“Pulp” is a word that kept flying through my head when reading this book. I ran into it cheaply, the description of pagan groups in the present day made me curious. The author starts with describing the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung “far from being a dispassionate observer, had been an active had been an active participant in the pagan revival” (p. 275) Jung saw Odin as an archetype and predicted two “Odinic experiments”. Following this idea, Rudgley starts with describing some old concepts, strange theories about the hollow earth, ancient and modern rune yoga, the rise of Nazi Germany, serial killers, Tolkien, the American white-power movements and towards the end a few pagan groups of today to close off with a few concepts such as the Web of Wyrd and Ragnarok. Rudgley manages to see the “Odic force” in all of this, throws a whole lot of rapid conclusions on a pile while trying to debunk modern myths such as The Spear of Destiny. Way too long descriptions of the content of books such as The Coming Race of Edward Lytton or The Turner Diaries of William Pierce, the ideas of (proto-)Nazis such as Von Lists, Kummer or Willigut and followed by wrapping up a subject in three lines. It is not that the book is a completely boring read. The information about the Wandervögel and similar groups of the time, the weird ideas of a few ‘occult Nazis’, groups that I never heard of like Stav, etc. are interesting in a way, but the grounds of the book are so far-fetched, the author makes a few such strange remarks, conclusions and mistakes and the writing style as a whole, makes this book nothing more than the enormous amount of “popular scholarly” literature like that of Baigent and Leigh, Ravenscroft, etc. that people love to read with the popularity of Dan Brown. If you want to learn about modern paganism, this book is not for you. If you want cheap literature for on the beach, you could consider this book.
2006 the random house, isbn 0712680969
