Saturday, August 19, 2017

A Dancer in the Infinite - Chapter 20


Chapter 20

Ragnarok

From The Faith of the Future by Allan Bennett (Ananda Metteyya)





Of all the apocalyptic visions of the ending of the olden days and ways that has ever been declared to humanity, perhaps the strangest—and in a sense the truest—is the story told in the Younger Edda of the coming of Ragnarök, the Day of the Twilight of the Gods. Of old the Æsir, the bright Gods of Day, deemed that they had destroyed all evil in the world. In many a hard-won fight they had overcome the forces of Loki the Evil, Lord of the Nether Fire, and had chained him to the rocks of the nethermost hell, to suffer whilst they caroused in glorious Valhalla, holding themselves secure to all eternity. Alone amongst them Odin the Wise knew that which must be—for had he not pledged his eye to the Norns, that the knowledge of the future might be revealed to his inner vision? But Odin was too wise to mock the joy of the Æsir in their world-sovereignty with the knowledge of the day to come; and so the Gods lived heedless in the Hall of Heaven, deeming that no sorrow could again come nigh them.

But, whilst they fought and drank, the Old World and the Old Order was ever hastening to its doom. Loki, recking not of bonds, nor of the tortures of his rocky bed, was filling the nether world with his offspring; whilst the serpent Nidhogg gnawed ever at the roots of Yggdrasil the World-ash. The longer the Evil One lay chained, the greater ever grew his power, till at last the time should come when, bursting from the bonds wherewith the Gods had fettered him, he should avenge his tortue and his long bondage in a last fearful battle, wherein all Gods, of good and ill alike, should perish in one final and irredeemable struggle. Then the seasons shall fail of their order, and the hearts of men be full of avarice and wrath; brothers shall fight against brothers, and parents slay their children, and at the last there shall be nor spring nor summer, but only an unremitted winter, a horror of cold and twilight over all the earth. Loki and the Fenrir-wolf, breaking the chains with which the Gods had bound them, shall raise all the children of Hel to do battle with the Æsir, and the Death-ship Naglfar shall be floated on the twilight sea.

At last the Gods in Valhalla will perceive—too late—the coming downfall of their empire; and, ceasing from their long oblivion of festival and fight, will sally forth once more over the Bifrost Bridge to wage their last was for the ancient Order of Things. As they ride forth, the Bifrost Bridge will fall in fragments behind htem leaving them no return, and they will meet the awful army of Hel ranged ready to their coming upon Vidgard’s Plain. The Midgard Snake, breathing forth venom and fire, will overwhelm Thor the Hammerer; Odin himself shall be swallowed by the Fenrir-wolf, who in turn shall be slain by Vidar; and Loki shall at last perish under the axe of Heimdal, the Watchman of the Gods.

Then will come Surtur, from whose destroying sword fire spreads on every side, and the flames shall spread throughout the universe, and heaven and earth and hell be crumpled into one smoke-filled chaos, until at last naught shall remain of the Elder World but an illimitable ocean, and silence and obscurity; and the Old Order of Things shall have passed utterly way. All life shall have vanished,—there will be no more on earth the sound of laughter or of tears, nor of any silence of the Gods to mock. Only the Deep Waters, and the Darkness, and the Silence—only these shall reign—an elemental chaos, unredeemed of any life.

Yet not forever. When the long reign of Darkness shall have passed, a new Sun rising from the East shall shed its light; and from the Deep Waters shall come forth an Island, fair and fertile, and a new life shall be, wherein war and sorrow are unknown; and those who fought for Good of olden times will there take birth anew,—will find anew the Golden Tablets, wherein all wisdom was inscribed of old, and men shall live according to that Law, and there shall be peace and love in all the earth.

Such is the Vision of the Younger Edda:— and to-day in sooth these things are being fulfilled. For the last hundred years the Twilight of the Gods has reigned, no indeed on Vidgard’s Plain, but in the more spacious battle-field of the hearts and lives of men in Western Lands; its warring powers not the old Æsir and the Demons of the Norse Mythology, but the hopes, the ideas, the faiths; the dark ignorances and prejudices, the passions and the base desires of man. Fallen are the ancient Gods that erstwhile reigned in Western hearts, fallen the Old Order of Things,—the chivalries, the despotisms, the animistic beliefs of a hundred years ago are past and gone; and now the destroying fire of Science, like a modern Surtur, mounting aloft even to the distant stars, makes heaven one with earth and leaves behind it but a darkling chaos in the mind of man; the problems of his unanswered, the secret meanings of his being unrevealed;—to his questionings of Why and Whither only an answering silence; to his search for Light only the darkness of an unavailing nescience

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