The New Paganism: value, sacrifice, charisma, and (oracular) truth

An abridged and edited transcript of a recent lecture by Timothy Snyder

Earlier this month Timothy Snyder —my favorite historian and one of the most widely recognized public intellectuals — gave a lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, titled “The New Paganism: How the Postmodern Became the Premodern.” In this lecture Professor Snyder addressed the following questions:

Why is it that we have these right-wing parties, which actually seem to be about sacrificing yourself for no particular reason, which seem to be about your own suffering but in fact above all the suffering of others, which seem to seek a political equilibrium in which I suffer some but you suffer more, why is that? Why do we seem to be in a moment where there is just so much cultish behavior, when the most successful of these movements or parties seem to have cult leaders who are regarded as heroes and treated as gods? Why is it that the future is so dark? Why is it that one can be politically successful, socially influential, without offering a future at all or by filling the future with dark fantasies of how things are going to get worse and must be worse? Why is it that we spend so much time staring at tiny things that we keep in our pockets, and what does that have to do with the warming of the planet?

A lot of time is spent in the European or the American conversation trying to answer these questions as if they had rational answers.

I’m going to start from the point that if we really thought these questions were about reasons, we would have to note that people seem to be sacrificing their own best interest over and over and over again, that people seem to be doing things that are obviously contrary to what would conventionally be regarded as the national interest or the interest of the state. It really doesn’t make sense for people to vote for Donald Trump knowing that this will mean the end of all of the social benefits upon which they actually depend. It really doesn’t make sense for people to vote for Donald Trump knowing that this will bring about an irreversible climate catastrophe. I’m not going to try to rationalize this because I don’t think that that’s the correct approach.

It really didn’t make sense for Putin to invade Ukraine. We can toil mightily to try to find various ways in which he was a rational actor, but I think if we simply accepted that makes no geopolitical sense, we would be much closer to reality. It doesn’t make sense to invade a country and then find yourself much weaker with respect to your actual problem, which is China. If we are seriously geopolitical about this we have to think that Putin is a geopolitical fool, and so I really think we have to start from somewhere else. I don’t think you can easily rationally explain by appeal to interest why Russian family after Russian family gives up its sons for this struggle. I don’t think that rationality or interests is the way to start there.

So what I’m going to be trying out on you this evening is a different heuristic, a different way of trying to explain what’s going on, which I’m going to refer to as “neopaganism.” My argument is going to be that if we understand the way European pagans behaved, we will actually see ourselves much more clearly than we do when we start from the notion of interests or failure of interests.

I’m not talking about the Marvel Comics version of Thor, I’m not talking about the DC Comics version of Wonder Woman. What I’m talking about is the actual pagan heroes and gods, who were very demanding of sacrifice, who were fickle, who were mysterious, who were devastating not only to their enemies but to their friends, to their favorites, who communicated in a way which was addictive and inscrutable at the same time. I’m thinking of pagan gods like Odin, who kills the people he admires the most because after all they should be in Valhalla, or a pagan God like Zeus who wants us to be stupid for the entire existence of our species and therefore chained Prometheus to a rock for allowing us to learn something.

Odin

What I’m going to try to evaluate is four areas of modern social and political life in which I think this heuristic might actually add some understanding and some knowledge, and those points are going to be value, sacrifice, charisma, and truth or oracular truth.

Gotland was a very big deal from about 800 to 1,000, maybe a little bit afterwards, it was an incredibly wealthy island. It seems to be the place where the Vikings from Scandinavia, mostly Swedes, brought back a lot of their wealth after engaging in trade in wax, honey, but chiefly slaves, with the Muslim world. So in that period of time, most of the silver which has been found in Europe or in northern Europe, most of it is actually on this one island where it was buried in huge hoards. And there are presumably lots of those hoards still on Gotland with thousands and thousands of silver coins in them, of antiquary and also of financial interest.

Value

This brings me to the question of value. Why did these rich Vikings bury their ill-gotten gains? Why are there these hoards? The answer seems to be that they believed that you can take it with you, that after death you will have access to the things that you leave in the ground, that this is Odin’s law that if you have it underground, and then after you are buried underground and you emerge in Valhalla, you’ll have access to the weapons and the wealth that you brought with — you can take it with you. What I want to suggest is that that principle shouldn’t sound strange because it’s quite explanatory of the way that our richest people behave. They are behaving as though they can take it with them, and I think once we know that, or if we start from that assumption, then a lot of other things begin to fall into place.

You can think of money as arising, at first at least, from beautiful physical objects which had contact with the body. It’s a very corporeal and even beautiful sort of instrument. What has happened since then — to do the history of money in the last thousand years in just a couple of sentences — is that money becomes increasingly less corporeal and increasingly more abstract, so that when I say that an oligarch has a billion dollars or 10 billion dollars, you don’t in fact imagine a heap of tiny little pieces of silver, you imagine bank accounts in Switzerland or Luxemburg. I want to suggest that that kind of money, the invisible money, the money which is a number, the money where quality has become quantity and then become a mysterious kind of quality all over again, brings with it a kind of frustration.

People hoard it. They are unable to give it away, they can’t bring themselves to give it away. The Gates Foundation has this idea that they’re going to persuade oligarchs to give away half of their money before they die. To cut a long story short, basically none of them can do it, they can’t bring themselves to do it. They put it in places where it can’t be found, in tax shelters, and then they get themselves into competitions with one another about who has the biggest hole full of silver in the ground. This money can’t actually do for them the things that they want it to do, which is another reason why they hoard it. Like the pagans they believe in immortality — not all of them I admit but some of them — and the way that they believe in immortality is stupid. It’s much more likely that we are going to wake up in Valhalla than it is that any of these guys by way of tubes and vitamins and so on is going to live forever.

The notion of a Valhalla is beautiful: you arrive somewhere equipped with all of the best things, your friends are going to be there. This may not be everybody’s fantasy, but you get to go out and fight with swords every day, and you come back and the table’s always miraculously filled with meat and so on, and if your friend kills you during the battle it doesn’t matter because you just reconstitute yourself in time for dinner.

My point is that if you think of the pagan version of value, you’re closer to where people are who actually have a lot of wealth. If you think of them as behaving in terms of their own interests or trying to achieve things, I really don’t think you get very far, but if you think of it in terms of an instinct for hoarding and an unjustified belief in immortality, I think you’re actually closer to where the money actually is.

Sacrifice

Which brings me to sacrifice. When a successful, which is to say wealthy, Viking chieftain was buried, certain things happened. We don’t have many witness accounts of this but we do actually have one very detailed one. If you were an important Viking chief and you died, you got to take it with you. Your friends made sure of that, or your clan, your followers, your retinue made sure of that. They would build a death house for you, you’d lie in it for nine days (nine is a magic number), meanwhile there’d be ceremonies and banquets. At certain intervals they would sacrifice dogs, hens, your horse and put them into a pit into which you would eventually join. In the example that was witnessed in the early part of the 10th Century by a very interesting Arab chronicler, a slave girl was elevated to the status of the wife of the chieftain, and then she was killed so that she could join her new husband on the other side. So value is not only what but also whom you take with you.

Now what does this have to do with sacrifice? Let’s think of this a bit more broadly. What I’m talking about is a unit which works on a regional scale. These Vikings were terrific raiders and merchants, and many of them saw an awful lot of the world but nevertheless it’s a local regional scale. They saw the world with a few of their friends, maybe a larger retinue as big as a few hundred, but that’s about it. What are the oligarchs taking with them? What is the equivalent? They’re taking with them the Earth itself, that’s what they’re taking with them in very much the same sense that their predecessors took a cow or a goat.

There’s not a single one of them who would deny that global warming is true, but nevertheless, quite directly, some of the wealthiest and most successful of our oligarchs are making global warming happen, and happen much more quickly. And they’re going to die, and when they die this is what they’re going to take with them. We tend to think of global warming as being a long-term phenomenon associated with the industrial age, and that’s of course true, but the clear majority of carbon emissions have reached the atmosphere in the last 30 years, so in the active lifetime of the people that we’re talking about.

Vladimir Putin is the world’s leading hydrocarbon oligarch. The wealth of his country, which is also his wealth, comes out of the ground in the form of natural gas and oil, and interestingly the rationale that Mr. Putin gives for invading Ukraine, or one of them, refers directly back to the pagan past that I’m talking about. Mr. Putin presents himself as a kind of reincarnation of a fellow called Waldemar, who was a extremely ruthless and violent Swedish slave trader and tribute collector, who got his first partner by way of killing her entire family, his second partner by way of killing his brother. His third partner officially was the sister of the Byzantine emperor according to the Saga tradition. He also seems to have had about 600 concubines.

So this Waldemar, who the Russians call Vladimir — Ukrainians call him Volodymyr — that story is the basis for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The idea that there was this guy called Waldemar or whatever you want to call him, and that he got baptized exactly a thousand years ago, and that was the beginning of a dynasty and all of this, that whole story is basically the first three paragraphs of any Icelandic Saga that you care to read.

The story that Putin is reciting is about how Three Brothers, which is a magic number, come to a town, they’re invited to rule, they’re descended from gods — that of course got cut out by the priests who chronicled this whole thing — but inevitably they’re descended from Odin, and that’s why they have the right to rule. This whole business, the idea that this is a dynasty, the Three Brothers, all of this, the whole basis of what’s supposed to be Russian history, which you might even have learned in school, it’s basically an Icelandic Saga, and it describes Scandinavian slave traders and their attempt to establish political dominion and to sell into slavery the Slavs and other people around them.

Incidentally, the last few words reveal the etymology of the English word “slave.”

So this war, which is based upon this entirely fake pagan fantasy, this is a war in which I would argue the only meaning is sacrificial. The reason why I believe this war is possible at this day for Russia is that death is the meaning. There’s no prospect of winning this war in any conventional sense. And going back to the notion of interest, there is no way that this war serves the Russian national or state interest in any conventional way. It can however be justified if you believe that sacrifice itself is the point, if death generates meaning.

it’s a sordid affair, but I think it’s actually not isolated. The two most important supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine in my country are Elon Musk and Donald Trump. One of whom has money, the other of whom claims to have money. Elon Musk does some very special things with respect to Russia’s war. He owns a social media platform. This social media platform directly conveys Russian propaganda about the war, it suppresses Ukrainian information about the war, but perhaps more fundamentally than that, it undermines thinking in the way that it operates. It encourages people to huddle around certain kinds of stereotypes or fantasies, and it pushes people to think in a pre-Christian or in a pagan way.

In addition to that, the digital world is connected to the physical world. For example, the gentleman in the front row who’s using his phone, he’s probably not thinking now of the coal-fired power plant in Africa, which just had to get going so that he could do his Google search. When we go into the digital world, we think, oh, here we are in this magical place where I can watch ski jump highlights, or whatever your secret thing is you do late at night.

We don’t think I’m burning down the world but of course we are. All of our digital action is directly accelerating global warming. So we’re involved, we are burning the hydrocarbons in that way, and in other ways we are conspiring in a larger sacrifice, and it is like literally a sacrifice of animals. The hydrocarbons that we burn are the remains of living things. The coal, the natural gas, the oil, these are all remains of living things. We’re actually burning the remains of billions of former biological entities.

There’s this larger act of sacrifice, which you can actually see quite specifically and concretely in the examples of the war in Ukraine, the digital support of the war on Ukraine, the two particular oligarchs who were very central for this war on Ukraine. They will die, and when they do die they are taking the world with them, and the war in Ukraine is a kind of preview of what the world going down might look like.

So, the world goes with them but of course we are also going with them, at least on present trends. It’s very nice and air-conditioned here inside but outside it’s a ridiculous temperature, and this is part of a worldwide phenomenon which is accelerating. They are making life as such much nastier, much more brutal and shorter. We are all the slave girl who’s strangled and thrown in the pit. That’s who we are.

Trump is a special case, and I think he teaches us something else about sacrifice which is very interesting. The god of goats or the god of cows — I’m going to let you in on something — they don’t actually have any goats or cows except for the ones you give them. Not that you actually do this but when you kill a cow, you kill a goat, and then you burn it on your porch, then the god of goats and cows has goats and cows. The god of goats and cows is only the god of goats and cows because of you. It’s the same with Trump’s billions of dollars. Trump does not in fact have billions of dollars, he doesn’t have any money at all. Probably every single one of you has more money than Donald Trump, because he has layers and layers of debt.

There’s a kind of magic around Trump, which is that if you rationally thought he was a billionaire, and he asked you for money, you would say, you don’t need my money because you’re a billionaire, but incredibly none of his supporters has ever had that thought. Instead they make offerings to him, they offer to him things that matter to them. The $5, the $1, the $10 matters to them. They’re going to miss that money. It matters to them but not to him. So they sacrifice things to him, and by doing so they create this god, this billionaire god. It’s precisely the sacrifice that does it. And I think that the appeal of that, it’s a little bit like the appeal of betting or the appeal of gambling. When you give money to the billionaire god, sometimes he favors you and sometimes he does not, and that’s why the little sacrifices are so attractive. Sometimes something good will happen but then other times it doesn’t, and so we have to just keep giving and keep trying and we become addicted to the whole process. Which brings me to Charisma.

Charisma

My definition of Charisma is the ability to tell a big lie and make it true. If we look back at the pagan days — which included much more interesting big lies than the ones we have now — Odin isn’t really telling the truth probably about Valhalla, but nevertheless it can structure your whole life and even the way that you die. The claim to be a god is probably not true, but our oligarchs in various ways are making these kinds of claims, if not to be gods then at least to be something like heroes.

There’s a kind of sublimated version of this in the libertarianism of the United States, where our oligarchs tend to in one way or another put forward a view called libertarianism. Libertarianism is that so long as everybody behaves as badly as possible, it will be good for us all in the end. That is a religious view. It is literally, historically a religious view. That’s a view that the 18^th-century liberals and the Anglo-Saxon tradition hoped was true. They hoped that if I behave selfishly, that’s what God wants me to do, and therefore it must turn out somehow in the end, and that’s become the basis of this libertarian political view. The idea that a billionaire who has 20 billion and behaves greedily, hoards his money, digs a hole figuratively in the ground and leaves it there, is somehow doing something which will then turn out to somehow be best for everyone else involved, it’s a religious view in which the billionaire himself is figuring as a kind of hero.

Putin’s whole idea that he’s Vladimir and that guy a thousand years ago was Vladimir, that they have the same name, they have the mission, this is also a religious view. One of the things that Trump does routinely is claim to be Jesus, just flat out, it’s not subtle like, oh, I’ve also suffered. He says he’s Jesus. He also says that if he removes his shirt, you’ll see beautiful scars that reveal his suffering. That’s not quite as big of a lie as the kind that I’m talking about. The idea that beauty would ensue like that is at least a medium-sized lie. So Charisma means telling a big lie about heroism or divinity, but it’s a lie that comes to life, it’s a lie in which people live, and I think the last ten years have very much shown that we are capable of this.

A lot of us — Americans, Russians and other people — are living inside big lies. Trump’s biggest lie is that he won the American election, which has created a dimension of reality along which many millions of people live. Putin’s big lie, or one of them, is that Ukraine does not exist, and that has created the dimension along which many people are living. Trump describes the people who took part in his coup attempt in 2021 as martyrs, over and over again that same word. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church is now claiming that Russian soldiers who died are literally being reincarnated, so they’re not in fact dying, they’re coming back to life because of their Christian behavior. The point of these lies is that — it’s not just a falsehood, it’s not just a view, an opinion. It’s a way of life, it’s like a dimension.

Snyder here resorts to the metaphor of the complex number plane, which contains a so-called real axis and a so-called imaginary one.

The people who are living on the imaginary axis are looking on the real axis much the same way that we’re looking on the imaginary axis. They think that what we’re doing is imaginary, made up, based on a big lie in which we’re too naive and helpless to understand.

Musk is another big liar, he lies a lot, but it’s not so much that he has a big lie of his own. It’s that he’s a sort of Father of Lies. His technology — not only his of course but we’re going to stick with him — the technology that he has brought into our lives along with others allows lies to spread. So Twitter essentially denies climate change for us, Twitter essentially justifies the war in Russia for us. But it’s more than that, it’s a generator of lying as such. And again not just Twitter, Facebook functions much the same way, as do other things. It has a kind of hutzpah which no human being could really have. The screen can lie to you emotionlessly and totally in a way that another human being would have difficulty doing. It can also do it repeatedly, and unlike most other human beings, the screen is also very, very good at figuring out the lie that’s going to fit you, the thing that you’re going to believe, the thing that’s going to continue to attract your attention.

So, to make this point, I just want to return to the idea of sacrifice. The logic of sacrifice is, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you’ve done this dramatic thing, you’ve killed your child or you’ve killed an animal, it’s often your child, you’ve killed your child, you’ve done this very dramatic thing, so therefore there must be a sense to it. You’re involved in it with your blood, you’re addicted to it.

Oracular Truth

Now moving to something else, what’s the logic of oracular truth? If we’re in a pagan world, and we’re going to see a seer, a prophet, a sibyl, someone who can tell us the future, we really want the truth. It’s really important to us, and we’re going to believe what the Oracle tells us. What the Oracle tells us is sometimes true, it’s sometimes not, it leads us off in a certain direction where we end up doing things. It involves you, it tracks your nature.

Now, the reason that I’m dwelling on the logic of sacrifice and on the logic of the Oracle, is that it’s the same as the logic of behaviorism. The way that behaviorism works is that I sometimes give you what you want, I sometimes don’t. You don’t know the logic behind it and so you keep coming back. And the behaviorist experiments which were carried out on animals in the middle of the 20^th century are the fundamental basis of the algorithms which now organize our everyday cognition, emotion, and so on. That logic, it literally comes from pigeons and rats, it comes from experiments where a pigeon would peck on a lever and sometimes they’d get food and sometimes they wouldn’t, and people realized, aha, that’s fascinating, the pigeon will keep doing that.

So the point is that the algorithm, the invisible thing which is drawing you in, which you’re following, functions a lot like the logic of sacrifice or the logic of an Oracle. Which brings me to the claim I’m going to make about your iPhone. What are we doing when we look at it, what is actually going on, where are you looking when you’re looking at your phone? What is the object at the other end that you’re looking at, where is the place that you’re looking at?

What we’re looking at is high technology. It’s l an incredible technological thing, and as a result it must be a site of reason, it must be somehow making us smarter, informing us. All the studies of course are on the other side. We are losing IQ points, we are dropping IQ points like a truck driving down the road with its back door open. We are getting dumber in every measurable way. So this thing that we’re looking at, it takes technology to make it work but of course it also takes technology to burn a fire in a pagan temple. It’s certainly not a site of reason. I think your phone is an oracle. I think you go to it for the truths that you want, and it answers you in the obscurities that motivate you. All the time that we’re spending with our phones is fundamentally pagan time. It’s time which is returning us to pagan ways of understanding and living.

There’s a drama called Cassandra by the Ukrainian writer Lesia Ukrainka, in which there are two prophets, Cassandra and her brother Helenus. Helenus always tells people what they want to hear. Cassandra, as you will know, always tells the truth, and she’s always right, but nobody ever listens to her, and this is how our Oracle works. There’s a Cassandra problem. The truth is out there, but your phone is an oracle of the Helenus type and not of the Cassandra type. The phone is never going to tell you a difficult truth. The phone is going to adjust to the things that you want to be, and it’s going to send you out on mysterious missions which I don’t think really are your own.

Whether you buy this argument that I’m making or not, I couldn’t have said any of it without the history of literature, without the history of philosophy, without archaeology, without the history of myth, without a whole series of fields which are being trampled on, suppressed and essentially destroyed. The kind of argument that I’m making — I’m not going to insist on this particular argument but the kind of argument that I’m making — the sort of thing which helps us to make sense of ourselves, is going to depend on the humanities. Part of the crisis that we’re facing is the suppression of the humanities. Insofar as we’re able to crawl ourselves back into at least having a pretense of giving a lecture or writing a book about what’s going on, it’s going to be thanks to the humanities. that’s where I wanted to land.