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

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

Laguz light the way!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

777  times the Norns I call.

Of the ten percent of magic that might actually work, ninety percent of that isn’t really supernatural at all. At least ninety percent of practical magic is made up of stuff that could easily be explained by logic, science or common sense – but which is not widely known only because it is unpleasant or taboo.

Occult and esoteric both mean “secret” or “hidden”. Remember that.

Of the ten percent of magic that might actually work, only about ten percent of that (about one percent of all occult knowledge) is actually made up of the genuinely very strange and inexplicable.

There are things about the universe that we don’t know and there do seem to be forces that we can’t explain. Anybody who tries to tell you that they’ve never experienced anything genuinely spooky is either lying or has an extremely closed mind.

On the other hand, anybody that tries to tell you that they can explain the unexplainable is generally full of shit and should be treated with extreme caution. This is where the ninety percent bullshit in magic (and religion) comes from. It’s a combination of outright fraud, willful self deception and half assed attempts to explain and control things that nobody really understands – yet.

A real magician, like a real philosopher, knows what he doesn’t know and isn’t afraid to admit it.

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!

Consider participation mystique, a term coined by anthropologist Lucien Levy-Brühl and used extensively by Carl Jung. In such a state, our beliefs and the objects of our beliefs are experienced as one undifferentiated mass. Thus, for example, we can experience an inanimate object (or even living things like trees and animals) as having intentions, feelings, thoughts, spirit, and other qualities of consciousness.

This stands in contrast to what some would call anthropomorphism, thus revealing their allegiance to nihilism, which I will discuss shortly. In participation mystique correspondence is identity; there are no symbols, only literalism.

This mode of relationship enables us to experience the living magic of the cosmos (for surely participation mystique is a vehicle for the riches of imagination), but it also enables some very backward and hackneyed thinking, for example paranoia, denial, and superstition. The world is mystical, but if we are immersed without reflection in that world then we can get into trouble. For we then lack perspective on the sense or otherwise of our beliefs and deeds.

At the other extreme from “primitive” mysticism we have modern nihilism: when all our attributions, projections, and beliefs are radically withdrawn from the world around us, are seen purely as products of our isolated consciousness. Consequently we risk experiencing nothing as satisfying, comforting, joyous, or meaningful. Participation mystique enables the very possibility of communication, by conjuring for us a “theory of mind for the Other” and therefore implying the existence of relationships. That possibility is lost in nihilism, which is stuck in an endless, narcissistic, self-examining regress.

Nonetheless, great self-understanding and insight can come from the reflectiveness of nihilism. Once we withdraw our raw and undifferentiated acceptance of our experience of the world, we can develop subtle perception and deep appreciation of complexity. We can assess the implications of our thoughts and deeds, evaluate them, and refine them.

So if the supposedly premodern consciousness of participation mystique has reverence but not sense; and if the supposedly modern consciousness of nihilism has insight but wallows in the despair of abstraction, what are we to do?

Contra Levy-Brühl, who saw participation mystique as being culturally “primitive,” I do not believe that these two modes of consciousness are mutually exclusive. Rather, throughout history their symbiosis ebbs and flows in complementary tides. They exist in each of us, all the time, and weave around one another in complex and subtle patterns. Both can be active in a single belief or action, engaging together like multifaceted computer programs interfacing over the Internet; like two chess masters of equal ability but totally opposed styles and methods; like Odin’s ravens Thought (nihilism) and Memory (mysticism).

Participation mystique invariably collapses. Either its own irrationality causes it to dismantle (consider the Protestant Reformation of an insane Catholic church); or it is so absorbed in the “world of its concern” (c.f. Martin Heidegger’s work) that it cannot cope with a sudden dramatic change of game (as happened to many indigenous cultures when European invaders turned up with guns, grog, and the Cross). Eve always ends up eating the apple and, though it can be unpleasant, the fall into ego consciousness is a necessary potentiality on the horizon of sacred oneness.

The Faustian fall into the clutches of the Devil’s isolated ego leads to a different kind of disaster than those which haunt participation mystique. Once we forget that our actions have consequences in the causal web that binds everything together, we begin to do incredibly stupid things. For example, burn dangerous quantities of fossil fuels, or base our society on disposability, unsustainably exponential “growth,” and other illusions. We layer abstractions upon abstractions, until stratospherically arbitrary conventions such as legality and economics conjure plenty in the midst of poverty…and, as we have seen so keenly in recent years, poverty in the midst of plenty.

Nonetheless, with the self-reflection of nihilism we are afforded an opportunity to, as Jung would say, withdraw our projections from the world. We can begin to recognize that our emotions, attributions, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings about the world are distinct from the objects in the world to which they pertain.

This is not dissimilar to what Edmund Husserl called the phenomenological turn. He correctly intuited a strong streak of participation mystique, of absorption in objects without reflection, in all the sciences (it continues today). In response, he called for a phenomenological revolution – to go “back to the things themselves” – to the projections which are the meat of all human experience.

A simple example: we all have an intuitive idea of what this “life” thing is that biology studies, and that intuition implicitly guides the very shape of all biological study. But try to draw out that intuition into a clear, explicit statement that doesn’t, in some fashion, already presuppose the shape of the field of study! Not so easy to do, least of all if you are a biologist. Husserl warned that often our implicit understandings quietly but fatefully determine the way we experience and interpret reality. Modern research on cognitive bias – on the dangers of the tendency thumbnailed by Robert Anton Wilson as “the prover proves what the thinker thinks” – is a powerful, if somewhat narrow, contemporary scientific exploration of this problem.

So Husserl invokes this turn, away from the world, to the phenomena themselves. In the process he puts the question of reality “as such,” “in truth,” aside. Which is in a sense nihilistic (or at least a kind of epistemological agnosticism). Yet it allows us to clarify how our unconscious beliefs frame and occlude the experiences we have. This in turn opens us, enables us to experience reality with a lot more open-mindedness, wonder, curiosity, acceptance, and equanimity. At least, it does if we set it to good use and do not allow it to become a hall of mirrors ala postmodern philosophy (which indeed partly emerged as a critical successor to Husserl’s ideas).

If we do not stop at a narrow and cramped state of nihilism (withdrawal of meaning from the world into the perceiver), but instead use that state to clarify how we relate to the world, then we find ourselves drawn, as Husserl was, to appreciate both the Forest and the Trees. Thus instead of being stuck with only mysticism, or only nihilism, we are given the gift of a bigger picture and a rapprochement of what seemed at first to be fundamentally irreconcilable kinds of consciousness.

For Jung, this all has a psychological dimension. Psychological well-being is achieved once we have systematically withdrawn all our projections from the world, grasped them as projections, as objects themselves (“to the things themselves!” we again hear Husserl cry).

This gradually enables us to see how our experience is shaped by our expectations, habits, and unconscious beliefs. Through this process we come to realize that it is not the world, not events, not other people that make us happy or unhappy, but rather our ability to achieve peace within ourselves; we become less dependent on the arbitrary whims of fate in order to feel whole. Of course, we then have to reintegrate ourselves so that the breach of psyche and cosmos is resolved into a new, far more robust relationship between mind and world.

(This is not to say that life events of a negative character somehow magically “shouldn’t” have a traumatic consequence, but to rather say that the person who achieves something close to Jung’s ideal of individuation is able to accept, cope with, and resolve negative situations more effectively and with less suffering).

Jung saw this process of withdrawal and rebirth in the symbolism of alchemy. He felt that the alchemists – sometimes purposefully, sometimes instinctively – used the state of participation mystique as a framework within which to experience their psychological withdrawal, transformation, and reintegration. Their medium? The myth-laden operations of their paraphernalia. Here we see the brilliance of alchemy: it distills the best of nihilistic, detached consciousness by establishing it within an environment of mystical literalism!

(Psychotherapy is almost identical, except that it substitutes the temenos of the therapeutic relationship for the retorts, alembics, and chemicals of the pseudo-scientist. The analogy was certainly not lost on Jung).

So: we begin by being immersed uncritically in the world, unable to separate our consciousness, our emotions and beliefs, from that which is around us – other people, other places, other things. Then we separate and become self-conscious – we detach ourselves from the world around in order to come to self-awareness. Finally we reintegrate, so that our newfound perspective serves to open and enrich our experience, while imparting a fresh sense of inner wholeness.

In this way we can enjoy the mystical sense of all existence as a sacred and interconnected whole without the blinders that we suffered prior to our quest for self-awareness. And naturally this is actually a recurring cycle, without alpha or omega.

The three stage model (withdrawal, transformation, reintegration) can be seen in the three stages of alchemy. We begin with the Prima Materia, the raw stuff to which we apply our Art. Then we enter stage one, nigredo: blackness, death – the detachment of self from world. Our gestation produces stage two, albedo: whiteness, in which we are transformed until we are pristine, unsullied by the world; but also isolated, disconnected. Finally comes stage three, the rubedo: reddening, where our pristine nature is redeemed to the world, and vice versa. Thus the lead becomes gold.

It is significant in this connection that Mercurius, the arch-patron of alchemy, is both Prima Materia and the Philosopher’s Stone; that is, he is both lead and gold. We begin with the lead, we finish with the gold, but Mercurius shows them to be the one thing. We complete our alchemical or psychological journey back where we started…yet at the same time everything is totally different. In this sense, alchemy depicts a spiral movement: our circular orbits nevertheless also describe an ascending path, with the Self or the Stone as the axis of the spiral. The same holds for any sound process of spiritual or psychological development.

The Philosopher’s Stone, the goal of alchemy, is that which is wrested from the chaos of the world, refined in isolation, and then reintegrated with the world from which it was wrenched. In a sense, this psychological redemption touches all of objective reality, for they are one even as they are distinct.

It is from Jung that I draw the analogy of the Self to the Stone – snatched from the blindness of naive projection, refined in the isolating reflection of the therapy room (or other life experiences), and then returning to the world in such a way that it is connected with, but no longer dissolved into, everything around it. It no longer needs to attack or defend or justify itself or anything of the sort. It is its own singular foundation and yet simultaneously utterly integrated and one with the universe as a whole.

I had a vision tonight. Woden appeared to me younger than he ever has – no beard, and two eyes. He led me through a forest to a clearing. In the clearing was a phoenix (a symbol of the Philosopher’s Stone, of the goal of psycho-spiritual wholeness and perfection).

Woden explained that it is a mistake to think the phoenix dies and is reborn. Rather, he said, if you look closely you can see an almost invisible membrane around it: its egg. The phoenix can expand and contract this membrane at will. When its egg is expanded it contains the whole universe, and thus we perceive the phoenix and think it alive. But when needs be, the phoenix can contract the egg until the bird is tightly enclosed. Then it seems to us to have disappeared, to have died, only to be “reborn” when the phoenix is ready to “participate mystically” through projection once again, which is to say, only when it again expands its membrane to encompass the world around.

This is the model which Woden, in his almost Mercurial form, encouraged me to pursue psychologically and spiritually. The eternal phoenix, neither born nor unborn, in the world, loving the world, but not owned by the world. Shamanistic but not superstitious; realistic but not cynical.

That the three-part process of withdrawal – transformation – reintegration is common in premodern cultural imagery suggests that participation mystique was never as absolute as Levy-Brühl proposes; otherwise it would never have been posed as a problem or questioned at all. That the three-fold process here discussed is so resonant even in modern times suggests that nihilism does not hold total sway even in this, its ascendant age. We can have hope.

Yet none of the foregoing means anything if we do not act on our hope. Learn to meditate. Keep a journal. Get psychotherapy. Join a community of like minded seekers. Reflect. Pray. Make art. Find the divine in small things and hidden places. Be your own inner alchemist. This is the purpose for which we have been made.

For when we invert the alchemical way – when we run things inside out and try to observe participation mystique within a cocoon of nihilism – then we expose ourselves to danger. For then we reduce ourselves to mere armchair practice; to being talkers and not doers. Although we may sound like we have undertaken the necessary work, the truth is we are just making ourselves vulnerable to the worst aspects of both mysticism and nihilism, under the spell of for our laziness, fear, hurt, arrogance, self-hatred, and all the rest. We might even make ourselves worse off than when we began, for we risk flagrant hypocrisy as well. Alchemy was considered a dangerous art, and these are some of the pitfalls of proceeding incorrectly.

I have made such mistakes too readily in my life. Now is the time, now is always the time, to undo the ills of armchair “wisdom” and roll up my sleeves. Join me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if there was ever anything worthy of being called the One True God, then the Living Universe would be it.

And if the entire universe is alive and everything is interconnected and we call that God; then that means that we are inside of God and we are part of him/her/it!

Or, as a Hindu might put it – I am God and so are you!

Most people that have this realization seem to then somehow infer that this unity with God implies that we should unconditionally love everything and be kind to everyone. Hence the assertion “God is Love”.

I rebel against this notion consciously, intellectually and emotionally. Or, to put it another way, I think it’s a bunch of bullshit!

The fact that everything is interconnected does not imply that feeding your children will somehow fill my belly. What I do affects you and what you do affects me, but that does not actually mean that we are one and the same person. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours…and it’s going to stay that way until I decide to make what’s yours also mine.

So don’t try to give me any of that “what’s mine is yours” crap, because I’m not falling for it!

To continue with our previous metaphor…

If the entire universe is alive and everything is interconnected
and we call that God
and we realize that we are all one with God
and that God is Love
but then I reject that knowledge
and I insist on remaining separate and selfish
and I reserve the right to love, hate and discriminate as I will…
then I guess that I must be the Devil.

For what else could the Devil be, if not the individual self who rejects the unity of all?

Which I happen to think is really a pretty cool idea, actually, because it means that now I get to be God and the Devil!

And so do you! All you have to do is reject oneness and just be yourself. How awesome is that?

Man…if you thought realizing oneness with God was an ego boost, just wait ‘til you’ve tried being the Devil for a few days. It’s great. I’ve been at it for years and I can’t get enough of it!

Hail Chaos!
Viva Loki!
Aum Satan!

“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.

Fear often manifests for me in hesitation. Hesitate to phone someone. Hesitate to express my understanding without loading it first with childish “attitude.” Resistance to doing many tasks – stems from fear. Laziness and resentment are both also driven by fear. Resistance to being present, to negotiating complexity or interpersonal ambiguity – all rooted in fear, which is to say, impiety against Mystery and the Tree and the Well.

“Feel the fear but do it anyway” does not break out of the ego as a basic framework (a cage, if you will). This notion counsels that we accept the ego…but then force aside its resistance. But I just cannot sustainably or reliably win that. Even if I could, I could never relax, feel confident or secure. That was a big part of what fed/feeds anxiety in me: the knowledge that I am not enough to meet the challenges of life by myself.

Formerly I imagined that I needed to make myself equal to the challenge of life. I thought if I could just be hard enough on myself then I would force myself into the person I wanted to be. This did not work.

Then I thought that if I just obliterated my ego then what remained of me would become a vessel for the divine. Superhuman power would swiftly follow and thus I could become equal to the challenge of life (and equal to my ever skyrocketing standards). This also did not work.

The first approach failed because you cannot get something from nothing. Trying to force myself to be font and foundation of my own existence was futile, foolish, and impossible. It guaranteed failure in vicious cycles; I learned to think that if I punished myself more then maybe I’d get somewhere. Astride a horse carcass, I whipped and flayed with exponential urgency. I could not see my whip was only cutting my own flesh.

The second approach was better, I admit. But I became righteous and inflated by my knowledge of the need to embrace Mystery and the simultaneous oneness and difference of all things. I easily became complacent; my ego found ways to claim credit for achievements that my moments of reverence and surrender were responsible for. Eventually I realised that despite my supposedly advanced spirituality, supposed humility (in distinction to humiliation), supposed wisdom and dedication – I still suffered, flailed, became entangled in my own poison. I had finally found truth, but then proceeded to abuse it. Consequently: self punishment, suffering, self pity, pessimism. As before.

My new way I am only beginning to approach, to trace out and understand. It remains as yet a sketch and projection of possibility. Yet it seems to be the best option so far. It is to trust in the Divine and in my patron Wod (id est Mercurius). If I truly trust then I abandon my grandiose expectations of perfection, adolescent/egoistic wish fulfilment, self-obsession (other-obliviousness), overweening hypocrisy. If I truly trust then I hand over my fear. Not try to dominate it through force of will. Not try to obliterate it as part of the ego.

No. Just hand it over. Fear is an expression of lack of trust. So I will trust and accept that whatever happens is meant to be. Even if I don’t like it. Guess what? That’s real ego shedding. Being willing to be a flawed, finite mortal if that is my patron’s will (which it manifestly is, for I am human). I cannot defeat fear, but I can be willing to hand it away. If I trust my patron then I must hand over my fear. And thus transcend the binary madhouse of courage and cowardice altogether.

Fingers crossed.

This morning I find him in a forest, on the hunt. He is wild and laughing, gray beard wagging, spear keen for the flesh of boar. We walk briskly as he counsels me.

“There was a man who traveled far from home. One day he came to a village and decided to settle there. But he did not speak the language or know the culture, and so he had many difficulties. He could not communicate his needs, he unwittingly behaved in socially unacceptable ways, and in general earned himself a reputation for being obnoxious or stupid.

“But despite his early troubles and conflicts, he persevered. Gradually he came to understand the local customs. Gradually he came to understand the language. He came to be able to make his way in the village, to meet his needs and earn a place of respect and value in the community. Sometimes he would still slip or become confused, but these reversals became less and less. The villagers came in turn to realize that he was not churlish or foolish.”

This, he tells me, is the story of my life.

This morning I find myself outside the palisade that wards his hall. This is new, and I cannot seem to make it otherwise. The gate is locked. No one answers to my knocking. It is cold and dark in the predawn. Resigned, I set to clambering, haul myself with difficulty up over the timbers of the wall, carefully lift over the sharpened tops of the posts, then drop to the other side.

The courtyard is bare but for sheets of morning frost that crackle beneath my feet. I find the door to the hall. Smoke belches sullenly from near-spent fires, wafting from the building in desultory manner. The door creaks open at my touch.

Inside, the bodies of the einheriar are strewn about wildly. Laid low by drink and revelry, not battle. I recall that this is the 11th of November, a day of commemoration. Of course, therefore, they’ve had an especially big party last night. I pick my way through their sluggard forms, negotiate scattered furniture, feet scratching on hay-strewn floor.

There he is, sprawled, sleeping, on his throne. He has appeared in various forms to me recently, but today it is as his younger self, when he still had color in his beard; when he still had two eyes. One side of his mouth raises into a grin when he senses my approach.

“You again. Good that you’re here. We had some fun last night. More important, I have something to show you.”

He rises unsteadily from his repose, smells of sweat and swill. Shuffles across the floor, and I follow a safe distance behind. We come to a spiral of stone-cut stairs that drills down into the earth. He climbs down into the darkness and I follow.

The staircase winds in a wide radius. We descend, and descend, and descend into a vast chasm, totally black. It could be inside…or outside. There is no way of knowing. The stairs are wrapped around a massive column, its surface rough. I steady myself on it as I negotiate the treacherous stairs, and I realize that it is the trunk of a massive, almighty tree. I know which tree this is.

Our descent continues into infinity and darkness. Until our destination finds us. The staircase deposits us in a clearing in a forest. Even here, at the bottom of the great chasm, I cannot tell if I am inside or outside. Insects and birds make an eerie chorus.

In the center of the clearing he stands, leaning on his proverbial spear. And at the edge of the clearing I also see another of his clan, a warrior who stands, impassive, a tremendous horn slung over one shoulder as if ready to be blown in the face of the faintest glimmer of emergency.

Beside my guide there is a well, set in the heart of this grove. No, a spring, for it gently weeps liquid that pours out over the grass and soil and seeps down into the earth. The water has a strange clarity and motility. I know that it is living.

At his gesture I approach, stare at him from across the well. He dips a ladle into the waters.

“This water is the stuff of life. It is the essence of memory. Memory, the heart and meaning of all that is. This is the gushing source of time, and tide, history and anticipation. It heals all wounds. It can heal you. It can help you live in the present moment, in your own flesh, in your own breath. It can reveal to you the philosophical stone, the inner self inviolate, that none can harm or touch or weary. But you need to drink, and drink often, else, parched and lost, you’ll become isolated, dehydrated, lost in misery. You know this already.”

He raises the ladle to my lips. “What you need to know is this. Despite all your doubt, fear, resentment, distrust, hatred, pettiness, weakness, hypocrisy – I am always holding this ladle, filled with the waters of memory, to your lips. It is always there for you, a draught of memory perpetually hangs before your lips. You need but open your mouth and solace, healing, strength, hope are waiting for you. You are never alone.”

We stand there, the water before my open mouth. We both know the power of this message. For all beings are vessels for the flow of the waters. We live to give their irrepressible essence form and flushing life. The illusion of my isolation, my cold rejection and ejection from the world, is refuted by these waters. And here I stand, at their source, and he is telling me that the water is always right there for me to drink, no matter how determined I am to convince myself of my self-pitying separation.

When I open my eyes, finish my observances, I know that I have been given a powerful, powerful gift and reminder. One that must be renewed every day through prayer and dedication. Through reverence and memorialization of the sacred in all things. Through remembrance, all things are preserved in their beauty and immortality. Only the arbitrary, transient human consciousness forgets. Forgets, yes. But therefore, also: remembers.

My heart brims with shining water. I hail the lord of the hall that lies beyond. And I feel just the slightest intimation of knowing the essence of this and all days of remembrance, beyond even the ledgers of tragedy that fill the history books to bursting: Lest We Forget.