Thailand's hip heathens: Wotan's clan in the Far East
Guythip Saraswatimonthon has been working towards this day for over a year. The young man with the Britpop haircut and colourful shirts has incurred two million baht (around 52,000 euros) in debt in order to fly in a group of half-naked, soot-covered savages who are supposed to hold a martial ceremony here this evening.
He scurries nervously through the foyer of the event rooms on the top floor of a glossy mall in the heart of Bangkok. Swords and battle axes are already stacked up in a corner of the Japanese-inspired, sweet-eyed consumer backdrop. Anyone who wants to can have their photo taken with a Thai boxer dressed as a Viking. Teenagers pull out their cell phones and giggle as he reveals his washboard stomach under his cloak - K-pop meets Hagar the Horrible.
Since the early hours of the morning, young Thais have been sitting on the carpet in the chic lobby, waiting for the hall entrances to open. A surprising number of them have Germanic runes tattooed on their skin. Some have painted the exotic characters on their faces. The treasurer and guard at the entrance wears fur shoulder pieces and horns on his head - typical insignia of healing, the group that everyone here longs to see.
The Denmark-based collective is giving its very first concert in Bangkok tonight, or rather its "first ritual in Asia," as the posters designed by Guythip proudly proclaim. With their live spectacles, Heilung want to revive the Viking and Iron Ages. To hypnotic sounds, the group, dressed up as shamans and warriors, dance themselves into a trance that is also meant to be passed on to the audience. They wear antlers and historical costumes, blow into towering bronze trumpets, beat animal skins and thrust spears into the air shot through with strobe lights. They call it "Amplified History." The lyrics, some of which are written in extinct Old Norse, are about sexual magic, pre-civilizational battles and a nature animated by gods and spirits. Their dark, threatening world music, for which the genre term "Nordic Ritual Folk" has become established, has started a neo-pagan trend in Europe and the USA. Heilung and Wardruna, the other big heroes of the scene, even made it into the top ten of the German and Austrian album charts.
Einar Selvik, the brains behind the latter, explained in an interview that everything indicates that the din is slowly becoming a global phenomenon. "It's a bit like when the West got excited about kung fu." In Thailand, it took just 46 seconds for the tickets to sell out, says Guythip, as he shoves his smartphone, which lights up every second, back into his pocket. It is the first time in his life that he has organized a concert, and one of this size. Much had to be negotiated right up to the last minute, from a special permit to use incense to reassuring the venue manager that this is an event of cultural significance and that European women with bare torsos are a non-negotiable part of the concept.
"I haven't slept for three days!" he sighs and points the way to the backstage room, past meter-high pictures of the Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn. It's still quiet back here. The warriors are on a sightseeing tour or enjoying a Thai massage, which Guythip, as a good host, has treated them to. He is actually a fortune teller, a highly respected and lucrative profession in Thailand. Heads of state have their futures predicted here just as naturally as housewives and university students. "We Thais believe in ghosts and the supernatural," explains Guythip, pointing to the many miniature temples that are erected in front of every new building so that the expelled earth spirits can quickly move into new quarters. "We respect Buddha and the Hindu deities, as well as the Chinese gods and Feng Shui. We can pray to everyone without feeling guilty." Spiritual openness
The spiritual openness rooted in Thailand's everyday animism has increased even further in the digital age. Millions of Thais consult online astrological offerings from influencers with names like Wittykrystal, some of whom are worshipped like pop stars, when making decisions about their relationships and careers. In this world of the "Mutelu", the "believers in magic", as they are called here, Guythip has specialized in an area with a novelty factor: he uses Germanic runes to predict the fate of his compatriots. "The runes served the Vikings as a writing system, but they also had magical meaning and were used for fortune-telling," he explains. By using them, Thais would immediately gain access to the world of foreign gods. His business model also includes a tattoo studio called Veldismagn, where you can have symbols such as the eponymous protective magic sign along with a blessing tattooed into your skin. Next to the reception, Guythip has erected a shrine with a golden statue of Odin, over whose spear fresh garlands of jasmine flowers are draped every day, a sign of respect that is otherwise mainly given to temple Buddhas here.
Guythip has made several pilgrimages to the homeland of Freya, Odin and Thor, where he visited the temple of Ásatrú in Iceland, the only country that officially recognizes this religious community of Germanic paganism. After returning from Scandinavia, he developed his own set of rune tarot cards and began to teach students the art of interpreting them. "Guythip made things interesting for us. He has a magical touch!" enthuses Sukanya Nimitvilai, one of his students, who, like many here, wears a Thor's hammer around her neck as a talisman. To date, Guythip has gathered around two thousand Thais who believe in runes, around thirty of whom are helping out in the organization team this evening, free of charge.
"One reason I pray to the Nordic gods is that they are like us humans. Odin had to sacrifice himself to receive the runes. I like the idea that you have to earn things," says Sukanya, who works as a lecturer in the Department of English and Linguistics at Ramkhamhaeng University, the country's largest university. In Bangkok, a metropolis of ten million people, the gods associated with the vast forests of Scandinavia also remind her of the importance of staying in touch with nature. Together with Guythip, Sukanya has translated an elaborately designed brochure entitled "Healing Explained," which every concert guest receives at the entrance to the hall. Individual titles from the set list are explained in detail, including mythological cross-references to Buddhism and quite explicit translations of old inscriptions from Norway: "Lovely is the cunt, may the cock fill it up." "If you want to understand the runes, you also have to know the myths behind them," says Guythip and says goodbye to the rest of the crew backstage, while more and more visitors crowd towards the entrances.
Just over a thousand people fit into the Siam Pic-Ganesha Center of Performing Art. Musicals, theater performances, and performances by local comedians usually take place here. But now the foyer looks like a fantasy blockbuster is premiering. Guests in linen costumes and headdresses pose in front of a white photo wall. Antlers in particular protrude from their heads, draped with plastic flowers, ferns, and glitter. Those who haven't brought anything of their own can borrow capes and shields for the selfie. A young woman, wearing a snow-white dress and blond wig, has obviously been inspired by the mother dragon from "Game of Thrones." While the audience at a healing show in the West resembles that at a metal concert - dressed in black, with long hair and tattoos - the people here are surprisingly diverse in age and makeup. Young families have brought their children with them, who also get a bit of war paint on their faces. A group of older ladies wear their leather chieftain robes with matriarchal dignity. Even the men in warrior garb appear more lithe than macho. The Wotan clan in far-off Asia does not even attempt historically accurate reenactment. No one would think of putting a decorative Buddha somewhere.
"What we do is just an interpretation," says Kai Uwe Faust, the singer from Hesse and conceptual mastermind of healing. Before the performance, he mingled with the crowd and put on a plastic Viking helmet from the photo op for fun. "Our music and our ritual are more intended to convey an idea of what our ancestors might have done." People have been travelling since the early Stone Age, adopting things from foreign cultures and reinterpreting them. "In Viking graves, coins from the Middle East, clothes made of Chinese silk and even an Asian Buddha figure from the 6th century were found, which reached what is now Sweden via trade routes."
Conversely, it is only in recent times that the West has turned Asia's holy sites into wellness devotional objects. Putting a Buddha on a shelf as decoration, as almost every other yoga studio in Europe does, would be considered sacrilegious in Buddhist Thailand. Aside from religious and royal symbols, however, discussions about cultural appropriation are rarely heated. When "farangs", white foreigners in sarongs, stroll along the beaches, it usually only elicits a smile. Thailand, "the land of the free", is the only country in Southeast Asia to escape formal colonial rule by the Western powers. Perhaps this also explains the more innocent curiosity in dealing with strangers.
When Guythip steps onto the stage at eight o'clock sharp, the drums and props around him are decorated with leaves from a Bodhi tree. Buddha is said to have found enlightenment under such a tree. With a tailor-made cape and a gristly wooden sceptre, Guythip stands at the microphone and looks like a guardian of sacred knowledge himself. Once again he speaks about the gods and the magical texts of Heilung, some of which he can recite without an accent. "If you feel like dancing, do it! Don't worry about what others think of you!" he says emphatically to the audience, who are sitting in the stands, visibly excited and leaning forward. Expats and tourists, who usually make up a not inconsiderable part of the audience at performances by Western bands in Asia, are almost completely absent. Besides the crew, only two Germans have taken their seats in the last row, long-time fans of Heilung who associate the concert with a holiday in Thailand. One of them hands out Swiss throat sweets. “When this smoking starts, everyone will start coughing, you’ll see.”
Then Guythip announces a surprise and disappears into the rising mist. When the first drum beat begins shortly afterwards, it is not barbarians who come on stage, but colorful figures with conical headgear, like birds of paradise. The artificial fingernails are as long as a tousled peter pan, the movements graceful, dignified, hypnotic. They are Menora, magical trance dancers that Guythip has specially invited from the south of Thailand. With their centuries-old choreography, which was declared a UNESCO cultural heritage in 2021, they too want to build a bridge to the ancestral world. Trance is a cross-cultural "heart" of all shamanic traditions, writes the American anthropologist Michael Harner, whose theory of "core shamanism" is based on healing. All people therefore react to the same spiritual triggers that have been neurophysiologically programmed into us over thousands of years, such as rhythmic drum sounds or psychedelic drugs.
"Our original spirituality has been severely cut by Christianity," says healing neo-shaman Faust, whose vision of a revived European animism is also alluded to in the band's name. "It is wonderful for us to experience a spirituality here in Thailand that has grown more or less uncut!" As he does before every performance, he will recite a poem he wrote himself tonight: "Remember that we are all brothers, all people and beasts and trees and stone and wind ..."
After the delicate performance of the Menorah, however, the performance of Heilung seems downright brutal. Pounding rhythms, deep roaring, threatening gestures. This is not digestible folklore, more like hard-frozen bread from the permafrost that hits hard in the pit of the stomach. Nevertheless, the audience gets moving. Some use the opportunity for a bit of archaic ecstasy and dance in the aisles, shaking their hair. Others have their eyes wide open, and probably their mouths too, but you can't see that, since most of them are still wearing corona masks, even though the mask requirement has long since been dropped. The guest from the West becomes self-reflective: Do the Thais find this spectacle fascinating because they encounter an archetype of the warlike European here? "I know that you associate this music with Satanism and other dark things," Guythip explained. He is also aware that the Nazis misused his beloved runes and permanently damaged their image. He doesn't want to talk about it any more. He has his own ideas, his own fascination, which is not measured by our standards.
After the concert, he goes back on stage to bow to wild applause. Relief is written all over his face. Everything went well, the people danced. Some of the audience may soon become his new students and perhaps even accompany him on one of his next pilgrimages to Europe. A young pagan woman from his inner circle has recently secured a place at the University of Iceland, where she plans to do a master's degree in Nordic mythology. There, at the source, she will have to come to terms with the European approach to cultural self-exploration - less prayer, more literary analysis. But that's just how it is: because everything is in flux, in motion, no culture can ever be fully understood as long as it is still alive.