Dipping My Toes In Evergreen Waters
How ridiculous and what a stranger he is who is surprised at anything that happens in life. — Marcus Aurelius
Recently, I’ve been exploring capital-H Heathenry much as magpie or crow might. I believe that there is something there that is shiny, useful, and which already aligns which much of what I’m already doing.
I started where many begin: by looking up a definition. The Longship’s felt like an intuitive place to start. It is, essentially, the following:
- possesses a worldview aligned with the cosmological concepts of the Well and the Tree, and accepts wyrd and orlæg as cosmic forces;
- engages in the gift cycle through reciprocity with appropriate divine figures—the gods, the ancestors, and the wights; and
- is animistic, polytheistic, and/or panentheistic.
I’m an animist, so that’s the third part of the definition in hand. I regularly take part in gift-giving with the nonhuman, so that’s another part more or less down. But where I was genuinely uncertain was the first part, the bit about cosmic forces. So I figured that would be a good place to start.
I ended up reading through bits and pieces of the very famous Völuspá — thank you very much to the kind folks who post various translations into Modern English/French all over the web, my ancient Scandinavian (vieux norrois) is nonexistent. In particular, I was interested in the lines which focus on the Norns, the Well, and the Tree, in order to read the poetry that pins down these ancient ideas: Wyrd and Orlæg.
Ask veit ek standa, heitir Yggdrasill
hár baðmr, ausinn hvíta auri;
þaðan koma döggvar þærs í dala falla;
stendr æ yfir grœnn Urðar (Wyrd) brunni.
Þaðan koma meyjar margs vitandi
þrjár, ór þeim sal er und þolli stendr;
Urð (Wyrd) hétu eina, aðra Verðandi,
skáru á skíði, Skuld ina þriðju;
þær lög lögðu, þær líf kuru
alda börnum, örlög (Orlæg) seggja.
Putting aside these ancient words and images for a minute, the first law, Orlæg, was the easiest concept to wrap my head around. As a framework for understanding one’s place in relation to others, it actually aligns well with my grasp of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s socio-legal framework of the experience of intersectionality, as expressed in her 1989 paper:
The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.
In the thirty two years since this paper was put forth, intersectionality has firmly departed the world of legal jargon and entered the mainstream cultural anglosphere across the planet, though how well the concept is understood by most people is pretty debatable. From my own perspective, I’ve often been interested in how it has profoundly influenced epistemology (the theory of knowledge) through standpoint theory, that is the idea in sociology that your unique positioning in the world gives you a particular kind of perspective on the world. In other words, everything you think and know is shaped by your social and political experiences. I’m also being guided here by my experiences reading about feminist epistemology, in particular the work of American philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. Feminist epistemology in this case deals with the ways gender influences what we take for granted as knowledge, especially what is traditionally considered “empirical, rational, scientific, impersonal” and which has in the past in Western societies been aligned with “masculine” values. (In particular, I’ve always been fascinated with the contradictions that have arisen between epistemology’s empiricism and feminist criticism of the sciences that have endangered the “legitimacy” of empiricism in some feminist strains of philosophy (but that is a huge digression from the point of this blog post, I’m getting seriously carried away!)
So, to return to ancient poetry: Orlæg — which I have seen translated into Modern English as “fate” in at least two cases — woe is us modern peoples with our limited vocabularies! — is the well and the water, is what the Norns use to keep Yggdrasil evergreen, and all the aspects of the world tied together. I’m a very poor physicist (forgive me, scientists, for the following, I’ve read too much Spinoza) but it reminds me very much of the idea of a deterministic model of the universe (or spacetime), where each moment depends on the moment before it. It seems that as a concept it goes beyond an imagining of time or destiny, but understands how matter and time are part of one coherent whole. In the universe described by the Völuspá, Orlæg transcends fate or mere causality — it is the laws, lives, and scores laid down by the Norns on the cosmos.
The interactions between Orlæg and Wyrd are a more complex kind of theory of causality, one that despite its mythological and cosmological stakes is not an impersonal one. On a personal scale, Orlæg is like a blueprint of the circumstances of your birth, upbringing, and previous choices, and your Wyrd is the way your present choices affect not only your own Orlæg (as your choices become a part of your past) but also the Wyrd and Orlæg of others.
In particular, when contrasted with my own experiences reading what by most would be way too much existentialist literature, I really like Wyrd’s and Orlæg’s focus on interconnection. When reflecting on the ancient lines of the Völuspá, and the rest of my reading on the ancient world, I find these verses encapsulate what can be a genuinely useful framework to work with. Among other things, the concepts of the Well and Tree pulls one out of a (mostly) individualist perspective and reminds us of our own interconnections in every one of our choices and searches for meaning, be it material, social, spiritual.