I Was Searching Stuff Of Freyja When I Ended Up Reading A Post Where Basically That Person Said That

I was searching stuff of Freyja when I ended up reading a post where basically that person said that Odin accepts all people at Valhalla (even n*zis) because he only cares about fighting. What are your thoughts? Do you think that Odin accepts n*zis?

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts, not the thoughts of all Heathens everywhere or even the rest of the mods here. Also, I’m not going to be censoring the word “nazi,” because as much as I’d love to avoid showing up under that search term, people who don’t want to see it deserve to be able to properly blacklist it.

Do I believe Odin agrees with or tolerates nazi ideology? No. I don’t believe that the Eddas are the infallible word of the divine or that we should base our morality solely on medieval texts written for a very different society, but even in those medieval texts, Odin welcomes foreigners and turns to them for wisdom. In some cases, he falls in love with them, has children with them. If you read the jotnar as another “race”, which many white nationalist Heathens do, then Odin is mixed race himself.

Even if you ignore all that, he does a lot of subverting of the social order. He breaks gender roles. He breaks the laws of nature through witchcraft. He goes wandering as a hobo while he’s supposed to be, you know, ruling. Not exactly the paragon of traditionalism.

Do I believe Odin only cares about fighting? Of course not. This isn’t to deny or minimize his associations with or participation in war, because that’s unequivocally there. But if you look at Havamal, and other passages with sayings attributed to him, you’ll find just as much emphasis on being wise and and just generally being a decent human being. There are instances where he’s explicitly associated with healing, e.g., the Nine Herbs Charm.

But despite all that, I’m not going to say any particular individual, no matter how vile they are, is barred from Valhalla, or any Heathen afterlife to the extent that one believes they exist, for a couple reasons.

For one, the Heathen afterlife just isn’t based on morality. Valhalla is not Heaven. It’s a training ground. Hel, despite the etymology, is not the Christian Hell. Good people, even Baldr, end up in Hel. Some people think the concept of Valhalla is actually pretty new, a consolation prize for warriors whose bodies couldn’t be brought home to their ancestral grave mound at a time when the Norse were starting to raid farther and farther away, and that Hel or the grave mound was the default for everyone prior to that. Your reward, or punishment, for the few short years you get here is the legacy you leave behind.

Secondly, even if the afterlife was based on morality, it would be really fucking presumptuous for us to declare who’s beyond saving. It’s perverse when Christians do it. It’s equally perverse when we do it. We disgrace our gods by painting them as so petty and vengeful as to sentence someone to eternal suffering for a few years of mistakes. Even if you’re not taking the sentiment seriously and are just using it as a snappy one liner, there are plenty of valid material reasons to discredit fascists without borrowing a scare tactic from Evangelicals that makes your gods look bad.

I don’t say this to spare the feelings of nazis. Nazis are terrible people. I fully endorse using any measures necessary in this life to stop them from committing the harm they are trying to commit. But if we’re granting the possibility that there’s an afterlife, then we’re granting that there’s an opportunity for change. And declaring change impossible is a very un-Lokean, and dare I say, very un-Odinic thing to do. You need, truly need to believe a person can be better, not for the sake of nazis, or even for the people you love, but for you as a flawed person with agency and the ability to impact others.

- Mod E