Priests, Priestesses, Magic and Spell Casting

How many priests do you know? If you are a Roman Catholic Christian you refer to members of the clergy as priests. Such a priest is quite different from the Biblical reference to priest and in the Bible passage I'm looking at this week (Hebrews 9:23-28) where Christ is called the high priest who put away the sin of all men by the sacrifice of himself.

All religions have one common idea about a priest. He—or she—is the person appointed by some authority to lead the people of the tribe or nation in worship and honor of God and offer Him sacrifices.

This was a critical issue in the Reformation led by Martin Luther. It has to do with an understanding of the primary worship service, known as the Mass. Here is the language to be found even to this day in the Catholic encyclopedia in reference to the priest:

"The Christian law also has necessarily its priesthood to carry out the Divine service, the principal act of which is the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the figure and renewal of that of Calvary."

Lutherans reject as unbiblical the idea that the sacrifice Christ offered on the cross of Calvary can and should be repeated in any sense. We Lutherans gladly and joyfully accept the fact that Christ offered Himself "once to bear the sins of many."

Roman Catholics still use phrases like "the unbloody Sacrifice of the Eucharist" and "expiation" to explain the Mass and what the priest does within the Mass. We  Lutherans reject such understanding, even while we retain a very high view of the Lord's Supper and Jesus telling us that we receive His Body and Blood together with the bread and wine.

All this has been argued at great length in many other places and I will not go into it here once more. My only point is that when the Germans who became Nazis in the 1920s rejected Christianity, either Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism, and embraced Odinism or Asatru, they still had priests. Their priests, however, were primarily and almost exclusively women, at least if they wanted to practice the magic and gain the wisdom of the gods.

Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth

Here's what modern day Odinists say about this issue—very strange and very interesting, I might add.

"Seið is a term which is used in Old Norse for any magical practice which requires altering consciousness and raising energy. It includes shamanic skills such as spirit journeying and weather working, magic that affects men's minds, spell casting and oracular divination (spæcraft) for good or for ill. As such, it is the natural complement of the more intellectual, controlled, runic galdor magic. A woman who practiced this craft was known as a Völva, visenda (wisewoman), spákona, or seiðkona (spá- or seið-woman). The titles for male practitioners were thul (a lorespeaker, though this could also refer to galdor magic), vitki (sage), andspámaðr or seiðmaðr (spá- or seiðman)."


No Christian priest or pastor claims such powers, nor should he. Yet the desire for magic, divination and spell casting still attracts.