NorsePlay: ideas from the Odin Brotherhood.

When Professor Mark Mirabello published The Odin Brotherhood (1992) surely many dismissed the idea of a surviving secret society of religious Norse practitioners as an attractive fantasy, or thought the dialog in the book only an Edda-like delivery system for a revival.

Understandably any sort of unearthed esoteric knowledge revealed after hundreds of years using unconfirmable sources opens itself up to scrutiny & examination, especially by reconstructionists who've had to weed out and re-plant structures in their religion, and we leave it up for those better versed in the archaeology & attestations in Asatru lore to do so.

What can't be argued is that Mirabello serves up some interesting ideas & perspectives onto the Asatruar's table, which we will present & ourselves extrapolate on here from the 5th edition (we don't have the current 6th edition [but if the publisher wished to send us one, we'd be happy to examine & revise this survey in light of the additional 50 pages, and even comment on Jack Wolf's complimentary The Way of the Odin Brotherhood {2013}, if included]).

[Bifrost to Asgard backdrop in Richard Wagner’s "Das Rheingold", directed by Otto Schenk (1990).]

The gods are presented throughout the text with unheard of epithets & cognomen, so much like the lore in using metaphorical descriptors & narrative associations to speak about the Aesir, which makes for some new additions one could use in writing or ritual.

Unlike in the Eddas, where it's the death of only a few of the gods that are detailed during the cataclysmic Ragnarök, we get a very grim additional description of the deaths of Frigg & Iðunn: "Freya will slay several trolls before she herself is killed, Idun [sic] will be soiled and raped and murdered" (p.102). There always seemed to be the implication that frost giant Þjazi perhaps did more than hold the youth-giver for her apples, but here the brutality upon her is made explicit & final.

As per the Brotherhood's origin story, a lead tablet will communicate to a dead person if buried at their grave in the winter (p.17). It's the exception that the dead answer, and it was a reply that formed their secret society.

The OB claim there are three types of death that lead to three different afterlife realms: Death in battle, the straw death of old age/sickness, and death by sorcery. Death in battle is a requirement in order to psychologically face death again when Ragnarök comes. In stark contrast, death by magick is bad since that ending denies the final army better numbers, thus giving us a longterm applied reason to avoid using magick for fatalities in the first place, which the OB states is "killing with words" and used by "all who thrive on malice" (p.74). The need for battle death also makes a fitting justification for Odin's grand plan to prepare for Ragnarök.

"Some men become terrified and dizzy at great heights. According to an old legend, it is the proximity of the gods at great heights that makes people afraid." (p.50) This passing detail jibes with citations that meditations to seek clarifying visions took place on high places, much like Odin camping on high seat Hliðskjálf to gain the best perspective.

All the gods cast a "light shadow" more like a reflection, as opposed to our conventionally dark shadow; therefore they'll only visit Midgard at night so as to conceal themselves (p.33).

Time between Asgard & Midgard passes at different rates: "An instant in the reality of the gods is an epoch in the reality of men." (p.61) This temporal difference could account for divine superspeed, seeming multi-locatant, and the need for special apples to offset aging. If men enter the reality of the gods, aging occurs, a reversed principle similar to the fairyland tales where visiting/kidnapped mortals don't age, while time passes much faster back home.

As for other realms, the OB locates Alfheim "where every river begins": "Rain is where every river begins, so the Elf-World is somewhere in the architecture of the clouds" (p.67). 

Frost giants & fire giants "exist in oblique corridors" (p.43), implying a nearby plane or dimension where they lay in wait for those barriers to break down when the universe ends. Sort of Lovecraftian, yes?

Death is hands-on sexy:

"AUTHOR: From the Odinist perspective, what is death?

THE ODIN BROTHERHOOD: In poetic terms, death itself is personified as beautiful females who exist in an endless variety of exquisite forms. These females are called the valkyries.

AUTHOR: And these valkyries extinguish life?

THE ODIN BROTHERHOOD: Yes. The gentle hands of the valkyries softly and voluptuously do the work of killing." (p.71)

Well, if you're putting it like that, death is a welcome pornography.

Endtimes update: Baldur is already dead (p.82). As the forerunning prophecy for Ragnarök, this places a greater urgency on the current state of things as far as the OB see it.

The text also presents the idea of time as an eternal cycle, similar to science's oscillating cosmology theory where the universe big bangs out (like Niflheim's ice mixing with Muspelheim's fire to explode matter into being), then gravity stalls the expansion and draws it back to collapse onto itself, only to bang out again, but the gods return with every universal genesis, like the lore mentioning Baldur's return after the sturm und drang of the current world's end is finished and everything resets. 

As for fate, it is something that's already woven out for us (p.93): "We cannot choose the joys or the terrors we must face, but we can choose to face them calmly. That is our freedom." Ergo, the inevitable's going to happen, but how we deal with it makes the difference.

And finally, the OB claims that when honor & heroic action are no longer found on Midgard, the separate worlds will break down, and Ragnarök will happen. So in the very act of honouring the old gods, we stave off Ragnarök indefinitely, and that alone is reason enough to venerate the Aesir. It's in our interest & the gods' interest to blot, for these interests of preservation, celebration, and recognition are one in the same.

Whether one buys the Eddaic adornments of what the OB's secret lore says or not, they provoke us to rethink what we know, and their last and most important point reminds us that in honoring the gods, we also honor the potential for our best selves and the world around us, all in the same horn, and that alone is worth listening (and drinking) to. 

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

don't forget your warhammer.

It appears Warhammer, the Forgotten Weapon: Its History Through Examples by James Roth, is the only volume exclusively featuring this weapon, so if you've just purchased a warhammer this would be the one choice you get.

Although a slim self-published 120 pages, which, when compared to the encyclopedias one finds on swords, is spartan, the style is succinct and says just what one needs to know in a well-reasoned historical survey.

Revealing that "James Roth"'s a pseudonym, one can deduce the author's protecting his/her stated professional fencing career, but any reader must question what's the shame in exploring other avenues of melee weaponry, when variations could only strengthen and add to any fencer's toolkit. 

Also, if the author/ess is a professional fencer, one should expect more practical guidance, say blocks, parrys, stances, positions, and contingencies versus differently armed opponents.

Instead most of the examples are based on remaining artifacts and intuitive explorations of period paintings, in particular this one:

[Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (probably c. 1438–1440), from a triptych by Paolo Uccello. Egg tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar, 182 × 320 cm, National Gallery, London.]

There's a detailed beat-by-beat breakdown of what's happening with the three knights' melee at right which backs up the clear superiority of the warhammer's ready handiness versus formidable plate and the awkwardness of the lance or sword in this situation. This deep minutia more than implies the author's acumen, but the know-how of most martial arts manuals isn't given to the reader in the fencing chapter as one might greatly anticipate. Instead the book mainly features the reasons behind the technology of the weapon's build & variants.

Citing Wikipedia and drawing from online museum and weapons' collection pictures, the book surveys the warhammer's precursors, working up to the evolution of armor, and the need for and hammer-style armour busting close quarter weapon when regular swords failed, and other arms proved too awkward. Discussing medieval & renaissance versions from Poland, Ukraine, and Germany, the reader's expertly lead through all the whys of warhammering.

The book concludes by stating "The warhammer should not be remembered through games and fantasies." Odds are however that given the current prevalence of gamer & geek cultures, it's precisely these aspects which give Roth his readership, which should be respected for deciding to do their homework by purchasing his text.

So if you've come to the battlefield hammer in hand looking for a guide with step-by-step techniques like the ninja books of the 1980s, this isn't it, but it's the only book out there and worth reading to know why you bought that bad arse hammer in the first place, and why it still fascinates us centuries later.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

dare you enter The Cemetery of Forgotten Books ... ?

We eagerly return to the Zafóniverse, a Gothic Barcelona founded upon secrets, unspeakable war tragedies, and mysterious legends, fueled by an unending hunger of Catalonian delectables, set in unforgettable residences, with a cast tossed about by masterfully plotted waves of hopeless hopes, impossible loves, and dark circumstances.

Yes, we are so bookdrunk on another double draught of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, this time the finishing two installments of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books trilogy.

[The Cemetery of Forgotten Books?
No, it's The Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.]

The Angel's Game (2008) proves to be an illuminating prequel to The Shadow of the Wind (2001). Our young boy main character adjusts from Daniel Sempere to David Martin, who have similar voices, both having lost their mothers to tragic circumstances, and a narrative difference being that David much more fearlessly says what intelligent Daniel only has the insight to think, perhaps because David loses his father far earlier and then feels he has nothing to lose. In most instances this gives the dialogue a winningly zippy Tracy-Hepburn delivery, especially in his later "His Girl Friday" repartee with equally sassy assistant Isabella.

Adolescent David gets a chance to pen a Gothic potboiler, The City of the Damned, serialized on the back page of the newspaper he runs copy for, and it becomes a runaway hit, earning the adoration of the common reader and the scorn of the city's classicist green-eyed literati. Like the eponymous cursed book in The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón's compelling description of this serial makes one want to read this book within a book with its Feuillade's "Les Vampire" (1915 silent serial film) criminal stylings. David's success launches him into the pleasures & perils of authorship, and gains him the attention of an enigmatic would-be patron. (Cue suspense theme.)

When this plot thickens, David's opportunity's for publishing increases, and the novel takes on the larger meaning within the craft & process of writing a book. Zafón's world posits that books serve as vessels of persona & purpose, just as equal as the soul is to the body.

AG also boldly holds forth on religious faith & its invisible constructs, the story-church/chicken-egg causality, whether it's made from a historical messiah figure, or verisimilitudinal legend, or fill-in for a current societal need (almost an unintended comparative to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology).

Whether commenting on the necessity of religion, the horror of civil war, or the glories of past architectures, Zafón adorns his ideas with a poetic hyperbole and a challenging exploration that is nothing short of transportive. We enjoy the peoples and city walks of bygone days, a fallen elegance that one thought gone but is held in the amber of Zafón's words.

One grim aspect that Zafón endows David's story with is that betrayal is the easy shadow cast by friendship as people turn out to be not what they steadfastly seemed, which makes for surprising (and woeful) reading.

AG also seems to contain a self-aware critique of the Gothic's tropes' effect on the reader, like Northanger Abbey (1817) -- but of course without all of Austen's ploddingly unreadable Regency twaddle. When David selects a long abandoned gargoyle crowned mansion to live in, the manse's dark charms are a dream come true to the writer's fevered imagination, yet as events progress, the house weighs heavy on its resident and possibly colours how he sees things happening to him. Yet the occult forces that are hinted in small details in SotW begin to be revealed, and plunges the book from noir mystery to seriously dark historical fantasy.

Between these last two books is The Rose of Fire, a small 2.5 short story installment that explains the mysterious medieval origins of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books!

But while AG takes it off the map into the unknown in an amazing way, The Prisoner of Heaven (2011) tells you the journey is a lie.

PoH Takes place after SotW, unlike the prequel placement of AG. While a forward states that The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series can be read in any order, in retrospect it unfolds best in order of publication as the third would definitely spoil aspects of the second.

The third installment picks up Daniel Sempere as main character, revealing bookstore clerk & bon vivant Fermín Romero de Torres' story and its consequences.

Fermín's nested flashback narrative honors Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) with a transposition of Zafon's characters which it makes no bones about reframing, but it's a long prison sentence of 82 pages out of 278 for the reader, and some may have hoped that having Prisoner in the title might have proved less literal.

PoH seems to retract the supernature of both SotW & AG as we find David Martin in prison, deluded & dialoging with his more-than-mysterious patron. This turn feels like a cheat that deflates as opposed to a quantum truth, and in questioning his own second novel's decisions Zafón undermines the darkly numinous occult forces in his world.

Zafón plays with the unreliable narrator which later comes across as a slight abuse of the reader/author compact. Yet it partly doesn't matter since by the time he unveils that trick's mechanics his story's momentum far outweighs most misgivings one might have for such an implied illusion versus reality twist. (And if the occult is unseen and the spiritual invisible, then there isn't a paradox to complain about -- but that's a semi-apologetic comfort this reviewer had to come up with, not the author.) Still, we feel this implied retraction shouldn't be there at all, that such a move feels cowardly, and this is our one large complaint about these otherwise brilliant books.

Not that a visual adaptation needs to even be made as the literary medium does quite well on its own, but if Zafón's work were serialized into a series, one would want the Russian network to give it a "The Master & Margarita" treatment. Or, if major motion picture, maybe best put in the hands of Guillermo Del Toro, who's Hispanic sensibilities would do the work's sinister mood justice.

Like an Alfred Hitchcock cameo, Zafón passingly references himself in the side character of Professor Alburquerque:

"‘You should write a book on the subject,’ I proposed. ‘A secret history of Barcelona seen through its accursed writers, those forbidden in the official version.’ The professor considered the idea, intrigued. [...]

‘You’d better, because cities have no memory and they need someone like me, a sage with his feet on the ground, to keep it alive.’" [p.211]

In this goal, Zafón succeeds. Dickens is to London as Zafón is to Barcelona, and that will be his immortal legacy that cheats death, the towering monolith that looms largest in the haunted center of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.