Yggdrasil, a Place to Stand

The red fox stands beside the tree gate.
I’m never at ease when he shows himself,
but he is flanked by the black dog,
ever watchful and reliable, a true guardian,
and there seems to be no conflict between them.
This is new. I could take the open door
down through the roots of the world tree
but I am distracted by the frisky moves
of a squirrel that is running down the trunk.

He is as big as an elephant, perfectly in scale
with the tree that rises into the clouds
and could contain cities. His presence confirms
I am at the place where a shaman-god
hung for nine days and nine nights,
sacrificing himself to himself.

Rattling his nuts, the squirrel of mischief
plunges into the Lower World ahead of me.
He is playing his old game, Wake the Dragon.
Fire and stink rise from the roots of the tree.
Earth shudders. The squirrel snickers in glee.
Ratatosk, Ratatosk, Ratatosk.
Here he comes back again.
He scurries up the tree, all the way to the top,
telling tall tales to anger the heaven bird
that keeps watch over all the worlds.

Dragon rises. Branches of the world tree
creak and groan as the eagle shakes out its wings
and comes down, talons eager for battle.
Between them, on a ledge in the tree world,
I see a man in a grey robe, with a broad-brimmed
grey wizard’s hat. There are birds on his shoulders
and a great company of birds all around him.
Lightning is with him. His eyes flash, his hands
spark white fire from the air. His form is never still.
He is the ancient of days, he is the magic man,
he is the young deer prince, antlered and horny.

As the dragon rises to join battle with the heaven bird,
he catches it by the throat with his left hand. His body
twists and buckles as he struggles to hold this power
and raise it. It is pulling him down, tearing him apart,
till he lifts his right hand, palm downward, and the eagle
lands on his wrist as the falcon returns to the falconer.

The balance is  made. The powers of above and below
are joined and turning together, evenly matched.
This is how the game of the world goes on.
The man with lightning eyes is calling me.
Come. Stand where I stand. See what I see.

I am drawn to him as the sparks fly upwards.
On his edge between the worlds,
my body stretches beyond itself,
my mind cracks open like the squirrel’s nuts.
Ratatosk, Ratatosk. There is a role for mischief.
And I have found the right place to stand.

-          October 17, 2014

From a vision while leading a group shamanic journey through the Tree Gate at the Hameau de l’Etoile, near Montpellier. We danced on the mythic edge all week, and my dreams and visions - like those of many in our gifted circle - often turned on Greek themes. But on a certain day, I was hurled deep into an indelible scene that seemed to come from the Nordic imagination.

Art "L'arbre et la brume" (c) Annick Bougerolle

The Apple of Fate

 

On a cool fall night, I lie down on my bed. As soon as I close my eyes, I see a form of the Great Earth Mother, vast and voluptuous. She rises before me, large as a mountain, and opens a fertile valley. I fly through this like a swallow, and come out in a world suffused by sourceless light.. There is a sense of being in a contained space, protected by translucent walls that are spirals of light. 
   There is a feminine presence. She lets me know she is willing to be a guide for me in this realm. She is very tall and slender, dressed in blue. Her name is of the North. Though the light is everywhere, she moves within a fine mist that makes her features hazy.
    She tells me this is a place of purification, of cleansing “down to the bone marrow.” She speaks to me of soul, and where it travels.“Where your desire goes, there you go in soul flight out of the body, and in the soul’s journey after death.”
    She shows me a ball fired high into the air, sailing up above the clouds. She tells me, “This is the Apple of Fate. When it returns to Earth, your present life will be over.” We agree I do not need to know the exact time or circumstances of its return.

 

Reading and reflecting on this report in my journal, from nearly thirty years ago, I am stirred again by the vision of the Apple of Fate. Now I am considering goddesses known to my Northern ancestors who were especially fond of apples. Idunn is a Nordic goddess who carries apples in a box crafted from ash wood. In the Prose Edda, when the gods start to feel old, they ask her to feed them her apples, which carry the magic of rejuvenation. This is why Idunn's name means Ever Young, or Rejuvenator. The Prose Edda contains the story of Idunn’s abduction and rescue, both the work of Loki) Idunn’s husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised..
    In a story of the goddess Frigg in the Volsung Saga, an apple from the goddess can produce a new birth as well as fresh juice. When king Renr prays for a child, Frigg's messenger, a crow, drops an apple in his lap, and soon his wife is pregnant. Then there are the Apples of Hel, They are mentioned in an 11th century poem by the skald Thorbrion Brunarson, who saw the apple as food of the dead. 
     I do not find the phrase Apple of Fate in the Icelandic texts, or the excellent works of Hilda Ellis Davidson, the great English scholar of Nordic paganism. But I see that the intriguing Nehelennia is also depicted as carrying a supply of apples. With the breath of her name I feel a wind from the mythic ocean gusting through my study. Nehelennia, whose best-known temples were on the coast of the Netherlands, was a Celtic-Germanic goddess who was a special patron of voyagers, those traveling by sea or across the astral tides, and those making the crossing to the Otherworld and the afterworld. 
    Apple of Fate is a term that could fit the apple in the Garden of Eden, or the apple in the story of Paris' choice between the three goddesses, since in each of those stories a choice involving an apple determined a fate. But those stories don't resonate with me in relation to the blue lady and what she showed me. And anyway, the apple of Eve and the apple of Paris weren't apples as we know them. Apples were unknown west of Kazakhstan until some of the soldiers of Alexander the Great brought them back from his campaigns; even then, these "apples" were only small and tart, like crabapples.
    I wonder where my Apple of Fate is now, flying or falling or bumping along the ground. As the lady in blue suggested, I don't need an exact fix on that, at least, not yet….

Drawing by Robert Moss: Lady of Apples

I made the drawing after a vision in the hypnagogic zone on January 2, 2021. I heard the name "Idunn" quite distinctly. I was wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smelled the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.I let myself drift into a sleep dream in which I drove north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seemed to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushed past us as the beating of great wings. We were excited because we had found the key to a mystery.I drew Idunn by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, dressen in apple-green rather than blue and holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I saw her this time.  

 

The Greatest Spell

The Poetic Edda contains the narrative of a young man, Svipdag, who raises his mother from her burial mound to help him on an impossible quest to find the beloved of his soul, his "fated bride". Groa was and is a völva, or seeress. Before she died, with her knowledge of things to come, she told him to call her back when he needed help.

Groa weaves nine spells of protection over him, to preserve him from flood and fire and to change the hearts of enemies so they cannot reach for their swords. The great spell is probably the ninth. If Svipdag finds himself in a "war of words", his own will not fail him.

Wit nor words be wanting you

At behest of the heart

- Grógaldr (The Spell of Groa) in Lee Hollander (trans) The Poetic Edda

The story of Svipdag and Groa has many counterparts in Norse tradition. In the Völuspá, the greatest of the poems in the Poetic Edda, a seeress summoned from the Underworld by the high god Odin tells the story of the creation of the world and its coming destruction and rebirth.

In tale in the Flateyjarbók, a poet is made by dreaming on the burial mound of a dead poet.

Dream Poetry from the Mound

An Icelandic shepherd lay down to sleep on the burial mound of a poet, hoping for inspiration to compose a poem in the style of the bard he admired, though he had no skill with words. While the sheep browsed and dozed, the dead poet appeared to the shepherd in a dream. “I will give you a rare verse. If you learn the verse by heart and can recite it without flaw when you wake, you will become a great poet.”

- Flateyjarbók I: 174 quoted in H. Ellis Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe.

The Norse stories have counterparts in other traditions. A story from Ireland weaves together the theme of calling on wise ancestors and the power of poetic speech.

Raising a Bard to Lift the Fog of Forgetfulness

There is a legend that the great Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle Raid of Cooley, was brought back from the fogs of forgetfulness when the foremost poets of Ireland gathered at night on the burial mound of Fergus, the ancient druid of dreams and battles. They called on Fergus to awaken. They praised him with drink and gallant words, and above all with fresh poetry.

When one of them delivered a fine enough poem, a deeper mist rose from the tomb, and from the mist came Fergus with his shining hair, to sing again the lost epic of gods and heroes and warrior queens. And the poets caught the words and carried them to the written page.

Illustration: "Old Birch at the Sogneford" by Thomas Fearnley (1839)

In the Beginning was the Scream of the Hawk

 

In the Norse creation stories, there are elements we recognize from other mythologies. The world is born from primal chaos. We are inside the body of a cosmic being, macrocosm to our microcosms. The being may have been torn apart in a primordial sacrifice, the origin of human sacrifice to the gods. The Norse version, unsurprisingly given the bloody reputation of the Vikings, at first seems more brutal than the rest. 

We read in the Gylfaginning in Snorri’s Edda that the giant Ymir is born out of a yawning void through the contention of fire and ice. Suckled by a primordial cow, Auðhumla, he is eventually slain and dismembered by the gods that are the progeny of a male being the great cow raised with her tongue from a salt-lick. Ymir's blood and sweat become the ocean, his skull the vault of the sky, his hair the trees and so on. Our sources on this are limited, contradictory and mysterious  The least colored by Christianity is in the Vǫluspá in the Poetic Edda, where an undead sorceress tells Odin – the god forever in quest of knowledge – how the world began and how it will end.

Word sleuthing may take us into deeper levels of the myth in the Nordic mind-sea. Norse scholar Henning Kure states that “ masculine name formation Ymir is mentioned in one of the þulur, the name lists, of Snorri’s Edda as a heiti, a synonymous name, for ‘hawk’. As such we are in no doubt that the name is derived from ymja ‘to scream’ and may refer to the bird’s shriek. The very closeness to the similarly derived noun ymr ‘scream, noise’ makes it hard to miss the association and must have been evident to any Old Norse audience.” * In contexts ymr could be the scream of a birthing mother, the groan of a tree or the clang of weapons. When the first being stitrs from primal chaos it is as the Scream of the Hawk.

 Ymir emerges from Ginnungagap, variously described as a yawning gap or as chaos or the void. The prefix ginn- denotes something more than we can grasp, indescribably deep, potent yet formless, prima materia that the Creator – or creators – will shape and fix into definite forms. How do they accomplish this? According to the Vǫluspá, they yppa the world. Come again? The verb yppa can mean to lift, raise, bring up, come into being, announce, reveal. Henning Kure uses etymology as his miner’s lamp to plumb the secrets of creation in the Eddas:

When the sons of Burr [Odin and his brothers] did yppa the world, they made it come into being from the parts of Ymir. Yppa may mean 'announce' and this, I am convinced, is what the gods did. They announced Ymir's flesh to be earth, his bones to be mountains, his sweat to be sea, etc. They created the world by naming it, by putting it into words, and thus defining it in a comprehensible way. The gods announced the world by transforming Ymir – the scream – into words. The scream is the raw material of words. Words are shaping the world.

In the beginning was the scream – the inarticulate and 'much too awesome'. The world was yet to be formulated and contained on a human scale. The process of creation is dependent on the nature of the raw material. In the case of the scream, it must be turned into words and language. Everything exists by being named, designated by a word. *

The gods turn primal Scream into words of power.

Australian Aborigines say that the Ancestors walked this world naming things, and that as they were named, life forms appeared– the crocodile and the river, the gum tree and the goanna. When Odin and his brothers declared that some part of Ymir’s anatomy would become mountains or ocean, that his eyebrows would become a shield wall between giants and humans, metaphor became manifestation. In the beginning was the word, in the Eddas as in Genesis.

 

*Henning Kure, “In the beginning was the Scream Conceptual thought in the Old Norse myth of creation” in Rudolf Simek & Judith Meurer (eds.): Scandinavia and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Papers of The 12th International Saga Conference, Bonn: University of Bonn, 2003) pp. 311-319

 Image; Ginnungagap. Creator not yet identified!

The double who arrives at a place ahead of you

 

When Fred, an engineer deeply interested in dreamwork, told me he was planning to drive across the continent to my neighborhood in upstate New York, I invited him to come and stay. The night before he was scheduled to arrive, I stirred from sleep and was startled by a ghostly form the foot of my bed. Man-sized. Peering through the grainy dark, I recognized Fred. He looked dozy and out of things.

    “Fred,” I spoke softly so as not to wake my wife. “You are not due here until tomorrow. Get back to your body and get some rest.”
     You may glean from this that the appearance of what the old paranormal researchers used to call a  “phantasm of the living” was not exotic for me. I had long been aware that consciousness can travel outside the physical body -and does so every night in dreams – and that when it does so it may be using the vehicle of a subtle or astral body. This energy vehicle may resemble the physical body closely, or take other forms.
    I assumed that Fred had slipped out of his dormant body during sleep and found his way to my house, unaware of the time or the circumstances. Uninvited callers who seek to enter my psychic space get an unpleasant reception, But Fred had, after all, been invited – only not for 3 o’clock in the morning.
    When he showed up for breakfast after sunup, I asked him if he remembered any dreams from the middle of the night. “I’ve been on the road since midnight,” he told me, holding out his coffee mug for a refill.
     This was an interesting twist. I had assumed that while Fred was asleep, his dream double went walkabout in the direction of my home. It now seemed that, cruising along the highway, he relaxed enough to release his energy double to arrive at my house early.
     The Norwegians have a word for the kind of double who arrives before you at a place where you are heading. The word is vardøgr. It is probably derived from the Old Norse vardhygi, which fuses vǫrd, ("guard" or "watchman") with hugr ("mind" or "soul"). "Early arrival" and “spirit predecessor” are suggested translations of vardøgr. The etymology might lead us to "soul watcher" or "soul guard" in the sense of advance guard.
    In the Viking era the Scandinavians were quite familiar with several forms of the double, and their ability to travel outside the physical body and shapeshift into many forms. This is such a central feature that a French scholar, Régis Boyer, titled a book on Old Norse magic Le monde du double, "The World of the Double". 
     When I recently returned to research on this theme, I was interested to find that my encounter with Fred the engineer has a parallel in a report from another engineer. In an article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, L. David Leiter, a mechanical engineer in Pennsylvania, describes how his double appeared at his home ahead of him. He took the highway home on a pleasant sunny afternoon and felt completely relaxed at the wheel, almost on autopilot.
    When he got home, his wife was surprised. Why had he gone out again? She explained that he had come in ten minutes before. Unusually for him he had skipped his usual greeting and kiss on the cheek and gone straight upstairs. She called their child to confirm her story. Worried that there might be an intruder in the house, they checked upstairs and found no one.

Engineers may survive projecting an astral double while at the wheel of a moving car, but I would strongly recommend avoiding this kind of thing while handling mechanical equipment! I have no doubt the safest and easiest way to explore these roads is in dreaming. It is quite likely that you are projecting an astral double every night in your dreams. It is also probable hat among the places you visit in your subtle body are locations that lie in your physical future.  Precognitive dreams can be “memories of the future” in the sense that your double arrived somewhere ahead of you and left you some souvenirs when they came back.

"Dream Double" drawing by Robert Moss

 

 

 

How a Völva Got the News

 

Her name is in the Saga of Erik the Red. Her name is Þorbjörg Lítilvölva, Thorbjörg Little Völva. She was one of a sisterhood of nine seeresses but now she is traveling alone. Gone are the days when a völva of her renown might travel with a chorus of thiry to sing for her shamanic flights. Thorkell, the big man in the settlement in Greenland, has begged for her presence.

When she arrives in her deep blue robe, studded with semiprecious stones, and her black lambskin hood and gloves lined with white cat's fur, holding her staff of power, with her bag of tricks hanging from her touchwood belt and her knife with the boar tusk handle, the lord of the manner treats her like royalty. He guides her to a seat set up on a high platform like a throne. She is fed foods of seiðr, porridge made with goat's milk and a bowl of animal hearts. Is she ready to give the frétta (the word means both news and prophecy)? Not before she has slept and dreamed.

The morning after, she asks for someone who knows Vardlokur, an ancient song for journeying. Guðríður, an Icelandic  woman of high degree, knows the song but is reluctant to sing it because she is now a Christian. Her resistance is overcome. A circle of women gather close around the völva. The song is achingly beautiful. It pleases the spirits of earth and sea and they join the seiðr. No longer alone, the völva takes wing and follows the skeins of her dream into the future.

When she returns she announces, ,"Now many things stand revealed to me that were hidden before". The news she brings back will carry the woman who sang for her all the way to Newfoundland; Guðríður will become the first white woman in history or legend to give birth in North America.

Dressed for the part

I was fascinated by the detailed description of Thorbjörg's costume in chapter 4 of the Saga of Erik the Red. She wears "a blue woven mantle adorned with stones down to the hem". She has a necklace of "glass beads"(that may be amber). She has "a black lambskin hood lined on the inside with with white cat's fur". (Hoods were generally separate from robes in this period of Scandinavian history.) There is more white cat fur inside her black lambskin gloves. She carries a staff with a brass knob decorated with stones. She wears "a belt made of touchwood", with a bag of her magical power tools attached. She has a knife with a tusk handle; it would be boar tusk in most of Freyja's domain, but up in Greenland it might be walrus. The end of the knife is broken off, a sign that it is for ritual use.

There are mysteries here, of course. The cat's fur is easily explained by the close affinity of Freyja, goddess and high priestess of the völvur, for cats, who pull her carriage through the sky. But: black sheep, white cat? And what of the touchwood belt? It has been suggested that "touchwood" is the English translation of an Old Norse word for a fungus that grows on birch, oak and beech trees. Cut off the outer rind, slice the inner part thin, soak and hammer and you can make a pliable felt-like material. Wearing this as a belt would confirm your connection with trees (from which Nordic peoples trace their descent in the myths). It also adds to your potential as a firestarter since a little piece, torn off, makes excellent kindling.

The saga doesn't tell us what Thorbjörg wears under her deep blue robe. I have given her a light blue woolen dress, a sign of the high status the saga accords her. She might, however, have been wearing a tunic of animal (probably reindeer) skin.

Dreaming and singing what is to come

I picture the völva deep in her vision of what is, what was and what will be. I turn back to Valgerður H. Bjarnadóttir's excellent study, The Saga of Vanadís, Völva and Valkyrja, and read:

"The völva (the one who turns, bends and evolves) is the one who sits at the hub(or völur) of the wheel, thus having a view into every direction. She could not only see into the wheel of time, she could turn it and bend, influence the future with her prophecies. She stored memory and from that memory she could predict a future, but in addition to that she was in touch with the collective memory of all times and places, Urðr, Verðandi  and Skuld. From that connection came her ability to predict the becoming future. "

Drawing by Robert Moss

Assignment: Idun

 

Dreams set us research assignments. A note on an assignment I was given in the hypagogic zone, on the cusp of sleep, when I lay down in the early hours:

January 2, 2021

HG assignment

IDUN

The name comes through clearly the moment I close my eyes.. I know I am being given an assignment: to explore and report from the realm of the Norse goddess who keeps the apples of regeneration that keep the gods young. For a moment I am wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smell the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.

I let myself drift into sleep. In the final scene of my sleep dreams, I am driving far north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seems to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushes past us as the beating of great wings. We are excited because we have found the key to a mystery. We now need to use it and confirm the story we may bring to the world.

Feelings: excited

Clearly this sequence demanded immediate research in ordinary reality. I looked at the name, written as Iðunn in Old Norse and translated as "ever young" and "rejuvenator”. I went back to the books: to the Prose Edda for the story of Idun’s abduction and rescue (both the work of Loki), to Hilda Ellis Davidson’s treatment of Idun in Gods and Myths of the Viking Age, I looked again at the role of apples in many traditions (notably Celtic) as seeds of life and as passports to the Otherworld. I reflected on the nature of Idun’s  husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised.

Of course I drew Idun by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I see her. This assignment has just begun. Who knows how far the road may lead?

RM jounal drawing January 2, 2021

The Wand Woman and the Odin Squirt

 I do much of my best reading and research in the middle of the night, between naps. Last night I decided to take a break from my recent four hour sessions with Jung's Black Books (which make the Red Book look like beach reading) and return to my studies of Viking era history, mystery and magical practices.

My particular focus last night was the staff or wand of the völva, or seeress. The word völva means "staff-carrier" or wand woman and the staff was her principal power tool, used for summoning spirits, for projecting harm or healing, for astral riding, for opening portals between worlds, for blasting enemies and probably for sex magic. It could be as large as a medieval pole-weapon or as slim and elegant as a wand acquired in Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter stories.

I read the description of a decorated völr (staff) in the Saga of Erik the Red. I examined scores of photos of staffs unearthed in the gravesites of Scandinavian women of power in Neil Price's monumental book The Viking Way. Most of the ones that have survived are metal but surely many more - long since decomposed - were of wood. One of the surviving wooden staffs, found in a bog at Hemdrup in Jyllund, Denmark, has a remarkable set of carvings suggesting an association with soul travel. A female figure in a feathered robe appears to be flying through the air, with her dogs nearby amd a triquetra as a magical seal.

I went online seeking more images and discovered that Etsy has dozens of pages offering reconstructions. Then I found this wonderful painting (above) of a völva striding forth with her staff by Arkel Eli Petersen, one of a series reproduced as postage stamps in the Faroe Islands, a self-governing province of Denmark.

I reread the Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, in which Odin journeys to a (deceased) völva to clarify the meaning of a dream and see into the future. Even the All-Father, no slouch at magic himself, turns to a völva when he wants reliable divination.

After five hours with my Norse books, I took a break by cooking one of the few dishes of which I am proud: a super-spicy hot chili loaded with fresh jalapenos and many cloves of garlic. Crushing garlic, I managed to squirt myself and was temporarily blinded in one eye. This has happened before, with lemon juice, as memorable punctiation to an interactive adventure in realms of soul healing and the care and relocation of draugr (Old Norse for the restless dead) I may tell elsewhere. Dabbing garlic juice from my eye,I again recalled how Odin paid with an eye at the well of Mimir for the power to see into the Otherworld.

Note to self: be careful what you squeeze after squeezing in a full helping of Norse mythology and magic.

The Völva as Cat Woman

I have long recgonized that my nocturnal habits are catlike and as I pursue my Norse studies - in dreams and visions as well as in books and conversation with friends who have walked these paths - I am struck by how important cats seem to be in Scandinavian myth and magic. The latest confirmation:

She comes in this silver body from a trove of jewelry unearthed at the former estate of a Viking magnate on Lake Tissø in western Zealand. Since the settlement was named for the god Tyr some scholars speculate that she was part of a blót, a sacrifice to the god. She has the face of a cat, or a shapeshifter in the midst of transformation.

Some think she is Freyja, the great goddess of the Vanir and mistress of magic who rides through the sky in a wagon pulled by cats. I suspect she is a völva, a seeress who may have painted her face like this in seidr and other rituals. Face paint was found inside a little cat-shaped box that was also a belt buckle. In other Viking tombs we find the remains of völva outfits including catskin gloves and hoods lined with catskins.

This cat woman resides for now in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, at least when the lights are on.