ABSTRACT
Adherents of Nordic Neopaganism-reconstructed pre-Christian Nordic-Germanic religions-engage with modern music in ways that inform innovative spiritual practices. Spiritually or historically invested music is received by listeners who viscerally experience these endowed sounds across multiple levels of sensory perception. This music creates a perceived Nordic Neopagan “sonosphere”, an affective field of sound that shapes individual or communal subjectivity. Bands like Wardruna and Heilung enhance their compositions and musical charisma by narrating themselves as spiritually charged. Ritualized creative processes include standing in a river for eight hours, playing with human bones, and making (blood) sacrifices, all of which, the artists and fans claim, add historical and spiritual value to the music. This value then affects practitioners, so individuals and groups might ritually engage the music. These bands’ self-narration in interviews and on social media legitimizes the songs’ ritual use. Musicians and artists draw on idealized pre-Christian Nordic history, claiming to temporarily collapse time between then and now. This draws Nordic Neopagan-aligned bodies of listeners to an imagined ancient time, cultivating experiences that realize past Nordic-Germanic concepts and practices in the present, which in turn helps to continually form and reform the spiritual identities and worldviews of practitioners.
