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+. 

incorrect inquiries encouraged.

Voice is everything. Unimaginative reductivists argue that there are no original stories left to tell (which, as a writer, I do not believe), but it's the teller's interpretation which is unique and what makes those stories worth retelling. Within that half-falsity, what makes a Lemony Snicket book is his voice, the redundant, rephrasical, regretful narrator who paints his uncanny world in shades of woe & misfortune.

Second in Snicket's All The Wrong Questions series, When Did You See Her Last? finds our apprenticing secret society autobiographer cutting his teeth on a case of a kidnapped heiress, but in the ghost town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea all isn't as sadly simple as it seems.

Unlike Vonnegut (bleh!) or Robbins (meh!), it's Snicket who uses constantly deft verbal dexterity to reinforce character & narrative, as opposed to an author just showing off at the cost of those same storytelling factors he should be building. It's Lemony who's so wordsmith, and the grasp of language is what gives him an edge, showing that he has the mind enough to define his dilemmas even if he doesn't yet have a true handle on their motives or scope: "I was standing in front of a Dilemma. There are people in the world who care about automobiles, and there are people who couldn't care less, and there are people who are impressed by the Dilemma, and those people are everyone. The Dilemma is such a tremendous thing to look at that I stared at it for a good ten minutes before reminding myself that I should think of it as a clue to a mystery rather than as a wonder of modern engineering. It was one of the newer models, with a small, old-fashioned horn perched just outside of each front window, and a shiny crank on the side so you could roll down the roof if Stain'd-by-the-Sea ever offered pleasant weather, and it was the color of someone buying you an ice cream cone for no reason at all."

Also, Snicket delivers consistently great character names, like Ellington Feint, Moxie Mallahan, Dashiell Qwerty, aside from his own, reaching far outside the usual baby name books to make not just proper nouns but cultural associations.

While the pacing of this book is slightly faster with less lingering descriptions, we still get a few wonderfully hard nutshells via Snicket's implicative encapsulations: "The books and shelves seemed to be in the middle of an argument nobody was winning."

Art by still no-last-named Seth (but we now know he's Canadian, so that narrows it down[?]) trades its predominant blue for purple in the solid graphic style. Sort of warming up to its noir sensibilities by this second book.

[Yes, a fountain pen skyscraper featuring a keyhole breather nib!]

Presentations of vocabulary aside, there's a new device in this series: In the oblique references to other books which are never actually named, Snicket reveals not only literary suggestions, but his influences. Yet these references are also distractions from the real mystery ... if there actually is a real mystery. Kit Snicket, Lemony's sister, keeps getting mentioned as perilously on her own back in the city, and her's is the story untold, yet bookended by Seth's splash pages at the front and back of both installments so far. For those of you who have read A Series of Unfortunate Events, you know how things sort out for intrepid Kit, but we may get the chance to find out how she starts her journey there, and these hints could fill in her arc.

Snicket also waxes philosophical. Between the kids there's a commerce of help, knowledge, and trust. Snicket trades book recommendations for cab rides from a duo of young taxi drivers, the same for breakfasts from teen fry cook Jim Hix, ingenue fatale Ellington Feint trades assistance for Snicket's gallant but possibly misplaced help, reporter Moxie exchanges her local who's-who for Snicket's info toward her unpublished news stories. Snicket argues that all would be more egalitarian if seen through the leveling eyes of youth and run by children, that adults get compromised and give up, while children with their untarnished optimism do not: "'You said we could make our organization greater than ever, but only if we stopped listening to our instructors and found new ways to fix the world. It was quite the speech you gave, It almost got you thrown out for good.'" And with that suddenly Lemony may become responsible for an event that does change everything.

While not as fresh as Who Could That Be At This Hour?,  there are revelations and far-reaching implications that Snicket's liminal role as hesitant documentarian for ASOUE may be much more involved than we ever suspected. While Snicket's world's never played with the supernatural, one dares to think that with hidden cult-like fraternities, octopi, a strange idol, the decaying seaside town, and constant fear of the unknown, that something Lovecraftian might dare to rear its scaly head? We dare hope.

April 1st, 2014, sees the release of not a third installment, but a collection of mini-mysteries set in the ATWQ world, File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents.

[Or is it an April Fool's publishing joke? So suspect, Snicket!]

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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+.