Our Honor is Loyalty
This Schutzstaffel (SS) recruitment poster from German-occupied Norway illustrated by cartoonist Harald Damsleth is brimming with mythological pagan imagery that form a rounded swastika.
The swastika’s left arm is formed by ancient Vikings aboard a longship, both iconic elements of Norway’s martial heritage. These warriors of yore are reflected on the right by their modern counterparts, legionnaires of the Norwegian Waffen-SS, vanguards of the new Germanic imperium. Inscribed below them is the motto of the SS in Norwegian: Vår Aere er Troskap (My Honor is Loyalty). At the crux is the revered god of war, Odin. Central to his mythos is the belief that half of the warriors slain in battle join Odin in eternal communion in the halls of Valhalla to be sanctified for their valor. One of his wolves, either Geri or Freki, sit beside him, while perched above atop the mythological tree known as Yggdrasil is a raven, venerated in old Norse mythology as Odin’s divine messenger.
The cosmic tree Yggdrasil serves as the axis mundi of Norse cosmology, bridging the celestial realms to the terrestrial, rooted in the earth and branching far into the heavens, as depicted in the swastika’s top arm. Trees hold a particular sacred significance in Germanic paganism and mythology. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that the Germanics “consecrate woods and groves and they apply the name of gods to that mysterious presence which they see only with the eye of devotion”. As with the destruction of the Saxon Irminsul by Charlemagne in his efforts to christianize the local Saxons, these trees became a Völkisch symbol of indigenous Germanic resistance to Judeo-Christianity.
Blooming at the roots of Yggdrasil is a humble Aryan family protected by the divine aegis of Odin and the SS. Armed with a shield emblazoned with the SS insignia, the family’s patriarch defends his homestead and the sacred natural order from the ravenous dragon of Judeo-Bolshevism and its serpentine kin. For the Germans, the war between National Socialism and Bolshevism transcended mere geopolitics, being a quasi-religious struggle for existence between the spiritual forces of light and dark, the divine and the based. To many Germans at the time, the Second World War was held as a war being fought for the preservation of European culture.
The backdrop of the poster, with its towering mountains, rippling waves and lush forests, portrays a certain Nordic reverence for nature in all its harsh, arctic beauty. This is linked to the concept of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) and the various resultant back-to-the-land initiatives which emerged from a longing for a simpler era, when peasants worked their land in harmony with nature, and when tribe and territory were one. This mystical past had profound romantic appeal on both the wider population and political elites. Belief in a Germanic spirit—defined as mystical, rural, moral, bearing ancient wisdom, and noble in the face of a tragic destiny—existed long before the rise of the Nazis, with the composer Richard Wagner celebrating such ideas in his writings. In his Nobel winning novel Growth of the Soil, Norwegian fascist Knut Hamsun captures this spirit perfectly.
Encapsulated in this poster is the profound esoteric symbology of the swastika and the essence of National Socialist cosmology. Combining the quadratic themes of each arm presents a singular, divine whole. The horizontal axis represents temporality, with the left and right arms symbolizing past and present, respectively, the constant theme being the eternal struggle of man. The vertical axis represents the theory of metaphysical dualism, with the craning branches of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil forming the top arm, symbolizing all that is transcendental and metaphysical, while the bottom arm comprised of humans and animals (i.e., nature) are understood as the earthly manifestation of the same divine essence. These elements all emanate from the Allfather Odin at its nexus, representing an all-encompassing yet intangible divinity which is immanent throughout nature, past and present, metaphysical and physical; a force that cannot be understood, only felt. We are all part of the divine and the divine is an equally inseparable part of us. The swastika is a symbol of the eternal cosmos; of birth, decay and rebirth; of the sun and of creation itself. As recounted in a Nordic tale by Guido von List in which the sun god Mundilfari whisks the cosmos into being, the swastika is the whirling fire whisk, the very act of creation. Its visual analogy to the celestial phenomenon of a spiral galaxy is no coincidence.
The socialist creed within National Socialism stems from its efforts to protect and advance a classless, communal society of peoples considered vessels of the divine, living in accordance with nature and a divinely mandated organic order. The swastika is a symbol of reverence for creation and certain racial traits that were perceived as indications of divine favor. The SS saw the conquering and settlement of ancestral and foreign territories not as a mere bureaucratic assignment but as a divine mandate to safeguard the welfare of this coming master race as ordained by God. The primary acting agent within Nazism is the selfless devotion of oneself and an unflinching loyalty towards one’s own people, the contempt for aliens occurring as a consequence. A typical accusation casted towards the Nazis is they were brimming in unabashed hatred. Yet hatred, in one way or another, always comes from a place of love, and an intense hatred is always matched by a love for something that is just as intense, whether that be your family, people, nation or an intangible idea. Within this matrix, the slogan of the SS, “Our Honor is Loyalty”, can be understood as an undying loyalty to a primordial divine essence, slumbering within our contemporary humanity as an ancestral memory, and inseparable from our existence even as a modern people.
The curved swastika seen on the poster is taken from the occultist Thule Society, which itself was named after a mythical and ancient northernly country called Thule, thought to be inspired by Scandinavia. The Thulean swastika was frequently employed by organizations of the Germanic SS to emphasize the Hyperborean heritage of the Scandinavians and cement their ancient racial kinship with Germany as part of the wider Germanic family and fellow members of the Aryan brotherhood. The German conquest of Western Europe gave the Waffen-SS access to these potential Germanic recruits, extensively co-opting their racial kinsmen into its ranks thereafter. This practice stemmed from the Völkisch belief that the original Aryan-Germanic homeland rested in Scandinavia and that, in a racial-ideological sense, its inhabitants, and those of neighboring northern European regions, were a human reservoir of superior Nordic-Germanic warrior blood, as alluded to in the swastika’s horizontal axis.
Both Germany’s National Socialists and Norway’s collaborationist Nasjonal Samling (National Assembly) rejected Christianity, drawing its imagery from paganism which they saw as a more authentically Germanic, and thus Norwegian, faith. Characterized by a Nietzschean ‘master morality’, Germanic paganism was seen to be the ideal religion for a new, pan-Germanic empire, pure with its pre-Christian ways and free of weak-willed Judeo-Christian ethic. SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop called Catholicism a catch-all of religions, infected with Judaism and it’s self-victimization. Stroop further claimed that Christianity was created as a Jewish conspiracy for the weakening and debasement of man through guilt. This guilt is what undeniably drives today’s woke social politics and the many neo-Marxist tendencies of the West, derived from the perversion of Judeo-Christian ethic and the perversion of its original slave morality. Many European fascists embrace paganism as being a more authentically indigenous and masculine religion compared to Christianity, linking de-Christianization with the reclamation of an unadulterated national identity.
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This Schutzstaffel (SS) recruitment poster from German-occupied Norway illustrated by cartoonist Harald Damsleth is brimming with mythological pagan imagery that form a rounded swastika.
The swastika’s left arm is formed by ancient Vikings aboard a longship, both iconic elements of Norway’s martial heritage. These warriors of yore are reflected on the right by their modern counterparts, legionnaires of the Norwegian Waffen-SS, vanguards of the new Germanic imperium. Inscribed below them is the motto of the SS in Norwegian: Vår Aere er Troskap (My Honor is Loyalty). At the crux is the revered god of war, Odin. Central to his mythos is the belief that half of the warriors slain in battle join Odin in eternal communion in the halls of Valhalla to be sanctified for their valor. One of his wolves, either Geri or Freki, sit beside him, while perched above atop the mythological tree known as Yggdrasil is a raven, venerated in old Norse mythology as Odin’s divine messenger.
The cosmic tree Yggdrasil serves as the axis mundi of Norse cosmology, bridging the celestial realms to the terrestrial, rooted in the earth and branching far into the heavens, as depicted in the swastika’s top arm. Trees hold a particular sacred significance in Germanic paganism and mythology. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that the Germanics “consecrate woods and groves and they apply the name of gods to that mysterious presence which they see only with the eye of devotion”. As with the destruction of the Saxon Irminsul by Charlemagne in his efforts to christianize the local Saxons, these trees became a Völkisch symbol of indigenous Germanic resistance to Judeo-Christianity.
Blooming at the roots of Yggdrasil is a humble Aryan family protected by the divine aegis of Odin and the SS. Armed with a shield emblazoned with the SS insignia, the family’s patriarch defends his homestead and the sacred natural order from the ravenous dragon of Judeo-Bolshevism and its serpentine kin. For the Germans, the war between National Socialism and Bolshevism transcended mere geopolitics, being a quasi-religious struggle for existence between the spiritual forces of light and dark, the divine and the based. To many Germans at the time, the Second World War was held as a war being fought for the preservation of European culture.
The backdrop of the poster, with its towering mountains, rippling waves and lush forests, portrays a certain Nordic reverence for nature in all its harsh, arctic beauty. This is linked to the concept of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) and the various resultant back-to-the-land initiatives which emerged from a longing for a simpler era, when peasants worked their land in harmony with nature, and when tribe and territory were one. This mystical past had profound romantic appeal on both the wider population and political elites. Belief in a Germanic spirit—defined as mystical, rural, moral, bearing ancient wisdom, and noble in the face of a tragic destiny—existed long before the rise of the Nazis, with the composer Richard Wagner celebrating such ideas in his writings. In his Nobel winning novel Growth of the Soil, Norwegian fascist Knut Hamsun captures this spirit perfectly.
Encapsulated in this poster is the profound esoteric symbology of the swastika and the essence of National Socialist cosmology. Combining the quadratic themes of each arm presents a singular, divine whole. The horizontal axis represents temporality, with the left and right arms symbolizing past and present, respectively, the constant theme being the eternal struggle of man. The vertical axis represents the theory of metaphysical dualism, with the craning branches of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil forming the top arm, symbolizing all that is transcendental and metaphysical, while the bottom arm comprised of humans and animals (i.e., nature) are understood as the earthly manifestation of the same divine essence. These elements all emanate from the Allfather Odin at its nexus, representing an all-encompassing yet intangible divinity which is immanent throughout nature, past and present, metaphysical and physical; a force that cannot be understood, only felt. We are all part of the divine and the divine is an equally inseparable part of us. The swastika is a symbol of the eternal cosmos; of birth, decay and rebirth; of the sun and of creation itself. As recounted in a Nordic tale by Guido von List in which the sun god Mundilfari whisks the cosmos into being, the swastika is the whirling fire whisk, the very act of creation. Its visual analogy to the celestial phenomenon of a spiral galaxy is no coincidence.
The socialist creed within National Socialism stems from its efforts to protect and advance a classless, communal society of peoples considered vessels of the divine, living in accordance with nature and a divinely mandated organic order. The swastika is a symbol of reverence for creation and certain racial traits that were perceived as indications of divine favor. The SS saw the conquering and settlement of ancestral and foreign territories not as a mere bureaucratic assignment but as a divine mandate to safeguard the welfare of this coming master race as ordained by God. The primary acting agent within Nazism is the selfless devotion of oneself and an unflinching loyalty towards one’s own people, the contempt for aliens occurring as a consequence. A typical accusation casted towards the Nazis is they were brimming in unabashed hatred. Yet hatred, in one way or another, always comes from a place of love, and an intense hatred is always matched by a love for something that is just as intense, whether that be your family, people, nation or an intangible idea. Within this matrix, the slogan of the SS, “Our Honor is Loyalty”, can be understood as an undying loyalty to a primordial divine essence, slumbering within our contemporary humanity as an ancestral memory, and inseparable from our existence even as a modern people.
The curved swastika seen on the poster is taken from the occultist Thule Society, which itself was named after a mythical and ancient northernly country called Thule, thought to be inspired by Scandinavia. The Thulean swastika was frequently employed by organizations of the Germanic SS to emphasize the Hyperborean heritage of the Scandinavians and cement their ancient racial kinship with Germany as part of the wider Germanic family and fellow members of the Aryan brotherhood. The German conquest of Western Europe gave the Waffen-SS access to these potential Germanic recruits, extensively co-opting their racial kinsmen into its ranks thereafter. This practice stemmed from the Völkisch belief that the original Aryan-Germanic homeland rested in Scandinavia and that, in a racial-ideological sense, its inhabitants, and those of neighboring northern European regions, were a human reservoir of superior Nordic-Germanic warrior blood, as alluded to in the swastika’s horizontal axis.
Both Germany’s National Socialists and Norway’s collaborationist Nasjonal Samling (National Assembly) rejected Christianity, drawing its imagery from paganism which they saw as a more authentically Germanic, and thus Norwegian, faith. Characterized by a Nietzschean ‘master morality’, Germanic paganism was seen to be the ideal religion for a new, pan-Germanic empire, pure with its pre-Christian ways and free of weak-willed Judeo-Christian ethic. SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop called Catholicism a catch-all of religions, infected with Judaism and it’s self-victimization. Stroop further claimed that Christianity was created as a Jewish conspiracy for the weakening and debasement of man through guilt. This guilt is what undeniably drives today’s woke social politics and the many neo-Marxist tendencies of the West, derived from the perversion of Judeo-Christian ethic and the perversion of its original slave morality. Many European fascists embrace paganism as being a more authentically indigenous and masculine religion compared to Christianity, linking de-Christianization with the reclamation of an unadulterated national identity.
