Angeli’s many tattoos are often on full display, including his large trio of Odinist symbols. He has a mjolnir, or Thor’s Hammer, on his stomach, an image of Yggdrasil, or Tree of Life, etched around his nipple, and most significantly, placed right above his heart, a valknut, or “knot of the slain,” an old Norse runic symbol turned recognized hate symbol that is popular among white supremacists. In addition, the mjolnir has become a symbol of identity among modern heathens, and is particularly popular among those aligned with the explicitly white supremacist neo-Völkisch” or “folkish” movement.
Understandably, many actual pagans are horrified at the way white supremacists have co-opted their religious and cultural icons and twisted them into symbols of hate. ...
This kind of Norse imagery had a long history of being co-opted by terrible people. The original Nazis famously made heavy use of Norse and Germanic runes (the “SS” bolt is the most famous example), as do their modern successors in groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement, the Soldiers of Odin, and the National Socialist Movement, which has adopted the othala or odal rune as its logo. Members of the Aryan Brotherhood are fond of tattooing runes and Viking symbols alongside their swastikas and Celtic crosses; an explicitly white supremacist branch of modern paganism called Odinism or Wotanism is promoted by the Asatru Folk Assembly (whose founder, Stephen McNallen, attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville) and continues to proliferate and cross-pollinate with other fascist ideologies (notorious white supremacist and murderer David Lane was a fan); and runes are rampant within the neo-Nazi black metal scene (which is where I first came across the valknut after stumbling on a Nazi black metal band named, well, Walknut). It’s similar to what happened to the swastika, in which an ancient religious symbol was violently co-opted by Nazis and forever poisoned; movements to “reclaim the swastika” exist, but some things simply cannot be undone, no matter how unfair it is to the innocent people who saw their sacred symbol stolen and perverted.
