Odin

Woden, Fear, and Frey

I am very much made after Woden’s form. I am a writer, musician and poet. I am no stranger to extremes of life, consciousness and the rest. I am an inveterate occultist; a wanderer of worlds and of this world; I tend to shroud myself in ambiguity and mystery (so I am told my reputation often seems to stand at any rate).

I don’t fit too well in consensus reality, and I don’t think Woden fit too well in the consensus reality of the old Heathens – too dark, contrary and mystical. The Outsider is a rather clichéd posture from which to live one’s life, and it certainly doesn’t define me as it once did; but its always been there, like a raven perched on a blue-cloaked shoulder.

Like Woden, I have a great deal of power at my disposal, but also a great deal of vulnerability. Woden might be the savage inciter of ecstatic fury (and this is the meaning of his name); but he is also the lonely old man on the moor, melancholy and (in my own subjective experience) suffering from wounds which have never fully healed.

Most of my life this pattern – intense power but also intense vulnerability – has made things difficult. Many times I have felt moved by awesome forces within me, yet been unable to bring them into manifestation due to a host of limitations, as well as some rather brutal depression and anxiety issues.

These latter two are now pretty much conquered, but as my personal alchemy unfolds I am beginning to come to grips with the root of my vulnerability: fear.

Let me explain what I mean. Often in my life I have held back, not brought my power, my will into action. I’ve retreated; I’ve given up without being forced to; I’ve convinced myself to bow down to resistance; I’ve deferred to others even though I know better. I am an unconventional person, yet I have somehow tried to force myself to fit within the conventional world.

This habit of not rocking the boat of those with more conventional (read: often boring and pointless) ideals, values, beliefs and habits is a bad one. I feel I should be subverting the closed borders of other peoples’ lives, not compromising on my wide-ranging spirit in order to keep those closed borders free of disturbance.

Of course in many ways, at many times, I have done just that: thrown spanners in the works of other peoples’ blinkered lives, and I’d like to think that this has had a net positive effect on both them and the world in general. I think that expanding the bounds of what might be called consensus reality is a good thing by definition.

But many other times I’ve compromised my power, passion and potential for the sake of my fear, my insecurity. And that has hurt me and sometimes others, I openly admit! It is a kind of dishonesty, a betrayal of my deepest worth – that which is given to me by Woden. And it also has caused me to harm others, whether by act or omission of act.

As far as I can tell the recently invented Innangard/Utangard distinction so popular in some modern Heathen circles is usually deployed to justify laziness of opinion and spirit. It often seems to breed stagnation and stupidity (as well as a mind-blowingly over-simplified understanding of the Heathens of old).

It seems not much better than the attitude of those people who are glued to the tube 24 hours a day. When I tell people I never watch TV – and don’t in fact own one – they incredulously ask me how I found out about the news. This response revealed the shocking impoverishment of these peoples’ horizons. The Innangard/Utangard crew aren’t much better in most cases.

(Not to mention the fact that television news has got to be far and away the most superficial, biased, sensationalised and idiotic information source you can find – other perhaps than blog websites pertaining to weird fringe Heathen mysticism of course).

I would much prefer to be confused, lost, and contradictory than mired in comfortable illusions. I would much rather walk paths of shadow and pain than slumber in slovenly, ego-bloated ignorance.

I once gave myself to Runa – to Mystery – and when I offered myself, Mystery laughed. “But I already own you, my dear, and always have” was her response. I just wish I could hold onto that with more conviction in the face of my fear.

Satisfied that I am like Woden, who violates the very ethics of the cultures he is at the heart of; who speaks with the dead and schemes with a vision that no one else can perceive; who is willing to kill himself on the world tree in order to encounter an illuminated dialogue with Runa (Mystery)? I hope some small resemblance is apparent.

I’m not saying I hold even a match to Woden’s bonfire; I am little more than a small spark that has blown off from his great conflagration, his river of fire, and I pray that I become a precursor, a way-finder, for the inferno to spread with vigour and without the crooked poison that some so-called Heathens carry in their hearts.

But that will never happen so long as I let fear dictate my actions. And over the years I have concluded that Woden alone cannot help me shatter this fetter, this Valknut.

In recent weeks I have more and more strongly confronted this blockage and wound within myself, this terrible fear-foe. And confronted too its ally, dishonesty, self-deception, a willingness to blind myself to my own thoughts and feelings for the sake of foolish beliefs or what I perceive to be the comfort of others.

I have been racking up terrible debts in the name of fear and dishonesty, debts to both myself and others. At the end of last year I started paying these debts and the result has been massive upheaval in my personal life, indeed in my life as a whole. Much pain and sorrow has emerged from this course of action, pain and sorrow I’ve been pretending I could avoid.

It is not unlike the current economic crisis, which was forged out of unscrupulous individuals’ beliefs that they could defer the consequences of their financial duplicity and rash greed forever. I do not like to compare myself to such persons, but the comparison is there to be made and I do not entertain illusions about my failings.

And yet, now I find myself for the most part facing up to these debts, and though it hurts terribly, I am glad that I am setting imbalances right and owning up to my own needs, wants and character.

I think this is a solid basis for proceeding in my life, or at least I now have the opportunity to forge such a basis, if I can be unflinching in prosecuting this transformative debt repaying.

Fear and dishonesty go together, however. To be honest with myself, and then to act on that, requires a lot of courage, or more precisely, provokes a lot of fear. You can see how as I seek to uproot my self-deceptions I thereby provoke a lot of suffering. And as I say, I do not believe that Woden is able alone to help me shatter this fetter. I need other kinds of guidance.

And a few days ago I realised, based on clues that have been offered to me over the last year, just who it is that might aid me – the great Veraldar guð or World(ly) God – Frey. But more on that is to come…

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Dissolution

What is magic but the destruction of what is and has been? The execution of present tendencies and patterns – performed by manipulating and turning those very same forces.

If I can convince myself of one belief one moment – then its inverse the next, what have I achieved? Twisting in the wind, belly slit, guts dangling around our ankles – this is the essence of performing magic.

I’ve seen myself shorn of flesh, or stripped of bones. I’ve seen myself torn limb from limb, thrown into a boiling cauldron, and utterly annihilated. I’ve seen myself rise anew, steaming and pink, from the seething broth. I’ve seen myself re-clad with flesh, my white bones gleaming from heat exposure. I’ve had Woden as a skeleton crawl into my dissolving muscle and fat and give it a new, familiar form.

I’ve faced the shadows of my own hypocrisy – without resolution or result. I’ve faced the shadows of my own fear – without resolution or result. I’ve faced the nightfall of my hope – without resolution or result. I’ve fought the armour of my limitations – without resolution or result.

I’ve faced the ragged end of all action: that every victory passes immediately into the past. What once was idolised as a distant future – as soon as I’ve won it I can no longer imagine how I survived with out it… and onward to the next impossible peak and precipice.

Screaming, crying, raging, rotting, I’ve hauled my blood-soaked ego through endless hells; through valleys where even shadows fear to tread; into the heart of dragon dens and the halls of slavering beasts. We’ve walked through fire, flood, war and the hell of boredom, crutches for one another, dizzy, concussed, lost, confused, dying – making life worth living.

I’ve stared into a mirror for hours without recognising the man in the reflection. Confounded by his gaze, the question mark of that face, that flesh, that spark of consciousness. Who? And Who? And Who? Dances endlessly through my being, this strange presence before me.

“Step by step, past all paths, slowly he approached the surface – the mirrors mocked him on the way” (Emperor).

Meaning is woven from story, from the fragments of our relationship to wyrd and the fabric of orlog. We struggle, play, dance, choke, and die in the arms of the question, the end question – this enigmatic horizon of the unknown, this mystery that crouches on the shoulder like a hook-nosed gargoyle, a sly serpent.

And I have sat with joy and misery, I have sat with ecstasy and hate; I have sat with loneliness and flamboyance; I have howled the wind into submission and crushed even the stars with my feverish rage. I have crawled through the mud of my silence and my weakness like a broken child, and found myself at the end of the struggle laughing with all the rich delights of mockery.

All these voyages beyond the limits of my own finite being, these struggles with my own boundaries, these transgressions of my habitual nature, to what end? Am I not still rough-formed, bewildered, lost, amnesiac? Certainly there is no end to the secrets that confound me, the dreams which my waking consciousness cannot fathom.

Even the faith I have in my own unconscious, the conscious faith I have in my own unconscious, my ego’s faith in my own unconscious – is a trap. Don’t relax and let the Deep Mind do its work; don’t listen to your intuition; don’t embrace the invisible and entrust yourself to the will of the divine. These too are easily subverted, these too can easily become vessels for the ego to expand the arcing shelter of its illusory control and its illusory terror.

“The struggle to free myself of restraints becomes my very shackles” (Meshuggah).

So easily we spring from precarious equilibrium to plunging collapse. So easily we find ecstatic release in the death of our own impeccable dance. So easily we murder what we think we know, what we know we know, and, to paraphrase a famous chimpanzee, even the unknown unknowns that we don’t know. Crows are smarter than chimps any day.

I saw two dead crows today, lying on the sand of the beach, their necks wringed by, I suppose, a cat. Their once glossy feathers now stark like wire brush. Their once noble gimlet eyes now dissolved into the air. Their breasts torn open and empty, where once hearts sung with the pleasure of flight.

And consciously? Consciously I thought “there is no meaning in such a sight”. Were it a pleasant image that had confronted me you can bet I would have thought “look, the gods love me! The world loves me!” – such is the nature of hypocrisy.

The tide came in and claimed my dishevelled friends, their clever crow heads never again to marvel at the stupidity of humans. Out to sea, dissolved in the vast reaches of the unknown, abandoned to the hand of mystery. I watched them go, engulfed and lost, as though they had never been, the sand beneath them swept clean.

How can any of us embrace this inevitable fate? How many deaths do each of us die in this life? How many times do we step up to Yggr’s gallows – knowing what we do or not – and embrace the caress of the noose? And yet we forget, and life blooms, and again and again death is necessary if we are to survive.

“I must crucify the ego before it’s far too late; I pray the light lifts me out before I pine away” (Tool).

And therein lies the beating heart of it. When ego flowers, ego begins to kill itself, like some beast whose tusks, if unused, grow backwards into its own skull. Even to express these sentiments is another dance of the ego, to force shape, to seduce meaning, from the chaos of experience, the tides, the songs to which all of being vibrates.

The serpent seeks its tail; the harbinger of chaos comes to us like a stranger at the gates.

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Soft Monotheism

“The Rune-gilder does not “believe” in the Gods and Goddesses in the same way Trothers do (or might). The underlying “reason” for this is made clear by what is implied by the Germanic Epistemology presented in Section II. Gilders may begin with a faithful approach to the nature of the reality of the divinities – but they eventually learn that such a belief is a fetter which must be loosened if they are to progress further.”

“All the Gods and Goddesses are real in a practical sense. But ultimately they are creations of the threefold All-Father. The only (apparent) exception to this is Freyja – who is the only deity who teaches him anything he did not already know, that is, the mysteries of seid”.

Both quotes from Gildisbok by Edred Thorsson.

After Clint’s recent and very rousing posting on the subject of so called “hard polytheism” I somehow felt the urge to make a perpendicular response – by reflecting on the words of Edred Thorsson in the Gildisbok, the Rune Gild’s members-only handbook. Note that I haven’t been in the Gild for years so my copy might be dated.

Regular Elhaz Ablaze readers know that I’m not a huge Thorsson fan, considerable though his contributions have been. I particularly take exception to his goal of attaining a state of immortal, isolate intelligence – this notion seems to fly in the face of both Heathen and specifically Odinnic cosmology and philosophy.

Given this goal is directly inspired by Temple of Set philosophy – which seems little more than a hilariously confused manifestation of late modern nihilism – it is no surprise that I am not Thorsson’s only critic. But I digress.

The two quotes above are fascinating launch pads for reflection on the nature of the Northern divinities – not least because they appear on the same page in the Gildisbok. With the first quote I find myself (mostly) cheering. With the second quote I find myself shaking my head in disbelief.

In the first quote I think Edred is saying that we need to get beyond the trappings of form. I think he is saying that we need to recognise that there is a lot more to Heathenry than memorising lists of facts or aping what we would like to think is old-fashioned behaviour (but may reflect more our own insecurities). I could be wrong in my reading of course.

He also seems to be saying that when we are talking about divine beings we will be well served if we avoid being too literal about who and what they are, and how they might interact with us.

After all, how can we really know? Whether they are ideas, myths, archetypes, or fully existent and independent conscious beings, they’re way beyond our limited perspective.

However, I do note one little discordant note in this first quote. It suggests that Edred has a monopoly on this point of view, or less strongly that somehow it’s an insight very specific to his philosophy or knowledge.

This is obviously absurd – I’ve known plenty of Gilders and plenty of non-Gilders, and if anything it’s the latter that have tended to be much less literal and simplistic in their grasp of matters divine.

That isn’t intended to be an absolute claim of course, and I know there are many, many exceptions in every category. I’m just speaking from my own direct and personal experience of specific individuals.

So it seems either the Rune Gild is not proving too good at promulgating Edred’s point of view (which in this instance is a point of view I broadly agree with), or else something odd is going on – who knows what the answer to this is, I guess it ultimately doesn’t matter.

There’s also something odd about the appropriation of the more ‘sophisticated’ view on the gods that is evident in the first quote. Why shouldn’t mere “Trothers” have understandings of the gods every bit as complex, contradictory and weird as the supposedly elite Rune Gilders?

The notion that simple dogma is good enough for the (implied) less discerning masses is obnoxious to a Chaos Heathen such as myself.

I’m sure Edred has copped flack from dogmatic types over the years, but you’d think the Yrmin-Drighten would be a little more thick-skinned. But hey, what do I know?

Maybe indirectly bagging out his more literal-minded critics in a book like the Gildisbok, a book to which they can’t respond, is the best way of dealing with the problem. Far be it from me to throw the first stone from the doorstep of my glass house.

It is the second quote that really floors me. All the gods and goddesses (save Freyja) are really Manifestations of Odin? If nothing else, isn’t this very definite and concrete claim substituting one dogma about the nature of the gods for another? The two quotes seem contradictory to my addled mind.

Putting aside the way that Edred very forcefully presents a flamboyant piece of UPG as though it were written “just so in the Edda”, this second quote really makes me wonder: just what is going on in his mind?

(I’ll put aside the comment about Freyja in this post because it really opens up a huge can of worms that needs separate attention).

The local Hindu temple near where I live has occasionally put out the following slogan: “God Is One, Though The Wise Call Him By Various Names”. Now that’s a subtle and very interesting point of view to hold. Viva the pan-Indo-European connection!

This slogan recognises the ultimate interconnectedness of everything (which is the spiritual truth of monotheism at its best), but also the significance of individual beings’ unique spirit (which is the spiritual truth of polytheism and animism at their best).

But to say that Odin – who really doesn’t strike me as being at all like the One, or Brahma, or whatever – is the secret source of all the other divine beings? Well that surely wouldn’t make sense under a comparative mythological lens. And intuitively it just seems like putting the cart before the horse.

I would have thought that the work of people like Paul Bauschatz and Bil Linzie resoundingly demonstrates that the closest cognate to the Totality of Existence (that is, God) in the Heathen myths would have to be some combination of Yggrdrassil, the various wells of memory and time, Wyrd, and possibly the surface of the Ginnung.

Conversely, Odin is surely best seen as somewhere between Mercury and Zeus, a definite divine entity of some kind but not a representation of the Totality.

Personally I lean towards seeing him as being more Mercurial, since Mercury is very similar to Odin; and Tacitus certainly glossed Wodan as Mercury. And also since the whole “king of the gods” thing only came on in late Dark Ages times and almost certainly isn’t representative of the whole spectrum of Heathenism.

Odin’s biography is maddeningly complex and with so few sources available there is a lot we just cannot know (and you can’t even ask him because he’s a bloody liar, so UPG isn’t much help either).

I get that Odin has a starring mythic role in shaping the cosmos, but even as Odin-Vili-Ve there was a whole lot of life and creation going on prior to his arrival.

This “Odin is behind all the gods” point of view just seems bizarre. It doesn’t square with the mythological evidence and as a speculative opinion it seems extremely left-field. It also seems rather disrespectful to a whole bunch of beings that I personally at least think have plenty of their own stuff going on.

Surely it would be prudent to refrain from making very strong, unusual and textually unjustifiable claims about Odin’s nature with no more authority than that old faithful “because I say so”. I mean speculate away (I know I do), but a bit of honesty about it please! What is lost from admitting the limits of one’s perspective?

Furthermore, it seems like a weird crypto-monotheism to reduce all the other gods to guises of Odin. If we are going to do that then why not just adopt monotheism for real? Or for those feeling the need to be contrary and ‘tough’, the Satanic road is there in its various absurd forms. Although Edred also walks that path, so who knows?

Hence the title of this post – “Soft Monotheism”. Just as Catholicism sneaks in all kinds of gods and goddesses through the back door of the Saints, one could be forgiven for thinking that Thorsson wants to sneak monotheism in through the back door of the endless hordes of divine beings that crowd out the old Germanic myths.

He is entitled to whatever opinion he wants of course. It just seems odd for someone who built their career on being so well grounded in actual historical evidence and research to then leap off into such a wild opinion and present it as though it were a matter of objective fact.

Maybe the New Age influence on Heathenry affects Edred more than he realises. Again – that isn’t a criticism, though given his marketing angle I imagine he might take it as one.

I for one have no idea what the gods and goddesses are; nor what the ultimate nature of reality is. I do have lots of personal experience with these things, but personal experience and rational discussion don’t necessarily like to hold hands.

I do know this though – every time I think I have it figured out, I find out there’s more mystery still. Silent, awe-struck, in the face of the infinite reaches of Runa – that’s where the truth lies. And I suspect the horizon of mystery is always going to foil any attempt at expressing it (though of course it might be possible to invoke…)

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Top Dog & Woki

Ok, so possession is a strange thing. When I think about the image of a berserker triggering a violent trance by biting at a shield, I guess I figure something more primal than the berzerker’s everyday personality is at
play.

You might have heard of a chap called Justice Yeldam, an experimental musician. He attaches microphones to pieces of glass, then manipulates the glass with his mouth. The sounds this creates are pretty wild, and his performances seem to involve a lot of blood.

The funny thing is, he says that despite how gory it all looks, he never really hurts himself very much. He goes into a very altered state and somehow in that state no harm comes to him.

In fact I recently I read an interview with him in which he laughs about the irony of a time when he badly cut his foot in a safe environment after a doing a performance that involved putting broken glass in his mouth for half an hour to no negative effect.

Think that sounds like berzerkergang? You bet, except this chap isn’t killing someone, he’s just putting himself at risk in order to create some very strange art. Which suggests that 1) violence is only one use for a berserk state and 2) berzerkergang has an awful lot in common with seidh.

The physiological science of all this stuff isn’t at all controversial – it has a lot to do with activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates all the bodily functions you can’t consciously control.

In other words, back we go to my good friend and writing partner the unconscious. The Uppsala Berzerkergang article goes into all this stuff in a lot more detail.

This is probably part of why in historical battles it was very helpful to surprise your enemy. While your side has had plenty of time to get itself all riled up and psycho-physically primed for conflict, the other side is still in a more sustainable, everyday, vulnerable conscious state. It is anything but a fair contest.

Of course today warfare seems to be more about having lots of bombs that you can bravely drop on the foe from thousands of miles away.

My reason for recounting all of this is to underline very strongly that there are many, many different shapes in which altered states can manifest, and those shapes are highly plastic. Thus the practices surrounding Heathen battle magic and the practices surrounding modern experimental music produce some comparable psycho-physical changes.

Some folks in modern Heathen argue that we absolutely must reconstruct the archaic practices as closely as possible or else we are somehow letting the Heathen side down. Well I agree that this is a fruitful and inspiring thing to do.

But it is also pretty clear that if we have different (perhaps even more) options available to reach the desired conscious states then that is no bad thing.

It certainly lacks any historical validity for me to use black metal as a consciousness altering tool, but somehow I think my ancestors would approve (at least once their ears recovered from the onslaught).

These comments serve as a pre-amble to the introduction of two possession forms that have entered my life in the last few months – namely Top Dog and Woki.

Top Dog is – well, he is THE dog. Class all the way. People get out of his way in the street when they see him coming. He like sunglasses, expensive alcoholic drinks, walking sticks and snappy clothes. Its hard not to love Top Dog because, damn it, he just loves himself so much!

Top Dog entered my life to help me in promoting my business, since I am naturally an introverted and retiring person (unless I am screaming my guts out on a stage – see above comments about using modern contexts to produce ancient trance states).

Since I am not a typical sunny kind a guy who thinks nothing of telephoning one thousand total strangers a day in the chase for referrals and work, I prefer not to be involved. Top Dog very kindly shadows me when I have to do this sort of thing.

Since Top Dog is undoubtedly THE dog of dogs, the classiest of class, he has no problem in selling us both to potential referral sources. Top Dog used my anxiety about promoting myself as a door to take over the reins – it was that anxiety which put my bodymind into the appropriately receptive state the first time we met.

He is in fact quite subtle in his presence when I am working with him (after all they are ultimately buying my services, not his). But during times of recreation he loves to put on the whole show, dancing, howling and amusing my somewhat dumbfounded wife with his antics.

He also likes walking around the neighbourhood, just so he knows that people have seen him around. And when he wants he can effect a total submersion ofmy ego, whereas usually when gods or spirits ride me I retain some sense of separate identity, watching as it were from the back of my skull.

Don’t tell anyone, but Top Dog seems to me to be an Odinnic identity. In fact, not long before Top Dog arrived on the scene my wife and I both noticed independently in Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology an intriguing Old Norse mythological name which I think is related to Odin – namely Hundalf/Hundulf.

There are debates about how this is translated – Dog-Elf or Dog-Wolf are the most common. I like to think Dog Wolf is the correct meaning – he is so purely Top Dog that one word for canine is not enough, so in Old Norse he gets two! I hope to get more of Top Dog into my life and to put together some really Classy
outfits for him to dress up in. It’s the least I can do in return for the help he gives me!

Oddly, Top Dog also reminds me of the Vodoun deity Baron Samedi, thought the Baron is admittedly a little more macabre than Hundulf is. Clint observed to me recently that there are many odd similarities between Heathenry and Vodoun. Weirder things have happened!

As for Woki – well let’s just say that WOden-loKI is a pretty natural concatenation is it not? But in truth I have had only limited experience with Woki thus far – though I must say that he turns up extremely quickly when invoked. He too is very energetic and a bit of a trouble maker.

I’m not sure how the deities in question arrange for this sort of alchemy to work out but I hope they continue with it. I love it! I also hope they teach me to get better at better at opening into their presence because really the average Odinnic or Loko personality is much more interesting than the average conventional me.

Or to refine that point – the most interesting parts of me get greatly amplified when these beings/patterns/mental states/trances/illusions/truths/insert-your-own-metaphyiscal-term start loitering around my bodymind.

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Odin has a Light Sabre

This article was written a few years ago… so my views have probably evolved since then.

–

I recently had a strange insight into the profundity of the first three Star Wars films (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). They have some deep parallels with the Heathen mythos, and some truly special psychological insights about the paths of Tyr/Teiwaz, and more especially, of Odin/Wodan. Then Othrerir roared, and out came this essay. I ask readers who are sceptical of the substance of the Stars Wars trilogy to consider this essay before they dismiss it for superficial reasons.

I will not comment on the new Star Wars films because 1) the third doesn’t exist yet; 2) I’m note sure that there is anything profound in them. And as a final note of slightly indulgent clarification, when I use words like ‘human’ below, the reader should infer that I mean all of the sentient alien species in the Star Wars films, not just the humans specifically.

At the end of The Return of the Jedi (which I will refer to as Return from here on in), Luke Skywalker, the Jedi knight, finds himself confronting his dark Jedi father (Darth Vader) and Vader’s malignant master, Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine tries to defeat Luke by exhorting him to “give into the hate” that dwells within him. Here we see the fundamental conflict of the Odinnic magician, of the child of Wodanaz. The struggle for Jedi (magicians) like Luke and his father is to find equilibrium between light and darkness, between Asgard and Hel. Each has an important place in the whole, but when one dominates disaster results.

The Jedi or magician struggles to resist the impulse to give into the hate. They feel keenly their own power and strength, and it is easy to forget that this strength has only come because they have surrendered their ego to The Force (the fundamental life energy of the universe that underpins the metaphysics of the Star Wars films). They risk beginning to feel that they have some innate power, and this is when the darkness, the hate, threatens to overwhelm everything and bring disaster upon the Jedi’s head.

Hate stems from fear and objectification. When the Jedi (or magician) denies that her power flows from The Force (or wyrd, or the Way), they are denying the fundamental subjectivity of the universe, treating it as dead matter onto which they may impose their will. Compounding the danger of falling into this attitude is the fact that the Jedi IS powerful, and so they feel that they have external or objective evidence of their personal greatness whenever they successfully act with purpose.

The Jedi, in their attempt to avoid the trap of being consumed in hatred and egotism, must not repress the darkness. Either they will go mad, or else it will grow out of all proportion and overwhelm them, turning them into a cancerous monster. They will become a beast, become even less than a Jedi that chooses to be totally consumed by hatred. All hope of redemption is then gone.

They must not indulge the darkness within, but they do have a responsibility to use it. They must turn it towards positive ends. They must use their resources as the outsider, the killer, the critic, the artist, the mystic, to contribute to higher ends – to help bring about a less tormented world, to help heal it. They can use the strength and independence that their darkness can  give them both to combat those who have indulged it (though they must have care, as the magnitude of Luke’s temptation shows), and to destabilise trends around them that are causing or allowing injustice or needless suffering. An incredible amount of art and creation, things that enrich so many lives, stems from the transformation of darkness into beauty. I am not criticising darkness, I am criticising those who abuse it.

On the surface, the ‘light side’ of The Force is much weaker than the ‘dark side’. This is for two reasons. One, it is non-linear – it is diffuse, it works in subtle ways throughout the whole fabric of the world. Two, the dark side is bound up with egotism – it is concentrated densely within the dark Jedi’s personality. The upshot is that in most situations the dark Jedi is able to bring more power to bear more rapidly than the light Jedi. He is more responsive in crisis situations. This is part of why the Jedi must learn to become comfortable and at peace with his darkness – it has its place and is valuable, so long as it is not allowed to rule.

Regardless, the light side is infinitely more powerful, because the Jedi who works with the light becomes a conduit for all of Being. They become a vortex of creativity and life, and in the moments when they is able to move with the tide of the world, they move with the momentum of the universe. The dark Jedi, conversely, must expend endless energy forcing circumstances, twisting patterns, manipulating, maintaining a constant sense of drama and crisis. They can never relax, because their power can only manifest when brought to bear on resistance – difficult circumstances, enemies, etc. And because they can feed only on their own energy, on their victims, and on the negative energy generated by the conflicts they orchestrate, they end up burning away into a hollow, monstrous shell. They become a living draug, a walking corpse. A sociopath.

When we follow Luke through from Star Wars through to Return of the Jedi, we see how he evolves, and we see the critical impact that other archetypes have on his own Odinnic one. He is raised as a farm boy, in touch with natural cycles, and raised in a spirit of humanism and passion. This sets him on the right path, and we must acknowledge that dark Jedi may have had a very big handicap in early life, though not always (some are just self-indulgent brats).

And yet his passion, which wells from the dark of the unconscious, makes him dissatisfied with his simple Vanic life (the Vanir are the Heathen nature and agriculture gods). This is the curse of the Aesir (the Heathen gods of nobility, magic, art, and war). Luke was raised by his uncle, a very Vanic man, they struggle constantly. Luke’s uncle is perpetually worried about Luke because he sees the trouble and suffering that this same passion brought Luke’s father, Darth Vader. This is an example of ancestral orlog, the process by which each generation must assume responsibility for retaking the tests failed by the previous one (orlog is a Norse word meaning ‘primal layers’ and refers to the past as a force that pushes the present towards a partly determined future).

Luke’s uncle does not understand the passion that Luke and his father share, and believes that he can keep Luke safe by stifling, dismissing and ignoring Luke’s sense of adventure and lust for mystery. This actually intensifies Luke’s tendencies, and also makes him idealise the only person he knows who allows a place for this aspect of his personality – Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Kenobi is a light Jedi, and his archetype is Tyr/Teiwaz, not Odinn/Wodan. He was Darth Vader’s master, but he failed to help Vader find equilibrium between darkness and light because he could not understand just how powerful the darkness is.

Although Kenobi is easily capable of killing, and is pragmatic about the means he uses to achieve his ends, his ‘dark’ acts are not motivated by passion or desire. Rather, he commits them because he accepts the flow of wyrd (a concept from Heathen belief similar to The Force). He has enough faith in wyrd that he does not question or argue with the courses of action that are Needful for the success of his quest to help promote empathy and equilibrium in the world.

Therefore, Kenobi does not struggle with the dark as Luke does. He is a child of Teiwaz, he has utterly offered himself to the Force as an agent for healing (of course sometimes healing requires the controlled destructiveness of the rune Kenaz, hence Kenobi’s warrior aspect). His burden is that he is doomed to self-sacrifice and will never truly know the rewards of his right action. In contrast, those who are Odinic must struggle endlessly with tides of shadow that threaten to drown them and turn them into the very monsters they fear and despise.

In the first film, Kenobi helps his friends escape from the Death Star by willingly going into battle with Darth Vader, despite knowing that he will be killed. He is comfortable with sacrificing himself for the good of his friends and for the bigger picture.

And yet he empathises with Luke’s hot-headedness, and sees that if it is repressed it will still manifest in the long run, but twisted and hideous. He has learned from his mistake with Vader, and so eases Luke into the Jedi path. Although he can see that potentially Luke may become an even worse agent of hatred and suffering than Vader, he has faith in wyrd, The Force, in The Way, and is willing to take his chances in mentoring Luke. He realises that to not try is to fail, and moreso, it is to fail to take responsibility for the need that he has been called on to fulfil. The way of Tyr/Teiwaz is the path of absolute responsibility, whereas the Odinic/Wodennic Jedi (e.g. Luke or Vader) must work hard to resist abandoning the path of right action and falling into hatred, into rampant, uncaring darkness.

To be absorbed by the dark of ego is to refuse to take responsibility for one’s own capacity to destroy and bring suffering. It is to refuse to take responsibility for the innate empathic bond with others and with Nature that all people must accept and move with. Hatred, therefore, is cowardice. It is for this reason that racism, elitism, sexism, homophobia, totalitarianism, etc, are contemptible. People with these attitudes pride themselves on being more powerful or better than those they victimise or demonise. But in truth they are the weakest of the lot, because they lack the strength of character to acknowledge even the most basic essence of being human – empathy.

Because of his total openness to the world, Obi-Wan Kenobi does not truly die when he is slain, but lives on as a spirit and guide to those he loves. Dark side egotism tries to live forever by seizing up and sealing itself from the world. Ironically it is Kenobi’s embracing of totality and surrendering of ego that lets him live on.

Luke is bonded to his friends Han Solo and Princess Leia through trust, empathy and love. He understands their flaws, and vice versa, but is able to love them anyway. They may not be able to understand the conflicts and responsibility that his nature entails, but they have faith in him and love him for his compassion and his determination. They also help to counterpoint his self-indulgence, bringing him back to earth when he becomes too lost in the ego-dangers of mysticism (the atheist Han especially plays this role).

Luke also helps his friends to have faith in themselves and find themselves – for this is the kind of healing that Wodanaz may bring. He helps Han take responsibility for his own life and begin working for the Rebellion to help create the chance for a society based on compassion and empathy. He helps Leia to have faith in her role as a leader, somebody who brings out the best in others. They help each other to come to terms with their conflicted and pain-riddled childhood. As it turns out, Luke really IS the brother that Leia never knew she had.

Luke’s next teacher is Yoda, who long ago attained equilibrium between light and dark, but who then chose to become a hermit. When we meet first meet him we find that he has gone into solitude so that he might maintain his stability until he is again needed.. For him, there is none of the false pretence of ‘try’, which really reflects insecurity and the low self-esteem that leads to the grating parade of egotism. There is merely do or not do. He is totally comfortable with the responsibility that he bears to all things, and therefore when there is Need for action, he acts. At first this mystifies Luke, whose lack of self-belief clouds his judgment and his connection to The Force.

The critical moment of Luke’s training with Yoda is when he goes into the dark valley. Yoda tells him that the only thing in this valley of darkness is “what you take with you”. In youthful ego and fear, Luke straps on his lightsabre and other weapons and heads into the dark.

There he confronts an imaginary Darth Vader. They fight and Luke beheads his foe. To his horror, the imaginary Vader’s helmet flies off to reveal that it is actually Luke. This is an important lesson for Luke – it forces him to confront his own darkness and realise that if he does not take responsibility for it and use it for the benefit of the whole he will become what he fears and despises. It also teaches him that he cannot indulge the temptation of objectifying his enemies, of reducing the world to simple dichotomies of good and evil. He must learn to empathise with everything, even those things that he hates and fears, if he is to avoid becoming those things.

Luke’s response to these revelations is something of a classic. Soon after the battle with his dark self in the valley, his enhanced clairvoyance reveals that Han, Leia and their friends are travelling to the Cloud City of Bespin, seeking refuge from Darth Vader and his Imperial space fleet. Luke realises that Vader is one step ahead, that his friends will be betrayed, and that Han will be turned over to his old enemy, Jabba the Hutt. Although Yoda warns him that his presence will not help and that he is not yet ready to face Vader, Luke attempts to take on TOO MUCH responsibility too soon, adopting a Tyrric role that he, as Odinic, cannot truly see through. If you pay careful attention to these parts of the film, you will notice that his arrival at Bespin does not contribute to his friends escape (they do it of their own initiative), and Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and shipped off to the court of his revenge-hungry foe.

Instread, Luke battles Darth Vader, who manipulates him into doubting both Obi-Wan Kenobi’s honesty and his own worth, before humiliating Luke in battle. Vader tries to corrupt Luke into joining forces with him, into making the same mistake that Vader did. Thus Vader becomes a direct agent of his own corrupted orlog, trying to propagate it in his son through unfulfillable offers of love. This dynamic is similar to an addict trying to encourage others to use drugs. In his sense of loss and betrayal, Luke reacts by denying Vader, who in anger severs Luke’s hand and leaves him for dead. The parallel with Tyr sacrificing his hand to Fenris in an ultimately futile attempt to save the Aesir from Ragnarok (the death of the gods) is clear.

Again it is the love and empathy of his friends that saves Luke after this disastrous initiation. Although this mainly occurs off-screen (between the second and third films), it is implied in the closing scene of The Empire Strikes Back (the second film). There we see a recovering Luke holding hands with Leia as their star ship flies away with the still-determined tatters of the Rebel Alliance to fight another day.

We then find ourselves at the beginning of the third film, Return of the Jedi. In the opening, Luke works to save Han Solo. By this stage he is almost totally in equilibrium with dark and light. He plays the role of Woden as wanderer and manipulator to gain entry to Jabba’s court, and becomes the catalyst for the rescue of his friends – Han, Leia, Lando Calrissian, Chewbacca, and the droids. He also pays back with blood the debt owed to Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who helped Vader capture Han and who took Han back to Jabba.

Although the Rebellion needs him to assist in battling the new Death Star, Luke realises he has yet to fully let go of his fear and egotism. He returns to Yoda, who before passing away tells him his last test is to kill Vader. Luke thinks that Yoda means that if he cannot murder Vader then he will never come to terms with his darkness and find equilibrium. In fact the test that Yoda foresees is that if Luke DOES kill his father then he will fail and be consume by hate. This is the dreadful manipulation that the Emperor tries on Luke when he and Vader fight as the battle over the Death Star rages at the end of Return.

When Luke confronts Vader and the Emperor, the Emperor sense Luke’s darkness, that he is not yet at peace with it, and tries to make him commit to hatred. If Luke were to slay his father in anger, then there would be no turning back, and the Emperor sees that he has even more ‘potential’ than Vader.

Vader has been so consumed by hate and ego that be has become more machine than man, “twisted and evil” as Kenobi describes him. The Emperor, the darkest of the lot, is not exactly an image of vitality, wholeness or happiness either.

As Luke and Vader duel, it becomes clear that Luke’s hatred is more overwhelming than Darth Vader’s, who finds himself in an emotional conflict because the fragment of light still left in him empathises with his son’s struggle. He cannot truly bring himself to slay his own son, and in a curious reversal, it is now Luke who severs Vader’s hand. Luke prepares himself for the killing blow, but empathy returns. When he sees how helpless and wounded he has made Vader he throws his weapon aside. With this act, he lets go of the hatred, the egotism. He ceases letting it have a chance to dominate him. He allows it no more than its rightful due, and would rather be killed by the Emperor than compromise. This is a mighty evolution of the Skywalker family’s orlog, for the son has overcome the temptation that consumed the father and, as I am about to discuss, this act also helps the father to atone for his own failure.

As the Emperor slowly kills Luke with his lightning hands, Vader in turn recovers his empathy. For the first time the awful consequences of indulging the dark side of the force are revealed to him in a way that he can permit himself to empathise with – in the attempted murder of his son. Inspired by the example that Luke has set by sparing him, Vader finally take responsibility for his actions and for his own darkness. With his final strength, he hurls the Emperor off a precipice, turning his capacity for darkness and destruction to a good end. Father and son lay together, exhausted and hurting, but finally whole and finally able to love one another. Soon after Vader dies, but he is reborn as Kenobi and Yoda were. With his final breath he lets go of the leaden burden of egotistical hatred. He becomes a son of Wodanaz who is able to find equilibrium and take responsibility for the empathic duty that rests on the shoulders of all human beings – love.

Luke is left to continue the ancestral path of the family of Jedi, a family bonded sometimes by blood, but more generally by common experience, harmonised (though sometimes different) perspectives, empathy, and fellowship. Interestingly, some semi-official written ‘sequel’s to the films have Luke later succumb to the darkness, and this is an important message. ‘Enlightenment’ is not forever, equilibrium is a responsibility to maintain, and initiations are not final. One must undergo initiations again and again in the process of growth, for an initiation is not just a ceremony (though ceremonies can be used to cause initiatory experiences). An initiation is some kind of challenging or traumatic life experience that helps you let go of repression and delusion and opens you to the central core of things that matter.

Hopefully by now my reader can see why I believe that the first three Star Wars films are essentially as profound as any mythology, be it Heathen or otherwise.

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