Return of the Norse gods

February 6th, 2016

Awake Goy

Iceland is leading the way. First they jailed the bankers that where trying to destroy Iceland, and now they are building the first temple to the Norse gods in over a 1,000 years.

Work will start in March on a wooded hill near to the the capital Reykjavik’s domestic airport.

Designed by Danish-educated architect and Asatru member Magnus Jensen, the oval-shaped temple will be built into the side of the hill and use the natural rock as one of the walls.

iceland-build-first-temple-norse-gods-viking-age — The high priest of the Asatru Association Hilmarsson leads a procession of Asatru Association

“At last, our long journey across the desert is at an end,” says Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, a composer and high priest of Iceland’s pagan Asatru movement.

Paganism thrived in Iceland until around A.D. 1000 when lawmakers agreed to make Christianity the country’s official religion. While the polytheistic religion of the Vikings was driven underground, it was never totally extinguished thanks in large part to 13th-century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, who recorded the ancient Nordic mythology in the “Prose Edda.” Even among Christians, Nordic beliefs in elves, trolls and nature spirits were handed down from generation to generation.

Around the time of the return of medieval Icelandic saga manuscripts from Denmark in 1971, interest in Old Norse mythology in Iceland began to grow. In 1972, a small group of believers seeking a faith rooted in the nature of Iceland and their Viking ancestors formed the Asatru Association in a Reykjavik café. The following year, the association received recognition from the Icelandic government as an official religious organization, which allowed it to conduct legal marriages, burials and other ceremonies as well as receive a share of the country’s tax money earmarked for official religions.

Although nearly 80 percent of Iceland’s population belongs to the Lutheran Church, the Asatru Association has become one of the country’s fastest-growing religions. According to Statistics Iceland, membership in the neo-pagan religion has grown nearly eightfold in the last 15 years, from just over 300 people in 1999 to nearly 2,400 last year. In a country of approximately 325,000 people, the Asatru Association claims more followers than the Mormon, Buddhist, Islamic and Russian Orthodox faiths combined. (Source)