North Toward Valhalla

What 'The Northman' Has To Say To Us About Christian Enchantment

Alexander Skarsgard as a Viking prince in ‘The Northman’. This dude ain’t Jesus

After my interview the other day with two Swedish podcasters, we remained on the connection talking. One asked me if I had ever seen the Robert Eggers film The Northman. No, I said. The eyes of both men grew wide, and they both told me I must, must, must — from the point of view of trying to understand an enchanted pagan world. So I watched it last night. It was brilliant but very, very bloody. I thought it was a magnificent film, and though I was very happy I watched it, I was also glad for it to be over. It did exactly what the Swedes said it would: make me feel that I had really inhabited Norse pagan enchantment for a couple of hours.

Before we start, let me quote again Brad East’s definition of enchantment and disenchantment:

“Disenchantment” names a false apprehension of reality. Imposed by the ambient secular culture, it proposes the world as fundamentally meaningless, chaotic, and godless, and therefore inert or plastic before the constructions and manipulations of rational man. We are alone; miracles are myths; angels and demons are fictions; dreams and visions are disclosive of nothing but our own psyches; numinous encounters are either harmless or signs of a broken or sick mind. Man is the measure of all things and the world is what we make of it. Meaning is imposed and autonomy is the first and last law of reality.

Given this stipulated definition, enchantment or re-enchantment is its inversion: a true apprehension of reality as it actually is: the fallen but good handiwork of a loving Creator; the recipient of his lasting care and unfailing providence; the medium of astonishing beauty; the impress of his grace; the theater of glory as well as of suffering; the audience of the incarnation; the vehicle for the eventual final epiphany of God become flesh. Here, in this cosmos of the Spirit, truth is discovered and disclosed, communication lies at the heart of things, and the grain of reality is compassion and mercy, not brute violence. The numinous is not psychotic, it is to be expected—if not to be sought, since this world is the haunt not only of angels but also of demons. You and I live our small and out of the way lives as bit parts in the grand drama of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the triumph of the former secured but not yet manifest. Join which side you will.

East is talking about Christian enchantment. The Northman presents a world in which everyone believes in the Norse gods. You might think you understand what that means, from a storytelling point of view, but you probably don’t. I wouldn’t have, until seeing the film. What Eggers is up to is giving us a world in which everyone in it truly believes in Norse pagan religion, experiences the gods as real. This gives great weight to all their decisions. Fine, but the thing is, this is very much not a religion of bloodless sword battles, sexy frolicking in the forest, and cool rituals to awesome sky gods that make you envious of god-drunk men who didn’t have to sit quietly in a pew with a tie on, listening to an ordained professor exegete Scripture.

No. This is not that.

These are early medieval men and women who really believe in their gods, and shape their entire lives around them. Their gods are gods of war, of honor, of passion, of vengeance. These are gods of omens, of blood and fire, even of human sacrifice. Their gods are gods of the tribe, who have no regard for the humanity of peoples outside the tribe. The movie works from the premise that Norse mythology is true, as if Odin and Freyr really existed. It’s not a Lord of the Rings kind of thing, exactly, but it does slip at times behind the veil, into the realm of the transcendent. In the final scene, where a warrior ascends to Valhalla, we see him rising to a heavenly gate — the gate of Viking heaven. This, I think, is what gives The Northman such narrative power: there is no ironic distancing between its characters and their religious imagination.

I want to emphasize, though, that this is no sanitized, Disney idea of Viking religion. From a story in Smithsonian magazine about the film’s realism:

This level of accuracy doesn’t stem from the film’s straightforward approach to “real” history. Instead, The Northman’s goal is to capture the atmosphere of the pre-modern Viking world, as conveyed in the vast corpus of surviving literature from medieval Scandinavia. Far from being accurate despite its fantastical elements, the film actually owes much of its authenticity to its portrayal of the supernatural.

“We [worked] with archaeologists and historians, trying to recreate the minutiae of the physical world, while also attempting to capture, without judgment, the inner world of the Viking mind: their beliefs, mythology and ritual life,” says Eggers in a statement. “That would mean the supernatural would be as realistic as the ordinary in this film—for so it was for them.”

The supernatural would be as realistic as the ordinary — that is what enchantment means. More:

This isn’t Shakespeare. Nor is it a Gladiator-like attempt at recreating a historical drama—in other words, a straight action film set in a specific, if not necessarily accurate, historical moment where the “good” guys win in the end. The movie isn’t even a faithful retelling of Saxo’s story. Instead, it’s trying to create a different, more medieval type of authenticity by telling a tale that would have been recognizable to the storytellers and audiences of the Middle Ages.

About twenty minutes in, I texted Johan, one of the Swedes, and told him that I can see why a young man today would be drawn to this kind of thing. However ersatz reconstructed heathenry might be in 2024, there is undeniable power in its imaginary. It was both exhilarating and terrifying.

But by the time I got to the end of the film, I thanked God in my night prayers for delivering humanity from that particular evil. One of the most unsettling things I realized was that there really are cases in which the only thing one can do if one wants to survive is exterminate a tribe that believes in such things. In most cases, it seems, there is no making peace with Vikings, not with a ferocious tribe that takes it as its divinely appointed destiny to slay your men, rape your women, and enslave all who survive that first encounter. This is not because they are not made in the image of God, as the Bible tells Jews and Christians; it is because they believe their gods give them warrant to kill everyone who is not them, if those alien peoples resist.

I thought of the Nazis and their reconstructed paganism. Frankly, I thought of Hamas. True, not all pagans were (are) Norse pagans, nor, of course, are all Muslims the berserkers of Hamas. The point is simply that if a kind of religion possesses the souls of men like this, turning them into beasts — as the war rituals of the Vikings in this film do, intentionally transforming Vikings into wolves before their raids — then there is no peace to be had with them. It’s kill or be killed. This is a staggeringly un-modern thing to confront. But if you struggle to understand why radicalized college students on American campuses today can confront the savage deeds of Hamas fighters on October 7 — the murders, the rapes, the kidnappings — and celebrate them as acts of honor and vengeance, well, watch The Northman. This is the way of the world. It is not so far in the past as we would hope.

I should say here that The Northman is definitely not an anti-pagan film, or at least is not intended to be that. Eggers has said that he strove to make a film as historically accurate as possible, and engaged experts to help him bring that vision to life. In this New Yorker profile from 2022, when the film was released, he says:

One day last fall, Blaschke texted Eggers, asking what he was most afraid of. Eggers gave three answers: being alone; being ambushed and stabbed to death; and surrendering to the occult. “I have met a lot of, like, occultists and witches and hippies who have a way of thinking that, like, I would want to be able to go there but would be afraid to,” he told me. His films function as a cage, a form of protection from himself. “I can explore it in my work fully and fully commit to being, like, inside it, without getting lost to it and never being able to come back,” Eggers said.

Why would one be tempted to surrender to the kind of enchantment one sees in The Northman? Take a couple of minutes to watch the trailer:

The words of Amleth (Hamlet, actually), the young prince: “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir” — that is the plot. Young Amleth, son of the king, watches his father murdered by his uncle Fjölnir, who makes Amleth’s mother his wife. He escapes, and grows up knowing that his destiny is, and must be, to avenge his father’s killing. The story is about how Amleth goes about that.

I am sure few viewers will come away from The Northman wishing to be a Viking. So why does it seem alluring, at least at first? Because these men (and women) live by an overwhelming sense that everything has ultimate meaning. The veil between this life and the next is very thin. Their rituals have great power. Even life on a sheep farm in Iceland, which is where most of the action takes place, is pregnant with the numinous. Watch this five-minute scene depicting the king initiating his son Amleth into the mysteries of manhood in a temple:

If you’re like me, watching the film, it’s easier to imagine a hypercivilized German young man of the 1920s and 1930s lured into Nazism by its promises of repaganizing around the ancestral gods, and the exaltation of the race. It’s the same kind of thing you see in the film Fight Club: there is something deep in the hearts of men that craves violence, honor, and all the virtues and vices of the old pagan world. Indeed, in Norse paganism, honor killing is not a vice at all, but a great virtue. To surrender to The Northman is to feel in your bones the difference Christianity made. All those peaceable Scandinavians we meet when we go to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark today? They are the sons of the Vikings. Few believe in Christianity anymore, but they were forever changed as a people by the encounter with Christianity.

If you regret that encounter, and believe that it destroyed something vital within Norse peoples — well, watch The Northman, and ask yourself honestly if you would want to live in that world. It’s fun to think about the pagan feasting and lovemaking, but not too many people want to be present when, like in one scene, a mortally wounded Viking stumbles into a hut at night with his greasy guts spilling out of his slashed belly like a bowl of spilled spaghetti.

The thing is — and I keep going back to this — there really is something deeply alluring about it all. Love, hatred, brotherhood, war — all of life robed as destiny, given dignity, and consecrated to eternity in service of the gods. You look at boys and young men today, sitting paralyzed on their couches playing video games, and you think, You were made for more than this. The world of the Vikings, and their warrior religion, said so. The witches, the prophets, the omens — all that mystery and ritual is spellbinding. As inhuman as the Viking men were, they are more human, in a way, than the sterilized, consumerized zombies of today. This, I think, is why some form of masculinist paganism — not necessarily religious, but pseudo-religious, like Nazism — will always hold appeal for men. It calls to something deep in our nature, draws it out, and sanctifies it. This is terrifying, to be sure, but if you watch The Northman and only see mindless mimetic violence, you will have missed something vital.

In Christian history, the Viking raids on monasteries are remembered as hell on earth. The age of the Vikings is generally considered to have begun with the raid in 793 on the great and rich monastery of Lindisfarne, on an island off the northeastern coast of the British Isles. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it thus:

"In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen men destroyed God‘s church at Lindisfarne."

Alcuin of York wrote at the time:

"Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race … The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets."

Watching the gruesome Viking raid on a Slavic village in The Northman, I thought about the peaceful monks of Lindisfarne, upon whom the Norsemen set without warning. This was like the Hamas raid on Israeli towns of October 7, except there was not just slaughter and the stealing of people, but also plunder and sacking. Lindisfarne was the first Viking raid, but there were many others. Imagine having to live in fear that these Norsemen would turn up in your town. The Viking raids on Britain ended with the Norman Conquest of 1066 — but you might say that it was the ultimate Viking raid, as the Normans were themselves descendants of Viking raiders given ownership of Normandy in the 10th century.

Indeed, it was the Christianization of the Nordic peoples, which began around the 12th century, that ended the Norse practice of slaving, as the medieval church declared it anathema for Christians to enslave other Christians. We should not imagine that the Christian kings were peaceable and tolerant. Charlemagne, the great Frankish enemy of the Vikings, was a Christian, but also a warrior. The point is that the Christian faith, the Christian imaginary, however imperfectly received by flawed mortals, is very different from the Norse pagan imaginary. And this made a huge difference over time.

If you read Sigrid Undset’s great trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (in the Tiina Nunnally translation, please!), you will enter a fully realized medieval Christian Norse world. Like Eggers, Undset relied heavily on historical sources (her father was an archaeologist) to recreate in exacting detail the habitus of the people of whom she wrote. To compare the world of The Northman with the world of Kristen Lavransdatter is to grasp the difference that Christianity made among that people.

I eagerly await the commentary of our friend Franklin Evans, who is a modern pagan, to see what he has to say about all this. I should underscore that Norse paganism is not the same thing as, say, Greek paganism, which is not the same thing as Roman paganism, or Lithuanian paganism. What I’m curious to know is to what extent modern pagan reconstructionism has been edited, so to speak, to appeal to modern sensibilities. I doubt very much that most contemporary people who seek out some recreated version of animist Norse religion want the blood rituals, the killing, the slaving, and the rest. Is it possible to have that, though?

Remember earlier this year, my post about Randall Sullivan’s new book on evil, titled The Devil’s Best Trick, in which he visits deep into Mexico, to the heart of Mexican sorcery Excerpts:

Early in the book, preparing to go to the Veracruz town that’s the center of brujeria, Sullivan consults the leading US academic expert on Mexican occultism:

I repeated what I had heard from Antonio Zavaleta, a professor of anthropology in the University of Texas system and the closest thing to an authority on the subject of Mexican witchcraft as exists in American academia. Zavaleta, half Mexican and half Irish, told me that he had struggled for decades with what for him was still an unresolved dichotomy: “In the Mexican culture, things that would be seen by you and me as clearly defined evil aren’t seen that way at all. For instance, the use of a supernatural medium to accomplish someone’s death would clearly be considered evil by American standards. But here at the border [Zavaleta was living in Brownsville, Texas] it is part of everyday life. People don’t see it as evil, or in terms of right or wrong. They don’t understand it in those terms. It’s just part of their cultural reality. If you’re able to manipulate the spiritual or supernatural world, then you have a right to. This is a power you possess and you can use it if you want.”

More:

Sullivan takes a long historical detour to the days of the conquistadors and what they found when they arrived in Mexico: an Aztec empire in which the mass human sacrifices beggared belief. I had not realized how fully attested to this stuff is by the historical record. As Sullivan avers, in contemporary times, we have scrubbed our awareness of this stuff, in service of an agenda that paints the Spanish as evil exploiter of innocent native cultures. You don’t have to think of the Spanish as saints and angels — they weren’t — to understand that they confronted evil so raw that it beggars imagination.

Here is a characteristic passage:

The Spaniards’ new residence was directly across from the spectacular pyramidal temple of the Hummingbird Wizard. The temple had been dedicated just thirty-two years earlier by the man regarded as the architect of the Aztec Empire, Tlacaelel. The highlight of the ceremony was the greatest human slaughter in the history of the Mexica—eighty thousand sacrificed, according to a sixteenth-century Aztec historian; the lines of those who would die stretched for miles, he recalled, and the killing went on without interruption for four days and nights. The Aztec nobility were provided with seats in boxes covered with rose blossoms intended to mask the smell of drying blood and rotting flesh. The stench was overwhelming, though, before even a thousand were dead, and by the second day nearly every one of the boxes was empty.

Yet the eighty-nine-year-old Tlacaelel remained the entire time, personally observing each and every sacrifice. It was Tlacaelel who had instituted Aztec worship of Huitzilopchtli, the Spaniards would learn, and who had invented the “Flower Wars”—contrived conflicts with neighboring tribes that were intended only to take prisoners for sacrifice to the Lover of Hearts and Drinker of Blood.

It is very, very, very bad. Words fail. If you saw Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, you know what happened there. It’s all based on contemporary historical accounts of both Spaniards and Aztecs — accounts that have been backed up by archaeological discoveries. Though many of the conquistadors did become exploiters, there can be no doubt that Cortes came up against a kind of evil that would not be seen again until the 20th century, with the Holocaust. True, this doesn’t exonerate the conquistadores of whatever evils they may have done, but then, whatever those evils may have been, they absolutely pale by comparison to the unfathomable evils from which the Spanish delivered the peoples of Mexico. We shouldn’t be embarrassed to say so. Sullivan:

For Christians, Catholics in particular, it was for hundreds of years an article of faith that what Cortés and his men confronted at Tenochtitlan had been the Devil’s own empire. As the Catholic writer Warren H. Carroll observed of fifteenth-century Mexico, “Nowhere else in human history has Satan so formalized and institutionalized his worship with so many of his own actual rites and symbols.”

Sullivan makes a good case, I think, that we moderns prefer to downplay or deny this raw evil because it suits our political ideology, or perhaps we are too afraid to confront it. I remember in 1989, reading the stories of the abduction and murder of Mark Kilroy, a US college student on spring break in Matamoros, Mexico. He was taken by a cult, sodomized, tortured, and ritually murdered, with his body parts cooked in a cauldron. At least fourteen others had died the same way. The cult leader said that this would give its members protection against the police in their drug smuggling. I read those stories that spring, my last one in college, and marveled not only that such things happened in the world, but that it had happened literally just across the US border.

It’s too much to take in, so we either find reasons to explain it away, or we just don’t think about it. This is perhaps Sullivan’s main point in the book: that if supernatural evil exists, then the world is very different than what we would prefer it to be. Sullivan reports at the end that he came to believe in the Devil at the end of his investigations, and got to the point where he read events in the world as physical manifestations of a deeper spiritual war.

You could argue that the killing that Christian warriors — say, Charlemagne’s men, or the Spanish conquistadores — did in ages past was not a fulfillment of Christ’s teachings, but the betrayal of them. You’d have to be careful with that, because it’s always dangerous to judge a distant age by the standards of today, but it is hard, to put it mildly, to reconcile the mass slaughter of, say, the Cathar heretics with the Gospel. Yet it seems that the ritualized violence of the Vikings, their slave-taking, and all the rest is not contrary to their religious beliefs at all, no more than Aztec slaving and human sacrifice was a violation of theirs, but rather the fulfillment, no matter how much modern people wish to explain that away.

How do those who participate in reconstructed pagan religions of our time reconcile that? How do they take what they (as products of Christianized civilization) recognize as good, while rejecting what they see as bad? Similarly, if Wafa or any other Muslims who read this care to say, I’m curious to know how contemporary followers of Islam condemn berserkers like Hamas and ISIS, given what we know about early Islam as a warrior religion. I’m asking all this NOT in an accusatory sense, but in a sense of genuine inquiry. I’ve always had a feeling that the reason why hardcore Islamic fundamentalists (salafists) will never go away is because they can always and legitimately appeal to actual Islamic history of the early days of the faith, when Islam was conquering the world for the sons of the Prophet, who was also a warrior-king.

So many of us moderns want desperately to edit the past, to sanitize it, to make it acceptable and useful to us. I’ve read Western journalists and anthropologists writing with great sympathy about Haitian voodoo rituals, but have also, as I mentioned yesterday, spoken to Haitian Christians who have witnessed them, and who left Haiti in part because they couldn’t bear living in a society that lived by the worldview of voodoo. Their testimonies are very different. What I discern as the key difference is that Western observers maintain a certain ironic distance from the rituals and the life of voodoo worshipers, in part to defend them from the judgment of Christians, whereas the Haitian Christians I’ve spoken with are closer to the world in which their neighbors and family members experience the spirits of voodoo as real. Not as symbols, but as actual deities. And they live like it.

I wonder who has more true respect for voodoo: Western apologists who don’t share any of its convictions, but who see it as a purely social phenomenon; or Haitian Christians who grew up with it, and live with it not as a cultural artifact, but as real life. Read Randall Sullivan’s lengthy descriptions of how Mexicans today live immersed in witchcraft — even secular, urbanized Mexicans. The title of his book, The Devil’s Best Trick, refers to the widespread loss of belief in evil in the traditional Christian sense. Broad-minded people today might believe that the conversion of the Norsemen from paganism to Christianity was a catastrophe. Though this is certainly not The Northman’s intention, watching it likely convinces one it was not catastrophe, but deliverance.

The Northman illustrates a good example of a point I make in Living In Wonder: that not all enchantment is good. Once you open the door to the numinous, and break down the artificial wall between “natural” and “supernatural,” you have to take the bad with the good. You can’t have an enchanted world of angels only; you have to make room for demons too. If you seek a return to an enchanted, pre-modern world, then you have to allow for the fact that this includes voodoo, revived Norse paganism, the lot. This is why I insist on Christian enchantment.

The Northman also made me appreciative of how ancient Christianity — especially Orthodoxy — took up good things about pagan ritual, and Christianized them. For me, Orthodox Christianity answers my deep, lifelong hunger for enchantment. It does so in the profound rituals, and in its phronema (mindset, outlook, worldview). The Orthodox Christian mind is enchanted, straight up. You don’t get this primarily by reading books; you get this by practice, by immersing yourself in Orthodox life with patience and discipline. From the great book Thinking Orthodox:

Since one’s phronema reflects the totality of one’s life, one cannot intellectually learn or be taught how to think Orthodox or how to be Orthodox. It is an attitude, mentality, perspective, a desire, an orientation that governs one’s entire way of life. This can only be acquired organically and gradually over time by active and full engagement in the life of the Church.

An Orthodox phronema forms as one is illuminated and guided by the Holy Spirit. This also requires a conscious and sustained effort on the part of the individual. Acquiring phronema is not simply a matter of studying theology, standing in Church, or saying one’s prayers in a mechanical manner. We may initially begin to perform these actions in a routine manner, but they must eventually become united with the soul and truly an organic part of our general orientation toward life, toward others and the world — just as prayer also begins with the lips but must enter into the heart to truly become noetic [“of the nous”] prayer, the “prayer of the heart.”

This quote, from a contemporary priest-monk named Ambrose, is apt:

The great challenge for Orthodoxy in the near future is not to find new and better ways of adapting to the dominant culture by assimilation and thus becoming “relevant”; the challenge is to establish and maintain genuine continuity with the Saints and Fathers of the past. This means more education, for ignorance of the Faith among many Orthodox today is appalling and is the single greatest factor in the crisis we are now facing.

This is why Orthodoxy is so conservative, liturgically and otherwise: because it strives to maintain the phronema of the early church and patristic era, which were closest to the time of Christ. When I see certain modernist Orthodox wanting to liberalize the faith to bring it in line with contemporary norms on sexuality, I object strongly, not only because I believe that these changes are morally and theologically wrong, but also because the great power of Orthodoxy today, compared to other forms of Christianity, is that is is so very different!

I don’t want to turn this into an apologia for Orthodoxy; I simply want to point out, in light of The Northman, and the richness of its pagan spiritual imaginary, including its rituals, that Orthodox Christianity is the most pre-modern form of the true faith. I intuit that so many searching young men today are coming into Orthodox churches for the same reason that this visceral masculinity of Norse paganism is appealing.

Obviously Orthodox Christians aren’t going out to do sword battles, sack the religious buildings of the non-Orthodox, and so forth. But what you experience in the Orthodox faith is a deep mysticism and profound liturgical ritual that seeks to sanctify — to enchant — all of life. In Orthodoxy we do have priests, of course, but we also believe that in a broad sense all men and women are called to be priests, to mediate between God and Creation, and through our own conversion and the ministry of our lives, bring Creation into closer harmony with Heaven.

Jonathan Pageau’s brother Matthieu is not a Christian, but he is very, very wise. In this post from a while back, I talked about his important book The Language Of Creation. In it, I quote from this terrific, long discussion of the book by the Anglican theologian Alistair Roberts. Excerpt from my post:

According to MP, everything that exists can be described as the result of the interaction between heaven and earth — that is, the spiritual realm and the material realm. They are not wholly separate realms, but rather interpenetrate each other. Man — the human person — is the nexus of this interpenetration. It is he who is the mediator between the Spiritual and the Material. He is supposed to draw heaven and its meaning down to the earth, and to raise up the earth, so that it can be rightly ordered by heaven.

Alastair: As a mediator of heaven and earth, mankind is supposed to bring heaven and its patterns down to earth, to bring heavenly meaning and impose it upon the earth, and raise up the flesh of the earth, and direct it towards the heavens.

For MP, a symbol is a physical manifestation of a spiritual truth. Once you learn to “read” the Old Testament symbolically, rich theological meaning reveals itself. MP says that humanity’s purpose can be understood as “informing matter with meaning, and expressing meaning with matter.” All of reality can be seen as nested microcosms of meaning, following the same patterns. The exchange between the two realms is a constant mixing of meaning and authority with matter and power.

You get a lot of this in The Northman, though obviously in a pagan form. If you watch the initiation scene I’ve embedded above, it begins with the king taking his young son into the temple for initiation, telling him that he once walked that way with his father, and now it is time for the boy to walk that way with him. Recreate the ancient pattern, lad; follow the rituals and marry heaven and earth, eternity with temporality. Our faith and worship is the thread that binds the seen to the unseen. That’s what’s going on here — and that is what ancient Christianity does too, in part. The liturgies and rituals are not mere decoration, but about what the anthropologist Paul Connerton calls taking the sacred story, of which we are a part, and “sedimenting it into our bones.”

The eminent historian of late antiquity Peter Brown has written that Christianity would never have taken off as it did had there not been something deeply lacking late Roman society. In this review of a scholarly account of Roman paganism’s end, Brown says that the old religion of Rome went out not with a bang, but with an exhausted whimper. There was no brave last stand of paganism against Christianity, just as today, the forces are not gathering at the gates of Byzantium, so to speak, for a final showdown between Christianity and Anti-Christianity.

I believe that Christianity would not be in retreat as it is today if there wasn’t something deeply lacking in the life of the Church. That something is what I call enchantment. It is that sense that God — the God of the Bible — is everywhere present, and fills all things. That we can and must know him, not only with our minds, and not only with our hearts, but in our bodies too. That the thread connecting heaven and earth, God and men, now and forever — that we can come to see it and feel it, and hold onto it like a lifeline keeping us from perishing beneath the waves of liquid modernity.

Imagine living a Christianity as vivid as the paganism of the Norsemen in that film. It is much harder to do today, granted. The Norsemen lived within a thoroughly paganized culture, where everything in their habitus upheld the ways of the gods. Even if we were to return to something like that, per Charles Taylor, we can’t ever believe simply anymore, for we now know that it is possible not to believe. Nevertheless, because God is real, and Christianity is true, we can always go back in some way — not exactly as before, but still, back to a time when men saw more clearly, and lived more truthfully.

In Living In Wonder, I put my cards on the table: I believe Orthodox Christianity is the truest form of the faith, not only true in its propositions, but moreso true in the way of life it prescribes. As mentioned above, the Christian life, according to Orthodoxy, is not living by the letter of the law, or saying one’s prayers faithfully, with ritual precision. All of those things are signs and structures serving as trail markers, so to speak, on the way to theosis, to becoming saturated with the presence of God in our souls.

That said, Living In Wonder is not a book about why you should become Orthodox. That’s not how I write. I was very surprised while researching the book to discover that so many of the things people like the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and others say about how to experience enchantment are already built in to Orthodoxy. I imagine some readers will be left curious about Orthodoxy, visit an Orthodox church, and convert. If so, well, glory to God. I don’t think this will be the experience of most, though. I do believe that readers of Living In Wonder who remain in their present churches, however, will learn from we brothers of the Christian East ways that they can draw closer to Our Lord, particularly in these disenchanted, post-Christian (anti-Christian) times.

So moved was I by The Northman that I returned last night, and again in my morning prayers, to the ancient Celtic prayer known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”. It is an early medieval prayer of protection, the phrasing of which clearly comes from Celtic pagan bardic tradition — but which, of course, has been Christianized. This powerful prayer symbolizes the power of a Christianity which has taken what was good in paganism, and refined it:

St Patrick’s Breastplate

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

Good weekend, y’all! I am grateful for your friendship and patronage. Go to church!