The Writing on Valhalla’s Walls
Kash Patel’s tribute to Charlie Kirk rings hollow and contradictory. It’s also appeasing to the wrong crowd.
Everyone is familiar with Norse mythology, no thanks to a recent upsurge in exploration of the Scandinavian and Low Countries. You flip a page, and you are treated to peak masculine and feminine portrayals of Norsemen in every medium.
Of course, the first thing people’s minds will race to inebriate themselves with are the images of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and the cast of characters that come with his brand in Marvel’s film adaptations.
But there are other channels where Thor’s hammer, Odin’s spear, and Loki’s cunning have cut across: Magnus Chase books by Rick Riordan bringing in some cheeky teenage fun; recent God of War video game adaptations taking the titular character to the frozen lands with his son being (spoilers) Loki; the third adaptation of the Witcher games by CD Projekt RED that not only promoted the books but brought forth the Wild Hunt in a fresh coat of paint and mythos; Robert Eggers fantastical epic The Northman in his signature here’s-Willem-Dafoe-in-a-crazy-role style; the Vikings TV show with its crazy braided hairstyles and tattooed individuals; and a host of different comic and manga adaptations across the world.
Your recency bias might lead you to believe that this fascination belongs to the turn of the millennium. The more you look at it, however, the more apparent it becomes that this mythos glacier has been feeding the rivers of creativity—Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Applegate’s Everworld, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, or any Heavy Metal Music lyrics.
And all these tales, one way or the other, end with Ragnarok—the twilight of the gods. The end before the new. But not just of the gods, however. All the brave men and women who fought bravely but met their end are handpicked by Valkyries and taken to Valhalla, where they revel under Odin’s glory until the final doomsday.
So, why is it that Kash Patel, a Hindu who swore on the Bhagavada Gita when inducted as the FBI’s director, ended his address for Charlie Kirk, a devout Christian, with a message to see him in Valhalla?
Banner of the White Gods
You know what Valhalla is. You’ve read it, seen it, played it. A million times already. The experience is not new, per se. But the grandeur remains.
It’s that very grandeur that gets co-opted, twisted, deified, and rebranded as a symbol of hope for the very marginalized, totally neglected, often persecuted, and on-the-brink-of-extinction, far-right white supremacists.
You see, they are a dying breed. Christianity, their primary faith, with its mere 2.6 billion adherents, was never sufficient to root their growing demands in a white-only world. And why should they? In the dichotomy of good and evil, white runs its veins of purity in every fictional and non-fictional setting. Whether it’s chess or Go, white always moves first. Except lately, on the board of global politics, white seems to be falling behind.
So, what does the predominantly-white West do? It, too, falls back in time to a pre-Christian era and paints the scene of historical civilizations in the colours it thought Rome used to stand in: Marble white.
The European north, one of the last bastions of old religions, offered the perfect contrast. Its stories, very recent, were easy to whitewash into a context of one almighty. So much so that they saw tokens of bravery and decided to upend them for their white benefit.
Not all Christians, no. But those who did definitely twisted their meanings for their merit: Thor’s hammer, Tyr rune, the Valknot, Jera rune, Elhaz rune, etc. They take the shape of flags, pins, tattoos, logos, monograms, and whatnot. The Nazis might be gone, but in their absence, the ideology finds a fertile ground in the white players of these elaborately global chess and Go games.
Valhalla, too, is getting bastardised. The ascension to the Halls of Odin was the reward for unmistakable valour on the battlefield, an anointment by the winged maidens who handpicked souls to stand tall with Odin when at last the long winter played its course. Only then would the souls live again for the only battlefield that mattered: Æsir and Vanir against Jötnar.
Where does Charlie Kirk, who died while in talks on a university campus, fit into this picture that Kash Patel would see him in Valhalla?
Nowhere, to be honest. Neither does Kash Patel. But tokenism is just that, tokenism; a dog whistle by a dark-skinned pawn in the white halls of the new world.
Does Patel Have the Watch?
I don’t know what watch Kash Patel has got for which he assured Kirk’s soul, but given he’s come under fire for dining out hours after Kirk’s assassination and failing to catch the right culprit, he’s likely not going to last long.
Now, Charlie Kirk was, by no means, a saint. He advocated for gun violence to be the only way to protect America’s Second Amendment. But even when you stretch thin the Christian standards he oh-so stood up for to blanket Norse mythology, you’ll find he’s not likely to find a way to Valhalla.
Not unless the goalpost is moved to define what really is a war in the eyes of these far-right groups.
Is that where Kash Patel is trying to kick his ball? Is that why he opts for a register on a global stage that was never his? Does he not see that the goalpost itself is universally white?
What’s more interesting is why a Hindu, just like me, would bring up Valhalla as the last frontier to meet his comrade? And such a casual use of the Norse afterlife by a man who placed his hand on a book that dives into rebirth? You are not going to meet him in Valhalla, much less in Christian heaven. You’ll be born again to continue the cycle of human toil until you’re able to break free through spiritual enlightenment.
But I get it. This is no different than Payton Gendron’s manifesto ending in “God bless you all and I hope to see you in Valhalla.” Gendron, of course, is the Buffalo killer who left the impact of his racist beliefs as ten dead bodies. They were African American. In other words, not of the dying White race, as Gendron put it.
I do hope that Kash Patel—a man so Indian his heritage drips from his name—knows that he will never be welcome in Valhalla, even with the blessings of the God. He should, after all, remember how the very symbol his family would paint for good luck outside their homes was twisted by the Nazis.
The Swastika is still sacred to Hindus, but its meaning has forever been twisted as the infamous Hakenkreuz. Today, it can be found painted in red on the alabaster walls of the new Valhalla.
