Berserkers and the Symbolic Power of War

Did the Viking berserker ritual involve drug use to achieve a battle frenzy? Maybe. But there’s no evidence for it, so it’s entirely speculative.

The idea was first proposed by the Swedish theologian Samuel Ödmann in 1784, based on a thirteenth-century description by Snorri Sturluson, who described the wild behavior of warriors before battle and called it “berserkergang.” However, was Ödmann just a romantic trying to apply things he encountered among Siberian shamans to a completely different culture and period without any foundation?

First of all, the question is which drugs they might have taken. There are a few prominent candidates, primarily Amanita muscaria and henbane. Karsten Fatur argues that aggression is indeed one of the side effects of henbane, but the whole matter still seems speculative. Thomas Hatsis, based on his personal experiences with Amanita, argues that there’s no way a trip from it could lead to the results described in berserkergang (although it is indeed unpredictable). Roderick Dale believes that the whole berserker phenomenon was a ritualistic practice and nothing more, within the worship of Odin. Let’s think about the Maori “haka” dance.

In short, it’s an open question. However, if you look at the archeology of polytheism, you may not need this evidence of drug war intoxication at all. And here is the exmplanation:

According to the theory of symbolic interactionism, when you engage with an institution, it expects you to behave uniformly or undergo a process of “socialization.” When you are part of a religion, your socialization involves becoming like the religious ideal. In this case, the religious ideal is the deity itself. In Christianity, this is called “imitatio Christi”. Each deity, of course, has its own attributes, but in general, war gods developed from the figure of the father of the gods. This can also be seen in etymology: “Deus” and “Deva” contain the root “diw,” which turned into “tiw,” meaning arrow or spear (and thus Tyr from Tiwaz, and perhaps also Indra, containing the roots D and R).

The reason arrows are mentioned is not necessarily because the arrow (or spear) was used as a weapon but because it was associated with divination. We see this in Hebrew as well: “arrow” (חץ) shares the root with “half” (חצי). The basic method of divination was a binary gamble, meaning there were two options: “yes” and “no”. A circle was drawn, and a stick was thrown from a distance. If the stick fell inside the circle, the answer was “yes”; if outside, it was “no”. Similarly, a line was drawn, and if the stick fell beyond it, the answer was “yes”; if before it, “no”. This is how, for example, David and Jonathan gambled in 1 Samuel 20.

These arrows were wooden sticks, or (hebrew: kesam, קיסם) and they were mainly used to ask the gods whether to go to war or not, or when the right time for war was. This was usually related to the weather, as it was important not to have mud, storms, and other adverse weather conditions during a campaign. Wars were usually waged in spring when the rains stopped, which is why the god of war was called Mars, like the month when spring begins. The people who answered these questions, the oracles, were called “magicians” (hebrew: kosmim, קוסמים) because they dealt with these sticks. Hence, war gods were generally also gods of weather or sky gods. Birds flying in the sky, lightning, or other natural phenomena, the movements of stars, and so on could all be used for divination. One of the reasons astrology developed was to perform divination. The scientists of that time didn’t know it, but the movements of the stars could be predicted using mathematical models. The stars’ movements meant nothing, but back then, they were believed to be omens and heavenly signs.

Since God was perceived as existing in another dimension, dreams were also a way of divination, as were different states of consciousness. The way to connect with the gods was to try to enter those states of consciousness. However, the berserker was not necessarily to divine but rather to acquire the attributes of the war god: uninhibited, violent, strong, and unpredictable, like the storm, lightning, thunder, earthquake, and so on.

But also because the psychedelic experience is perceived as a battle with demons or “dragons”, the one experiencing it is considered a kind of survivor or guerrilla fighter. The internal war was spoken of in terms of a real war, somewhat like what later became known as Jihad – the lesser and the greater. The lesser is an internal holy war, and the greater is a physical war. The attempt to emulate the god became the shaman’s internal war and the berserker’s physical war. In both cases, they used the main attribute of the war god, the soma that Indra, the war god, loved so much. Because soma is actually the psychedelic. In Christianity, this kind of Robinson Crusoe was called “athleta Christi” – and it had two manifestations: the ascetic, hermit monks, a kind of Western fakirs, and the righteous knights in the style of King David, “scholar and warrior”, those who would be part of the “army of believers” and accompany Jesus in his war against the Antichrist at the end of days.

the druids decorated their temples with the skulls of their enemies. The Greeks, as mentioned, also placed the heads of their offerings in temples, as I previously wrote about the bulls’ “bucrania”. But because war is a divine matter, and when one nation fights another, their guardian gods are also fighting. If you win, your god has defeated their god and is superior. They would go to war with divine symbols, and victory was considered achieved once you “captured the flag” of your opponent and took their god.

In ancient Greek culture, weapons captured in battle were turned into monuments and dedicated to the gods as a sign of gratitude or as an offering. This was especially common during the Archaic and Classical periods of Greek history, though we also see such practices in Rome, like the famous example of the temple lamp displayed in a triumphal procession. They displayed not only the spoils taken but also prisoners and the religious symbols of the defeated. The divine symbol was considered a “tropaion”, and the victor “won it”. The public display of the tropaion was considered a “triumph.”

This motif of each nation having its own god persisted in Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, each nation has its own “prince,” and when Israel fights its enemies, the “prince of Israel” fights the “prince of Esau”, as if it were a clash of titans between Larry Bird and Dr. J. We also see in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant captured by the Philistines and displayed by them, and David seizing Goliath’s sword, which is sometimes (1 Samuel 17:7) referred to not as the “wood of his spear” but as the “arrow of his spear,” because both the spear and the arrow evolved from the same “stick”.