Siri Christiansen
“Hail Thor!” The priestess and her heathens, standing in a circle, raised their mead-filled horns. We were gathered in an unassuming spot in a pine forest outside Stockholm. This was our temple, and the large, mossy stone before us was our altar. I was relieved to see that the animal-based sacrificial offerings were long-dead and highly processed. A bearded man reached his tattooed arms into his backpack and raised a red, horseshoe-shaped sausage to the sky. A goth girl unboxed a plastic tub of hammer-shaped cookies. The priestess offered me a handful of flaxseeds to toss on the altar, which was overflowing with gifts, apples and bottles of homemade mead.
A dozen people had gathered for an autumn sacrifice to summon Thor, the hammer-wielding Norse god of harvests and storms. Many pleaded for him to bring rain, after a summer plagued with drought. Others asked for the strength to battle unemployment, or for the recovery of a sick mother. We all had our own reasons for being there. A middle-aged man, perspiring in his blue office shirt, seemed to be there to connect with his hippy-looking wife and teenage daughter.
I was there because pagan events kept popping up in my Facebook feed, and I couldn’t fathom why. I’m not “spiritual”, or even agnostic. I’m staunchly secular, I like modern medicine, and my social media usually reflects that. Having just moved back to Sweden after five years living in the UK, my online world mainly consisted of London friends and British banter. But there was a glaring exception: my algorithm kept recommending that I check out neo-Norse sacrifices in my local area. It suggested that the movement may be surprisingly mainstream, and the two middle-aged women standing beside me in the forest seemed to confirm this: they looked perfectly normal – like they could work at a nursery. I really had not expected to return home to a Viking revival; nor that it would be so chilled out, when I did.
Sweden’s conversion to Christianity in the middle ages largely eradicated the pagan religion of the Viking era. Now, people are intent on bringing it back. While far from a nationwide trend, the fringe faith has racked up a notable following. Two formally recognised faith groups, Nordic Asa-Community (NAC) and Community of Forn Sed Sweden have around 2,700 members between them according to their own estimates, though no official figures exist. On Facebook, they have 16,000 followers combined. They offer naming ceremonies, initiation rites, weddings, funerals, new holidays and a reason to gather in forests and fields. They have a total of 20 sub-divisions across Sweden that organise local, small-scale sacrifices like the one I went to, and their annual, nationwide sacrifices are said to attract about 300 participants.
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