“First you were clay, then from being mineral you became vegetable, from vegetable animal and from animal man . . . and you have to go through a hundred new worlds yet . . .”
Rumi
Different angels and spirits come to prominence in different times and different places and different traditions. If the Greeks and Romans remembered the deeds of the angel of Jupiter particularly vividly, in northern Europe it was the deeds of the angel of Mercury that fired the imagination. The Norse people remembered this angel as Wodin or Odin.1
The stories of the Norse planetary gods, like the stories of the Olympian gods, show them and their rule threatened by giants but also undermined from within.
Odin knew he had to suffer to prepare himself for his world-saving mission.
He was wounded by a spear and hung himself on the gnarled and windswept World Tree for nine days and nine nights, while the leaves whispered to him the secrets of the runes.
Then he traveled down through dense mists to dark caves, the realm of the Black Dwarves. He intended to learn from them the secrets of forging the elements.
Finally he traveled along the roots of the World Tree to find the Fountain of Wisdom. This fountain was the source of all memories, and the elderly giant who guarded it was called Memir (or Memor, “Memory’). He refused to let Odin drink from it unless he sacrificed his most precious possession. Odin plucked out one of his eyes. It sank in the waters of the fountain and lay in the depths, glimmering.
In the spiritual vision of the peoples of northern Europe, the World Tree stood at the center of the cosmos. The world of humans was called Midgard or Middle Earth and the World Tree sprouted out of the middle of it, towering high into the heavens.
Near the top of the World Tree was a golden throne. Odin sat there with a raven perching on either shoulder, and every day the ravens flew all around the world, returning in the evening to tell him what they had seen.
The World Tree also held Asgard, the great city of the gods, in its branches—twelve golden castles, each decorated with the sign of one of the constellations. The only way into this golden kingdom was via Bifrost. This bridge, made of air, water and fire, appeared to the people down below in Midgard as the rainbow. Heimdell, the watchman of the gods, stood by the bridge. It was said that his senses were so keen that he could hear the grass grow in the ground or the wool grow on a sheep’s back anywhere in a hundred-mile radius.
Led by Odin on his eight-legged horse, the gods would ride out over Bifrost to battle against the giants and the trolls. The Kingdom of Midgard was bounded by mountains and beyond these mountains lived the Ice Giants, the Fire Giants, the Sea Giants, Hill Giants and the Rime Giants.
The dwarves and trolls were allies of the giants. Green-eyed and dark-skinned, the dwarves bred like maggots in the body of the Earth. Trolls lived in small villages made of mounds, surrounded by human heads on poles. Inside these mounds they hoarded treasure, but they also enjoyed living in squalor, their dirt floors crawling with worms and snakes.
The giants and their allies were held in check by the gods, above all by Thor, the great god of thunder, who rejoiced in his title “Bane of the Giants.” As a baby he’d astonished the older gods by lifting ten huge bales of bearskins with one hand. Challenged to a fishing contest, he’d snapped the head off a passing ox and used it as bait.
Thor rode in a chariot pulled by two fierce butting goats. Thor’s hammer would fly through the storm clouds to shatter the head of a giant, then return to his hands. He liked to say if it hadn’t been for him, the land of the gods would have been overrun by giants.
The iron in our blood hammers round our bodies, powered by Thor, the god of war.
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The Norse myths, like the Greek, Roman and Hebrew, are an account of an evolving world in which great spiritual beings called angels in some traditions and gods and spirits in others are the agents of creation.2 Again, they are not necessarily inconsistent with the data collected by science. Alfred Russel Wallace conceived of the theory of evolution of the species according to natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin and independently of him; as a mark of this, they copresented it to the intellectual elite of the day in the form of the Linnaean Society in 1858. While their joint theory gradually compromised and eroded Darwin’s religious faith, Wallace believed that natural selection was guided by creative intelligences, which he identified with angels.
Today such creative intelligences have been reframed by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake in his theory of morphic resonance.3 In a recent book, The Science Delusion, he pointed up the lack of philosophical sophistication of the leading militant materialists, showing that the version of science that they used to beat spirituality was a broken old stick. Mary Midgley, one of the UK’s senior philosophers, reviewed it in the Guardian:
The unlucky fact that our current mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn’t often mentioned today. We can’t approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th century style as if it were dead, inert stuff . . . We need a new mind-body paradigm.4
In myths the gods and angels of the planets have a special role in the forming of the human condition. They work to give it its fundamental structure—to make an arena in which we can grow and endure, struggle, love and develop a faculty for free will and free thinking. Myths belong to idealism, to a worldview where matter is only there in order to help us have experiences. That is what it is for. Myths are an account of the human condition subjectively experienced, and they may be as precise as it is possible to be.
* * *
I have written elsewhere about the origins of the idea of evolution in religious thought. Evolution means evolving into something better, and religious and spiritual thought and experience always yearn for this.
But religious thought, as expressed in these myths, is also always highly conscious of how precarious this process of evolution is . . .
By drinking of the Fountain of Wisdom Odin had learned of the transience of all things, and he knew too that the giants would not be held in check forever. In the halls of the gods the feasting on roast boar, the necking of mead, the boisterous sporting contests and the knockabout practical jokes helped keep anxiety at bay, but it was all shot through with a strain of melancholy.
No one caused more merriment or made Odin laugh harder than Loki—and Odin loved him for it. Loki is the angel called Lucifer in Christian tradition. He lived with the other gods in Asgard and was always accepted by them—but he was mischievous, and his mischief turned slowly into evil.
Loki disappeared for a while and then it emerged that he had taken as a lover one of the enemies of the gods, a giantess. Worse, it turned out that this giantess had given birth to three monstrous children. Loki had kept these children secret as long as he could, but they had grown too large to hide any longer, and now Odin ordered him to bring them to Asgard.
The other gods shrank back in horror when they were dragged into the hall, but Odin was afraid of no living creature. He stepped forward and seized the first of the monsters, a great snake. He hurled it into the ocean and pulled it tight around the Earth so that it was imprisoned there, its tail fixed in its mouth.
The daughter of Loki and the giantess was called Hela. She was hideous, half alive and half a blue, rotting corpse. Odin threw her out of Asgard and she fell for nine days until she reached a dark and dank kingdom in the bowels of the Earth. Odin ruled that she could never leave this kingdom until the end of the world. Named after its queen, this hell could only be approached by paying a toll, then crossing a freezing underground river and by evading a blood-drenched hell hound chained by its gates.
Odin was less sure what to do with the third monster, Fenris. The Fountain of Wisdom had shown him this giant wolf in a prophetic vision. He knew it was a deadly threat to him. By the laws of Asgard it was forbidden to kill a guest, even a wolf, but day by day it grew larger and stronger, howling in the courtyard of Asgard and shrugging off the strongest chains the gods could forge as easily as if they were cobwebs.
Then, remembering the secrets of forging metals he had been shown in the realm of the Black Dwarves, Odin sent a messenger to them. But this messenger returned with a tiny chain as delicate and soft as a ribbon.
“That will never hold Fenris!” cried Odin.
The messenger protested that the dwarves had sworn it would hold the wolf until the day of the Last Battle. It was a magical chain, he explained, made from the pad of a cat’s footsteps, the beard of a woman, the roots of a standing stone, the nerves of a bear, the love-call of a fish and the saliva of a bird.
The wolf had now grown big enough and strong enough to resist any attempt to put a chain round his neck. He was confident in his strength, afraid of no chain except a magic chain. The gods promised no magic had been used in the manufacture of this new chain, and Fenris agreed to have this new chain put around him, provided that one of the gods placed his hand in his mouth as a token of this promise.
When the others hesitated, the war god Tyr stepped forward and placed his hand in the slavering jaw. Then Thor draped the chain around the neck of Fenris and fastened it to a rock in the center of the Earth.
The moment it was fastened, the chain tightened, digging into the neck of the wolf. Fenris roared and howled with rage, and strained and shook his head so violently it was all a blur. After a while he was still again and everyone saw that he was indeed held fast—with the severed hand of Tyr clamped between his jaws.
So Fenris was enchained—for now. But Odin knew well enough that good could not come from evil and that ultimately evil would result from evil. There would be a price to pay for tricking the wolf, even if they had done it for the best of reasons.
The human condition is very precarious. It is threatened on all sides. And it could—and can—easily be destroyed by something as seemingly slight and evanescent as a hidden intention.
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How come we are here then? How come all the extraordinarily unlikely coincidences, the delicate series of checks and balances needed for the creation of intelligent life have come together to create us and give us a chance to evolve? Scientists agree that the odds against this happening by chance are almost infinite.5
According to the ancient answer, the perfect fit is not an unlikely accident. It has come about—and we are as we are—because every thing is directed and informed by the intelligence of angels. In the mind-before-matter account, every thing is charged with intelligence, every thing is full of mind.6 The material world was made to cradle the vegetable world, which was formed to cradle animal life and that was created to cradle human consciousness in turn.7
We are not routinely conscious of this intelligence and the way it informs every part of the material world. We may see evidence of intelligence at work all around us, but fail to recognize it. Yet even the most inert-looking object, such as a mountain or an escarpment, is full of intelligence and intent. It just moves very, very slowly.8
In prescientific times, all the sharpest minds were idealists. They had more of a sense of this intelligence both in the world “out there” and inside us. They had an acute sense of the role of the planets in particular in forming both our physical and our mental makeup, of the cycles of the moon influencing the forces of generation and of the cycles of Venus influencing the kidneys to produce desire in the form of testosterone. They knew that Mercury worked through our limbs, enabling us to move through space and think spatially, and that the sun had called the eye into being and caused it to grow as a sunflower grows up to meet it.9
Our conscious self is like an infant emperor carried aloft by a bustling train of nursemaids, ministers, bodyguards and generals—and these helpers are the great forces of intelligence in the universe.
These forces are much greater than our own conscious intelligence, and they are at work below the threshold of our consciousness. They know how to perform complex chemical operations, for instance breaking down food to isolate and convey substances to different parts of the body, absorbing oxygen into the blood, converting inorganic substances into vital fluids, converting vibrations in the ear into the sounds we hear. A vast number of intelligent operations that you or I may barely begin to understand take place below the threshold of our consciousness.
In the ancient world the agents of these complex processes in different parts of the body were seen as spiritual—as gods or angels. Today we have a complex and sophisticated sense of the human body as made up of parts with a degree of independence working together with other elements inside and outside the body—a sense of the body as a living machine. The ancients had a similar sense of an individual’s spiritual makeup. They saw a human being as a spiritual machine made up of many different living parts working in cooperation and at the behest of spiritual beings. Basiledes, a pupil of St. Peter’s, called the human being “an encampment of different spirits.” Ibn Arabi, a spiritual master among the Sufis, said, “Angels are the powers hidden in the organs and faculties of Man.”
The retinue that carries the infant emperor aloft is therefore made up of St. Michael, Odin and Mars, of the great gods and angels of the planets and stars, and the lesser angels and spirits at their command. The common academic criticism of belief in gods and angels is that they are an example of the fallacy called anthropomorphism. This is a matter of looking at natural phenomena, such as thunder or volcanoes erupting, and projecting human characteristics onto them in a primitive or childlike way. A thunderclap shows the gods are angry.
The trouble here is that scientific materialism is so entrenched in our society that it may sometimes be difficult to even begin to understand the ancient spiritual wisdom that informs the stories of the gods and angels. The aim here is to try to see what is good and wise in the ancient way of thinking about these things. The ancients liked to dwell on an important truth and to draw out its implications. One of these important truths is this: the human being is a continuation of its environment. We have evolved as a reflection of and in reaction to qualities in the cosmos. Therefore there are qualities “out there” in the universe that make us human.
Ancient peoples called these qualities gods and angels. On this view, what we like to think of as our intrinsically human qualities have been lent to us by angels.10 They have projected their qualities onto us, not the other way round.
