Wyrd, Runa, and the Beauty of Ignorance

I had another really beautiful, intense and long-drawn possession experience with Woden today, this one totally unplanned and spontaneous. Sometimes I call… sometimes he just turns up.

I cannot say anything about it (because there are some things that I just can’t stick on the Internet for everyone to read). But I can talk about how I’ve reacted to it.

I feel as if the course of my life is reflected in the image of an archaeologist lovingly brushing dust from an ancient relic. When I was born I was buried in the earth. At some point I was dug up. Now the process of carefully cleaning me off begins. Next will be detailed documentation and theorising about my significance and meaning.

Right now it feels like everything that has happened in my life was meant to be according to a hidden logic and significance that I cannot comprehend. I am woven so integrally into wyrd. Of course, everything and everyone is.

I’ve been reading a bit about Leibniz’s philosophy lately, his idea that this world is exactly how it is meant to be. Voltaire might have mocked Leibniz, but I think I might be able to understand what he was saying. Not the best of all possible worlds in any obvious sense we can grasp… but definitely meant to be just how it is.

To ask it to be other than what it is means being world-denying and… well, unHeathen. Just a thought, no need to turn that into rigid doctrine (unless you feel like experimenting with dogmatism to see what it is like [some chaos magicians come up with the most brilliant little psycho-magical experiments]).

If each of us is on a unique trajectory through time then perhaps, well, I cannot complete the thought.

As a Heathen I am both a determinist and a believer in free will. The division between these two is false and built on ill-conceived ideologies; it reposes in an ultimately Christian abstraction, and even hard determinists are thoroughly determined by Christianity in their views.

So here we are, webbed in wyrd, hurtling through time simultaneously under our own power and completely involuntarily as well. Making decisions, responding to the shifting weave of the Norns as best we can. Once things have occurred it is retroactively true that they could never have been otherwise.

But before they occur – well there’s a whole lot of possibility for the oscillations of our agency to come to bear. Free choice is only determined once it is fixed through the hand of time.

We know Urd, the past (though the past constantly changes in meaning as it expands and is never truly fixed despite the illusion of its certain solidity).

We are in Verdandi, the present that stretches forth and most certainly is not fleeting or momentary. Heidegger was right on that one – he was paying attention. St Augustine, on the other hand, really had no idea.

Skuld, the future, is a debt that, sure, we’ll pay, but never just yet. We’re always going to pay or else we’ve already paid but you can never catch any of us handing over a wad of cash to the time bank. And even after the big cosmic foreclosure at Ragnarok things will keep going – you just watch!

So yeah, right now I ride the chariot of trust and calm. Everything is unfolding in just the right way. That isn’t the same as pretending that the world is perfect or that I and others don’t suffer all kinds of wounds or that struggle isn’t both necessary and worthwhile.

But right now I can affirm it all. Not, as Nietzsche demands, that I force myself to see the whole past as an act of my will (as though I could ever have even conceived of all this, let alone willed it!)

Rather, I affirm it all as the veil of Runa – of mystery – which I can never penetrate. Nor can any finite human being. I affirm the beauty of the horizon of Verdandi which escapes me no matter how fast I run towards it.

This is why I ultimately have so many grumpy things to say about the approach to magic typified by the ‘step by step’ logical, linear curriculum that groups like the Rune Gild espouse.

Reality is so much more complex and so much richer than that! Think of all the opportunities you miss out while you dally with you regular rigid practice of galdor, stadha, “rune thinking” and all the rest of it.

While you’re off “constructing” your Wode-Self as Mr Thorsson recommends you are missing out on the real Woden coming and showing you that a) it already exists and b) its way beyond anything you could have created anyway.

We aren’t creating from the force of our ego wills; we’re just brushing the mud off our golden forms so that we can shine with the light that falls upon us from the sun and the moon and the torch of human community (Kenaz, folks, Kenaz).

Yet ironically I worked through all that stuff for years when I was in the Gild and to carry my current train of thought to its conclusion, even that time spent doing “magical training” I now consider nearly worthless was crucial, just as crucial to my evolution as my beloved Jan Fries-style Seidh with all its serendipitous riches.

Sure, the latter is inspiring, beautiful, profound and actually helps you embrace magic and mystery. But for it to be the oasis that it is to me – well, I had to stumble through the desert of ego magic teachings and all that other rigid spoon-feeder magic rubbish first.

(The Gild say they’re against spoon feeding, yet the Gild curriculum is exactly that, an all-too-human crutch and distraction from the magic going on everywhere around the “aspiring Runester” … even if I must confess I profited from the rigid practice of getting my chanting in every day, meditating on the rune poems, etc, etc and owe the Gild a big debt of thanks).

So right now I know that I cannot and never will pierce the illusion, that the way things are unfolding for me is way weirder and more magical than anything I could ever have consciously constructed or conceived, and even my exposure to stodgy ego magic rubbish contributed to that (so maybe its good that such philosophies exist after all and I should be a little more circumspect when I grouch about them… aww, but grouching just feels so good).

And yet I have pierced the illusion at various times and will again. This is also true. Folks, two contradictory statements can be true at the same time; Aristotle was wrong (though, and here’s the kicker, for consistency’s sake I will also say that Aristotle was right).

Well anyway, things are unfolding and I’m in the eye of the storm and always have been and we all have because we’re all on our trajectories and maybe it will take one lifetime or maybe billions of years, I really don’t know if or how that reincarnation gig works, but right now I’m in the heart of marvelling at how ignorant I am and how beautiful the universe is and folks, this is the place to be. Or really, wherever you happen to be right now is the place. Or whatever. You get the idea (or not).

And tomorrow I’ll forget and I stumble back to my fears, frustrations, quirks, my amnesia, my all too human tendency to forget Mimir’s well in favour of disconnected distraction.

That’s ok too.

We forget the big picture so that we can have the pleasure of remembering it again and again, over and over. Endings are great because they guarantee new beginnings and beginnings are great because once something starts it has to stop.

And every time you come back to Mimir’s wisdom, well, I’d like to think you crawl a little closer to wherever.

What is the ultimate point and purpose of existence? I have no idea. I feel so strongly that my life is unfolding exactly in the way it is supposed to, but that doesn’t mean I have even a shred of a clue. “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment” said Rumi – I reckon he and Odin would have gotten on something fierce.

Socrates was the wisest of all the Greeks because he at least knew he was ignorant. Somebody remind me to toast that old gadfly next time I’m at sumbel, please?

What is the meaning of the question of Being? Asked Martin Heidegger. Being is Mystery/Runa – this is my answer. We are skating on the ever changing skin of the Well of Memory that feeds the world tree.

If Heathenism really says that there is no sin, no fallen-from-grace-ness, no world-as-bastardised-image-of-God’s-wisdom – well then we might as well start loving the vast cosmic question mark that escapes and entices our every rising breath.

Because that’s all there is, the question is the answer, or might be, or probably isn’t, or…. Well, you get the idea (or you might, or might not or… [yes this can regress infinitely, another secret there! {I just added this layer of parentheses to be a smart ass – or did I?}]).

Hail Chaos! Viva Loki! Aum Wotan!