Shades of Yggdrasil

As I sit here writing this, there looms outside a steel grey clouded sky. That sky sits like an iron blanket upon my vantage of the trees, with their leaf-littered fingers reaching up to Heaven. Below it all likes a fundus made of grass and soil and stone, green, almost vulgar in her beauty. In my head I hear the song of the Golden Dawn, which I myself stole from YouTube because any day now some diaper-stained sissy will decide it is somehow offensive and have it banned. I’m drinking my Cumberland Farms coffee, made the way I like it, like how I like women: full-bodied, pale and sweet. Life is good. This Nature I surround myself with has formed the landscape of my dreams, inspired the measure by which I judge natural beauty. Its climes have shaped my own soul, too. Maine is a rugged State, beautiful in theory – life here is slow until it is not. The seasons, while transient, seem indefatigable until they are not. The lands are steep, but they also stretch. They seem invincible to me, until one considers the short life of every season.

I surround myself with Nature. Between myself and the forest is a frontier of field. Now, I have planted several trees to invoke that spirit of wooded harmony and bring it ever closer. Among these trees which I have planted is a Sterling Linden, Tillia Timentosa. Her I have planted in honour of my favourite story, that of Baucis and Philemon. It is a beautiful story involving the mighty oak and the noble Linden. Look the story up, you can find my own retelling earlier in this blog I post in.

Naturally, the act of caring for the trees reminds me of the World Tree. Every mythology worth their salt has one. Except for maybe the Irish. For me, there is no finer image of the World Tree than that of Yggdrasil. This image speaks to me, for it captures so many themes and narratives of life that for the concept to have dwindled is tragedian in nature. Allow me please to illustrate this gripping archetype.

Yggdrasil, the windswept tree, an ash tree of which no finer example is found, stands proud. Her roots bury deep into the underworld, into the far reaches where even Hel thinks twice to tread. Her branches reach high, into the highest heaven which eclipses the glories of the Gods themselves. In the balance hang her branches, from which the Nine Worlds hang – the material cosmos lies in the twain. For as long as Yggdrasil lasts, we know, so lasts Midgard – the world of men, and all the other realms whose being inspires myth and legend. At each of Yggdrasil’s mighty roots there are wells, from which spring the Nornir who order the fates. Yet, for all her eternity Yggdrasil is under constant threat. The looming doom is that someday, Yggdrasil will shed her leaves and the world shall fall apart. Beneath the roots lie Nidhogg, the dread serpent who excels Jormungand in every way. There lies the serpent that gnaws on the damned in Nastrond, the direst of all the underworld’s halls. Atop the tree sits Hraesvelg the eagle who sends wind to all the worlds. The two hate each other, and are egged on in their rivalry by Ratatosk, a squirrel, who carries insults back and forth. Great harts gnaw on the bark at the tree’s mighty base, and insects attack the leaves. Yggdrasil sways in the wind made by Hraesvelg’s mighty wings, lending her the nickname ‘windswept tree.’ And here the tree was stained when Odin sacrificed himself, crucifying himself to the trunk of this most noble tree in order that he might gain insight into new states of being.

I live in a land of bounty, in a time of suffocating decadence. Those who claim Germanic descent must understand that for our ancestors, life was different. Especially for the Scandinavians for whom life could be especially harsh. It was in the Scandinavian telling of Germanic cosmology that a very sensitive understanding of duality and dualism was achieved. Theirs was a multifarious weltanschauung in which beauty and cruelty held hands, where light and darkness were separated only by a shade of opinion, where good and evil were intangible and all lines seemed blurred beyond recognisance.

Every day I go to tend my Linden Tree, and I think sometimes of the Norns who tended to Yggdrasil. Every day I find that my beautiful tree is under new threat. Root rot from overexposure to water one day. Fungus, another day. Now I check the leaves daily for the eggs of caterpillars, and I check for beetles and other pests. Last year, when I planted my Mesabi Tree there was an immediate scorching heat wave that robbed her of nearly every leave. My Pear Tree which lies at the frontier of my yard was gnawed at by deer. Chipmunks stole all my pears, this year. Japanese beetles tried and failed to thwart my Mesabi this year, and last year my biggest pear was cut in half by a particularly massive gust of wind – and yet the half that lives has flowered in such majesty as I have yet to see. Despite the threats against my garden, the smell of pollen – so sickly sweet – has filled the air. The sight of green’s leaves and whitest flower has brought me great hope. And so Nature marches on.

I appreciate the observation and attention to detail the Scandos employed. But as with all things mythic, there lies deeper layers of meaning. Perhaps the attention to detail came from their lot. Scandinavia, they tell me, is a rugged country. Full of permanence. Their summer, I hear, is pathetic. Their winters are mighty. No small wonder than that the age of man was conceived of as a brief spring before the Fimbul-Winter that would end the world. I, Mainer, live with the yearly dread that one year we will face a winter that I cannot outlast, that the snow will rise so high that my shovel cannot breach it, that the pack will be so dense my snow blower cannot cut it. How much more the dread for those who had worse winters and fewer tools?

For the Norse, eternity was temporary. I can relate. But Maine has verdant summers. This is something we take for granted. Scandinavia had rough earth. Farming was difficult. To propitiate fiscal and culinary demands, the Viking was born. The raids began as a way of reaping sustenance, but with all things, became corrupt. So imagine a land where trees were the sturdiest plant you could know. Imagine a land that rejects the bulk of what you try to grow in it. A fruit tree might have been the best hope for food among some, the most reliable. This is not something the Folk Soul of the Anglo grasps easily, for ours was a race always attached to arable soil. Perhaps this is why I so love my trees and my dirt, it is, after all, in my blood. But it goes that the Anglo has older strands in his DNA than gardening and farming. The Anglo owes his ancient ancestry to that land that gave us Yggdrasil.

The whole notion of Yggdrasil reveals something else, a ubiquitous theme prevalent in understanding among the post-Aryan tribes. Yggdrasil illustrates a cosmic truth that materiality relies on a carefully calibrated system of dynamic tension, resistance and cohabitation. The Eagle sits atop Yggdrasil – a symbol of splendour, regality and honour. The dragon lies beneath, a symbol of decay and consumption, dread and fear. The two hate each other, but neither could persist in a vacuum. The dragon was needed, representative of entropy, to consume sick and dieing tissue to ensure that glory could be reborn. For glory left unheeded, still fades and loses vigour. In life, all grows, becomes, withers, and passes away – from this new life is born.

Life is beautiful, precious, because there is ugliness, decay. Being stunned, exposed to this dark nature teaches appreciation for the light. The penultimate failing of White Civilisation has been this idea that you can play God and remove the darkness. In this way we have failed our entire race in modernity by trying to save face against pain, discomfort, illness, death, tension, and identitarian concern. The Norse had no such notions. Their picture of life was untainted by this sectarian cowardice. When you remove the threat of ugliness, the allure of beauty is taken for granted. Strength fades and glory dies. In all things there is a distinct balance. When upset, bad things happen.

The worlds were born, we are told, from the harmonising of antagonistic elements. Anathematic to each other, the fire of Muspelheim and the frost of Nifelheim became the mist that birthed the cosmos. Yggdrasil was the medium by which modes were attenuated. Her power and beauty came from the fact that she too, had to struggle. She was the Tree of Life because she harmonised those elements. What a sublime concept, our ancestors had made long before the idiot-savants of materialism came to save us. Life cannot exist without the specific cooperation of axiomatic catalysts.

When I travelled to Guatemala as a youth to minister, I was taught that the finest coffee must be picked from the highest peaks. There where the oxygen is thinner, little but shrug can grow – but those proud few plants that survive produce the richest fruits for they must extoll all the more energy to survive, and are unencumbered by the competition of inferior specimens. The Norse understood that life came from struggle. Alles Leben ist Kampf, a wise man once said. It seems prudent to acknowledge that the finest lives are those that emerge from struggle, stronger than those that do not toil.

My Linden Tree looks rough now, having been subject to much infliction, but next year I know she shall be reborn from the coming winter in splendour. Just like every other tree I have planted has come back stronger, and with surpassing beauty. She stands there now, nearly naked but for the lonely leaves spared by pestilence. But I see in her shape the formulary of the Life Rune. No small wonder, this Rune was cut to resemble the growing tree. It is why I chose the Linden I have. The promise of the shape of that Rune is that the bare bones of life will be buried in abundance.

Yggdrasil was the skeleton that held the flesh of the universe. In her wake, a new world arose and buried her. Just as Ymir was the skeleton that fed Yggdrasil as she grew. I myself shall die, and I shall be buried by the legacy of my child(ren). When my body fails, every molecule of my physical being shall be transmuted into something else. My corpse shall someday become dirt, and my remains may yet fertilise a tree. And my children may yet tend the tree that my corpse could grow. They shall live and die and be replaced by my descendents. You will have the same fate. All that we know in this Earth shall live its course, and by the very act of living, lend new life to something else. Life perpetuates life, and as with all things in this universe, there exists a complex system. Wheels within wheels, realities within realities, whose interchange perpetuates a cycle of being our fickle, feeble minds cannot yet fathom.

Our ancestors palpated this vein in the meta-language of reality. They called it Wyrd. Remember that every time you call something weird and understand you are abusing a word with untapped meaning. They understood that reality was a delicate, intricate web with an infinitude of nuances. This sense of place gave their lives a rich tapestry, a nuance that modernity has robbed us of. And what has been the replacement for our stolen valour? Nihilism. Take a walk through Idavoll, the Elysian Fields, and see that Tree of Life. Deny the nihilists, materialists, the great modern scam artists their unjust deserts. Live a little.