Berserkers: What's faction and what's fiction?

[MilesGregarius]

I second Watchman's response. The reality or otherwise of magic is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether there are believers engaged in such rituals, and whether such rituals are seen as threatening. Think Santeria and the suspicion and persecution it endures as well as its potential to countervene animal-cruelty laws and the like.

Non-Scandanavian berserker behavior is not unknown: Celtic gaesatae, Aztec quachicqueh, Malay amoks, Arab ghazzis, arguably kamikazes and modern-day suicide bombers.

On the herbal-enhancement theory, I saw a documentary some years ago about Isandhlwana examining, among other things, the role of Zulu witch-doctors in pre-battle rituals. (It may have been an episode of Battlefield Detectives, but don't quote me on that).

Most, if not all, the Zulus heading in to battle snorted cannabis snuff. The particular strain of cannabis used was found to be extremely high in THC, which is a stimulant, and very low the depressant cannabinoid pychoactive (I forget what it's called). The use of stimulants in modern war is well documented, i.e. the Wehrmact's amphetamine-laced "panzerchocolate" and the USAF's "go pills", and have been implicated in wrecklessness, atrocities, and friendly-fire incidents - classic "berserkergang" behavior.

In addition to "normal stimulants", select volunteers who were sworn to die in battle were given psilocybin mushrooms. Most interestingly, as part of the investigation, two skilled judoka were brought in. While sober, the two were essentially evenly matched. After setting this baseline, one was given psilocybin, the other a placebo. From this point onward, the "dosed" judoka consistently defeated his non-dosed counterpart. On the other hand, the tripping judoka couldn't complete simple square-peg-round-hole cognitive tests.

[Furious Mental]

"Second, you're making a serious error in lumping "black magic" and the odd critters humans populated the dark corners of the world around them with."

Well these ridiculous accounts of superhuman berserkers often appear in exactly the same fairytales. Read Egil's Saga and you will find them mentioned in the same sentence- "The thing about shape-changers and those who go berserk is..." It is difficult not to lump them together when they are found in those circumstances.

"The same can logically be applied to the "berserkers" outlawed in Medieval times. However much the stories concerning them that have been preserved to us may be inflated (and it's a fairly safe bet there's been a lot of embellishement added), the royal authorities would not have bothered criminalizing something that wasn't regarded as real - and as "berserkers", like "magicians", were people rather than goblins and thus a social phenomenom, there must have existed some group or pagan tradition that warranted such attention."

If you actually read Gragas you will not find references to warbands of berserkers or berserkers engaging in pagan rituals. What you will find is a clause saying that if a man goes berserk and his kin or friends don't restrain him, he is banished for three years, and if he does it again, forever. As I said if the word "berserk" has any relation to reality it almost certainly just referred to a temporary and violent loss of self-control which perfectly normal people can and do experience in extreme circumstances, and was then blown out of all proportion first of all by the cult of violence which existed back then, and then by saga authors writing centuries later.

Now one may examine Celts, geasetae, and zulus but frankly that doesn't explain anything. As I said above the substance once (no more) usually proposed as the hallucinogen used by berserkers was found to turn even recidivist criminals into laid back junkies. As for religion I don't consider that an adequate explanation either, for the simple reason that there was no organised Viking religion and druidic class. The closest thing they had to priests were soothsayers and most of them were women. The notion of male soothsayers leading a war band is strange because war was considered the highest pursuit for men and soothsaying the exact opposite- the view then was that real men didn't practice soothsaying. Groups of men who thought that reckless bravery was the best way to make it into Valhalla is the only credible explanation but as I said above that really means that "berserker" refers to men who attack without regard for their own safety.