Else Christensen

Else Christensen (1913–2005) was a Danish proponent of the modern Pagan new religious movement of Heathenry.

She established a Heathen organisation known as the Odinist Fellowship in the United States, where she lived for much of her life.

A Third Positionist ideologue, she espoused the establishment of an anarcho-syndicalist society composed of racially Aryan communities.

Born Else Ochsner in Esbjerg, Denmark, Christensen developed her anarcho-syndicalist sympathies while living in Copenhagen.

From this position she moved toward the Strasserite National Bolshevik faction of the National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark, which brought together a far-right emphasis on race with a left-wing approach to economics.

Christensen was born as Else Oscher in 1913 in Esbjerg, western Denmark.

She became a professional handweaver and in 1933 moved to Copenhagen.

There, she embraced anarcho-syndicalism and became a follower of the anarcho-syndicalist ideologue Christian Christensen.

Exposed to the various competing radical groups on both the far right and far left, she came under the increasing influence of the Strasserite wing within the National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark (DNSAP), a group which had embraced the Nazi ideology of Germany's Nazi Party.

In 1937 she married fellow Danish Nazi activist Aage Alex Christensen; however, because of their National Bolshevik allegiances they were placed under heavy scrutiny amidst the German occupation of Denmark during World War II.

In 1937 she married the woodcarver and unionist Aage Alex Christensen, who had served as the top lieutenant of the DNSAP leader Cay Lembcke.

The Christensens became associated with the Strasserite National Bolshevik faction of the party, but Aage was part of the faction ousted when Frits Clausen seized control.

Following the German invasion of Denmark in 1940, both Else and Aage were arrested for the latter's involvement in National Bolshevist armed cells.

Christensen was released after three days' interrogation, but Aage was convicted of illegal weapons' possession and detained for six months.

At that point, Christensen convinced her father's cousin, who was Minister of Justice, that Aage should be released.

Following the end of World War II, the couple left Denmark for England.

After the war they moved to England and then Canada, settling in Toronto in 1951.

Corresponding with various far right activists, she came upon the writings of the American far right ideologue Francis Parker Yockey and the Australian Odinist Alexander Rud Mills, both of whom had a profound influence on her.

Christensen believed that Jews control the Western socio-political establishment, and felt that this would prevent the growth of any explicitly political movement to spread racial consciousness among those she deemed to be Aryan.

Instead, she believed that Heathenry – a Pagan religion that she termed "Odinism" – represented the best way of spreading this racial consciousness.

In 1951 they migrated to Canada, where they settled in Toronto; here, Elsa worked in various hospitals, a vocation she retained throughout her life.

Retaining an interest in class and race-based radicalism, she established contacts with various far right activists in the neighboring United States, including Willis Carto and James K. Warner, the latter being the New York organizer of the American Nazi Party.

Warner had earlier attempted to establish Odinism as a religious wing of the American Nazi movement, but having believed this to be a failure he gave Christensen all of his leftover material on Odinism.

It was in this material that Christensen came across the Call of Our Ancient Nordic Religion, a pamphlet authored by the Australian Odinist Alexander Rud Mills.

Although Christensen believed that many of Mills' ideas were too heavily influenced by Freemasonry for her liking, she was profoundly influenced by his ideas about reviving the worship of ancient Norse deities.

Her approach to the understanding of such deities would be heavily influenced by Jungian psychology, believing that the Norse deities were encoded in a collective unconscious of the white race.

She was also influenced by the writing of the far right American theorist Francis Parker Yockey, in particular his 1962 work Imperium, in which he lamented the defeat of Nazi Germany and blamed it on the influence of Jews in Europe and the U.S. Influenced by Yockey, Christensen came to believe that Aryan culture had reached its "senility phase", personified by the ideologies of Christianity, communism, and capitalism, the belief that all human beings are equal, and the internationalist erosion of the distinct cultures of different races.

She also read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West; however, she rejected Spengler's pessimistic view that this decline was terminal, instead opining that the Aryan civilization could be rejuvenated through its adoption of a new religion - Odinism.

She deemed Odinism to be a religion that had a natural and intrinsic relationship with what she perceived to be a Northern European race, stating that the "primary source" of the faith was "biological: its genesis is in our race, its principles encoded in our genes."

She also believed that this Odinism should use Norse names for the deities rather than Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic ones in order to avoid the post-war animosity between England and Germany.

In 1969, Christensen and her husband founded a group called The Odinist Fellowship.

Christensen established the Odinist Fellowship in 1969, then based from her mobile home in Crystal River, Florida.

The academic specialist in the far right Jeffrey Kaplan termed it "the first organizational expression of racialist Odinism in the United States", while the religious studies scholar Stefanie von Schnurbein noted that Christensen created her version of Odinism as "a discrete vehicle to establish her cultural pessimist, anti-Semitic, and radical racial agenda in a religious cloak".

Alex died in 1971, and Christensen continued her work, relocating to the United States.

That year she began publication of a newsletter called The Odinist, which continued for many years.

In 1971, her husband died, after which she began to focus more fully on her Odinist activities.

In 1993 she was imprisoned for drug smuggling, although maintained that she had been used as a drug mule without her knowledge.

On release, she was deported to Canada, where she lived in Vancouver Island during her final years.

Christensen exerted a significant influence over the racially oriented Odinist movement, gaining the moniker of the "Grand Mother" within that community.

Her life and activities have been discussed in a number of academic studies of Odinism and the far right in North America by scholars like Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Mattias Gardell, and Jeffrey Kaplan.