High Chieftain Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson of the Icelandic Pagan Association tells Inside Edition Digital that the misuse of his religion by hate groups is "born out of ignorance," and he's fed up. “‘F*** off’ would be my polite reply."
It has been more than a millennia since Iceland has seen a pagan temple erected, but belief in the ancient Norse gods remains prevalent. Today, Ásatrú society is the second largest religion in the country behind Christianity, appealing to those looking to return to their roots and worship according to what they refer to as the Old Beliefs.
High Chieftain Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson of the Icelandic Pagan Association has been involved with the religious organization since the beginning of the revival. He said he was curious about the Old Beliefs as a boy, despite being born into a Lutheran church, and became involved in the religion’s revival at 14 years old. He discovered the beliefs during the founding of the modern version of the ancient religion in 1972, on a national holiday known as the First Day of Summer.
The religion was the main belief system among Icelandic settlers until European influence led Christianity to become the official religion in Iceland in the year 1000 to avoid a divided nation, according to Iceland Magazine.
But thanks to the revival in the '70s, more than 4,000 people in the country of about 364,000 now belong to its fastest growing religion, despite an edict against missionary work or proselytizing.
The belief system is largely based in Nordic history and Norse gods like Thor, Odin and Freya, but Hilmarsson explained that their dogma also is rooted in belief systems from all over the world picked up by their Viking and traveler ancestors, including Hinduism and Shinto Buddhism.
“It’s about how to be a good guest, about how to be a good traveler and open to people's ideas,” he tells Inside Edition Digital. “It’s all about how to sort of mingle and how to sort of work together in harmony… this peaceful coexistence.”
Hilmarsson said most new followers join after learning about their organization’s projects or seeing their ceremonies, and they welcome people of all creeds and backgrounds to learn more. “It’s open, it’s inclusive, it’s not excluding anything,” Hilmarson said. “We just invite everyone to join.”
To say they were upset when prominent groups like the Ásatrú Folk Assembly, which has been labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, began co-opting their language, beliefs and symbols to give fuel to different white nationalism movements, would be an understatement.
“They're obviously, willfully or not, misinterpreting the Old Beliefs,” Hilmarsson says. “It goes so much against what we truly are about. [The Old Beliefs] were never about race, they were never about origin. So this thing about supremacy is totally alien to the Old Ways.”
In a statement to Inside Edition Digital, the AFA said it "is not, nor have we ever been a hate group." It classified itself as a "traditional and socially conservative group."
Why It Matters That Hate Groups in U.S. Claim to Practice Asatruism
A plethora of hate organizations plague the United States and some of them claim to be practicing Asatruism. The most well-known organization labeled an extremist group to coopt the religion is the Ásatrú Folk Assembly (AFA), which claims to be rooted in “ancient Scandinavia,” similar to those of the Old Beliefs.
“Plenty of them feel they have this lineage of this heritage that goes back,” Chris Magyarics, senior investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, tells Inside Edition Digital. “They see this as their heritage to the Viking or Nordic warriors themselves in an effort to try to promote themselves as these modern day warriors and it is their job, their duty as the white warriors to protect their kind.”
Magyarics is an expert in white supremacist organizations in the United States and has spent the last 15 years monitoring movements, training law enforcement and consulting on cases with a specialty in white power music and tattoos and symbols.
Asatruism as a religion tends to appeal to white supremacists for various reasons, he says. “One, it's seen as a warrior religion because of it's connections back to the Viking days and the Viking warriors. This is in contrast to what is seen as the pacifist religion of Christianity,” Magyarics says. “Two, it's considered a tribal religion of people of pre-Christian European descent. So this is as opposed to the whole universality of Christianity, but also [Christianity] is a descendant of Judaism, so you don't want that link.”
The appropriation of Asatruism and other Norse mythology isn’t a new phenomena. In fact, the most obvious example goes back to Nazi Germany, with Adolf Hitler’s party using images of Viking ships as a way of unifying the party under a shared noble history. Images of regal Vikings and their ships, which invoked desires of expansion, were used as a further means of propaganda.
Hilmarsson says it goes back ebven further. “It started in the 19th century, or even before, where people were trying to appropriate the old literature for their own nefarious ends,” according to Hilmarsson. “We [had seen that] with the German ‘folkish’ movement, who were trying to find a German root for supremacy. It was never here. We have never seen ourselves as racially perfect.
“We haven’t turned away from our symbology. We use the same symbol(s) that we have from the beginning,” Hilmarrson continues. But there is one exception. “Of course, we’re not using the swastika as we did back in the 19th century because that’s been tainted.”
Today, many Asatru-inspired groups, like AFA, are both classified as hate groups by the SPLC and as religious organizations, a designation that sometimes allows them to operate as 501(c)(3) non-profits.
“It did call to me on an ethnic level too, because I am mostly German and Swedish,” says Scott Ernest, of Woods Bay, Montana, of the AFA. “I was a white nationalist. I like to think that I never got as bad as other white nationalists. Everybody in white nationalism says they weren’t very bad, but that’s how it is.”
Ernest was involved in white nationalism for nearly 10 years, and was once a member of AFA, which he now calls “a white nationalist group that has a lot of Odinists.”
Ernest, who describes himself as a former white nationalist, says he became involved in Odinism, which some classify as Asatruism with the addition of right-winged or racist beliefs, before he was even a teenager, and jumped from organization to organization before he became registered with AFA.
“There’s some pride in being a part of something that has lasted for 8,000 years in one form of another,” Ernest says. “Their religion, in whatever form it has taken, has endured. It wasn’t stamped out. Most of them don’t really have a lot to be proud of otherwise. A lot of it is just good old fashioned ethnocentricity.”
While Odinism continues to be misused by white supremacists, the belief system is not always racist. Ernest says that while he no longer associates with white nationalists, he continues to practice Odinism.
“Getting out of white nationalism was pretty easy for me because I just got sick of the violence,” Ernest says.
Magyarics says the “desire to be a part of something bigger” is prevalent among people who join hate groups.
“Feeling like they’re part of something bigger than themselves has a broad appeal to people,” he says. “Whatever’s going on in their own personal lives, whatever’s going on in the country as a whole, where they feel that maybe they need to do their part. Engaging in this kind of activism, real-world activism of plastering propaganda or joining in a small little rally, that sense of belongingness has an appeal to a lot of people."
Reclaiming a Religion
“It’s born out of ignorance,” Hilmarsson says of the hate groups’ misuse of their religion. “You have these people who are spouting all these things that have no basis in the Old Beliefs.”
Hilmarsson has personally experienced AFA’s influence, having received plenty of hate mail from their members as well as other hate groups over the years.
“They were basically saying I was a race traitor,” Hilmarsson says. He notes that race is in no way mentioned or influences the Old Beliefs. In fact, race is anachronistic to what their ancestors would have believed, he says. “We are a nation of immigrants. Iceland was settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and Ireland, probably from Finland and all over the place, so we never saw ourselves as being something racially perfect. Our origins are clouded," he continues. "They’re different and we have different backgrounds, so this whole thing about race and background is basically a 19th century invention.”
Hilmarrsson says he no desire to give power to those who misuse their beliefs, even as it continues to be a point of tension.
“‘F*** off’ would be my polite reply,” he says. “I’m really fed up. I have absolutely no time for them.”
