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”.

Celts worship of the oak and its eco system

Maximus of Tyre testified to the worship of oak trees by the Druids, and concluded that since these are the same trees of the oracle at Dodona, the Celts worship Zeus and liken him to an oak tree. Pliny the Elder also testified to the worship of the oak trees, and believed that the druids were actually named after the oak, since the word for oak in Greek is drus (δρυς), and it turns out also in the Celtic languages ​​(derw, dair).

Oak trees were usually sacred to thunder gods, Hector Munro Chadwick wrote about this in his study “The Oak and the Thunder God” in 1900. We see how St. Boniface uprooted the oak of Donar, the parallel of Thor, identified in Latin hagiography as “the tree of Jove” (i.e Jupiter). When the Saxons saw that nothing was happening to Boniface, they immediately all converted to Christianity. The Baltic thunder god Perkūnas is also closely related to the oak. And of course, in Hebrew there is also the connection between the god “El” and the tree of “Ela” or “Alon”.

You would say that the similarity to the worship of El is a nice coincidence, but considering that in Roman times there was a practice of worshiping “columns of Jupiter”, and such columns were found in a variety of Roman-Celtic sites such as Mainz, Maastricht and even Budapest – these columns actually symbolized the tree of the Axis Mundi, and were often have scales and bumps that resemble those on the surface of the oak trunk, which protect it from pests. These columns are the counterparts of the Hercules columns, or Melqart columns, which were placed in the center of Phoenician temples. The Celts met the Phoenicians in Spain or Ireland, and may have adopted this worship over time. One of the theories regarding the distribution of the Celts claims that all the Celtic languages ​​and all the peoples called Celtic are not necessarily genetically related peoples, but rather an elite that settled in trading stations on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and the Celtic language was their lingua franca. Some of them may even be of Semitic origin, or at least those who founded the colonies. In any case, these pillars and the worship of the oak trees may be of the same origin.

Strengthening this claim that the Celts adopted local rituals may come from Arthur John Evans’ study of Stonehenge from 1889. Evans points out that Stonehenge was actually a place of worship around which the circles and stones were built, and this place may have been a sacred oak tree, symbolizing the same god as the father of all. Evans shows parallels in Greco-Roman art depicting sacred trees associated with stone pillars or trilithic structures (i.e megaliths built of 3 stones), and thus concludes that these monuments are generally associated with sacred trees. The remains of the sacrifices found in the area also strengthen his claim that the Celts adopted this form of worship that matched their cosmology. This is of course if we adopt the approach that the Celts were late invaders who preserved a cult that had existed in the place since time immemorial.

The god of thunder, the father of the Celtic gods is called Taranis, he is symbolized as a naked god carrying a wheel and lightning. The wheel symbolized his chariot of the sun crossing the sky. The wheel was a recurring motif in Celtic art, and was usually used as a protective and luck amulet among warriors. The warriors, by the way, fought like Taranis, naked, and painted themselves blue like the color of the stones in the pits of Stonehenge. Julius Caesar describes this blue color as the color of glass, and it is not clear why. One of the explanations is because when lightning strikes the sand, glass is sometimes formed in the form of thin tubes called Fulgurite, and their color is sometimes blue, which is of course related to a multitude of variables such as the type of sand, the intensity of the lightning, etc., but when you are a pre-scientific pagan, nothing is clear to you.

And more about the worship of the oak trees and the god of thunder: among the tools discovered in the Hallstatt culture were found decorations and ornaments of birds. Since this god is the god of the sky, whoever is able to fly and dwell in the sky is also holy, and we see many birds that are considered sacred in Celtic culture. The Celts used to practice divination based on the flight of birds, some also claim that traditional Celtic music tried to imitate birdsong. Birds were considered messengers connecting the sky and the earth, and represented the souls on their journey to the other worlds, or rather, the ability to fly symbolized for them the soul leaving the body and embarking on a journey.

The bird sacred to the druids was the wren, whose name also happens to be very similar to that of the druids Drwy, and it also usually lives among the branches of the oak tree. Harming this bird or its nest is considered a taboo, transgressing it brings bad luck. However, on one day a year it was allowed and even desirable to hunt these birds, on the day of the winter solstice, perhaps to hasten the return of the sun symbolized by the god. In fact to this day in the Isle of Man and Ireland there is a custom at Christmas to hunt these birds, which is called Wren Day. Celtic legends usually praise the skill of the warriors as a measure of how accurate their stone throw was, so much so that they were able to snipe birds.