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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