Heimlich A. Laguz

Loki: Strife as the Harbinger of Love

Faroe_stamp_498_Djurhuus_poems_-_Loki_Laufey's_SonLoki confronts us with the inevitability of loss. The awesome tragedy that each of us confronts every day. Loki is an advocate for the gravity of grief in our lives; for without gravity, how would there be life on earth? How would the planets orbit the sun? The very structure of our cosmos would be as nothing without gravity; so too the very structure of our consciousness would be nothing without grief and loss.

Sometimes Loki is the catalyst of loss; sometimes he is merely its herald, even its scapegoat. Many times, he serves as the gods’ wild card: get out of loss free. His manipulations, for example, ensure that the gods get walls built around Asgard at no cost; they drive a bargain with a giant to do the work, yet on seeing that he will meet their deadline and collect his payment (Freya, no less!), the gods enlist Loki to sabotage the process. And he does, most assuredly.

One wonders, therefore, whether the embrace of loss is the antidote to loss. Our fear and loathing of loss: perhaps this is the opening through which loss seeps its cold and deadly waters into our soft and vulnerable hearts. Loki challenges us to have a more conscious relationship to loss; our vilification of him as a symbol of the inevitability of loss is merely a function of our own lack of character.

In meditation we find it helpful to learn to observe the phenomena of our experience without indulging in the habit of attaching our identity to them. Not “my breath,” or “my sensations.” No, rather it is the breath, the sensations to which we turn the lens of our awareness. The self begins to wash away, yet nothing is lost but the illusion of the same. We find ourselves instead to be integral threads in the infinite tapestry of Wyrd – and nothing more. Yet…this is everything, for that is what we are.

Ah, so then Loki is a god of meditation, awareness, enlightenment, the sacred oneness and difference of all things. Perhaps in this light he is enlightenment’s ardent advocate, its patient and persistent provocateur. Enlightenment not in the misunderstood notion of somehow shedding the physical. No, enlightenment in a more true sense, the shedding of the illusions held about the physical, and about the beholder of the physical.

In the window of enlightenment there is a knowing and loving embrace of that which is – known in the perfect and irrefutable medium of direct personal experience. When we come to separate the carapace of ego from the endlessly flowing experience of sensation that is the body, we find that we begin to release ourselves from reactivity. We begin to respond to the flowing current of temporality. As such, in stepping back, we step forward and live with unprecedented fullness.

It is this fullness to which Loki wishes to seduce us. Yet we cannot achieve it so long as we are ruled by our fear of loss. So Loki goes to work, admittedly with a toolkit of strategies that shows mixed effectiveness. And he is stigmatized, hated, scapegoated for it. We believe we must protect ourselves from him; yet ultimately what are we protecting but the illusion of control? The illusion of knowledge? The illusion of certainty? The illusory notion that we can have honesty without a sense of irony woven through it?

Yet I would not dream of trivializing loss. It is a profound doorway for Mystery – for Runa meant in the fullest, broadest sense – to announce herself in our lives. And as such, it’s means are often profoundly hurtful. We have to be kind to ourselves first and foremost, for if we are infinite we are also crushingly finite. Those of us who truly know loss know that some wounds can never be healed; we can only learn to live with them, in an armistice that we can never entirely trust. And yet just as there is no limit to attachment, there is also no limit to liberation.

As such, to sit in judgment over those who judge Loki is itself a denial of loss, a denigration of human vulnerability. Which would stand against all that Loki is; would stand against the central column of Odin’s mysticism too, the embrace of vulnerability ,of death, on the tree of the world. To sit in judgment on the judgers is to become one of them. If we sit in judgment in Loki’s name then so much the worse – now we are not only hypocrites, we are mired in unconscious irony, an almost unpardonable sin.

What could be possible if we were to gently come to know Loki? Not back him into the corner of cruel retorts and spiteful war. What if we were willing to experience ourselves as embodied beings without resentment, without distrust? We can enter into ourselves gradually, after all. The fear of Loki is the fear of being thrust too quickly into the eye of mystery, of Runa. It hardly seems fair to blame him for our own shortcomings, our own projections, our own self-doubt. Why resent ourselves for our finitude? Our frail mortality is the best and only door into all of Being.

Adherence to dogma, authoritarianism, and absolutes seems to be grounded in denial of the body. Loki wants you to live in your flesh, as it is. He want you to do it right now; not in the ruminative past or the illusory future(s). He wants you to find your way, through letting go of effort, into being both masterful and unattached to that mastery. To have a light touch that can yet bear more weight than the heaviest grasp.

Those who refuse to let the mystery of loss into their lives – who ward it off with whatever kind of psychological chicanery they can afford themselves – will ultimately be defined by that very mystery. They will hand it only the most narrow, barren blueprint for their existence. And yet they blame the loss, the inevitable price that life exacts, for their woe. And they will blame Loki, the scion of loss, just as readily.

What of those who can learn to accept loss? Who can allow themselves to sit in its suffering, its agony, its discomfort, its sheer, threatening novelty? These will become free in their relationship to mystery. They will not become superhuman, or immortal, or exalted. They will achieve something far greater: they will become themselves.

Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare to his pupils: “to find me, first lose me and find yourself.” Odin gave himself to himself as he embraced Runa on the gallows. Loki, Odin’s Blood Brother, summons strife into the world so that we might know loss and – if we are fortunate enough – step through its uncanny door and into the very heart of our own living beingness. Loki: strife as the harbinger of love. And let us not forget that Loki experiences at least his own fair share of suffering. He asks nothing of us that he will not himself endure.

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Loki: God of Honesty

Loki_as_a_salmonWe are taught that if we ever admit to any kind of short-coming – there, that is weakness! But if we deny it, suppress it, silently struggle with the misery of it – that is somehow strong.

In other words, we are taught from an early age that dishonesty is a worthy virtue. We are taught that the self-respect that comes from being honest with ourselves and others is an ugly sin. Better to suppress it deep and let the wounds fester.

This long-entrenched tradition, naturally enough, is the progenitor of innumerable vicious cycles, knots in the cord of wyrd that just get more and more complicated, dense, unbreakable. The more I deny my weaknesses, the more power they come to hold over me. The more I worry about them. The more their shadow haunts my every waking moment. Soon that which could have been dissolved in the sunlight of open and frank admission becomes instead a dreadful specter, a force which dictates the terms of my life more and more.

Caught in the pain and panic of our denial, our terrible fear of admitting that I, too, am human, we find our self-made devils begin to leak out the sides of our personalities. These weaknesses begin to calcify, to harden, to metastasize. Where at first was, perhaps, a little fear, a little self-doubt, a little trauma – soon it becomes a depression, a trigger temper, anxious paralysis. It becomes an addiction to this or that drug, or the adoption of this or that irrational and dogmatic belief.

As these layers of psychic (and sometimes physical) scar tissue build up around our festering wounds, they cease to serve their purpose of assuaging our misery. They begin to take on the character of failed solutions, and it is evident that many of the problems one can create for oneself originate as attempts to solve other problems. Over time our adaptive solutions can become maladaptive as conditions change; or perhaps they were never good solutions to begin.

So now, on the foundation of our denial of weakness, we not only have created unhealed, festering problems, but we have created new problems from the loose ends of the original flaws. And still we heed that ancient, ubiquitous teaching: never admit to weakness. At some point in this process we lose even the right to call ourselves victims, since in time we have taken over the task of self-destruction for ourselves. And no doubt, our pain leads us to perpetrate harm against others, usually our own loved ones.

All this, for the sake of preventing the accusation of weakness! What a sorry, weary, weakened state that fear of weakness leads us into. A state where even our strengths become yoked to the wagon of strife and misery. The irony! The tragedy!

Naturally, this same pattern replicates itself at larger scales. So long as a culture lives in denial of the harm it has inflicted to either its own members or to members of other cultures, it condemns itself to continually replay the same injustices, violences, omissions. Curious how often the partisans of bigotry are also the first to play down the history of their own culture’s past (and present) misdeeds. This is a thin veneer, drawn with trembling hands across feelings of profound inadequacy. Surely a strong culture has no need to vent endless self-contempt upon any group less materially intimidating.

Unto this comes Loki. Who fears Loki? Who reviles Loki? Those who have gotten themselves into a fix of the kind I have described here. Those who have dug themselves so deeply into the pits of denial that they cannot bear to be confronted with Loki’s awful, truthful mirror. Oh no – to these he is the worst sort of enemy, the infiltrator, the spy, the underminer, the traitor. A figure both inside and outside, conscious and unconscious, as much “us” as he is “them.” Loki violates carefully constructed lines of abstraction, denial, control, definition.

Thus the sick individual or culture reaches its endgame. For it cannot overcome Loki. The more it fights Loki, the stronger he becomes. Having only ever learned brute force, our anti-Loki figure cannot comprehend that in some cases less is more. Loki feeds on the hubris, the paranoia, the self-disgust that drives the fight against him.

And in this sense, Loki is a god of peace. The only way to end the terrible conflict is – to stop fighting it. The only way to defeat the unbeatable foe is to allow him in. Anathema! Thus the sick soul cries, unable to understand that it has made itself into the terrible enemy, and did so the moment it adopted the dishonest denial of its own weaknesses.

For this is the truth: we create Loki ourselves. We birth him in our hearts, guts, and minds, weave him from strands of fear, projection, and humorlessness. We take his fluid, pulsing, ecstatic life force and impose the interpretation of anxiety upon it. And then we complain of our anxious imprisonment.

Loki is irrepressible, flowing life and joy. This is ultimately what his critics make to be their enemy – love of life itself, life lived, the riches of being a fleshy, inspired being. No wonder he cannot be overcome – for the only way to destroy the influence of Loki would be to destroy ourselves. And many people are willing to do just that, so cleft is their consciousness.

So embrace the courage of admitting your weaknesses. Acknowledge where you are uncertain, lost, useless. Celebrate the all-too-narrow bounds of your understanding, your knowledge, your wisdom. Smash the easy habit of self-satisfaction where you find it, and replace it with the kind of loving acceptance that grows the self into its depths rather than ripping up even its most shallow roots the moment they find purchase in the earth.

Alan Watts believed that Jung’s power came not from being better than anyone else, but from his ability to accept his own flaws, limitations, and evils. Loki wants you to embrace the terror you feel at the prospect of self-love. Embrace the terror and discover what flawless flowers might grow from the bone and blood of its fertile ground.

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Loki Bound

Loki BoundIn my last article I proposed to discuss an expression of Loki which tries to avoid the pitfall of declaring to be either for or against this complex and provocative figure. Unfortunately this will entail a bit of self-promotion on my part, because I intend to present and discuss the lyrics to a musical release called Loki Bound, performed by Greed & Rapacity, a band of which I am one half.

Loki Bound is a one-song 30-minute funeral doom metal descent into Loki’s stream of consciousness during his imprisonment by the Aesir, the primary Norse pantheon, for misdeeds real and imagined. He lies chained by his son’s intestines to a deeply buried boulder, while a serpent drips venom upon him. His loyal wife, Sigyn, catches the poison in a cup, but when she goes to empty the cup, the poison falls on Loki’s skin. His agonized convulsions are the root of earthquakes, and it is fair to say that Loki is a deity of psychological tectonics.

Loki Bound is not easy listening. Yet the project was born out of a spirit of empathy – not, it must be said, sympathy. Empathy.

Our point of departure is some clinical advice of Jung’s: that the therapist must accept the client’s experience and perspective without either agreeing or disagreeing. To either agree or disagree out of hand would be to do violence to the client and their struggles. This idea – of holding to the discomfort of not reaching for a settled judgment – is tremendously powerful. It releases blockages and opens new ways out of the clutches of darkness.

In one sense, then, Loki Bound is a kind of psychotherapy for Loki as a cultural icon. An abreaction undergone on his behalf by musical means. We wanted to “save the phenomenon,” as Edmund Husserl might say: not to present it with any kind of slant or interpretation, but rather to hold it out as raw as we possibly could. We wanted to be free to let the being of Loki be itself, sing for itself.

Naturally, it is impossible to succeed completely. Yet I think we have captured something of a truth of the fragmentary mythological narrative of Loki’s life (a life which concludes in his fighting against the gods at Ragnarǫk).

The lyrics began with a seed that my Greed & Rapacity co-conspirator, D. Nahum, provided. Then one night I received a strange visitation and the text was written less than me than by a violently inspired mood. I hesitate to say that it came from Loki himself, but I do feel it was born of the dynamic tension of standing in acceptance without judgment of good or bad; of facing the pleasant and the repellent together.

Recording the vocals for the piece was uncanny. We found ourselves shocked by the unearthly cadences and inflections that emerged – animalistic, desperate, despairing, inhuman. The creative process called on something deep and old and savagely articulate.

Some of the musical elements bear comment. Passages of chanting recall the impassioned invocations of Sufi singers. Oppressive, down-tuned guitars loom like the weight of Loki’s subterranean prison. The rhythm section lurches and clatters sickeningly, evoking Sigyn’s wavering hand as she holds up the bowl that wards Loki from the drip of the snake’s poison.

Lyrics and music are ultimately an insuperable unity, but this does not mean that exploring one or the other in isolation is a wasted gesture. Here, then, are the lyrics to Loki Bound, which have not hitherto been published.

Loki Bound

Lyrics by Greed & Rapacity

I spit on your lies
I spit on your cowardice
Your grief, your greed, your terror
Your cruel laughter.
I spit on your hubris
I spit on your hate
I spit on your spite
And your perverse lusts

Hypocrites all
In shining towers
Your spirits are halls of mirrors
That dissolve into night.
Unbearable to you
The sight of I
That wears on my skin
As a shallow veil
What runs to the pits of your souls

So condemn me as thou wouldst.
Condemn me for my sins
Condemn me for my virtues
Condemn me from sloth
And whimsy
And pain
And daub yourselves in the glory
Of your brittle victory

For I will have my revenge
My revenge: knowing that you wait
You wait for the bleak day
On the Shining Field
When all your knowledge
All your might
All your insight
Will be run into dust.
Will be finally crushed.
By me and mine
By mine and me
By you and I

My revenge: knowing that you wait.
You lie awake at night
And the venom that drips
And drips
And drips
Into the cup that my trembling beloved sustains
Drips as loud in your ears as it does in mine –
As loud as it does in mine
Do you understand?

This poison will not quench my thirst
These bonds will not break my strength
These shadows will not rot my rage
For this nightmare too must end.
Must end in the dawn of your drought
Your forgetfulness
Your long dark misery.

Just you and the snake.

Drip
(Wait, wincing, for the next to fall)
Drip
(Wait, wincing, for the next to fall)
Drip
(Wait, wincing, for the next to fall)

At total leisure to reflect on every ill deed
Every rash oath
Every lie
Every theft
Every barb
That I have ever cast
That has ever been cast at my word
That saw me be cast from the light
Even though it was done at your behest –

Because it was done at your behest.

This will be your fate!
To gaze into yourselves
As I have gazed into myself.
Driven mad with terror
Driven made with rage
Driven mad by the awful dark
And the slithering drip of venomous pain.
Driven beyond all sense
Into all-destructive love
For the inferno and its brutality

Do you understand?
Can you understand?
How I could long to quench
All life in the world in scorched death?
You made me to be this thing I am:
Your servant, the seething fraud
The agent of your secret rage.
Yet when you tired of your slave
You abandoned me to darkness:
Bound in the guts of my son
My wife enslaved by her love

You gave me up
To all that lurks beneath the earth
And bound me in the choking gloom
Of interminable doom

Do you understand?
All that is light in the world is saved by
All that is dark
And I was the agent of darkness that served the light

No more! Now the only light will be
The stinking blaze of your rancid flesh
As you fall to your knees before the hosts
Of my implacable reckoning

With such thoughts I comfort myself.
As I lose my mind in this dark cave
Covered in shame, loss, and gloom
Will broken and reforged anew:

With fury
And righteous disgust
With fury
And righteous disgust
With fury
And righteous disgust
With fury
And righteous disgust

There are several themes I would like to touch on in these lyrics. Firstly, the ambiguous sense of identification between Loki and the Aesir, against whom the poem’s bile is directed. “This will be your fate! / To gaze into yourselves / As I have gazed into myself…/Driven mad by the awful dark / And the slithering drip of venomous pain.”

Here we see Loki projecting his own grim self-reflection in captivity onto the Aesir, as though somehow it is they who will one day endure such suffering. Yet we know they do not; Ragnarǫk seems to be an altogether more brief and dramatic affair.

This perhaps is Loki’s effect (I deliberately do not say his purpose): to provoke self-reflection. Where there is disruption the tranquilizing familiarity of daily life is broken; new thought and life can emerge. Loki threatens those who are tight-fisted; it is worth remembering that the old Heathens regarded generosity as the highest virtue.

This is something for each of us to consider. I do not think it accidental that in this imagery Loki identifies with the Aesir even after enmity erupts between he and they.

We see Loki’s self-righteous fury in these lyrics. He feels himself the victim of injustice; in his own mind called to play a particular and necessary role as fomenter of change, then punished when he becomes too much to bear.

At one level, we can of course regard his attitude with distaste; it is hardly that of a person willing to take responsibility for their actions. At another level, however, he is holding up a mirror. I wonder if Loki’s detractors might not be guilty of attacking him for the sin of resembling their own unacknowledged flaws.

Loki is the tragic figure par excellence, both abhorrent and sympathetic. He represents a living fault line of belief, and like Oedipus he therefore offers us nearly unparalleled opportunities for remembering our limits, our mortality, and our need to keep our feet on the ground.

As such, I do not believe there is any fruit to be had in partisan wrangling over Loki’s significance and worth as either a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” As soon as we set down a value, a judgment, we have thrown away his value as a teacher, as a mirror. We cease to be present to ourselves and to our lives. We deaden a little part of ourselves. Loki is a wonderful teacher, as much because of his terrible flaws and failures as because of his strange gifts.

It seems that the old Heathens might have had a tolerance for ambiguity – which is to say, for real life – that has largely been lost in modernity. We are slaves to the binary. The binary is not a new invention, but it is no longer tempered by the grounding thought of having to grow one’s own food, weave one’s own shirt, decorate one’s own tools.

There are fewer havens to offer us shelter from the binary’s excesses. We have to set ourselves at odds with convenient and received thinking to find such harbors of the spirit. In this respect, perhaps Loki can assume a new and healing significance that he might not have held in archaic times. The Faustian pact might be far more nuanced, perhaps even beautiful, than Goethe imagined.

Greed and Rapacity has only performed Loki Bound live once, but that was probably enough. The rhythmic complexity of some passages – though deceptively minimalist to a casual listen – are in themselves a very difficult undertaking. But more to the point, the performance proved a catalyst for necessary unearthing of pain, conflict, and strife. If this process was very painful, it was also very much a good thing, though at first it seemed like Ragnarǫk.

In Norse mythology, Ragnarǫk paves the way for a renaissance of the world, of the gods, and of humanity. It clears a ground for a shining new day. And Loki is a central agent of this regenerative drama. Every ending is a beginning, and it is churlish and futile to hate the harbingers of the going-under. For as Nietzsche so joyously declared, the going-under is the birth-pang of the going-up.

All of these considerations haunt Loki Bound in one fashion or another. Yet I will not pretend that it was not also born of a maniacal and even malicious desire to make difficult, cathartic, and abrasive music. Even perhaps to hurt the listener, or frighten them. For Loki also teaches that, as with all things, the destructive urge is a phenomenon that must be saved.

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Loki: The Disowned Psychic Shadow

Loke_by_C._E._DoeplerI propose that part of the challenge of life is learning to be comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty. And I suggest that this challenge is connected to Loki.

Loki is a classic shadow figure – the bearer of everything disowned and rejected. He stands out as a challenge and a dare to each of us – can we accept the destructiveness, the chaos, within ourselves? Or do we deny it and blame it on some external figure or figures? This is a basic test for every human being, and no one passes all the time. Some people fail dramatically, and in some cases these individuals cause war, hatred, and destruction on a mass scale.

The classic symptom of a person who has rejected their inner Loki is self-righteousness. When I claim mastery over the truth, the exclusive truth, the whole truth, I am free to dominate with impunity. I no longer have to consider myself, the inevitable ironies and hypocrisies that haunt my and every person’s life in one way or another.

Once Loki – meant in the broadest possible symbolic sense – has been expelled from my consciousness and imposed onto some Other, I become obliged to maintain the veneer of perfection. I cannot dare back down or risk losing faith.

An analogy: when dooms day cults outlast the date they have predicted for Armageddon, they often very quickly find an excuse for how they “miscalculated…” and so plunge forward into mounting absurdity (and a string of broken dates with The End Of It All). For some people, piling the self-deception higher and deeper is always preferable to the fleeting shame of being caught out in the act of rank foolishness.

In this respect, if we have an appreciation for Loki and his destructive children – the god-eating wolf Fenris, the underworldly goddess Hel, and so forth – we are theoretically adopting a stance of honesty. On the other hand, if we accept the (unfortunately misguided) notion that Loki is essentially a negative force, it is possible that we are using him as a stool pigeon to avoid facing the frightening moral ambiguities of this existence, of our own psyches.

I should clarify that as I see it, Norse mythology does not give a decisive answer as to Loki’s worth. In many stories he is a troublesome but ultimately helpful figure. Furthermore, the view that Loki is responsible for the death of Balder does not seem to be grounded in the primary mythic sources. There’s enough room for ambiguity, or else doubt, that the Eddic accounts really aren’t the smoking barrel that Loki’s critics think they are.

Of course, Loki does get bound by the gods. But, this seems perfectly explicable in the context of his abusive behavior in the poem “Lokasenna.” And we can imagine that his firebrand, troublesome spirit could easily be twisted into pure malice by the experience of his long imprisonment in the darkness of the earth (suppressed deep into the unconscious?).

But if the extreme – and common – view of Loki as a villain holds little water, I must also express some wariness about the unguardedly optimistic view of Loki that is fashionable in some quarters these days. Loki is dangerous and unpredictable! Play at your own risk!

Sometimes Loki’s contemporary fans and followers seem to want to gloss over the chaos that tends to follow in his wake. In doing so, they themselves are sanitizing the bearer of the psychic shadow; in this sense, they are partaking of the same drink as those who reject Loki outright.

It might seem, therefore, that I am criticizing both “camps” in the unresolvable argument over the status of Loki in contemporary Heathenry. I am. In whose name? Loki’s.

Loki is a violator of expectations and a destroyer of boundaries. Anyone who draws a line in the sand – whether pro- or anti-Loki – risks violating his very essence. Loki is beyond us and them.

He is like a Hindu mystic who seeks to contradict social convention in order to break down the ego. Such a person may seem mad or malefic, but as we are assured by Lao Zi, sometimes the master is indistinguishable from the crazed wanderer. Can anyone really claim to know all ends, after all?

I want to therefore offer a manifesto of malice in Loki’s name – a humorous malice, the kind of malice that Alan Watts admired in Carl Jung: a willingness to accept one’s flaws, failures, and poison, and therefore a willingness to accept the same in others. Such acceptance is necessary if we are to create opportunities for healing and transformation.

Simply put, Loki is quicksilver, ungraspable – literally a shapeshifter. Loki is a transgressor, sometimes even transgressing against his own reputation as transgressive. Loki is not a villain or a hero; not a god or a giant; not even, it seems, a man or a woman. Everyone has something in common with him, and yet everyone may find something alien in him. It makes little sense to me to be either for or against such a being.

Loki doesn’t need your, my, or anyone else’s sympathy. But, we need Loki. We need Loki to challenge us, to frighten us. We need him to keep us honest by keeping us – just a little bit – humble. We need him to shock us out of our tranquilized reverie. When he draws our blood we discover we are alive, and if we can greet his outrages with humor then we might win his favor. I say “might,” of course. I am not making any promises on his behalf.

When I first conceived this piece, it was my intention to try to offend everyone who has an opinion on Loki. I wanted to argue that his fans and his detractors are all guilty to some degree of the same dualistic attitude that he is compelled to violate. In some ways this is what I have tried to do – yet something has restrained me, too.

I realized that to consciously cause trouble – this is not Loki’s way. Loki is all instinct, improvisation. He is always trying to get control over one impossible problem or another. I don’t think he could ever be organized enough to truly be the grand sworn enemy of all that is godly and good that some people would have us all think.

I don’t buy the whole “Loki haters are just latent Christians” argument. After all, the exact same statement could be made of Loki lovers who hate Loki haters, right? And the “Loki haters are being Christian-like” relies itself on a stereotype of Christianity, one loaded up with plenty of disowned projection.

Perhaps the reason that people resent Loki so much is that it takes extraordinary arrogance to become a trickster. He claims far more than we’d like to think is his fair share, and from an admittedly limited human perspective that looks like arrogance. Even more, he often somehow wins out of the drama this creates!

Worse still: when he does get the worst of things, he takes his punishment stoically. Loki is certainly not a whiner, and I suspect that for some people it is uncomfortable to recognize such quality in his nature.

Nobody likes a jerk who plays by their own rules. But some of us admire the chutzpah that such behavior entails. If you hate Loki – the joke is on you. If you love Loki – the joke is still probably on you.

Me? I look forward to the day when we silly humans stop trying to make these gods – whatever they are in truth – fit into our neat boxes, our goods and evils. We cannot escape the abyss of uncertainty into which we have been flung, no matter many symbolic gestures we hurl it at.

Only by cultivating the courage to own our shadow projections can we begin to come to peace with the insanity of being mortal beings. And maybe a possible first step in that direction is to keep the gods out of our little spats over belief and truth and all that righteous stuff.

I know. I know. Easily said! Next time round I am going to present an artistic attempt to explore Loki’s nature, one that tries to avoid both uncritical sympathy and simplistic demonization. It is my hope that it provides a bridge between the extremes of sentiment that Loki manages to provoke.

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Dreaming into Valhalla

I had a dream last night that a red-bearded former friend, who has a reputation for destroying his relationships through paranoia, contacted me. He told me that he was in touch with a major record label who wanted to re-release the Ein Skopudhr Galdra/Mistsorrow split CD that I did with Dan Nahum and Chris Gaydon (available at  http://einskopudhrgaldra.bandcamp.com/ ).

He said that for this to happen, however, I would need to get permission from the lyricist, but my ex-friend informed me that he and the lyricist had a big falling out, so I would have to contact this person myself, although we’d never met before (how I got to use this person’s lyrics in the first place is a little mysterious, but I think the implication was that my ex-friend had served as the go-between).

I found out the lyricist lived near me, so I walked to his house. I discovered it was in fact a Kung Fu school, and he was the founder and head instructor. The school was housed in a giant, purpose-built long hall atop a very high hill. I had to climb over a wall around it to get in.

At the door I was greeted by the sight of a large room where a class was being held. The teacher was a rather warlike woman who paused to ask me what I wanted. I explained the situation, making it clear that I was a little lost due to the strange circumstances.

I was escorted off into the building, past dormitories where live-in trainees and instructors dwelt. They had a lot of people training in the arts of war. Finally I was led into a throne room – the lyricist-Kung Fu master’s throne room.

And then I woke up.

In my waking state I was perplexed by the suggestion that I had used someone else’s lyrics for my contribution to the Ein Skopudhr Galdra/Mistsorrow split release. Then I remembered that I did borrow some lyrics for that release, and suddenly the imagery of the dream made perfect sense.

For those who know, here are the lyrics that I borrowed:

Veit ek, at ek hekk
vindga meiði á
nætr allar níu,
geiri undaðr
ok gefinn Óðni,
sjalfr sjalfum mér,
á þeim meiði,
er manngi veit
hvers af rótum renn.

Við hleifi mik sældu
né við hornigi;
nýsta ek niðr,
nam ek upp rúnar,
æpandi nam,
fell ek aftr þaðan.

Fimbulljóð níu
nam ek af inum frægja syni
Bölþorns, Bestlu föður,
ok ek drykk of gat
ins dýra mjaðar,
ausinn Óðreri.

Þá nam ek frævask
ok fróðr vera
ok vaxa ok vel hafask,
orð mér af orði
orðs leitaði,
verk mér af verki
verks leitaði.

.-)

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The Elhaz Ablaze Phoenix Rises

Walhalla (1896) by Max Brückner

It has been three years since Elhaz Ablaze’s contributors last produced content for the site. We’ve continued to be active in other domains, but it was necessary for this website to lie fallow for a while. Even so, we still garner hundreds of visits each month, so clearly someone out there is enjoying the body of writings that we have compiled.

However, this silence is ripe now to be broken. Not only will we again be producing articles for this website, but the Elhaz Ablaze crew has  been quietly collaborating on an Elhaz Ablaze book! In addition to ourselves, we’ve also managed to recruit some marvelous guest contributors, and the book will not only feature some mind-bending essays, but some seriously intense, mythic artwork will accompany it!

We’re just beginning to embark on the editing process, and not all submissions are in yet. We don’t even have a title for the book! But nevertheless, the process has begun. Stay tuned, there’s plenty more to come.

Meanwhile, we’ve also entered the world of Facebook. Find us at http://facebook.com/elhazablaze/.

 

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Across the Wild Seas

Infinite SeaOne year ago, almost to the day, I crossed the Pacific Ocean to begin a new life in a different land. shortly before I left my band Ironwood released an album called Storm Over Sea, a sonic exploration of oceanic voyages as a metaphor for psychic transformation. For a song entitled “Will to Live,” I penned the following:

Lonely, lashing through the swell
Blackened sky of seething blight
Driven from forgotten lands
Into the sea’s raging night!

Hail-struck with self-disdain
Need-fire set our lives aflame
Thorn piercing the veil of pain
Longing for new Odal to claim!

Laguz light the way!

Ocean lured us to depart
Fled Alfheim, embraced Midgard
Wove our wyrd to wrathful waves
Praying Logr will ward our path

Sang oaths on bright-shining gold
Honest fearlessness to hold
When at last our fleet finds land
We’ll burn our ships and make our stand!

The significance of these sentiments resonates throughout me as I read over them now. Though they were written years ago, their full meaning has only now come into resolution. And I will embrace the sentiment.

I was born on a day of the year when the walls between worlds are considered thin. And often I have felt like the proverbial changeling, an otherworldly child swapped for a human at birth, ill suited to the dare and challenge of being present in a terrestrial, human world. Being what I am, existence in this world has proved a difficult problem, and if I have had some success in bringing myself into material manifestation it has nevertheless been tempered by much pain and reversal.

The will to be present in the world does not come naturally to me by birth, and too many times I have chosen to avoid the struggles that forge depth of character. Yet I have also striven mightily to reach terms with incarnate life, and it is true that my victories are many. The difficulty remains though: when one is coming from a long way behind, a great slew of advances may nevertheless seem to produce little progress.

I say this not in an attempt to extract undeserved sympathy; I am more than conscious that there are others in the world who have overcome much harder biographies and genealogies than I. No: I say this to express my determination to fulfil the vow of the lyrics of “Will to Live.” For truly those words were a vow, though I did not know it when they were composed.

My first year in this new land has been difficult. Many of the structures I have built around myself to allow myself to function emotionally and spiritually were left behind; yet somehow I expected myself to meet a slew of new challenges without any replacement for those supports, and this absurd expectation caused much gratuitous pain. It is only now that I recognise the extent of my self-inflicted folly. I am fortunate to be loved and known in this new life.

Well: I have burned my ships, like the Tuatha de Danaan on the shores of Ireland. If Ireland is incarnate life, then here I am, declaring myself to be for life itself, to be willing to grasp and reach and risk and dare. There was reason in my decision to throw myself into a new life: to give myself no more opportunities to avoid committing to the fine art of being present, of occupying my life.

For it is true that mind and body are one; and too long have I indulged a schizoid fantasy. I recognise that. If for a year I have tangled myself between acceptance of my path and absurd denial, then my errors and confusions stand redeemed in the perspective that I have been given. The encroaching threat of meaninglessness and bewilderment comes into a new light, and the sense and beauty of my chaos and lostness stands in relief.

So: the formula for a full life. One: acceptance of what is, unconditionally. No more fruitless rage and despair that the world does not gratify my every small desire. No more denial of the self-evident. Two: Lust for life. The willingness to reach out, to dare, to risk, to struggle. To embrace the joy of personal power, to cease to cut myself down in the name of supposed enlightenment. To embrace struggle as the terrain of transformation, not as an impassable foe.

“Riding is in the hall easy,
but very hard for the one who sits
on a powerful horse, over miles of road.”

I call my ancestors, literally and figuratively. I imbibe the infinite concatenation of liquid memory from which I am spun.

777  times the Norns I call.

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Thor Says: “Let Go!”

So long as I live, my ego is indestructible. It is a condition of being a finite being of the sort we call human that an ego is part of the complex called Self (albeit only a part, and not even the greatest).

I have often advocated for the destruction of the ego. Then realizing this brought me little peace, I have advocated for its curtailing, hemming in, restricting. In short, advocated for controlling and regulating the ego. I could not see how ironic it was that activities such as controlling and regulating (and destroying for that matter) are all very much par for the ego’s course. No wonder I have struggled with myself despite the rich spiritual life I have been gifted.

Thor gave me a valuable lesson. I kneeled, and he stood behind me. “You want to be free of the ego’s insanity?” He asked. “You want to stop trying to force reality to fit your lazy wish-fulfillment childishness by sheer force of thinking and emoting?” (he knows that I have found such mental activity to bring nothing but suffering and pessimism).

“So!” he cried, and struck my head clean from my shoulders with his hammer.

But immediately, my head grew back, good as new.

“Again!” He cried, and Mjolnir’s reverse sweep decapitated me again. A new head immediately popped out of the gaping cavity of my neck.

“And again!” He was laughing now, as his hammer swished back and forth as though light as a switch of birch. With each swing, he sent my head flying. Yet by the time the backswing was on its way, a new head had appeared, ready to be knocked off again.

Finally, his point made, Thor stopped. “So,” he declared, “now you see that as soon as the ego is in any way attacked, it reappears. Its roots run deep, and at a certain point cannot be destroyed without ending your life.” I realized that the addiction to ego is like an addictive relationship to food (what we might call compulsive overeating). A food addiction is trickier than, say, a drug addiction, because you cannot quit food as an aid to overcoming the addiction. You have to manage a stable relationship with food, while constantly placing your hand in the wolf’s maw.

Now, how then to deal with the ego, its endless complaining, whining, raging, resenting, fearing, overthinking, superstitions, paranoia, and all the rest? How, if not by controlling or abolishing it?

“Just hand it over to me, or whoever you wish to hand it over to,” Thor says, reading my mind. “Just say, ‘Thor, I’m handing this over. I’m letting go.’ You can trust me that I’ll put your ego in a nice safe place for the duration, and you can get on with developing all the other parts of your psyche that have been atrophied in the shadow of your ego’s unruly canopy.”

Just hand it over? Just hand it over. Mind turns to powerless worrying? Hand it over. Mind turns to self-righteous pomposity (designed to inflate a feeling of well-being with little merit of effort)? Hand it over. Even the need to always let go…can be let go.

Like all human beings, I am lopsided, uneven, in my psychic anatomy. It is very hard to straighten a crooked spine when the load that bent it is still on your shoulder. Better to give it to the Divine so that your posture can be healed. The gods want us to be hale in order to better serve and celebrate them. They want to help. But we have to ask (know you how?).

How do we ask? The simplest formula I have heard is the prayer that goes, “God – help.” And then the trick is not to immediately look for the magical solution of all your problems. Causality doesn’t work like that. Let that go. And the need to let it go. And then in the next moment, whatever comes up – let it go. And that too. And that objection. And that digression. And that worry that you digressed. And so on.

Thor reminded me of his Marvel Comics incarnation. The comic book Thor flies, but not through force of will, not through effortful thinking, not through having a specific flying power.

No, how he flies is by whirling his hammer violently, around and around, until it builds up tremendous centrifugal force. Then he throws it, which actually amounts to releasing its circular momentum into a straight line. Just as it leaps away, he grabs the strap on the end of the handle and the hammer carries him with it.

So! This, Thor told me, is the ideal model for how to proceed. If we want to advance, if we want to fly, the way to do it is not through direct effort. No, instead we build momentum, or find momentum, or tap into momentum. When the time comes to move, we do not provide the power ourselves, we just channel the energy we have invoked through right action, self care, sensitivity, intuition, and all the rest.

If we overthink this at all then it will not work. Thor is a god of action (this is what makes him such a profound mystic). Overthinking, egoism whether self-aggrandizing or self-destroying, has a way of subtly creeping back into the mind. Vigilance but also self-compassion are necessary. It will never totally subside, but it can become more and more easily sated and salved – and therefore gradually takes up less space that could otherwise be held by happiness, laughter, play, and power.

So! Whirl the psychic hammer – do not try to somehow force forward. Instead, when the time is right just – let go, and catch the strap. The inner Mjolnir will do the rest. Our job is not to be big, strong, heroic, and striving. Our job is to make ourselves available for forces much more powerful and playful.

Hail Thor!

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I am the Greatest Rebel that Ever Lived

I am the greatest rebel that ever lived. There is no glory in it. Only misery and shame, since I rebel against even my own rebelliousness. Wherever the underdog cries, there I stand, ready to brim over with molten righteousness. Wherever there is injustice, I am ready to fume and steam until I boil my own hair away. Wherever there is evil, you’ll find me, outraged in the most symbolic and useless way I can imagine, in order to undermine even my own self.

You might think that Marx or Guevara or Gandhi are greater rebels than I. But you would be wrong. All of these individuals actually acted on their convictions in a meaningful way, after all. They did not rebel against their own beliefs and world views. I would rather dissolve into a muddle of benighted nothingness than actually make my convictions manifest. Yes! The greatest rebel ever.

I hate being here, I hate having to make an effort. The bloody-mindedness of inhale-exhale-inhale galls me. The stench of human flesh that radiates, fetid, from my bones! What a tiresome bore. Can not these inconveniences be dissolved, yesterday? What a bother and trouble to have to exist, to be present, to make choices – worse, to see them through. No, I would rather rebel against all of that. Why not?

Oh, there are so many good reasons to be even less rebellious. If I could just be a little less rebellious I would make a wonderful egomaniac. But if egomania is a rebellion against the not-self, then I’ve already outsmarted myself! My kind of egomania is undermining. It makes me tiresome to be around, careworn by triviality. Somehow this is the ultimate port of call for my rebelliousness: giving the middle finger to everything that I value, might enjoy, and most especially, towards any person or thing I love.

Wouldn’t want to relax now, would we? Give me a helpful suggestion and I’ll find my way to resisting it before you’ve even contemplated blinking. I can build towering edifices of self-justification and excuses and drama like a master. If Erik von Daniken met me, he’d think I was made by aliens.

Even my disgust at my rebelliousness serves the same. This vast and sprawling ego force within me, so dominated by petty fears and thin-skinned hypocrisy. I carry it like a gilded chain around my heart; the more it aches, the more firm its grip becomes. At some level I probably even enjoy this misery that I relentless seek out and impose upon myself. Why not? That way I can feel guilty about causing my own problems, too.

What a pain I must be to be around! Always convinced of the impossibility of everything. Always looking for the “no,” for the “fail,” for the “not good enough.” The problem is not that I haven’t been given a reasonable share of talent, but rather my systematic determination to squander it. Ah the ecstasy of being one’s own executioner.

Best of all is the pointing of the cursing bone at anything in which I recognize my own reflection. Greed, laziness, hate, pettiness, paranoia, pessimism, resentment, cowardice, hypocrisy – so valorized and celebrated in myself, so vilified and decried when in another. I am the quickest draw in town when it comes to self-righteous stupidity. A flicker in my eye, a blur at my side, and my six-shooter out-paces the fastest draw in the West (who is probably the Devil).

If there is God – which is the great, luvverly, beautiful, interconnected whole – and the Devil – which is whatever of that whole decides to be a jerk – then I say death to them both! I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself and my overblown sensibility for drama to pick a side, or even to care about such tensions. Even to be so honestly nihilistic offers no relief. Dark tides close over my head, and the tentacles of the deep black sea swallow me whole…

…only to regurgitate me in due course. Even the Great Old Ones can only stomach so much of my curmugeonry.

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