Loki

The Swaying Inner Serpent

A source of minor frustration to me is how rarely I seem to write for this website. There are so many ideas to be explored, yet so few make it through into print (or pixels, or whatever).

I realized this evening that part of the problem is that, ironically, I impose a lot of rules on myself. Combine that with a very demanding, satisfying job that calls on all of my magical prowess, and other fun creative pursuits, well the written word languishes. That…and what I really want to be writing is material too demanding to be squeezed in around a job, no matter how satisfying that job may be.

When this site first started, I was slamming out the articles, yet my daily life had a lot less satisfaction in it. I never dreamed I would be doing the work I do now. Even if I work in a very mainstream environment and even if my interests and ideas don’t get to often openly show themselves, my creativity and tenacity and weirdness get enough of a workout that they aren’t begging for literary adventures as they once did.

This is a shame because my magical journeys have become richer and richer. Since I did a Vipassana retreat some 3 years ago I have had a most wonderful and potent meditation practice. My voyages into performance art have been giving me rich new opportunities for the veneration of Odin and Loki (and the runes!). I am learning about therapeutic applications of trembling (Jan Fries eat your heart out!) and might even get to study hypnotherapy under the auspices of a fellow Elhaz Ablaze book contributor.

Oh! And our book! What a journey that was. I have more books in me, but for now not the space and resources to realize them. What a conundrum.

Yes, and even as I write this I recognize submerged voices telling me that I’m doing it wrong, no one wants to read this. And that is the fundamental mistake: we must create for the inner serpent, not for the appeasement of a projected audience. So long as I am trying to contort myself into an externally determined form, I am violating the font of my power and inspiration.

“To find me, first lose me and find yourself,” admonished Zarathustra to his disciples as he dismissed them. This website, and our book, is fundamentally about the art of stripping away all the authoritarian introjects, the shoulds, musts, and oughts, so that the inner serpent may sway as she wills. A life of constriction and suppression is worthless. Anarchism is the only viable option in the long run (meant psychologically and spiritually, and who knows, perhaps one day even socially?).

I want to burn myself away in the mirror-flame, the harsh mistress called reflection. I want to know my desire, to become it, to articulate it, to nourish it, to be confronted only with the choice of whim, not the rigidity of doubt. For my only criterion of choice to be my judgment, not my fear.

How do we become strong? We nourish ourselves and we test ourselves. One or the other alone will not suffice. I must feed myself and then stretch myself. On the other side of punitive forcing and lax lassitude there dwells the discipline of kindness, which nourishes the endless thirst for mystery that captivates the swaying inner serpent.

Vipassana has taught me to abandon my fear of pain, discomfort, suffering, to embrace it, which paradoxically grants freedom. Not that there is less pain, discomfort, or suffering, but that they are no longer impediments as they were. “This is better than perfection,” to quote another of my incarnations.

Yet I am still so terribly constricted. Tentacles, inner armor, abound in my psyche, my flesh. I am learning more and more just how damaged I am, how much of a freak I am, and it is by turns exhilarating and devastating. Will you truly court Mystery, Runa? If you truly will, you must be ready to shed your skin.

As authoritarianism becomes progressively more brazen on the world stage, we are called upon to challenge its hold on our internal landscapes. Without that inner work I will never have the strength to defy the tyranny of mediocrity that is so dominating US politics (and other places too). My liberation and collective liberation are admixed. There is no separation, only different perspectives.

Do you crave to run screaming across the astral plane? Ride with the Hunt across storm-tossed skies? Tear yourself to pieces in the calling of rebirth? I want the truth of my nature to be fulfilled as fully as it may.

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Belief is Not Your Friend

Why Chaos Magic and Heathenism fused together? The guiding thread is skepticism about the importance of belief.

Christianity ushered into prominence the notion that right belief (orthodoxy) is fundamental to religious or spiritual life. This notion has profoundly shaped how most modern Westerners understand spirituality and religion. However it is not a notion that is particularly relevant to ancient paganisms.

Therefore it is important for anyone who wants to explore Heathenry or other reconstructed spiritual approaches to develop a sense of irony about the importance of belief that modern Western culture still seems fettered by. Otherwise any attempt to re-enter old spiritual-historical currents will be hiddenly and thoroughly warped by the ubiquitous notion that spirituality entails the holding of beliefs.

One of the reasons that Christianity jived so poorly with Roman paganism is that the latter didn’t place much emphasis on belief. Individuals were able to have whatever theories about the metaphysics of divinity that they wanted. The important thing was not right thinking, it was participation. It was knowing the right way to make spiritual (and cultural) contributions and observations.

This is a really, really radical idea for anyone in the modern Western world. Spirituality for pagan peoples had little, perhaps nothing, to do with right belief and everything to do with what we might term ‘right participation.’

One consequence of this attitude is that syncretism was a common religious phenomenon in ancient times. Everywhere one looks, one finds cross-cultural hybrid deities. Apparently no one thought this to be problematic, perhaps because they had a sense of irony about belief and recognized that praxis was the more important thing.

(Or maybe they had no sense of irony about belief at all and never even pondered the vexing, burdensome dilemmas of early Christian moral philosophy, where for example the thought is as ‘bad’ as the deed, and the abstraction of ‘purity’ is elevated above all else).

When we review Havamal there is a section that appears to be referring to magical or spiritual (perhaps runic?) practice, here is what it says (Hollander translation):

Know’st how to write,                   know’st know to read,
know’st how to stain,                    how to understand,
know’st how to ask,                       how’st to offer,
knows’st how to supplicate,       know’st how to sacrifice?

Observe that the knowledges here referenced are not about dogma or belief, but rather about the practical dimensions of spiritual or magical activity. It might shock many modern Heathens, but there is no rider along the lines of “and if you don’t believe that Loki is anathema then I’ll never let your magic work!” It seems like anyone with the technical knowledge could participate. Right belief? Whatever, pal.

Ok, so this brings us to Chaos Magic because the stanza quoted above could be straight out of a modern Chaos Magic grimoire. Chaos Magic is the first Western occult or spiritual tradition in many centuries to openly express contempt for right belief in favor of a focus on correct technical practice. Chaos Magic is ridiculed for inventing deities or using pop culture figures as spirits, yet its methods are effective, and they are effective for the same reason that ancient pagan religions were satisfying to their adherents – the emphasis is on praxis, not belief.

Modern Heathenry is so bound up in obsession with orthodoxy. I do not believe Heathenry could be used to justify racism and other bigotries if it were not polluted by the Christian obsession with ‘pure,’ binary thought processes. The more we look at ancient paganisms, the more we find they had their moments of outrageous free-for-all. Even the runes, supposedly the unique spiritual DNA of the Germanic peoples, appear to have been cribbed almost wholesale from the Etruscans (or Romans, depending on your biases).

Chaos Magic offers a useful model (the map is not the territory!), a way out of unconscious adherence to orthodoxic thinking. Combined with the grounding of a Heathen perspective that takes reconstructionism seriously yet playfully, the yield is a model of Heathen spirituality that has at least a small chance of recapturing the character of the ancient ways (which is about as good an outcome as is likely possible, given the gulf of time and the lack of information).

It won’t be perfect, and many mistakes will be made, but that’s why we have to keep trying to keep up with the academics and the archaeologists, a problem that all Heathens, whether they have achieved a sense of irony about belief or not, must face. Better to be honest with ourselves than boxing with our own shadows.

Naturally, Chaos Heathenry is subject to any number of uninformed criticisms, often based on the notion that it professes or promotes false beliefs. Oops. We can only say that we never claimed to be anything other than what we claimed to be. There’s no shame in syncretism when it is embraced consciously, in an informed way. That’s what the ancients did, and we are reconstructing that.

This statement should not be understood as an attempt to excuse sloppy thinking or new agism. We have our own particular kind of discipline, and Loki is only as subversive as the dominant culture is repressive. Belief is in various respects an epiphenomenon, the cart put before the horse. Let’s set it back into its appropriate place, and restore playful, open-minded, and fumbling-toward-rigor praxis to its rightful role.

*

(Don’t forget, our first ever book is out and available!)
Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712
Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK

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Returning to Seething

Groa's Incantation By W.G. Collingwood (1854 - 1932)Recently I reactivated my interest in Jan Fries-style seidr – namely the induction of shaking, swaying, and trembling as a healing tool. I’d like here to discuss the background to this technique, draw some parallels with the findings of trauma psychology, and discuss my recent initial foray back into the practice.

First of all, Fries has been criticized by many Heathens for his apparently bogus connection of seidr to “seething,” and thereby to trembling as the basis of Northern trance work. Fries has actually addressed a lot of these criticisms and even pointed out that his ideas were only ever presented as playfully speculative.

I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with speculative innovation so long as one is transparent that this is what one is doing, so that others can make their own informed choices. Fries, I do not think, has tried to pass off speculation as historical fact. For me, Fries’s notion of seething makes absolutely perfect sense. I do not believe that anyone can really claim to practice “authentic” seidr in this day and age, but seething seems to fill that function for me just marvelously. So there.

More importantly, Fries’ research on traditions of magical trembling seems to indicate that such experiences are common in a vast array of cultures, and symbolically speaking they make sense in a Heathen context too, even if the specific technology of seidr (whatever it even was exactly!) makes no reference to trembling experiences. That said, there are boiling cauldrons and ecstatic furies aplenty, and the magical power of ergi seems very nicely compatible with the flowing vulnerable liminality that trembling can produce – states of healing and sorcery.

As such, I feel confident that in going back to the testimony of my own bodymind, and connecting that to my Heathen practice, I cannot really go too far wrong. I trust the flesh to tell me what is best for it (at least if I know how to listen!). That doesn’t mean I have to sacrifice my keen interest in reconstructionism, it just means I have healthy senses of irony and humor.

In Fries’ book Seidways the theme of healing recurs in his accounts of different seething-type practices from around the world, be they San magic rituals or Mesmerism. My own experience of trembling, shaking, and swaying practices align with his accounts most marvelously; in fact, reading that book was like coming home for me, spiritually speaking. Finally someone had put words to the deep, wordless experiences that I knew and craved.

Indeed, long before I consciously realized the significance of trembling, I had already undergone several powerful healing experiences in which I spontaneously trembled, shook, swayed, or even several such behaviors at once. These movements were automatic, unguided by conscious intention. Since I started consciously seething I found out that these behaviors could move from consciously willed into automatic modes, and that the more this involuntariness suffused them, the deeper the magical effect.

Imagine, therefore, my surprise on reading research on the psychophysiology of trauma. It appears that when a mammal experiences trauma (e.g. almost getting killed by a predator) it first experiences the potent neurophysiological event of the fight-flight-freeze reaction. After the danger has passed, the animal will then tremble and shake. And this behavior releases the body of the traumatic damage done to the nervous system and organs, so that the creature can shortly return to normal life without any chronic harm from its harrowing experience.

Humans, on the other hand, do not listen to our bodies (this comment applies mostly to modern Westernized humans) and so by and large have forgotten how to allow ourselves to tremble after experiencing trauma. This in turn is the root of many chronic problems that can be caused by trauma. It is not necessarily the traumatic event itself that causes the depression or the anxiety; the culprit can also be that the body’s natural mechanism for correcting systemic imbalances (imbalances that are adaptive in the moment of danger but not long term) has been suppressed.

The parallel with seething is significant: what Fries documented in Seidways is nothing less than a catalog of the ways different cultures have sought to ensure that cultural praxis serves the biological and psychological necessity of trembling. More than this! Such practices also marshal the tremendous psychic potency of trembling and, aligned with conscious intent, make it into a powerful engine for the working of magic.

Seething, therefore, is a particularly primal kind of magic, one which activates every layer of the nervous system’s evolutionary strata and brings all that power to bear on the seether’s intent. Yet this is not something that can be mastered overnight. First much self-healing through trembling must be accomplished (meditation, particularly in the Vipassana tradition, which emphasizes the experience of the sensate body, is a valuable adjunct).

This is where I am up to – this process of self healing. It is funny that, even though I have understood the significance of seething for years, I am only now finally taking it to my deepest heart. Well, we each have our journey, our voyage onto the sea of irony and mystery.

Recently I undertook a session of seething for the first time in many years. Since that session I have been astounded at the loosening of certain very persistent and difficult psychological fetters. I find myself more able to become conscious of the ways in which unconscious, emotional forces hiddenly direct conscious thought into flights of justification, attempts to pass off as rational what are really courses of action that have been shaped by unresolved trauma in the bodymind. Deep shifts are occurring in the tectonics of my psyche. I can intuit that if I keep up with this practice, then this profound shifting will get progressively more potent.

So what does my seething practice look like? I run from Jan Fries’ directions in Seidways pretty much as written (admittedly he allows plenty of latitude for individual preference). I find low light with candles to be helpful; I put a randomized iTunes playlist of Dead Can Dance on softly in the background, and I open the rite with the invocation of runes for protection.

But most importantly – and this is a detail that in earlier years I neglected to my cost – I am sure to ask, rather than tell, the deep mind/spirits/gods/whatever for what I would like to experience. I am humble and respectful and invite its/their instruction, rather than thinking I have to be the “master magician” in control at all times. No, such an ego-centered attitude runs utterly contrary to the sympathetic and autonomic spirit of seething, which loves to undermine the illusion of the ego’s supremacy.

As I shake, sway, tremble, and seeth, I sometimes chant, moan, sing, and laugh. My mind wanders and then returns. I am sometimes vigorous in my movements, sometimes subtle. There is little about this that is intellectual, formalized, or precise. I turn again and again to accepting what the body wishes to share, seeking to cultivate trust in that deep self from which all spontaneity and magic flows.

I call out to Odin and Loki mostly, and they are helpful, though each embodies seething in a different way. My recent Loki-themed articles reflect the building unconscious anticipation that was leading me to return to seething; if Loki is the body, then seething is worshipping Loki. It is restoring to the body recognition of its innate beauty, just as it is.

I have never loved my body. I have never trusted it. I have hated it, circumscribed it, battered it, despised it, treated it with contempt. I have been learning in recent years to nourish it, to be kind to it, to embrace it. Ill health and emotional struggles forced me to do so. Now I wonder if this whole journey were not a prelude to my decision to reintroduce seething into my life.

I am ready for this now as I never have been before. I am grounded in a vigorous meditation practice, and this seems crucial. I encourage anyone reading this article to stop now, and instead get stuck into active, practical magic, in whatever way you see fit. Magic is meaningless if it is not actively practiced. Perhaps I’ll see you in one of the worlds that only the trembling seethers may enter…

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Loki is the Body

Gosforth_Cross_Loki_and_Sigyn

What if Loki is the god of the irrepressible body? The body that speaks, sings, sways, shudders, grows, fades, pulses, aches, dies, rebirths. What if his threat to consciousness is the threat of body to dissociated mind? Oh, well, we have to suppress this body thing – thus speaks dissociated mind. And so the drama begins, culminating in Ragnarok.

Loki, then, is the enemy of denial. Yet he did not start the war. Denial started the war. We cannot accept the body as it is and so we begin to dictate terms. We begin to try to consciously manipulate the body, the sensations of the body, the pleasure and the pain. And once we begin meddling in this way we become irrevocably attached to the very sensations we are trying to regulate, dominate, do away with.

Irony of ironies! The more we fight Loki, the more his serpent coils tighten around us, make us gasp and splutter and choke. We resist the body, we refuse to know it as it is, and it comes to rule us. We armor up. We escalate the combat. The body responds in kind.

Consider the opponent process that occurs in addiction. At first the drug we use to control and dissolve the body and its sensations, to regulate and efface it, works wonderfully. Yet soon the central nervous system begins to compensate, and more drug is needed. And more. Until eventually, we need the drug not to feel “good,” not to impose our denial on the body…but rather just to avoid feeling “bad.”

At either end of the continuum we are running from our embodied experience, the serpent god Loki (is he not a serpent god? Consider his underworldly ordeal…). At either end of the continuum, our denial, our dissociation, has taken us into a conflict with the body and its spontaneous truth of flowing experience. It need not be a drug; any kind of attachment will do. Our aversions and our lusts in all their polymorphous perversities (to retrofit one of Freud’s more poetic turns of phrase).

So who makes Loki the villain? The body is not evil and the body is not good. The body just is. “It will chew you up and it will spit you out/Behold the flesh and the power it holds” (Chuck Schuldiner/Death). Perhaps the body will destroy itself, as it did in Schuldiner’s case. Yet it is our judgment that determines the meaning of even this sort of tragedy.

So who makes Loki the villain? Judgment makes Loki the villain. Denial makes Loki the villain. Ignorance of self makes Loki the villain. For we are Loki. We are the body. Only ignorance of ourselves could make ourselves a villain. Yet we are so wonderful at not even noticing that we make ourselves the enemy. The more dissociated we become in our quest for denial and control, the more self-destructive we become. As Loki is persecuted, so we persecute ourselves.

The corollary of these musings is that one’s spiritual well-being can be indexed by one’s relationship to Loki. Why do so many accept Odin, the god of strife, murder, ergi, and betrayal, yet they cannot accept Loki, their own embodied selves? Dissociation. After all, Odin and Loki are brothers in blood.

Who fears Ragnarok? It is a transformation and a healing event. It entails terrible loss, yet the loss is caused by the debt of dissociation. Without the resistance to what is, there is no need for a terrible catastrophe. Thus we are called to embrace the real as it is, to observe it without reacting, so that the bad blood can be allowed to flow free and clear, and the festering wounds can heal.

This is a remarkable and terrible discipline, this embracing and observing of what it is as it is. Loki is a remarkable and terrible god. We like to think that healing and growth are happy, safe, joyous processes, but this is dissociation again. Loki teaches us that healing is a bloody, strange, tortuous affair. We have to observe our experience, and our experience hurts. Worse, sometimes it feels good, and then when it ends, we’re addicted. Back to the opponent process, unless we’re very disciplined.

Mastery in the sense that Loki embodies is not the mastery of total obliterative domination. That notion, that idea of absolute control, is an illusion. Where in history may it be found? Only in wishful thinking and propaganda. So no, mastery is not domination. We do not gain domination through the embrace of the body. Or, for that matter, through any other means either. Domination is an illusory artifact of bifurcated consciousness.

What we gain is the willingness to be. As we are. What, does this not mean acquiescence, stagnation? This question is born from the untrusting attitude of dissociated mind. Have we so little trust in the divine materials from which the gods have woven us? Who could dare say that this remarkable thing, this body, is anything but a well-spring of divine possibility? Let us not slander it, as we have been trained to do all our lives, with accusations of fault.

If we deny the body we deny the divine. The divine as Runa – mystery. The divine and her consort, Loki. Let us heed the call to embrace the divine that is Loki. Let us embrace the body, the sensations of the body. Without resistance. Without judgement.

We will, of course, fail. There is no end to our capacity for resistance and judgment. So we must accept this failure before we begin. Ahh…and there lies the magic of Loki. For in accepting defeat, he is liberated to become more than he, or we, could know.

To become what one is. A task that defies our dissociated mind and its projections of power and control. As Nietzsche would have it, we must go under to go up. And love and accept all that we revile, lest we discard the alchemical gold of the body in our haste to shed the dross of our loss and our fear.

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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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Thor: The Laughing God

“He sent you to talk to me today,” he says, tossing his crimson mane and cracking his knuckles. He is huge, thick necked, bursting out of his leathers and pelts. “And talk to me you shall!” He swings a great hammer up onto his shoulder, its bulk swishing through the air like a feather. “Come on then, walk with me boy!” Silent, I fall in beside him, almost scampering to keep up.

“You have to understand, kiddo,” he rumbles, “that my power does not come from my muscles, or from eating so many beasts’ hearts and livers (though my kingly diet hardly hurts my cause!). Its root lies not in the primeval blood of my mother, Earth, nor in the patrician fury of my father (himself born in part of mighty giant stock).” It is hard to focus on his words; his stumping stride makes the ground shake, and he tosses boulders from his path like so many grains of cat litter.

We stop, suddenly, atop a cliff, looking out over vast forests, distant mountains of resplendent white. He sucks in tremendous gulps of air, beats his chest. “This is the air that a god deserves!” he shouts, and his eyes sparkle.

“Fresh air, my boy. There is no substitute for it. Fresh air and good humor. Good humor!” His words dissolve into guffaws. “When the air is freshest is when it tastes of ozone and rain, and black clouds, and clashing light and sound! Where some tremble, I cannot imbibe enough!”

Then he is silent, lips thin and carved from stone, for the sky is yet clear, pale blue, rarefied. His voice softens, as if following suit. “I laugh when I say this, but I do not joke. Good humor has no substitute. Good humor, boy. Laughter is the spring from which my power rushes. Laughter can forge mountains and level them, carve river valleys and flood them, birth stars and consume them in a trice. Without laughter I am nothing; laughter is the only thing I am.”

He thrusts a finger in my chest; I am driven forcefully to my ass, a dull ache shooting up my tail. “Don’t forget,” he admonishes fiercely. “Laughter is the greatest love, fury, and force in the universe. There is nothing that is not mirth, lad, and my spirit is the distilled essence of exuberance!”

I have always suspected it might be true. Even Thor’s violence emerges from boisterous celebration of life, not from malice. The brutality of Woden triumphant on the field, that insouciant will to slaughter: this is not Thor’s nature.

No. Thor is superabundance without limit. Confronted with armor, fear, hatred, the grime of miserliness (for surely such is the mean spirit of those he cannot abide), he cannot help but wish to liberate his enemies of their ugliness. He is a heavy handed masseur, not a boorish bully. Every knot of rigidity that he dissolves releases torrents of life into the world, like a kinked hose that is suddenly, violently, straightened.

And therein lies the heart of his friendship with Loki. Oh, the hiss of the anti-Loki brigade! But none can deny that Thor and Loki are boon traveling companions, for so our myths assure us. Two different expressions of the power of laughter, polar opposites that contain a seed of one another. It is just as necessary that they be sworn foes at the end of time as intimate comrades earlier on. Laughter knows no boundary; these are forged by the brittle clutches of seriousness.

Seriousness – that empty armor of lies and madness. That willingness to bind up the world in limitations, abstractions, supposedly moral injunctions. That addiction to the entrapments and blandishments of corporeal power, which is to say, power won not through the good faith of laughter but the poison tongue of the spirit of gravity. Perhaps here lies Loki’s fall – who could cling to their sense of humor after an age on the rock, the snake perched above, roped in the guts of their son?

The power won through seriousness is a brittle illusion, made to shatter, and the price paid for it is too high. It is always too high. But there are always fools willing to delude themselves into thinking otherwise. Eventually they turn to stone and arrogance, and as Thor demonstrated in his duel with Hrungir, the Thunder God is more than adept at breaking heads that have become too big for their bodies.

“Don’t forget it,” he says again. “You cannot get anywhere without laughter as your companion. That’s why I love these high altitudes – high spirits fly about the summits of the teeth of the world! We are natural siblings and companions.” He swings his hammer, that potent symbol of fecundity, of new life and pumping vigor.

“Laughter, little one, laughter! Who do the dour vultures of the halls of power hate the most? The servants of mockery and lampoon! Those that clutch at the illusion called “control” cannot bear to have the skins of their bad consciences pricked. And am I not a thorny god?”

The lesson is ended like that, abruptly and completely. I open my eyes and gaze at the predawn light outside. I see that it is good.

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The Mystical ‘Not’

“Not [the word as such], in this case, represents Crowley’s Qabalistic Zero, defined as 0=2. It is the Fool of the Tarot. It is a condition of Being unbound and unfettered, utterly outside of time and space. Thus it is not part of the Universe as we Understand it, it is the Absolute … It can be given no coherent definition, hence it is No-Thing, Nothing. It is every potential and possibility which we have within ourselves but have not yet made manifest. Thus it is all that … implies the omnijective perspective. … [W]e ourselves contain this Absolute and are Nothing, for we our Essence is not bound by the Universe.

‘There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not’ — The declaration taken as a whole has two meanings, one obvious and one esoteric:

1. All of time and space, i.e. eternity and infinity, is imprinted with your presence and influence.

2. There exists a timeless Void in which you are All-Potential.”

(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis, p.172/3)

 


“And if all things come from One Thing, then send your prayers to the Sun.” Boyd Rice


Everything is one, when 0=2, I pondered once, when I first grasped Crowley’s idea of the mystical Nothing, Zero or the Tarot trump The Fool. I remember that realization very vividly. My friend Henrik and me were on a trip, on shroooms, in the woods and he quoted a sentence from a Current 93 song: “Nothing shall fresh spring again.” And I said: “Isn’t that rather heavily pessimistic?” And he went: “No, don’t you get it? It’s about Nothing of which All springs.” Well, I’m quiet sure that the band was talking about apocalyptic visions and meant literally what they said. But with an overdose of Crowley and magic mushrooms things can connect quiet differently in your brain. However, it’s also encoded in the Qabalistic Ain and I think it’s behind the Germanic idea of the “magically charged Void”, Ginnungagap. The equation of the mystic then might be 2=0, changing duality into No-Thing, uniting duality, transcending the whole show (of duality and thus illusion), as it were, by returning to the source of all, to the primordial state of being (or non-being?). God to some (monists and monotheists), shunyata (’emptiness’) to others (Buddhists). In Qabalistic terms it means to return to the Abode of the Nous, the higher triad of the Tree of Life (‘City of the Pyramids’), where the spiritual world, the Real, which is ideal, is seperated from the material one, the Unreal, which is actual (in neo-platonic thought). Hence the world-denying tendency in mystical currents (not all currents). The magician, in turn, plays with duality, with Maya, with Ginnung, or Chaos — an undifferentiated ether that longs to be formed into substance by the will of the magician. (Of course, this division between the mystic and the magician is arbitrary and unnecessary.)

“Ginnung or Ginning becomes a word for ‘delusion’ at a certain point in Old Norse. One of the sections of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson is called the Gylfa-ginning, usually translated Gylfi’s Delusion. But in the Rig Veda we see that Maya is the creative power wielded by Varuna, who with his pashas [bonds] can bind or loosen, destroy or create anything he can imagine. In both cases what we are dealing with is the idea that this is ‘powerful stuff — and power can equal mortal danger. In essence Ginnung is the undifferentiated energy/matter which preexists creation, and which underlies the forms of all phenomena. What had been ‘magical power’ to the trained elite, became ‘bad ju-ju’ as its practices drifted down to the masses. The amount of training and discipline necessary to wield Ginnung in a reliable way is so great that the vast majority of humanity, when they try to ‘use’ it, simply end up confusing themselves and devolving into a morass of illusion. Hence the use of the substance becomes more or less taboo.” (Edred Thorsson)

This is an interesting explanation of what this ‘stuff of Chaos’, this Ether, Maya or Ginning might be. Anyway, when I began to write this article today I thought of writing a short persiflage of the Lord’s Prayer, using the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but my poem, including the whole article, turned into something completely different and took a strange direction in the last few hours. It’s rather weird to write poetry in your non-native language, similar to playing an instrument you can’t play. But also, it opens new angles and one can use words differently, create word-plays that don’t exist in one’s own language and new meanings emerge. That’s one of the many reasons why learning Old Norse will be very rewarding to any true Runer, I guess. And why learning new languages in general is a rewarding activity. “To learn another language is to possess another soul”, said Karl the Frank. After the poem I quote one of my absolute favourite passages from Hakim Bey’s famous Temporary Autonomous Zone that puts his idea of ontological anarchism across. He was also, like some of our contributors, inspired by Sufism.


The Mystical (K)Not

Primal Chaos — permeating Heaven and Hell,
Shape wisdom erupting from Urðr‘s Well,
As above, so below,
Eternal Mystery I strive to know.

Eagle King, spread thy wings,
Thou art the Shaper of all things,
Thou who art No-Thing and have no Name,
Inventor and Player of the Master Game,
Thy Intelligence come, thy Word be done,
I am thy Son of the the Black Sun.

Let feverish dreams rain down from the skies,
Teaching false truths and true lies,
Give us frenzy, make us divine or insane,
Push us to change ourSelves and to unchain
us from false divisions and Single Vision.

Lead us into temptation with Her — Runa,
I came to court Her, She’s my Fortuna.
And deliver us from mere Beliefs,
They are for priests and other thieves.

Death is the Warrior’s Wife and ultimate Bliss
The bloody Knife and the Valkyrie’s kiss,
And Life is Power, Beauty and Desire
We are the Dragon’s Eye, arosen from Fire.

For thine is Intelligent Chaos and Noetic Gnosis,
I don’t care, if you teach by thorns or by roses,
Thou art God’s Golden Shower
Magic is Love and Will to Power,
Thy Glory is the Cosmos’ Story
Of the Eternal Copulation of Kia and Zos,
Pulsating in Dagaz and the Elhaz Cross!

Blessed be their Child that dances and sees
Eternal Forms ascending in Ecstasies.
With formless Fire I create from mud,
I know I’m drunk on Kvasir’s blood.
Thou exhaled wisdom and divinity,
Now I bathe in thy Eternity,
For what is Thine is also Mine,
I Am as Thee and thou Art as Me.

Thou gave me Life-Breath, thou gave me Form,
Holy Madness pours from thy Horm,
Thou art the violent, upcoming storm
That tears all apart to again be reborn.

And to grow and to dance and to love and to fight
To rise in thy Might, seek for Darkness and Light
Is to love Mystery and to wear Her Sign
Man’s  incomplete, but man is Divine,
Do not fear, Eternity is here,
The only crime is not to notice Her,
And I think to myself, lying dead on the floor
Oh Life, oh Death, you are but one Door
Man cannot cut this Gordion Knot
There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not


Hakim Bey, ontological anarchist and prophet of Chaos

“CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin–your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age–shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they’d call it an act of terrorism–so let’s take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.”

Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.


 

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