Monthly Archives: March 2018

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Audhumla, Wealth, and War

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The ancient Norse relied on cattle for wealth, and the creation myth reflects the understanding they had of sustenance and its origins. The proto-cow, Audhumla, is said to be one of the first living beings to come into existence after the worlds of Niflheim and Muspellheim began to collide with one another in the Ginnungagap. The other was Ymir, the progenitor of the Jotuns. While he was able to reproduce asexually, Audhumla’s milk sustained his life.

Audhumla, who sustained herself by feasting on the poisonous rime that no other creature could tolerate, acted as a catalyst that transformed poison into sustenance. While she could directly partake of the rime, Ymir could not. Yet, Ymir could drink her milk, which would have been a transmuted version of the rime she used to sustain herself.

This is interesting in the context of a culture who relied on cattle for wealth, as a person’s wealth depended on the number of cattle he owned rather than the number of treasures he counted amongst his possessions. The more cattle a person owned, the better his life would be, as he could sustain himself, his family, and potentially his community with the milk and meat the cows provided.

Audhumla, as the cow in the creation myth who helps bring the gods into existence, demonstrates the strong correlation between sustenance and wealth. The vitality of life is the greatest life that a person can receive, and her actions in the myth demonstrate that truth. She is the embodiment of the Fehu rune.

The poem for the (Icelandic) Fehu rune poem translates as “Source of discord among kinsmen /and the fire of the sea/ and path of the serpent” which has some pretty interesting implications.

Wealth as a source of discord amongst people cuts across all recorded history and through all cultures. Every culture, no matter how wealth is defined, struggles to maintain the power balance between those who have it and those who do not. Those struggles are amplified amongst family, which can be seen in the constant struggle between the Aesir and the Jotuns.

Ymir is unable to sustain his own life without taking sustenance from Audhumla. Buri, the first of the gods whom Audhumla reveals, may not need that sustenance from Audhumla, as the way he sustains his life (after being released from the ice) is never mentioned in the myth.

Taking the liberty of extrapolation, let’s assume that Buri doesn’t need anything to sustain his life. Now that he is free of the ice, he is fully capable of sustaining himself through his godly powers of creation. Ymir, on the other hand, is fully dependent on Audhumla for sustenance.

Ymir is constantly producing children asexually, and all of those children share their father’s need to derive sustenance from Audhumla. However, Buri, once he comes into the picture, marries one of these children, and then the first half-Aesir/half-Jotun springs into being.

These children either inherit the Aesir ability to sustain themselves or the inability to do so without Audhumla’s assistance. As they are all kin, it would be natural for those unable to sustain themselves to develop jealousy towards those who have such an ability. With that in mind, it is easy to see how Audhumla can embody the line of the Fehu rune poem that reads “source of discord among kinsmen.”

“Fire of the sea” and “path of the serpent” may both be kennings referencing gold. The Norse viewed gold as being red in color, rather than yellow, so the first is obviously a kenning for gold. Audhumla embodies this concept as she sustains her own life by eating the rime from the rivers that flow from the Hvergelmir, merging together in the Ginnungagap to create the spark of life. In other traditions, the ocean is understood to be the source of all existence, and life itself can be viewed as the greatest wealth any living being may possess.

.As for the “path of the serpent” kenning, “serpent” typically refers to a dragon of some sort, and the Norse viewed dragons as hoarders of wealth. A dragon can no more help its nature as a hoarder than Audhumla can help her nature as a being capable of producing milk that sustains life. While she may not be hoarding her wealth, the fact that there is only one proto-cow rather than hundreds may be an indication of the scarcity of resources that existed in Iceland.

Cattle were wealth which meant life. In cultures with limited resources, warfare and strife among people tends to be higher because people have a desperate drive to survive.

In the myth, for example, Ymir is producing so many Jotuns that the Aesir see that the worlds cannot handle the strain of such an enormous population, so Odin and his brothers slay Ymir and drown the Jotuns in a sea of blood. To say that the Jotuns have the greatest potential for destruction of the three tribes of deities – the Aesir, the Vanir, and the Jotuns – is to ignore the fact that the Aesir reacted to violence with violence and established a war that will eventually result in Ragnarok.

In the Norse pantheon, every single deity is a god of war – there are no exceptions to that. Even the Vanir, who seem far more peace-loving than the others, have started their fair share of wars – Freya and the start of the Aesir-Vanir war is just one example of that.

And that tendency towards warfare is expressed in Audhumla’s being as well. She sustains life, but death is never far away. Her milk keeps death at bay, and it is the war against death that we all fight every day with every breath we take. In a way, life is a war on death, and I’ll leave you with that.

Note: As always, this perspective belongs to me alone. I do not claim to speak for others. 

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Loki Worldbreaker: The Bound God and Overcoming Limitations

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Loki, as the bound god, is a symbolic representation of the way that the primal nature of all beings is contained and constrained by an imposed social order. The binding of Loki is never fully explained in the lore. While suggestions exist that the binding originated from his suspected role in Baldr’s death (Saxo’s version of the Baldr myth is void of Loki’s presence entirely), these suggestions are, at best, speculation if not outright conjecture.

Another mythos that contains a story about a bound god is the Greek one, in which Prometheus is confined for his audacity in stealing fire from the gods and thwarting Zeus’s plan to destroy humanity. Many scholars have compared Prometheus and Loki, so it is probable that a story of a similar vein underpins the binding Loki endures.

Because so many of the old stories have been lost, it is important to understand that both the concept of Loki being bound as punishment for his role in Baldr’s death and the concept of Loki being bound for reasons similar to those for which Prometheus was bound are speculation, at best.

Still, the image of Loki as a bound god does provide a lens through which to view the god as a god who overcomes limitations. Allegorically, the binding of Loki – no matter the reason for its occurrence – demonstrates an almost desperate need to halt the forward motion of chaotic change. The lore prophecy states that Loki will be the one to instigate Ragnarok after he slips his chains, so the binding serves the purpose of keeping the world from disintegrating.

However, the world cannot stay in-tact forever, and, eventually, Loki slips his bonds. Every time this happens, Ragnarok occurs, and the world is destroyed and subsequently recreated. The cycle of creation-destruction-creation (a.k.a life-death-rebirth) persists in mythologies across the globe, and it has only been since the introduction of Abrahamic doctrine that the cycle has changed from life-death-rebirth to life-death-afterlife.

Loki comes in as the god that overcomes limitations when he slips the bindings the other gods have forged for him to fulfill the role he was always meant to play. In this, he demonstrates that all beings cannot escape the limitation of their own nature – no matter how hard we try to run from ourselves, we cannot escape the truth of our own person.

He shows us where the limits truly lay – inside ourselves – and where they don’t…everywhere else. Loki’s actions often upset the social order. Sometimes, these ways displease the other gods. When Loki steals Sif’s hair, the other gods are displeased, and Loki has to make amends, which he does with an incredible degree of resourcefulness. He relies on his own skillset – his silver tongue – to con the dwarves into making a beautiful gold wig – and makes amends with the other gods so flawlessly that they are awed by the wig rather than concerned with the mischief he originally wrought when he cut Sif’s hair.

In the myths, Loki is either getting himself in trouble and finding clever ways to fix the problems he creates, or he is helping the other gods fix problems. In either case, he is always portrayed as the one who finds the solution to the original problem – whether he is directly responsible for the problem or not is of no concern.

A lot of people get stuck on this point when they try to understand Loki for the first time. They read the myths, and all they see is Loki causing mischief. They contend that Loki solving the problem afterwards doesn’t matter because Loki’s presence is the very reason the problem occurred.

That line of reasoning lends itself to an inability to appreciate that Loki’s resourcefulness and problem-solving are central to his character. Whether Loki’s presence creates the problem isn’t the point – he is the one who has the strategic cleverness that allows him to find solutions that the other gods overlook.

Loki’s ability to overcome limitations allows him to assist the other gods in ways that end up benefiting them to an extreme degree. Unlike many of the others, Loki has no problem defying social norms when necessary to get a problem solved. When Thor loses his hammer, Loki is the one who suggests that Thor dress as Freyja to win it back from Thrym. Thor is, as convention dictates, uncomfortable at the suggestion but listens to Loki’s advice. Loki’s advice proves sound, as Thor soon reclaims Mjolnir.

Actually, speaking of Mjolnir, Thor would not have such a magnificent weapon if it weren’t for Loki’s cunning in his dealing with the dwarves. Odin would lack Draupnir and Gungnir, Freyr would lack Skithblathnir, and Sif her golden wig – to name a few of the gifts that Loki negotiated with the dwarves to claim for the gods. In his negotiations with the dwarves, he overcomes the limitation of the dwarves’ reluctance to craft these items.

Mostly, when it comes to limitations, Loki is the god of overcoming the limitations that others present. He is a force against conformity, though it is doubtful he would support nonconformity simply for the sake of nonconformity. When Loki breaks from the social order of the Aesir, he does so in ways that work in the favor of the gods.

When Loki is bound, he is no longer able to control his own abilities. By my own understanding (i.e. upg), he is one of the oldest deities of the Norse pantheon. He is the embodiment of change and, eventually, he loses the ability to control that side of himself. The binding the other gods force on him only hold him back for so long, as nothing can stave off change permanently. Once he breaks those bindings, Ragnarok occurs, and the world begins again.

 

Note: Many Lokeans shy away from Loki’s Worldbreaker aspect, claiming that the story of Ragnarok was Christianized and not an original part of Norse mythology. The collected evidence doesn’t support that theory, and it is far more likely that the Ragnarok story is a different version of a well-established creation-destruction-recreation (life-death-rebirth) of the world demonstrated in a multitude of other mythologies. Refusing to engage in these conversations makes it far easier for Heathens to view Loki as a Nordic Satan rather than develop a fuller understanding of Loki’s character. This is, therefore, my attempt to address a question often ignored by other Lokeans (and, as always, this is my interpretation and my interpretation alone).