane and David Lane (1938–2007) while Lane was serving a 190-year prison sentence for his actions in connection to the white supremacist revolutionary domestic terrorist organization The Order, of which he was a member. After the founding of 14 Word Press by David Lane and his wife Katja to disseminate her husband's writings, Ron McVan joined the press in 1995 and founded Temple of Wotan (co-writing a book by that name). 14 Word Press - Wotansvolk proceeded to publish several books for the practice of Wotanism before becoming defunct in the early 2000s.

History

Wotansvolk was launched following David Lane's publication of a 1995 article titled "Wotan's Folk", which gave the group its name. Wotan is the Germanic name of Odin, a central figure in the Norse faith and other Germanic mythologies. Lane had been publishing white supremacist and neopagan works under the name "14 Word Press", along with his wife Katja Lane and Ron McVan, an artist who had become involved in the white supremacist movement in the 1970s after reading the works of Ben Klassen, the founder of Creativity, another white supremacist religion. Headquartered at a mountain outside St. Maries, Idaho, Wotansvolk rapidly evolved into "a dynamic propaganda center that spread its message throughout the United States and abroad".

Established at a time when the Internet was beginning to revolutionize means of communication, the group set up a website in 1995, and it got its own domain in 1997, "14words.com". In 2001, an online chat was created, in order to link Heathens around the world in a common white power culture. The first European Wotansvolk group was established in spring 1996 in London. According to Mattias Gardell, Wotansvolk was not founded as a membership organization but rather as a propaganda center, providing "a philosophical foundation for independent kindreds and fraternities" with a large number of individual supporters helping disseminate Wotansvolk materials in their local communities. Besides illustrating the group's publications, McVan extended Odinism to a business by selling artifacts such as rune-staffs, Thor's hammers or ceremonial drinking horns.

A number of pagan white-power bands have referenced Wotansvolk in their lyrics, including Darken’s Creed of Iron album and Dissident’s album A Cog in the Wheel. The original group eventually split in 2002, when administration of Wotansvolk was transferred to John Post in Napa, California. In March of the same year, Post announced the formation of the National Prison Kindred Alliance, as a joint effort of Wotansvolk and a number of independent Asatrú/Odinist tribal networks which were seeking to improve their religious rights in penitentiaries.

Presence in US prisons

Wotansvolk operated a quite successful prison outreach program. Research by Mattias Gardell indicated "a pagan revival among the white prison population, including the conversion of whole prison gangs to the ancestral religion [...] partly due to the reputation of Lane and its association with the legendary Brüders Schweigen, Wotansvolk's name-recognition is high among the Aryan prison population". As of January 2001, Wotansvolk catered to more than 5,000 prisoners, including several members of The Order like David Lane and Richard Scutari. There were fewer than a hundred prison kindreds by the fall of 1996; more than three hundred of them were present by the year 2000. Prison authorities however often break groups by disseminating their members to various establishments. Lane’s campaigning has contributed to the fact that all states now allow any prisoner to wear a Thor’s hammer as a religious medallion.

If many white supremacist groups were active in prisons, the organization seemed to be "more successful in its outreach efforts than other Asatrú/Odinist programs," according to Gardell. Non-racist versions of Asatrú and Odinism are protected in the US under freedoms of speech and of religion, but violent and racist religious materials, such as Wotanism, may be banned or restricted from prisons. While the movement is primarily associated with prison culture in the media, Wotansvolk's co-founder Katja Lane asserted in a 1999 interview that prisoners only constituted an estimated 20 percent of all Wotansvolkers in the United States.

Beliefs

Wotansvolk is based on a combination of white supremacism, Jungian psychology, the Völkisch movement, and occult Nazism. Lane was also an early proponent of the Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory, the belief that "the U.S. government is controlled by racial enemies, using its military might to establish a global Jewish dictatorship." Convinced that white man was at the verge of extinction, Lane coined the "Fourteen Words" slogan as a rallying point for white supremacists. The group praises a mythologized version of the Viking Age, with Odinism as a religious component. Wotansvolkers also cite as influential the works of ariosophist Guido von List and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Race

Wotansvolk promotes "pan-Aryanism", as a form of nationalism derived from white identity. They attribute various wars occurring in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia as consequences of artificial borders imposed by the enemies of the white race to divide and conquer. Wotansvolk followers have defended Hitler and the Nazis as "prisoners" of these artificial boundaries.

Followers of the movement often selectively cite Carl Jung's theories of an "Aryan" collective subconscious, which they equate with the "race-soul" of Nazism. Wotansvolk followers specifically cite Jung's 1936 essay "Wotan".

White revolution

Aiming at a "white revolution", Wotansvolk endorsed the "leaderless resistance" strategy originally developed by Louis Beam. Their own version involved the tactical separation between an open propaganda arm and a paramilitary underground. The mission of the overt part was to "counter system-sponsored propaganda", "educate the Folk" and "provide a man pool from which the covert or military arm can be [recruited]." Predicting that the openly racist propaganda arm would be "under scrutiny", Lane emphasized by 1994 the need for members to "operate within the [legal] parameters" and keep themselves "rigidly separated" from the military underground. The paramilitary wing would have to "operate in small, autonomous cells, the smaller the better, even one man alone", in order for its members to primarily target "weak points in the infrastructure" of industrialized societies, with "fire, bombs, guns, terror, disruption and destruction". Lane added that "whatever and whoever perform valuable service for the system are targets, human or otherwise" and that "special attention and merciless terror are visited upon those White men who commit race treason".

Lane considered loyalty to the United States "race treason", as he viewed the United States as actively committing genocide against white people.

While Wotansvolk followers have endorsed the white separatist project of the Northwest Territorial Imperative, they mostly dismissed the constitution of the white ethnostate proposed by Aryan Nations in April 1996 on the ground that it restricted liberties, especially the freedom of religion.

Anti-Christianity

David Lane attributed the current weakness of the "Aryan man" to Christianity, a creed which he believed was "diametrically opposed to the natural order," and part of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. "God is not love", he said, "God the Creator made lions to eat lambs; he made hawks to eat sparrows. Compassion between species is against the law of nature. Life is struggle and the absence of struggle is death."

Despite Lane's contempt for Christianity, he described the Bible as containing secret codes which were hidden by pre-Christian, non-Jewish Aryan masters. Lane stated that this Bible code was carried over into the King James Version, which he believed had been translated by Sir Francis Bacon. Lane also taught something which he called the "Pyramid Prophecy" and according to him, it said that his name and birth-date were both prophesied in the Bible as being connected to the coming of the Antichrist, who embodied the spirits of Mars, Thor, and King David and it simultaneously said that he was "the Man of prophecy," the "666 Man" and the "Joseph Smith of Wotanism". Ron McVan dismissed the African-Americans who "zealously emphasize the rigors of 200 years of slavery in this country," and he also dismissed Jews who "rant hysterically and endlessly about an alleged holocaust," and highlighted the "freethinking Aryan pagans, alchemists, and scientists who suffered under the Christian pogroms and Inquisition. This was a deliberate, religious slaughter of the innocents which was unparalleled in the Western world".

McVan argued that the main cause of the fall and degeneration of the Aryan golden age was the spiritual advent of Jewish Christianity. According to him, the folk then began to gradually lose consciousness of itself as a race: “if ever there were a birth of tragedy, it was when Aryan man turned his back on the indigenous Gods of his race,” McVan wrote in 1999.

Wotanism

Ron McVan developed Wotansvolk ariosophy in two books which he titled Creed of Iron (1997) and Temple of Wotan (2000), with the project to get the lost "folk consciousness" to re-emerge, and reconnect white people to their "roots [in] the Aryan race". Wotanism is presented by McVan as "the inner voice of the Aryan soul, which links the infinite past with the infinite future." To McVan, Wotan—the Germanic name of Odin—symbolizes "the essential soul and spirit of the Aryan folk which is manifest" as an iron-willed warrior god. According to James R. Lewis and Jesper A. Petersen, "there is no ontological distinction which is separating Aryan man and Aryan gods. They are conceived of as kin, differing in power rather than nature." McVan cultivated the "mystery of the blood", the belief that unmixed Aryan blood carries a genetic memory of the racial lineage with all of its gods, demigods, and heroes of the aboriginal golden age. Given that the Aryan can reconnect to the archetypall gods of the blood, "man is able", in the words of McVan, "to awaken to a divinity which flows within him". "A race which is without its mythos and religion of the blood", McVan followed, "shifts aimlessly through history."

Contrary to self-denying Christianity, Wotanism is seen by Wotansvolkers as a "natural religion" which preaches "war, plunder and sex." Lane's followers, who regard him as a folk hero, see the 14 Words and the 88 Precepts as holy scriptures and they see his other writings as foundational texts. They primarily consider the gods through a "soft polytheistic" lens as Jungian archetypes, although Lane said that one could be a deist, a pantheist, or an atheist and still be a Wotansvolk. McVan and Lane have described many rituals and practices, none of which are required to be adhered to by practitioners. In his writings, Lane frequently used the terms 'Odinist' and 'Wotanist' as synonyms, and as a result, the Southern Poverty Law Center regards Lane's Wotanism as a form of Odinism, whereas Ron McVan labelled it "Heathen."

Universalist Asatruars—notably The Troth—along with some non-folkish Odinists, have rejected what they perceive is an attempt to appropriate the revival of the ancient native faith of northern Europe for political and racial ends. Folkish Odinists who are on their side, such as Stephen McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly, generally support Lane's Fourteen Words, but they are generally not in favor of the use of domestic terrorism in order to establish a white ethnostate.

See also

• Ariosophy
• Christian Identity
• Creativity (religion)
• Irminism
• National Socialist Kindred
• Neopaganism
• White Separatism
• Ynglism

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Gardell, Mattias (2003). Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3071-4.
• Gardell, Mattias (2004). "White Racist Religions in the United States: From Christian Identity to Wolf Age Pagans". In Lewis, James R.; Petersen, Jesper Aagaard (eds.). Controversial New Religions. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 387–422. doi:10.1093/019515682X.003.0018. ISBN 978-0-19-515682-9.
• Kaplan, Jeffrey (2000). Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-0340-3.
• Lewis, James R.; Petersen, Jesper Aagaard (2014). Controversial New Religions. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199315314.

Further reading

• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-3155-0.
• Kaplan, Jeffrey (1997). Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah. Syracuse: Syracuse Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-0396-2.