Ragnarök, Shamans, Druids and Things

Mythology, and the symbolism that they are about, are cautionary tales to make us aware of what is beyond our obsession with eating, sex and staying alive. Originally, I believe anyway. But what turns a bunch of stories into a religion? I guess its mass participation or a good storyteller. The way our brains operate, it doesn’t take much to impress on us the importance of possible disasters. It’s harder to get us fired up about stuff we call Wisdom. I guess it doesn’t hit the adrenals in the same way.

John, on the island of Patmos, had a bunch of visions. None of them were very pleasant, scaring the Christian world out of its wits ever since. Where did they come from? Was there some psychedelic plant on Patmos that tempted John? Was it the Holy Spirit, or a psychosis brought on by his exile? We will never be able to verify that, but we can’t with any myth. That’s the nature of them. How ever the Book of Revelations as written and translated (and that another aspect to this. Who knows the veracity of words 2000 years ago translated from Hebrew to Greek and then to Middle English? Well, something like that.) has created a institution looking towards collapse that essentially is meant to be a new beginning for some, and devastation for the rest of us. Indeed, the very reason the good old U.S of A. is so supportive of the Israeli diaspora is that it doesn’t want the Arabs messing around with the end of the story they are all geared up for. So much so that millions of people believe it as written, making choices unconsciously to bring it all about. Because that’s what unchecked neuronets do. Well, being a student of the bible for 14 years has made me reasonably conversant with that story and I watch its unfolding with a mixture of interest and anticipation mixed with a goodly slice of anger and anxiety (I’m only human).

 On to some other myths from other countries. And here is where I find it extremely interesting. In Mesoamerica there was a god/ruler who was called Quetzalcoatl (also known as Kukulkan by the Mayan, they of the Dec 2012 when the stars began to move from the darkness into the light again). He reined over a time of peace and plenty to be usurped by a demon called Tezcatlipoca. He was betrayed and there are various methods for his death, whereby the Aztec descend into evil. But guess what? He promised to return to restore peace and banish evil. This was all before they were introduced to Christianity by the Spanish colonialists.

Then, and here’s my special one.: Ragnarök, the Norse end of the world. Now I became extremely interested in Norse stuff when I went in search of my own Celtic people’s spiritual take on life before Christianity. Because, you see, the British Isles suffered wave upon wave of colonialists before they, using their own unconscious neuronets, became the arch colonialists of the human world, and the death of most of the rest of it. As a result of those waves we had multiple mythologies to choose from. First there was the Celts themselves. Like Aotearoa, were there were people before the Māori arrival, there were people before the Celts but damned if I can find them, accept that they were depicted as one-eyed monsters called the Fomorians. But then, all invaders demonise the people that they oust. The there were the Romans and we all know all there is to know about they and the Greeks because our whole British culture was designed to emulate them.

After that there were the Saxon, Angle and Jute waves stepping in, at the Celts invitation by the by, to fill in the space left by the Legions. Along with that there were raiding Vikings, leaving their sperm in the mix, as well as their mythology, the Danes, followed by Bretons. So who the hell was I? It depends how far back I go. My folk were from East Anglia, so Angles? Saxon? All of their amazing mythologies and pantheons of gods lay open to me. A smorgasbord-oops Swedish?? Anyway, Ragnarök was fascinating. A time at the end of the world where the Giants fight the gods and humans causing the world to end and be drowned again, destroying all but a few gods and, amazingly, a couple called Líf (Life) and her partner Lífþrasir, who escape into a forest and survive to start the human species all over again. Remind you of anything? No! Ragnarök predate the time when Vikings came in contact with Christians, but you could be forgiven for aligning with the Adam and Eve scenario. Many have studied this possibility but no. Its not what happened.

 There are recurrence of this same end of the world scenario in many cultures it seems. The Hopi have us destroying ourselves four other times before and predict a fifth last chance. Resurrection all over the place. There are also similar instances in the Welsh ‘Mabinogian’, where a son god is brought back to life, and then there is Isis and Osirus. Anyway, you get my point. One may wonder if it’s the other way round: that the Christian end times, resurrections of gods and worlds was all around them when they were promoting their new religion. It could even have been another Middle Eastern story of the same that as a result of Roman adoption of it (and might I say use of it as an Empire making tool, it became a major thought form throughout the Western world. The problem is though, playing by these playbooks and seeing them as truth rather than in the context of mythology, containing both wisdom and warnings, is putting us in a dangerous place. We could actually manage to make it come true if we are not very careful.

Now here’s the good bit. What I found as I descended down through the layers of my whakapapa (if you’re from a country other than NZ look it up) was sanity, mine and possibly the worlds if it listened. I found the Druids, and their modern incarnations in their rebirth with Irish poets and Celtic revival, and the rebirth of Wicca with Gerald Gardener. Now the Druidic ways can be traced back some 3000 years before Christ, so were fine there. They were there in dear old Britain and Gaul so far back that I concluded that I had hit the spot at last that would lead me to understand my people ancient beliefs.  And there was one male god above all, believe it or not. It had nothing to do with gods hanging by their feet from Yggdrasil, or dying on crosses, or being dismembered and put back together again like Humpty Dumpty. The Devine that my people understood was the cycles of Nature. They honoured them, studied them, understood that all were alive intelligent beings too. The celebrations of the Druidic world (and yes they were old men with white beards as well as everything else and women who were equal) were all about renewal and the resurrection brought by the seasons to all the natural world. They understood that we are everything and that everything is us. The Wise Women that were dubbed Witches and burned were, like the Bards, another form of this Druidic understanding of life we had before all the colonial killing changed all that. Indeed the word Wicca is a derivative of Wise and Wyrd and Wyld. Because to be wise we must be wild. We must take ourselves away from the stories of destruction, and rebirth dependent on the acts of mangods and dissolve the barriers to the equality we share with nature/Life. We all have our part to play and our season in which to play it.

Well as far as the Romans were concerned, like all colonial powers, the Druids had to much power over the people from their perspective. It was getting in the way of the Romanisation of the world towards trade and away from the Natural World. They drove them out, killing most, and driving the rest to hide in Ireland where the Romans never got. But then the Catholic priests came and the Druids had to hide again. They adapted themselves into wandering monks with their original tonsures intact and carried on ministering to the people as they always had, just under another banner, They became Bards and MInsterals, and Seanchaí. They became Songsters and Poets and storytellers, teaching as they went. And they are still there. They live in the DNA of everyone that cares to go looking. Believe it or not they are looking for you. If you are open to it they will teach you through your own DNA if you are willing. Because their teachings can save us from the destruction stories. We don’t have to allow ourself to believe them. Nature is all around us, even under the concrete of our Cultural brainwashing. She doesn’t die, she simply moves in and out of seasons, changing her coats as she goes. So do we. Death is not the end. Its just a different season. Bless