“Hail Thor!” The priestess and her heathens, standing in a circle, raised their mead-filled horns. We were gathered in an unassuming spot in a pine forest outside Stockholm. This was our temple, and the large, mossy stone before us was our altar. I was relieved to see that the animal-based sacrificial offerings were long-dead and highly processed. A bearded man reached his tattooed arms into his backpack and raised a red, horseshoe-shaped sausage to the sky. A goth girl unboxed a plastic tub of hammer-shaped cookies. The priestess offered me a handful of flaxseeds to toss on the altar, which was overflowing with gifts, apples and bottles of homemade mead.

A dozen people had gathered for an autumn sacrifice to summon Thor, the hammer-wielding Norse god of harvests and storms. Many pleaded for him to bring rain, after a summer plagued with drought. Others asked for the strength to battle unemployment, or for the recovery of a sick mother. We all had our own reasons for being there. A middle-aged man, perspiring in his blue office shirt, seemed to be there to connect with his hippy-looking wife and teenage daughter.

I was there because pagan events kept popping up in my Facebook feed, and I couldn’t fathom why. I’m not “spiritual”, or even agnostic. I’m staunchly secular, I like modern medicine, and my social media usually reflects that. Having just moved back to Sweden after five years living in the UK, my online world mainly consisted of London friends and British banter. But there was a glaring exception: my algorithm kept recommending that I check out neo-Norse sacrifices in my local area. It suggested that the movement may be surprisingly mainstream, and the two middle-aged women standing beside me in the forest seemed to confirm this: they looked perfectly normal – like they could work at a nursery. I really had not expected to return home to a Viking revival; nor that it would be so chilled out, when I did.

Sweden’s conversion to Christianity in the middle ages largely eradicated the pagan religion of the Viking era. Now, people are intent on bringing it back. While far from a nationwide trend, the fringe faith has racked up a notable following. Two formally recognised faith groups, Nordic Asa-Community (NAC) and Community of Forn Sed Sweden have around 2,700 members between them according to their own estimates, though no official figures exist. On Facebook, they have 16,000 followers combined. They offer naming ceremonies, initiation rites, weddings, funerals, new holidays and a reason to gather in forests and fields. They have a total of 20 sub-divisions across Sweden that organise local, small-scale sacrifices like the one I went to, and their annual, nationwide sacrifices are said to attract about 300 participants.

This summer, Sweden’s first new pagan burial ground in almost a millennium has been approved. The site, which will take the form of three grass mounds shaped like buried ships, will be located next to a Christian cemetery in the small town of Molkom. Around 50 people have already requested to be buried at the site, which is expected to open next year, according to the faith-based group behind the initiative. They have also raised SEK108,295 (£8,740) to build a temple near the village of Gamla Uppsala, once the centre of the Viking world. The point is that the heathen community are serious about asserting their rights as a minority faith, and about summoning Odin, the All-Father.

It’s an unexpected development in Sweden, a country often characterised as highly secular, ultra-modern and tech-savvy. Historical precedent suggests it may be a sign of existential crisis. In the early 19th century, Sweden ceded a third of its territory, Finland, to Russia. Writers and intellectuals turned to Viking-age lore, forging a new national identity based on the brave, masculine, pillaging Viking, to process the humiliating defeat. This ideal was later co-opted by the Third Reich to project the Nazis’ notions of Aryan dominance and racial purity, and far-right groups still use runes and other Norse symbols today.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to assume today’s pagan revival is linked to nationalism and Sweden’s new anti-immigration sentiment, and it’s impossible to know how many heathens hold such sympathies. Officially, Forn Sed is openly antiracist, and NAC expelled one of its leaders in 2017 for allegedly making racist remarks. While reconnecting with lost traditions and ancestral heritage is a core tenet, both groups strongly emphasise respect for the natural world. Nordic animism, in which nature is revered as sacred, has emerged as a significant new theology within the heathen community. Perhaps this ecological interpretation of Norse culture is a response to the current climate crisis, the effects of which – forest fires, water shortages and floods – are becoming increasingly noticeable, even in the north. Restoring a half-extinct religion could offer a way to cope with climate anxiety, and the fear that your way of life may soon be history, too.

Is Norse paganism here to stay? In Iceland, it’s become the second-most practised religion after Christianity, with 7,000 active members in a country of 387,000 people. Their temple in Reykjavik is set to open in 2026. In Denmark, where the movement claims to have over 3,500 believers, a pagan burial ground opened in 2009. Looking at Google Maps, it’s still standing. Thirteen heathens have been laid to rest there as of 2025, according to an email from the local municipality.

Though it’s easy to dismiss this new wave of Viking heathens as silly, we’re all guilty of obsessing about the past. Nostalgia runs through contemporary culture, whether it’s a fashion revival from the 2000s, sounds from the 70s, trad wives from the 50s, or pre-industrial homesteading. The pagans may look that little bit more extreme, with their rune-inscribed arms and braided beards, but their longing for permanence in an unstable world is not so different from our own.