Eh. It’s complicated because those fucking losers are the only reason anyone knows or cares about them. Most of what we think of as “viking religion” or “pagan religion” was made up by 19th century Romantic Nationalists who were trying to create ethnic nation states. But to have a nation state you have to have a nation first. Europe didn’t really have national identities prior to the romantic nationalists. Germany is the best example - 800 squabbling principalities that were mostly 1km square. The idea of a single nation of all German speaking people was something that was built from scratch by nationalists who believed that an ethnonation was desirable for political and spiritual regions.

As part of the project all these countries had to invent a unifying national myth to convince people who really had nothing in common that they were all part of a real, important, and historically meaningful nation. Like the line between French people and German people is completely arbitrary, even Language wasn’t really defining until programs were put in place to eradicate unofficial regional languages. So the proto-Nazis who wanted to create a German nation had to create a German mythology that separated German people from French people, Poles, Czechs, Danes, whatever. So they turned to archeology, which was trash science at the time, and started basically making stuff up about the significance of various artifacts they found. Whatever came out of the ground became evidence of an ancient German people who had always been German and lived in Germany and were full of Germans. Linguists and folklorists and historians suddenly discovered that German folklore was actually all about Wotan and pagan gods and Germanic German Germanness and the Christians (read Jews) had covered it all up and changed the gods to Saints to suppress real authentic Germaness. Amulets that were dug up and symbols found carved on old stones were assigned important Germanic significane despite not having any written attestation explaining what they might mean, if they meant anything. This whole mythology of a German past was built up out of fragmentary historical documents written by hostile Christians and Romans, along with a lot of “It came to me in a dream” stuff to assign meaning to artifacts that had no meaning because the people who made them didn’t write the meaning down.

The Nazis famously adopted a lot of this mythology and symbolism as part of their process of developing the Nazi state. Lots of other right wing ethnoshithead European groups did too, inventing their own “Authentic” ethnonationalist not-Christian (read Jewish) religions. It died down for a bit after the war, but then an American white supremacist stuck in prison in the 60s invented, I want to say he called it Odinism, a neo-religion based on a bunch of esoteric German and Nazi stuff mixed Crowley stuff and various New Ager beliefs. That formed the kernel of American neo-Paganism. Even the folks who are explicitly anti-racist and inclusive have a connection to it as that’s what brought the idea to public view in the US. European neo-Paganism took off a few decades later and really took off after the fall of the USSR when deeply traumatized people were looking for meaning in a world where all meaning had been destroyed. A good number of reactionaries fell back on ethno-nationalist turbo-racism to explain why their nations had collapsed alongside the Soviet Union, telling themselves that it was all Communism’s fault for destroying the volk their original and authentic culture and that by adopting the “Old Religion” they could rejuvenate the nation and return to their entirely mythological national greatness.

We can see this most directly and obviously in modern Ukraine; After the destruction of the USSR, NATO sent in the cadres of Banderites that they’d been harbouring since the war to influence Ukrainian society towards ethno-nationalism. For whatever complex reasons it worked and now we’ve got memorials to Stephen Bandera, a Ukrainian Nazi who never had much support and was responisble for a hundred thousand murders before being crushed by his fellow Ukrainians in the Red Army. alongside that WWII nationalism we got the neo-pagan ethnonationalism as typified by groups like Azov being covered in sun wheels and other “pagan Slavic” symbols which, again, have completely invented meanings because the people who originally used them didn’t write down what they meant.

There are nice, inclusive, anti-racist neopagans. But if you see a white guy with a thor’s hammer tattoo or an axe pendent he’s probably a Nazi.