The different ages of the Viking Gods

Humans like to classify things into easily understandable systems and groups. This is why when
we talk about deities, they are frequently organized into pantheons, with each deity having
particular attributes that are also found in human behaviour and in the natural world.

This is true to an extent, but with most cosmological systems the truth is a little more complex.
Take the Norse or Viking Gods, frequently described as the Æsir and rulers of the world. But
Viking mythology is about far more than the Æsir. They certainly take center stage, although
much of their time appears to be spent battling against or learning from other types of
supernatural beings.

The Norse pantheon, which includes Odin and Thor, is a pantheon simply because these
particular Gods were worshipped and adorned the most at the time when these mythologies
were described.

One will note that Norse mythology contains many other magical beings, such as the dwarves,
the elves, the giants, and the other countless local traditions of spirits who inhabit a particular
place or domain. The difference between the Æsir and these other Gods is simply that the Æsir
were considered superior supernatural deities, they were not by any means the only deities or
figures that Norse people recognized and made offerings to.

The word Æsir is connected to words in other European languages, including Etruscan, Old
English and Irish, to describe a high authority upon the human world at that particular time. We
cannot date the emergence of the Æsir in human consciousness, but evidence points towards a
strong association between them and the mastery over the material realm.

If we take this literally, we can see that the Æsir, in the past few thousand years, were the
emerging dominant higher status of human consciousness in Europe and in the Middle East,
there are strong associations between them and the Bronze and Iron ages, where mankind
really started to take his skill and intuition to a mastery over the material world. Looking at the
world today, it is clear that we are living in the world created by the Æsir consciousness, which
humans have misunderstood, being too immature to understand the implications of this
knowledge and having more or less poisoned the entire planet with our mastery over the
physical realm.

This can be put down to that, relying solely upon this knowledge, we have lost connection to the
earlier deities and ideas which allow us to feel connected to the natural realm.

The Æsir inhabit Valhalla. The word Val or Wal implies power or light, we can see a connection
to the Finnish and Etruscan languages here where in Finnish the word for light is valo. Tolkien
may have been aware of this connection and used the same word principle in describing his
Middle Earth mythology.
Before the Æsir were the Vanir, gods associated with farming and with fertility and abundance.
We can perhaps date these gods to the arrival of the Neolithic in Europe.

Interestingly, the Æsir-Vanir distinction is not always clear cut. It is clear from Old Norse
mythology that the Æsir admired the Vanir for their knowledge of magic and of the earth. The
Æsir learned the runes, the secret keys to understanding the geometry of matter, from the
Vanir. So whilst the Æsir are clearly beings of light and of power, they are not all-knowing, they
inhabited the same places as the Vanir and there was some kind of cultural exchange
happening.

Whereas the Æsir seem to have had an Eastern origin in terms of the human world, the Vanir
seem more native to Europe. The prehistoric possibly Turkic influence from the east upon the
Etruscan and Hungarian cultures may be identified with the Æsir, of course this is not the same
as the later emergence of Turkic folklore proper.

In Norse mythology there is nothing so simple as a single creation story by a group of Gods.
The world of the ancient Norse was inhabited by many groups of supernatural beings who all
played their part in the creation and continuual actions happening within the universe.

The Æsir themselves were not born from a one, superior God. They came originally from giants,
the Jötnar, the primordial deities of nature and human life who may have been upper
palaeolithic and mesolithic spirit animals, and deities to the early northern Europeans, much as
native Americans identify many of their deities with the natural energy found within nature.

When the giants or primordial deities become disconnected from humans, they tended to be
demonized and seen through the image of our fear of the natural world. The metaphysical
concept behind this is that what is not visible will become changed and distorted by our own fear
into something that it is not. Thus our relationship to the Jötnar became a more negative one
because we ourselves could neither respect nor understand them.

It is also important to understand that the Jötnar were not gods that one worshipped. The Jötnar
were as numerous as there were people. The Jötnar did not have a magical control over the
cosmos, because they inhabited a different realm and likely didn't always care or take much
interest in how people chose to live. They were the personified energy inherent within nature
that we can see and feel, we may see rocks and trees that look magical, and the Jötnar are
what lies behind this veil, the aspect of that energy that is conscious and able to communicate
with us. Human relationships with the Jötnar were not about bidding and orders, but friendship
and mutual work. The Jötnar are neither good nor evil, they respond to us depending on how we
respect them. Just like nature, the Jötnar do their thing, and were believed to help and bless the
people who they chose to work with, often ferociously protecting them. But just like nature, a
positive relationship with the Jötnar was not about following orders or commands, but about
respect and courage.
The world of the Jötnar, Jotunheim, was separated from the human world by dense mountains
and forests. Implying that they are the living forces "behind" the solid rock and trees, an ancient
consciousness, held within stone or dense roots to our eyes, but in their world, the energy within
the stone and forests is fluid and very much alive. Jötnar are frequently linked to landslides and
to the movement of ice in nature.

When I went to Iceland in 2018, I walked at night along a road in the mountains and felt a
powerful presence, urging me to keep my wits about me, but not in a seemingly threatening
way. I thought of the Jötnar, and seconds later there was a crashing sound as ice and rock
tumbled down the side of a steep mountain. The next day, I sat below some other cliffs and
thought about them, making an offering to them, at a place that felt like it was once the home to
mesolithic humans. Seconds after thinking about them and acknowledging them, there was a
further landslide, and the clouds themselves seemed to form into the shapes of giant faces
staring down at me.

Unlike other deities which are worshipped in systems of temples, or beside alters that can be
inside and even in one's home, the Jötnar urge us to seek and communicate to them through
nature itself. Geography changes our consciousness when faced with the raw power of nature,
and places of dramatic or unusual geographic features and where to find the Jötnar. We have to
be brave and go to the literal edge of our realm in order to find them and to show them that we
want to communicate.

Later on, Jötnar became personified as trolls, the difference being that trolls are more
associated with communicating with humans on a human level, taking on human features and
being easy to find. The concept of trolls having many heads has to do with their distortion-
consciousness, the same thing that the Jötnar and Draugar use to change size and shape,
something which other Norse deities were known to do from time to time.

Distortion-consciousness is the ability to let the raw raw universe flow through oneself to fill,
influence or change our form. In mythology this is frequently associated with the growing of
snake heads for hair or legs, tentacles or horns. The horny growths or multiple heads represent
where ancient, hidden primordial spirits have been manifested within a person or being, and as
they push outwards into the mind and body they cause it to grow in a seemingly unnatural way.
The horns in ancient archetypes that later became linked to the devil, comes from the concept
that the "devil", or Pan, or Cernunnos, or Loki, gave people knowledge of the ancient and
hidden things that are invisible and cut off from our world. They warp us from within, the
extension of horns or snakes from the head being representative of our consciousness seeing
further with the mind as we become combined with other beings and integrate into a multi-
consciousness across different planes of existence.

Affectively it is some form of possession, but the difference is that distortion-consciousness is

an integration of archetypes in other realms into our physical form. We are more than our
physical form anyway, and these other things we connect to have in fact always been a part of
us, cut off, our ancient selves before the concepts of linear time and reincarnation came into
existence. We need only realise that they are us.