Every Autumn, while the wolf devours the wanderer and seeker Wotan, something dies in us too.
Warriors from Valhalla rush to fight by his side, just as the veil thins and our ancestors long past come through to aid us in what we’re shedding.
Thor the protector, kills the mighty Drake, and we conquer part of our own snake energy.
Loki brings the dead from the underworld along with the Jotuns, the dead, and the wolves who’re ever hungry for the sun and moon.
Frey holds the Antler up to the fire that will destroy the world, just as we are divinely protected in each of our cycles when we have the bravery to face our death head on.
At this time of the season around the end of October to beginning of November, I invite you to see how aligned the fall season is with Ragnarok. So we may remember to see these stories through a shamanic animist lens.
Ragnarok is the cycle of seasonal birth, death & rebirth every year. As October comes to an end, just before Winter nights marks the coming of the winter cold. The earth falls into the death & destruction of falling leaves, bare trees, and ice jotuns who bite the skin like frost - winter descends upon us, before the Sun returns with the Son Baldur’s resurrection at Yule. This is also why the mistletoe that killed him is a sacred herb.
It is the archetypal hero's journey of the shamanic medicine wheel.
The destruction of the old ways giving way patriarchal Christianity, led by a Lokian shadow masculine, which eventually had its hold over humanity broken, as people turned back to the divine feminine of the old ways & mother earth, its no wonder the goddesses like Freyja/Frigga, Idunn, and other goddesses survived.
Baldur's resurrection being akin to modern people saying - "The second coming of christ is merely the return of christ consciousness".
Odin, who seeks the knowledge of the cosmos, his impending doom, and arcane wisdom, which he gets from his mother's brother Mimir, his uncle on his mother's side alludes to ancestral wisdom of the Disr on his mother's side.
He gives up his left eye.
In body mapping & energy work, the left is where we've been, and the right is the future. So he sacrifices who he was before, much like the folk song lyfjaberg tells us to let go of who we were before in this turn of the wheel. He sacrifices himself to himself, which is to surrender to the gallows of our own suffering. This is why Yggdrasil means “Odin’s Gallows”.
Odin shows us what it means to surrender to our fate - to the ancestors, in pursuit of knowledge. To allow spirit, the runes, and the evolution of Universal consciousness - the mead of poetry and cosmic inspiration, to take place.
Every seeker faces this moment — when knowledge and growth costs us the ego of the self who sought it.
This is the beginning of spiritual awakening, when we decide to start seeing our suffering through a spiritual and shamanic lens, and see that every trial we go through is a self sacrifice on the path to our own ragnarok.
As much as our ego fears it, we cannot start to view life through a spiritual lens, start to work with spirits & runes, wish to grow into a different/better person, without eventually surrendering to the hail storm & destruction of the life we had before.
I’ve lived this too. Jobs, habits, friendships falling away like leaves, as I surrendered to who I was becoming.
Wisdom always costs something — and as Odin hangs, the next story begins its descent: the light of Baldur fading.
The Death of Baldur, which happens in summer when the days start getting shorter and he returns to the underworld - starts the events of Ragnarok. He knows he will die, he's foreseen it. Yet, despite his mother's best efforts, the one thing she didn't protect him from, blasted mistletoe, killed him anyway. Some things in the soul contract, our Øorlog, are simply meant to play out. And we cannot protect our children from their fate, or the suffering that is theirs to bear.
So Loki Kills Baldur with Mistletoe. Through an archetypal Jungian lens, Loki is the chaos within us that resents our own light. Loki the chaotic shadow self and Baldur as both the inner child & golden shadow, who the shadow banishes to the underworld, because he's jealous and cannot handle how loved Baldur is.
Show me a person who let their chaos over take their gold, and I will show you someone who wanted to be loved so badly that they hid the best parts of themselves.
None of Loki or his children are truly evil. Like Jotuns, they are chaotic forces, shadow, the duality of life & death itself, the snake energy, and primal animalistic nature - all part of the human experience and nature.
Have you ever found yourself on the path of healing and self work, then fuck up and ruin friendships just because you were scared and pushed people away?
Loki does this in Lokesanna, when he taunts everyone at Aegir's feast to the point that after killing Baldur, the gods have had enough - like our loved ones can only take so much when we bury our best self and treat them poorly.
So they tie him to a rock in a cave with snake venom dripping on him. His wife sticking by his side catching the venom that drips. We all have one loved one who stays by your side even when we're deep in shadow.
Shuddering in the cave at the venom that drips on him. The deep, dark, isolated depression we face when we're so deep in shadow. Yet he only shuddered and shook when she had to turn away to empty the cup of venom she caught for him, and face the truth that even our loved ones have to take care of themselves. It’s shaking, shuddering, and rocking back and forth on your floor in the dark when we're left alone with the venom of our shadows. He shakes. We shake. He endures venom; we endure our own.
Then he breaks free, to bring the spirits of the underworld to Asgard and the rest of Ragnarok itself sees the human psyche come out of the underworld.
The einerjar, the warriors of Valhalla are as ancestors, whom we may call on to help aid us in fighting our battles in life. At this point in our awakening, our ancestors and spirits are facilitating not only our growth, but supporting our suffering as well.
Thor fights Jormungandr, as a mirror of man and the snake energy, this is the inevitable part of the awakening where we fight our very power, resisting and ultimately dying, surrendering to the energy coiled up around the world & our body. This aspect of ego dies, for without this dichotomy we cannot surrender into the power of our Oðr - the kundalini, and clear our energy centers.
Freyr, the loving divine masculine. He had to give up his sword which fought on it’s own, his un bridled lust, for Gerd. Just as we must surrender our lust and desire, to come into Divine union with our feminine. Having the patience and respect for the feminine's consent to truly win her love.
In death he faces surt with not but an antler held high in his hands against the passion & fire which burns the world - as much as it does our old uncontrollable self, the patriarchal shadow masculine which seeks to dominate.
I cannot tell you, dear reader, how many times I’ve struggled between my sword and the antler. Yet True union demands we lay down the weapon of control.
He does not need his lustful nature, because he, much like Thor and Odin, will not survive.
They are meant to die. Like the ones meant to survive this cycle, when the smoke clears, only what is fertile remains.
And so the wolf of our primal nature, Fenrir, kills Odin — The part of us who watches all things, who has put up every measure, even enlisting ancestors, to fight this coming battle, to avoid his own death. And he still dies, just as he knew he had to sacrifice part of himself for the runes.
We’re invited to go through our suffering every turn of the wheel. Letting go of lust, burying our gold & inner child with our shadow, letting chaos & shadow run the show for awhile, then after fighting the resistance of it all, the fire of passion, as well as our inner animal Fenris, will burn away & kill everything we once were.
There are no coincidences.
Loki, is killed by the light of Heimdall. Awareness kills the chaos. The watcher ends the storm he foresaw when he blew the Gallrhorn.
The same awareness & consciousness who watched the whole hero's journey happen from his high seat.
Finally, Baldr, the gold from under the shadow, and the inner child of the high one and our own ego, returns from the underworld. Like the resurrection of other stories, to embody the fully integrated light that we are, after such deep destruction & healing in our hero's Journey. Much like Tolkien's Aragorn, the lost son who surrendered into darkness even when he knew his destiny was to be king in the end.
If you have read this far, know that to fear Ragnarok is to fear your world as you know it being utterly destroyed as you go on your personal journey to heal, make the unconscious conscious, and shine light on your shadows.
Ragnarok in itself, is the culmination of all the myths starting with creation, a mirror for the human experience. Destruction, cosmic death and rebirth, just like literal death, it’s all a part of life.
Like the stories of those after awakening who lost jobs, certain relationships, their car broke down, and it felt like their life completely fell apart...it is all ragnarok in action.
Just like growth cannot continue in nature without the death, falling leaves leading to winter, or sometimes a full on forest fire that the trees endure: We cannot begin a spiritual life and demand growth and change without having the life we knew, everything we were, completely stripped away, to make way for the growth which will come from the ashes of our old life. We rise from the ashes not reborn as someone new, but remembered as who we always were beneath the smoke.
Add comment
Comments