Höndin yfir krákurnar | The hand over the ravens
Echoing in my mind as if it were always one step ahead.
On the first day I had no eyes and walked fearlessly in the darkness, feeling that what guided me came from within and at times from a light hand guiding me. The hand over the ravens.
I turned over the entrails of the trees, felt the roots growing from my own hands, and saw them become stem, trunk, crown and seed.
And while in that abyssal space I was the fruit holding the seed:
The past fertilizing the present; the present germinating the future. The future being uncertain, being the unknown, being the complete and primordial void.
“I am Time, the destroyer of worlds; I have come to consume the people.”
— Bhagavad Gita 11:32
In the infinite hall of black pillars and mirrored surfaces I stopped seeing the road, to see the reflection of the future.
She stared at me with her eyes streaming with tears, dripping with cunning and a sparkle that cried out for audacity.
And her voice became like earth in my mind:
“Look around, for all sides are before you.”
I felt the presences growing inside the room that could no longer accommodate this event. My hand reached for the candle, in a fleeting movement guided by the wind: the air of the earth lifts the serpent and extinguishes the fire. Pitch black.
And like an inverse Odin, an eye was offered to me… could this be the very eye of the hanging god?
I dared to look around and face what I felt probing me. There they were, two pillars, one white and one black. Right and left.
Despite their size and numbness, the pressure in the air did not suffocate me and my mind reached places it had never touched before.
There was no fear or anguish. Only recognition and peace. The feeling that lovers of the night and devotees of death feel when they encounter them.
Just like feeling the hand on the ravens.
She was there in me and in the center, in front and behind.
And I saw, with my vision watered by her cunning:
“Matter is undone with the matter that you are made of.
The web is remade by the hands of the lurking spider.”
The message is as follows:
“The bridge established, Hel offers her gentle and cold hand to belong to her tradition:
Understand She is the beginning and the end; the root and the crown; the womb and the void; from where life came and to where life returns: the mother and the mother!”
Now she will welcome me at her gates and I will enter, ready to strip myself of all vanity and longing for the ascent. Feeling every moment of this death: the cold, the loneliness, the sadness, the longing, the dream…the dream of death.
“If I do not return, set up a lament for me.”
— Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld