Why So Serious?

So, week before last, we kicked off 2019 here on the blog with one of our most profoundly positive posts to date. Now, you would think that our response to such a post would’ve been great, right? I mean, we definitely need more “happy” in the world right now. Much to our surprise, though, that wasn’t the case. Compared to previous posts with way less positive content–especially ones that covered unrest within the community–it received far less interaction, and even apparently caused a few people to even stop following us on Facebook. Weird, right? So I thought this week we would talk about why that might be the case, what it implies about our community as a whole (inclusive of the American Heathen community as a whole), and how this might be associated with a lot of opinions about the “Lord of Not Being Serious” Himself, Loki.

Why would people not respond well to a positive post, but flock to ones with more negative content? The same reason that Don Henley released the song “Dirty Laundry” back in 1982: people love it when other people lose. (For those who don’t remember this classic tune, it’s linked below. No copyright infringement intended or implied.) Think about it: when somebody is going on and on about the happy things in their lives, sometimes as human beings we get jealous. Sometimes, especially when our own lives are going through a particularly sucktastic phase, the last thing we want to hear is how awesome somebody else’s life is. Yet, when somebody’s life is total crap, or there is crap going on–a potential pot to be stirred–we tune in and turn on, because it gives us a chance to realize maybe our life doesn’t suck as bad as we initially thought it did. Plus, it gives us something juicy; something interesting, in a perhaps less-than-interesting little-life-of-our-own. Positive posts can also be read as “la-la” or “woo-filled” or “fluffy”, which brings us to the answer to that second question:

What does the popularity of negative content imply about our community as a whole, and about American  Heathens in particular? 
Love, light, and delight are often viewed as “fluffy bunny” concepts, best left to self-proclaimed hippies, with flowers in their hair. Obviously, the really real world is not overflowing with such concepts; it is, in fact, a semi-ugly place where lions eat the cute bouncy gazelles and wolves eat the bunnies, and none of us want to join either of those two fluffy creatures in being “gobbled up” by the ugliness of the world. So, why then, doesn’t it occur to us that maybe if we actively worked to promote a little more love, light, and delight, then the world might be a little less ugly and “gobbly”? Because the paradigm that has been set for us is that “love, light, and delight attitudes are weak“, and that “only the strong survive”. This is a particularly rampant attitude in the American Heathen community, primarily because of its historical roots in Third Reich propaganda based on the alleged teachings of philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche (though patently not Nietzsche’s fault; he was long-dead by the time the nazis came on the scene). Twisting Nietzsche’s philosophy to their own devices, the nazis used his paradigms, such as “man should not strive after happiness” and “one must resist all sentimental weakness” to keep themselves in power, and make excuses against sentimentality. After all, any sort of sentimentality–offerings of charity; caring about the welfare of fellow humans, wishing to spread light, love, and happiness, etc.–would have ground the wheels of the Holocaust to a shuddering halt, and happiness was purely that: sentimentality. This propaganda has been piped freely into the American Heathen community since the 1970s, largely without most people ever realizing its actual source, which is really kinda scary, when you think about it. The other source of these “that’s too fluffy” attitudes is the “that’s too Christian” attitude, often coupled with the “that’s too Wiccan” attitude. Everybody arrives at any path carrying the baggage of their previous paths. Often, it is precisely that baggage that led us to seek a new path in the first place. Christianity, on the whole, certainly doesn’t deserve a “get out of jail free card”, when it comes to leaving people with baggage. However, Christianity also doesn’t have the market cornered, when it comes to the ideals of love, light, and delight: all of those things are very much alive and well in pre-Christian traditions as well. All of those people screaming “Wiccatru” at love, light, and delight attitudes clearly haven’t met many of the witches that I know, or whose work I have read. The Wicca of the 21st century, in many (I would even venture to say most) cases, barely even resembles the Wicca of the 1960s through the 1990s, on which such “fluffy bunny” opinions are based. Ultimately, the bottom line is this: we are living in a comparatively “dark” world right now, and the entire point of any spiritual system should first be to achieve balance; the only way to balance “darkness” is with “light”: love, light, and delight.

How might all of this be associated with a lot of the opinions that are floating around out there about the “Lord of Not Being Serious” Himself, Loki?  It’s no big secret that if you hail the Trickster at many American Heathen gatherings, you’re likely to be run out “on a rail”, so to speak. Only recently has The Troth lifted a ten-year-long ban on the hailing of Loki at Troth-sponsored community events. This problem doesn’t seem to happen in Europe; only here, in America. Why is that, you may be asking? A lot of it has to do with the “demonization” of Loki, as well as most of the other Jotnar Deities (aka, the Rokkr, such as Angrbodha), which becomes almost comical, when you realize what happens if you say words like “evil” or “demon” within those same groups. That “demonization” is basically Christian grafting at its finest: someone, back in the 1970s, at the dawn of American Heathenry, brought their personal baggage along with them, and it stuck, and it stayed. In a faith that supposedly celebrates “the gray areas” and that some things are neither wholly evil nor wholly good, but “simply are” (check out some stories about Odin’s shenanigans, to punctuate this point), a large majority of people have steadily clung to the “Loki is evil” paradigm, and neither arguments of historical proof of His veneration during the period of the Ancestors, nor any other rational thought seems able to shake them from “the truth” they’ve been fed since their arrival on this path. Some will also argue for the “evilness of Loki” on the basis that, according to lore accounts of what will happen at Ragnarok, He is the “enemy of the Aesir”. Well, that’s great, if you’re sworn to the Aesir (which I’m not), and would be even more great if that was all that the lore actually had to say about Loki. Unfortunately for them, it isn’t: Loki is also the blood-brother of Odin, which basically makes Him “Aesir-by-adoption”, just like Tyr (Jotun-born; fostered by the Aesir). Given the true cyclical nature of the historical Norse concept of time, what Loki will or will not do at Ragnarok (or did or did not do, as the case may be) really has absolutely zero to do with how He should be regarded right now, right here, today. This “demonization” of Loki, unfortunately, also has given many self-professed Lokeans “permission” to act like total jerks, while proclaiming “Loki made me do it”, which only serves to further perpetuate the “Loki is evil” myth. I have personally encountered many Lokeans who are absolutely wonderful humans, so this is a highly unfortunate stereotype, both of them and Their fulltrui/fulltrua.

I personally think that a lot of the current American Heathen attitudes against Loki also have to do with His reputation as the “Lord of Not Being Serious”: He is the Trickster archetype within the Norse pantheon. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Well, first off, Trickster Deities, within any faith system, are traditionally the most often demonized, primarily because people in power (the ones deciding who and what gets demonized or not in the first place) tend to have a desperate need to crush any figures which disrupt the status quo. Tricksters represent the “paradoxical category of sacred amorality” (Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes the World, 1998). In other words, Tricksters represent the use of paradox (often achieved via mischief) to make people notice the absence of, indifference to, or disregard of morality, and They do so within a “sacred framework”; what might be considered the “ultimate top-down allotment of morality and power”, in Their capacity as Gods. Having a Deity like that is generally “bad for business”, when the people “in charge” of a faith system are attempting to develop and maintain a specific morality, especially if the morality those people are attempting to “promote” is fundamentalist in any capacity. Loki, as with most Trickster Deities, is the fundamentalist’s ultimate nightmare! Fundamentalism requires strict adherence: to “scripture” (in the case of American Heathenry, The Lore), to predetermined principles and standards, and most especially to a predetermined moral code. When you insert a Trickster Deity into that sort of fundamentalist paradigm, all hell breaks loose! Through the power of the Trickster–in this case, specifically Loki as He relates to American Heathenry–all of those fundamentalist ideals and their “you’re doing it wrong” mentality go straight out the window, and the people who want to maintain such a “power base” want none of that! They would much prefer to laugh at other people, than to be laughed at themselves. Placing Loki firmly “outside the fence” (utangard) helps guarantee that they will be the ones doing all of the laughing.

One of my favorite stories about Loki is the one in which He makes Skadhi laugh. Her Dad, Thjazi, had just been killed by the Aesir and Vanir because He had stolen Idunna and Her apples, thereby robbing the Aesir and Vanir of not only Their youth, but also Their sovereignty (I’ll be writing more on this in a future book; stay tuned). Rather than staying at home in Jotunheim and weeping vigorously while making Daddy’s funeral arrangements (Skadhi is anything but “that type of gal”), She dons Her bow and arrow and Her skis and sets off for Asgard, to ask for payment from the Aesir and Vanir for the hurt They have caused Her. In repayment for Her father’s death, Skadhi asks for two things: that She be allowed to marry a God of Her choice from among the gathered Aesir and Vanir (She seriously wanted to call dibs on Baldur, but it didn’t quite work out that way), and that someone among Them make Her laugh (otherwise the mundane world could look forward to an eternity of Skadhi’s wrath; cue: snowstorm). Of course, it is Loki–the very same God who got Thjazi killed in the first place–who rises (semi-literally) to the occasion, by tying His balls to a goat. The ensuing tug-of-war, while likely very painful to Loki, received gales of giggles from the Goddess of Snow and the Hunt. And that was, ultimately, His point: He had caused Her pain, so it was only fair that His own pain bring Her laughter. That, my friends, is balance; such balance is the ultimate lesson of the Trickster.

Everything in the universe craves balance: without “good”, we would not recognize “bad”; without “light”, we would not know how deep the “dark”. Heck, without “less thans” to spit upon, the “better thans” wouldn’t have much of a life, would they? Yet too much of anything crushes its opposite, thereby throwing everything out of balance: too much “bad” crushes the “good”, just as too much “dark” crushes the “light”; too many “better thans” crush the “less thans”. And when the negative force overtakes the positive force, friction is the result (that’s not just my opinion; that’s science!). In other words, constant negativity leads to conflict, animosity, and a constant clash of wills, whether you’re talking about objects in a space or people (oh, boy, especially people!), and who wants to live life that way? (I mean, other than the “better thans”, who seem to enjoy it immensely.) An increase in positivity will lessen the friction, and the opposite of friction is peace. Trickster Deities, like Loki, can be a huge help in “turning the tide”, when it comes to giving the universe the balance that it naturally craves, though Their methods of achieving it are rarely “fluffy”.

If you’ll stick around, I believe you’ll find that love, light, and delight aren’t terribly “fluffy”, either. Love is one of the hardest things we will ever do as humans; it makes us profoundly vulnerable and it hurts. It takes mountains of bravery to truly love anyone or anything. Light is a hard thing to bear through the darkness, for someone or something will always try to put it out, causing you to be assailed on all sides and at all times when you are carrying that torch. Delight is not something that comes easy in our world, either: you must be willing to work for it, to gain it, much less maintain it. So, I ask in the end: “Why so serious? Is it because we genuinely fear being ‘fluffy’, or are some people just cowards, when it comes to doing what is difficult?” For the rose of love is inevitably laden with thorns, the light is ever-chased by the dark, and delight is a thing hard-won.