Thor

Thor Says: “Let Go!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hail Thor!

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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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Thor Says: Invoke With Laughter

Donovan and I celebrated a truly marvellous Thorrablot yesterday. One of the most brilliant ritual experiences I’ve ever had – we’re on such a strong shared wavelength and what an honour it is to know him.

I arose early. I packed a delicious organic lunch of red beans in pasta/tomato sauce, chopped carrot, almonds, and sauerkraut. We ended up mixing these together with surprisingly delicious results when lunch time arrived.

I drove out to Donovan’s place. That morning, suddenly inspired, he had made a beautifully carved Mjolnir from wood, a hefty hammer, an offering for us to give. Armed with mead and drinking horn, we drove to a National Park by the sea.

We spent the drive talking about our hopes, desires, lives, people we know; about our creative, health, spiritual, hobby, and financial goals.

We walked for an hour or more through exquisite forest, over dizzying ocean cliffs, the sea vast and majestic, the trees all wise and all wit.

We came to our secret location, a gigantic flat rock which perches, secluded and stolidly precarious, on the cliff face, overlooking vast ocean vistas. How to find this rock? The almost-hidden trail is marked from the main path by two trees which, if seen from the correct angle, one behind the other, form an Elhaz stave shape. Elhaz: perhaps it invokes the sacred space which is open and closed all at once.

We meditated, bare feet; let the distant, epic sea song wash away our petty conscious thoughts. We knew what we wanted this ritual to be from our conversations in car and forest. To invite Thor to help us renew the momentum of spirit in our lives, to drive out the frosty barbs of negativity and boredom and renew the membrane of magic. We let this hope flow through our beings, through the rocks, the trees, the clouds, the sea.

When it felt right the ritual began, in such a way that we scarcely even noticed that we were in it. We joked and played, laughing (with compassion) about the stiffness and artificiality that some folk fall into on ceremonial occasions – so anxious to get it “right” that they cramp up and lose the spirit of the thing. Not us; we called and hollered, half serious, half in parody, but we could feel that our deities were warmly inclined to our spirit of joy.

I sang and screeched and howled and Donovan roared. We told snappy tales about Thor’s many fine qualities, of his travelling companions, of our desire to uncover the magic in our lives that makes us joyous even amid the imperfect drudgery that seems always ready to swamp our days.

Three brilliant phrases emerged as we seethed and celebrated.

Wyrd trumps Will

This gem came to me in my meditation. I have in the past (and well after I should have known better) had this idea that if I fill myself with enough magic then with my power-bloated ego I can blast the hard things in my life into halcyon dream-perfection. Clearly a notion that can lead to disappointment!

What crystallised as I meditated was something I’ve explored several times recently with brilliant people in my life – that we don’t get to live a richly magical, spirited life only after we’ve cleared away all the sources of drudge and struggle.

No, the best way is to call on the magic in the midst of life’s hard work, to have the courage and creativity and humour to find magic even amidst the awesome mundanity of dealing with the ignorant, foolish, and petty (at some level that means all of us); in dealing with the unrelenting challenges of work and money and stale repetition and I-never-have-enough-time.

So go with wyrd, don’t try to fill your will up with numinous force, you’ll just waste it in exhausting struggle. Instead work with wind, tide, and wit. Cut with the grain, dance when you are tempted to stomp grumpily. Empty yourself and you cannot be drained – be a conduit, there’s an endless supply of magic that just desperately wants to be tapped into idiosyncratic human channels. It might or might not produce what you think you need, but there is a good chance it will produce what you actually need. Let yourself be curious. Radically curious. Let yourself be bewildered and surprised.

Then in our ritual playfulness a second phrase emerged.

Invoke with Laughter

Chaos magicians tend to think that laughter is the best way to banish magical moments, spirits, spells, states of mind, anything. Yet in certain senses (not all) this could actually be a very dry, grey, boring, ugly idea. Could it potentially imply that magic has to be pompous, serious, over-stuffed, strained, redundantly effortful – in a word, insincere, in a word, dishonest – in order to be summoned? What an awful notion seems to potentially coil implicit in the notion of banish with laughter!

We, on the other hand, we invoked with laughter. We joked about ourselves, people we know, about our gods, and they joked with us and on us, and it was exquisite. Cascading joy flooded the mounting force of our ritual, which had no distinct beginning but just came into tide when it wanted, as we gave it space to do so (a nice example of wyrd trumps will in action). And Thor is one of the most mirthful figures I can think of, a truly joyous force in the world: who better to call with hilarity?

We talked about Thurisaz, its recent recurring wyrd appearances in Donovan’s life. We agreed that we like this rune, with its scary reputation and its heart of gold. Thurisaz is like Hagalaz or Nauthiz – it invites a reality check and people are afraid of that and avoid – to their cost, or more accurately, to their loss.

And Laguz kept appearing in syncronicitous ways throughout the day, the sea rune, the rune of hidden riches and mystery! Of terror, and fury, and utter confusion, and yet also of “silk and gold and reveries of graciousness” (Nietzsche).

And goats! Thor has a close connection to goats. We celebrated how knowing, collected, assured, adaptable, tricky, durable, flexible, and just plain weird goats are. Nobody messes with Goat. Goat is low key. Goat doesn’t gab his mouth when he should be silent. Goat doesn’t give away his full abilities, doesn’t show his hand out of narcissism or insecurity. Goat keeps it real. Goat is permanently, impeccably unflappable. Goat keeps the magic of its membrane in flourishing order. Goat knows that horns are to be worn, not goofily tooted. What a truly awesome role model.

Ritual, not Routine

Then the third phrase came, and it was a verbal crack of thunder as it sprang from Donovan’s lips: Ritual, not Routine. Yes! Let’s not have lives of routine: numb, stupid, clanking, ornery, dogmatic. Repetition can also be playful, flowing, artful, even creative. It can have rhythm and flow and wit. We can move through all the “must do this” tasks of life with hang-dog heads, or with halos of fire and supple limbs (in a casual/subtle/low key way if you want of course).

It’s all in how you let yourself attach meaning to the things that unfold. Change the meaning, change yourself…well, who knows what sort of brilliant consequences that might have (you might not even notice them)?

Ritual, not Routine applies literally to the art of doing ritual observance – and we were doing ritual, not empty rote motions! It was sacred play. And this goes beyond into all of life. The whole of life is potentially a ritual: improvised, filled with joy, serendipity, learning, healing, growth, courage, and patience in the face of challenge. We forget this at our peril, falling into the factory farm of our own dullness. Yet it takes so little to stay – in the dance, in the joyous.

“Love life” is not an item to be checked off on some to-do list, some roster of accomplishments. And it has nothing to do with the arbitrary turning of events. In this we aligned ourselves with a tradition that stretches from Lao Tzu (and earlier) to Cicero and even to Nietzsche, yet without any self-consciousness or reflective pomposity: that to love this life is wonder, is its own reward, is nourishment complete. That we find love for life when we give love, not when we churlishly try to force life into the shape that we ignorantly think is best for us. After all, in an infinitely complex universe, who can really be sure of what is best for them anyway?

And to those who disapprove of our light feet: perhaps you need a dose of Nietzsche’s fröhliche wissenschaft, his gay science, his dancing seriousness and courageous frivolity. Being ponderous and heavy has nothing to do with being profound. Let yourself embrace the vulnerability and power of dedication and play admixed!

We drank toasts of delicious mead, charged with lashings of chanted Thurisaz runes. We laughed and prayed and affirmed and quaffed. We drenched the hammer and offered it up, our sacrifice. We splashed mead on rock, tree, sky, sea, cloud, every hidden delight of that sacred place. We offered our gratitude liberally.

We ate our lunch happily. We talked to spirits of stone and wood on our walk back through the forest, the mead sending us into buoyant clairvoyance and exuberant inspiration.

We talked and ate into the night, and sang, and played music, and warmed ourselves in the glow of family and dogs and the full moon, and laughed at the limp literalism that sometimes haunts folk that call themselves Heathens, and marvelled at the privilege we’ve been given to flow so easily into the spirit of things (and vice versa).

And I have to re-emphasise – nothing said here takes away the reality of the challenge and difficulty that life presents. If we try to force spirituality into being a magic bullet for the ease of our burdens then chances are good it will not long tolerate our presumptuousness, our pandering to our ego’s fear of suffering (which is not a trivial thing, but nonetheless which need not be made the maxim of our actions).

The trick might be to get beyond the mole-vision of bean-counting one’s entire life into allotments of effort (lots) and ease (never enough). There is no guarantee that any of us will see out our journey in the way we’d consciously most prefer, but with our eyes fixed on the horizon (and not on our feet) our chances are that much improved, and the toil of the path might be somewhat lessened (and if not then so be it – we are here to learn, so let’s not miss whatever opportunities we are given).

All such caveats aside, I want to express my profound gratitude for these fine gifts, these three principles of religious/magical/cultural practice…and for living life, too:

Wyrd trumps Will
Invoke with Laughter
Ritual, not Routine

I pray I remember, and keep living out my remembrance, of these terrible, wonderful thoughts.

Hail Thor!

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