There was a brief window, back there in the twenty-teens, where, if you wanted, you could buy something on Amazon and – thanks to Amazon’s now-defunct Smile programme – have 0.5 percent of the purchase price donated to the Odinist Fellowship of Newark-on-Trent.
This is the kind of quaint anachronism that comes up fairly often in the Odinist game. These stewards of a pre-Christian Nordic religion operate out of an old almshouse chapel not far off the A1 (down Beacon Hill Road, straight on past the skatepark and it’s on your left, round the bend). The Fellowship is Registered Charity 298688, and its official objective is ‘the continuation and promotion of the organic spiritual beliefs and religion of the indigenous peoples of northern Europe’.
As the only active pagan worship building in the UK, the Odinist Temple is a site of minor local interest. It’s open to the public on Wednesday afternoons, and welcomes visits from the town’s schoolchildren: ‘Following the recent school visits by the eight and nine-year-olds of ___ Primary School, I was delighted to receive a very generous donation from the School,’ temple director Ralph Harrison posted in summer 2022.
So far, so wholesome. In a world of bewildering full-tilt change it is perhaps a comfort to know that in a quiet corner of England some holdouts still honour ‘the gods of our Folk’.
‘Odinism’ is a contested term for a strand of revivalist religious belief – or perhaps reconstructionist, as there wasn’t much left to revive – that purports to derive from the beliefs of Germanic people in pre-Christian Europe. So that’s the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and related Nordic societies, between around the 4th and 8th centuries.
Because these Germanic societies constituted a pre-literate culture, it’s very hard to know much for sure about who they were and what they did, let alone what they really believed (or what ‘belief’ even meant to them, what religion even was). Did these people really extol ‘the Nine Noble Virtues’ – courage, truth, honour, discipline, and so on – as the Odinists maintain? Well, who’s to say they didn’t?
And there’s one other thing the Odinists want to make clear.
‘The Odinist form of paganism is ethnospecific,’ the website says.
