Sigrdrífa counsels igurðr concerning how to use málrúnar in the rune-lore section of Sigrdrífumál (Poetic Edda).
‘Speech-runes you shall know,
if you want no-one
to repay you harm with hatred;
wind them about, weave them about,
and place them all together
at the assembly, where people shall
for full judgment go.’
The Words of Odin the High One (Poetic Edda).
‘At every door-way,
ere one enters,
one should spy round,
one should pry round,
for uncertain is the witting
that there be no foeman sitting,
within, one on the floor’
A poem about Karma and correspondence, focusing on how important is the Feeling we have concerning anything, for upon that depends the nature of the atmosphere, for upon that depends the atmosphere we create for ourselves.
‘I am the voice of the voiceless;
Through me the dumb shall speak
Till a deaf world's ear
Shall be made to hear
The wrong of the wordless weak.
The same force formed the sparrow
That fashioned man, the king.
The God of the Whole
Gave a spark of soul
To furred and feathered thing
And I am my brother's keeper;
And I will fight his fight,
And speak the world
For beast and bird
Till the world shall set things right’
The ancient Christians Gnosticism insisted that genuine truth cannot be discovered by valuing one polarity above the another, “but instead by making the two one”. We unite ourselves by acting the same on the outside from the way we feel on the inside, in accordance with our outer actions what our inner soul urges us to do.
‘When you make the two one,
and when you make
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the above like the below…
then, you will be ready
to enter the Kingdom’
These religious disciplines appear to have the same goal: conquering death through inner wholeness, integrity, and perfection. Never the less, Despite all the different religions intended to promote spiritual wholeness and integrity, humanity’s masses still found themselves trapped in a down-ward spiral of unconscious self-deceit, self-betrayal, and self-destruction.
'Light the light within you. Do not extinguish it!
Raise your dead who have died,
for they lived and have died for you.
Give them life. They shall live again!
Knock on yourself as upon a door,
and walk upon yourself as on a straight road.'
As a hatchling, Jörmungandr was cast into the sea by Odin, and in its adulthood became an enormous creature with a body so large that it wrapped around the world, forming an ouroboros. Interestingly, the lan-guage used to describe it suggests that it could be perceived not just as acreature, but as a force. Lines 46–53 of Völuspá provide insight:
'Steps back the renowned
son of Earth
doomed from the serpent
fearing no shame.
All men will
abandon their world
when Midgard’s protector
strikes in rage.
The sun grows black,
the earth sinks into the sea.
The bright stars
vanish from the heavens. '
The root of Yggdrasil that reaches down into Niflheim ends at Hvergelmir. Old Norse for “Bubbling Stream”. In Grimnismál, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda, it is identified as the source of all waters in the nine worlds and the place where liquid from the horns of Eikthyrnir, a stag that resides on the top of Valhalla, falls. Those all waters in the nine worlds begin in the dark depths of Niflheim.
‘Eikthyrnir the hart is called,
that stands o'er Odin's hall,
and bites from Lærad's branches;
from his horns fall
drops into Hvergelmir,
whence all waters rise.’