For some fascists attempting to creep back from oblivion after the war, Satanism appeared to be a viable link to protofascist foundations. Satanism retained a connection to the pagan revival and occult milieu, which included Theosophism, Ariosophism, Crowley’s cult (the Ordo Templi Orientis), and the Germanenorden, a secretive, nationalist cult with chapters extant throughout Germany. The latter included a small Bavarian chapter known as the Thule Society, from which many of the high ranking members of the Nazi Party had once emerged. Gazing through the looking glass at the components that comprised a kind of early fascist model, the spiritual element appeared to Madole and others as indispensable.
Madole’s syncretic Satanist ideology was repeated by others decades later. One such descendant was the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF). With a name derived from Yockey’s European Liberation Front, the NSLF had splintered from the National Socialist White People’s Party in 1974. Led by a long-haired, pot-smoking Nazi named Joseph Charles Tommasi, the NSLF advocated violence against the “Jewish power structure” and published propaganda including a famous poster of a shadowy, cocked revolver and the line “The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty—Political Terror—it’s the only thing they understand.”196 Tommasi’s overarching goal was to create chaos and bring down the “System,” causing a race war and the eventual “liberation” of the white race.197 Like leftists, the group advocated armed struggle from a working-class perspective—the major difference was the anti-Semitic and racist messaging. Also like most leftist groups at the time, Tommasi’s Front had little effect and fell apart in short order.
Yet Tommasi’s legacy lasted. A ninth-grade dropout and longtime Nazi named James Nolan Mason revived the NSLF to launch a guerrilla war against what he identified as the Zionist Occupation Government. Reviving Tommasi’s vintage 1960s national socialist organ, Siege, Mason spread the militant message of “armed struggle” against the “System” through bombings, assassinations, and murders of racially mixed couples. Mason became increasingly fascinated with the occult, Satanism, and especially Charles Manson. As we will see, Mason’s continuation of Satanist national socialism would go on to influence an important developing subculture within the fascist movement, one that combined disillusionment with Christianity and the notion of a powerful, elitist individual whose cruelty elevates him above the herd and enables him to exploit, conquer, and reign at will.198
Asatru and Odinism
Neither the ecstatic violence of Evola, the Indo-Aryan mysticism of Devi, Yockey’s Gnostic-like cosmology, nor his partner’s Satanic influence would prove necessarily commensurate. In fact, they have contributed to a complex field of images and discourses navigated by fascists in search of proving and testing their individual ideologies. Perhaps no spiritual persuasion has become more important in this field than Odinism.
The most influential person to cobble together a Norse fascism in the United States was Else Christensen, born Else Oscher in the western coast of Denmark in 1913. Christensen participated in the revolutionary undercurrents in her country in the 1930s, which included rowdy clashes between different factions vying for political power, from Trotskyists and Stalinists to national socialists and anarcho-syndicalists. Initially, Christensen aligned herself with the latter, but she soon moved toward the Strasserite faction. She eventually married Aage Alex Christensen of the Danish National Socialist Workers’ Party, which maintained a National Bolshevik bent.
After the war, Else Christensen reached out to international white power activists like David Duke and an Odinist named Alexander Rud Mills. Influenced by Mills and Yockey, Christensen asserted that in the unconscious mind of European people resided “the wisdom of our pre-Christian forefathers which we today call Odinism, and which expresses the essence of our folk on the moral and religious plane.”199 With this kind of strangely liminal Odinism of the unconscious, Christensen sought to cover racist ideas with a more acceptable patina in order to disguise their inherent fascism.
Christensen created the Odinist Fellowship in 1969 to teach the “lesson” of Nazi power: that Hitler failed because he quashed the Strasserite faction and joined the right wing. She based her own ideas in part on the work of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos’s Spanish organization Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (Union of the National Syndicalist Offensive). Christensen opposed “reactionary Francoite authoritarianism” because she believed that Aryan freedom is essentially anarchist and communal in a specifically folkish way. She called on “Aryans” to “retribalize,” since a “certain form of socialism is inherent in tribalism.” So, Christensen’s formulation of Odinism declared that it would honor “the diversity of Nature, including the natural variations of human beings,” without relinquishing white supremacism. 200
Christensen was clear about the tactical strengths of her approach. “You have to go in the back door!” she exclaimed. “[N]obody could put a finger on what we said, because we said it in such a way that it couldn’t be clamped down at. We still have to do that.… Everybody knows that the Jews rule the whole damned world, so you cannot fight their combined power. You need to watch your step.” As scholar Mattias Gardell notes: “Self-sufficient, ecologically sustainable, monoracial tribes would, Christensen suggests, be a practical method for redefining American federalism and for establishing an Odinist union of Aryan republics.”201 One of Christensen’s principle forms of outreach became a prison ministry, which enabled Odinism to spread throughout the prison population. Yet the Odinist Fellowship was more intent on racial awareness than rituals and practice.202
Rivaling the Odinist Fellowship, another heathen named Stephen McNallen created the Asatru Free Assembly in 1976 with a very similar, though distinct and sometimes oppositional, range of ideas. More interested in spirituality than national socialism, McNallen developed the Asatru Free Assembly into a movement focused more clearly on religious rituals, assemblies, and meetings. However, McNallen maintained the “metagenetic” discourse of ethnic Odinism, and even borrowed from Carl Jung’s essay “Wotan,” in which the latter sees Hitler as the personification of the Wotan/Odin archetype in the German people’s collective unconscious.203 McNallen warns non-Aryans to stay away from Asatru:
I think they are sadly deceived if they try to take on my ancestors. They need to look to their own ancestral line. For me, joining any ancestral religion is not as simple as deciding you’re going to join the Elks Lodge or you’re going to join the local bridge club. You’re not just joining something that exists right there in that moment in time. What you are really joining is something that includes a whole line of ancestors. The ‘we’ that we see now, is just the tiny tip of the iceberg. But to take on our soul, to take on that which is an intimate part of us, is to take on all of those ancestors as well. I don’t think that you can just do that arbitrarily. I can never be an American Indian. I can never be a black man. I don’t want to be any of those things. I want to follow my ancestors and my way. Likewise, I would strongly encourage them to do the same.204
While clearly advocating Asatru as a racial movement, McNallen also attempted to clear his movement of open Nazis, banning uniforms and insignias from their meetings, leading to new splinter groups with more explicitly white supremacist politics.205
Yet Gardell argues that the apolitical stance of McNallen’s later group, the Asatru Folk Assembly, has “political implications…revolving around a call for decentralization in terms of radical localism, tribal communalism, and Jeffersonian republicanism.” These politically ethnonationalist positions highlight the notion that “Body, mind, and spirit were shaped by life in artificial urban environments. At war with himself, alienated man embraced the universal notions of religion and politics that now threaten to destroy the remnants of every organic native culture on the face of the earth.”206
From the giant nationalist engines of World War II-era fascist states that sought the “total mobilization” of masses