Essay for Rind
by Gary DeJong
Not being a traveler myself, I can only get
my info on the Nine Worlds and their denizens from what I have read, and what
little personal contact I have had from its visitors. To be honest, I
find the nature of the Gods’ reality baffling, and often think it sounds like
some sort of immensely tragic virtual world that these entities have become
locked into, perhaps because they draw their sense of who and what they
are from it. This does not undercut in any way how seriously I take the
goings-on there, since I count these beings as friends and these realms are
what they have staked everything on.
To me, by far the most perplexing story to come out of the myth cycles
that have been developed by spirit workers over the last couple of decades is
that of Rind. The first version of the story that most people would have
come across is in the Havamal, with the stanzas about Billing’s daughter.
Here Odin gives a decidedly different telling of the events from Saxo's,
changing the circumstances to make himself look the victim of a cruel
prank. Saxo's account looks to be older, and it might be easy for one to
miss the link between it and the one in the Havamal. The characters in
folk tales often become attributed to deities in disguise, so one can imagine
this tale of a wily sorcerer to have been the creation of some bard living on
the hospitality of others.
Now the classical myths have rarely, if ever, required self consistent use of
time and space; and chronological weaknesses became a tool for Christian
missionaries to point out the illogicality, from their perspective at any rate,
of the pagan worldview. Earlier narratives did not need a steady time
flow, and the idea of changing that flow is something from modern era
literature. This gives the current version of the story attributed to
Rind herself, where she appears not as the daughter of a human dignitary but
instead as a kind of Jotun time lord, a terribly anachronistic feeling.
Now I mention my doubts in passing here just to note that Rind seems to take a
wry amusement from them. She likes to remind me of the sort of theories about
time I used to appropriate and play with back in my “chaos magic” phase, in
particular the sum-over-histories approach as applied to the mundane world. In
this approach, every possible history to get to the present reality has
occurred. It is just some flaw in human perception that only allows us to
see one of them, and consciousness itself has the potential to choose which of
these paths we can have. This paradigm is a very effective tool for explaining
anything magical. But it hurts my fracking head and allows for too many
contradictions to form a coherent enough world view for me regard as
functional; and it is not really necessary for this realm. I have been
told that our home is the most solid and least affected by the activity of consciousness,
which is one reason the gods like to see us corralled here. These were
ideas she seemed to like playing with, with the subtext that I wasn't
understanding any of it at all and my presumption gave her something to chuckle
about.
To paraphrase from the dialogue that I took as being her narrative:
"Does every aspect of a god/dess, and to be sure there are many of them,
have a history of its own? Would such a history have a complete reality
of its own? You know there is no one to correct a how a god/dess remembers
things. Wouldn't that mean there would be very many time streams in which
the gods interacted with each other in different ways?"
Soon she was giving advice for constructing guided meditations:
"So, as you have learned, gods and humans are composite beings, colonies
of awarenesses which each have the potential to become self conscious, yet
humans can only focus upon one at any given time. They each have their function
as part of the whole. They fall out of perfect alignment with each other and
the internal sense of time-flow when they cease to be the focus of attention.
That focus is, in fact, a component of the individual’s temporal sense. Lining
up one or more of these components in perfect synchronization will cause
those feelings of timelessness and unity that comprise the mystic's peak
experience."
(I found from experimentation that this idea of “components” was helpful in
bringing a meditative state to complex physical tasks.)
"To slow down or speed up the feeling of passing time, visualize the
relationship between internal temporal sense and the flow of the external time
stream. Imagine a bird flying headlong into strong wind. That bird is your
subjective sense of time. While you can't, at least at this level, control the
wind; you can, if only slightly, change the relative speed of the bird."
As to Rind herself, I found her vibe to be a bit less martial than I would have
thought, but I also found that Rind feels different on a spring day by the
shoreline then how she does in a snow-covered forest, and it was during that
spring I had the most visits with her. Perhaps the environment reminded
her of her childhood. I was left with clear memories of her father, Billing,
and evenings spent watching Sunna going past the apparent waterline. There Rind
learned to extend sunsets so she could watch them for longer; that was one of
the earliest manifestations of her talents. Rind’s skills became like a
privately cultivated art, something that happened in an inconspicuous
matter-of-fact way while she got on with the details of her life, and something
from which she sought neither fame, nor influence, nor advantage of any
kind. From the glimpses we have seen, it would look like she had a full
domestic life before events beyond her control caught her in the turbulent
politics of the nine worlds. The UPG I received has her leading a quiet and
secure existence in the roles of daughter, sibling, wife, and mother in the
prosperous classes of Jotunheim. And as such, she stands as an example of one
who brings the vision and wisdom of the contemplative and ascetic and applies
them to the rounds of daily life. In my experience she is just as adept and
comfortable in discussing the mundane as she is with the metaphysical.
She seems to be less a goddess of the hearth or war, even if she does have
elements of both, than one who strives for the transcendent while keeping a
foot firmly grounded in the world that one lives. And in the end, this helped
her deal with the tragedy that her gifts had unwittingly brought down upon her.