Hel: An Ecological Perspective
Winifred Hodge Rose
In previous Alchemy of Hel articles, I’ve discussed my thoughts about how Hel and the Saiwalo souls arise, how Saiwalo condenses a Dwimor-phantom out of itself and projects it into Midgard to ensoul a new life, how that Midgard-Dwimor attracts and holds together all our souls, body, and energy flows during life, and how, at death, Dwimor sublimates out of the body as a wraith and returns to its Saiwalo in Hel, bearing a lifetime’s worth of images as its treasure-hoard. Saiwalo draws its returning Dwimor toward itself through its long, echoing, sonorous song, and once Dwimor has arrived, the vibrations of the song and the cool environment of Hel cause Dwimor’s hoard of images to precipitate into Saiwalo.
During its journey between Midgard and Hel, which may be swift or may be drawn-out and lingering, Dwimor’s perceptions and experiences are shaped by the images it bears from its years of life in Midgard. Unlike many of our other souls, Dwimor has no ability to evaluate, to judge, to think critically. Dwimor’s images are its reality. This is important for us to understand, as living, fully ensouled humans who can make choices about what we accept into our personal thought-spaces, our perceptions and interpretations of reality, our Hugr’s framework of thought.
If Dwimor has a lifetime’s worth of threatening, debased, ugly, frightful, painful, corrupt, meaningless or worthless images of what reality is like, as it heads back to Hel it will populate its surroundings with these perceptions, and experience them as real, both during its journey and after it reaches Hel. If living persons—relatives, loved ones, etc.—happen to be in contact with this Dwimor after death through dreams or visions, they also will perceive and be influenced by the Dwimor’s perceptions, and will assume that ‘this is what death and Hel are like.’ Thus, Hel develops a reputation as a negative, fearful place, or a place empty of meaning and of hope.
Christianity and some other religions deliberately paint a horrific picture of what their version of hell is like, in order to draw their believers toward a God who can save their soul from this terrible fate. This picture of hell then becomes a lasting part of the cultures influenced by these religions. During times and places in Midgard (including much of Heathen history) where people suffer from war and conflict, slavery, oppression, starvation, epidemics, disasters and other terrible experiences, whole populations become imbued with the awful imagery that these experiences leave in their minds. This, too, is carried by their Dwimors into Hel.
So Hel ends up, over time, carrying a heavy load of negative imagery, absorbed through the negative beliefs and experiences of people during their lifetimes in Midgard. This imagery is not passive or static: it continues to bubble back up into Midgard through the Saiwalos and Dwimors of living people, perpetuating not only negative imagery in Midgard, but all the harmful beliefs, behavior and deeds that people engage in, as reactions to this imagery. All of this establishes a vicious circle, in the most literal sense.
But…all is not gloom and doom! There is a great deal of activity going on under the surface of Hel, activity which is not really perceptible to the Dwimors who have recently returned from Midgard. I perceive Hel and its Saiwalos as something like a wetland ecosystem, similar to both freshwater and estuarine (brackish, shallow seawater) ecosystems, which are among the most biologically active and productive types of ecosystems in the world. And not only are they productive of great biodiversity, they are also great detoxification organs of our planet. Wetlands receive, and also produce, a lot of ‘yucky stuff’: rotten, stinky, toxic stuff, including, these days, human waste and pollution. They have an amazing facility for purifying material that is toxic and corrupted, to the point where humans can deliberately use natural or artificial wetlands to process waste and pollution and produce clean water.
This is what I envision as the major role of Hel and its Saiwalos in the spiritual ecology of the Worlds: it is a great, spiritual ‘wetland’ which accepts the harmful spiritual waste-products draining down from all the Worlds, and very slowly but steadily transmutes this waste into pure, life-giving spiritual Water which fertilizes the Worlds.
The Impact of Christianity on Hel
When we understand the function of Hel as I have described it here, it becomes clear how damaging it was when Christian ideas came in and transformed Heathen beliefs about the nature of Hel-world (seen as simply the place where souls go after death) and the destination and role of Saiwalo / ‘soul’. I don’t believe for a moment that Christian beliefs were really able to change the natural functions of Hel and the Saiwalos. But one of the great powers of our Saiwalo soul is the ability to create images that affect how it and others around it perceive and experience their surrounding environment.
So when Christians convinced living humans, with their Saiwalo souls, that ‘hell’ is a terrible place of burning, punishment and despair, and convinced them that ‘bad’ / Heathen souls would go there while ‘good’ / Christian souls would go to a remote ‘heaven’ detached from all Earthly concerns, connections and energies, it was—and still is—possible for people’s Saiwalo souls to create images of these beliefs and experience them as though they were real.
Christians said that ‘good’ Saiwalo souls would go to ‘heaven’, to dwell in serene bliss with Deity. In fact, dwelling with deities is the natural destination of our Ghost soul, while our Ahma soul is at home within the undifferentiated primal power/substance of Ginnungagap and Hvergelmir, experienced in all religions as oneness with the primal source of all. Saiwalo, however, has different work to do, a different role to play. Sending Saiwalo to these ‘heavenly’ places would be an unnatural displacement, made worse by the idea that if Saiwalo’s Dwimor does go to its natural place, Hel, this is a horrific punishment and failure, rather than its proper destination. All of this disrupts Saiwalo and Hel-world from pursuing their proper functions within the cosmic ecosystem of the World Tree, and causes suffering and distress among Saiwalo souls and their Dwimors in Midgard and in Hel. This spiritual suffering is reflected into Midgard through the roiling and spoiling of Saiwalo’s imagery.
Hel-world’s true role, in my perception, is to serve as a metaphysical analog of a healthy wetland, involved in composting, refining, purifying, fertilizing, recycling, regenerating, and gestating energies, evolving new spiritual forms, and shaping the ‘roots’ of events and entities in Midgard. Under Christian influence, Hel was supposedly transformed from this perhaps messy and uncomfortable, but necessary and healthy, set of functions into a horridly polluted, dead-end spiritual cesspit called ‘hell’. The result is an apparent—an experiential—disruption of cosmic forces and processes affecting both spiritual and physical worlds.
In my view, this has created a severe spiritual and cultural PTSD, except that it is not post-traumatic stress disorder, it is ongoing traumatic stress disorder, rooted deeply in the spiritual disruption of Saiwalo and Hel-world, and the disrespect, fear, and denial of the deities and powers associated with them. Humans, and Midgard as a whole, really need the functions of a healthy Hel as I described above: a place and a means to clear out psychic and spiritual gunk, poisons, pollutions, to purify and recycle them. Physical Midgard pollution is a reflection of the spiritual ‘landfills’ and ‘superfund sites’ and ‘ocean dead-zones’ that accumulate in Hel without proper processing, breaking down, and reusing the components for fresh spiritual energy. This is a natural, spiritual process of cleaning up what is decaying, ‘dead and done with’, what doesn’t serve life and well-being, and forming fertilizer from that to feed what is fresh and new, nourishing and revitalizing.
I think it’s interesting to look at the evolution of our culture’s understanding of ‘hell’ in light of these ideas. The Christian notion of ‘hell’ that I described above reached its heyday during medieval times, and had many social repercussions. Though there are still many Christians who take these beliefs about ‘hell’ literally, there are many others whose concepts have evolved in a different way. A belief among many modern Christians is that ‘hell’ means ‘separation from their God’, eternal loneliness: a form of psychological / spiritual suffering, rather than the ‘physical’ torment of the medieval hell-scapes. And of course, many modern Westerners don’t believe in ‘hell’ at all. I think that an important influence on this gradually changing concept of ‘hell’ is due to the work of the Saiwalos over centuries of Midgard time, slowly breaking down the horrific hell-scape imagery that seeped into Hel from Midgard and creating space and energy for new imagery to arise.
Our Responsibility during Midgard Life
Each of our Saiwalo-souls is a part of this great task of ongoing spiritual regeneration, though we likely have no awareness of this during our Midgard life. This work is powerful and transformative, but it is also slow, in terms of Midgard time. Transformation takes time, and is not accomplished in one go-around. Dwimors returning to Hel, and Saiwalos sending up images into Midgard, stir up the churning soup of imagery and keep it active. Negative, positive and neutral imageries and energies mix together, mutating and recombining. A lot of good stuff arises from this, but negativity is also churned up and passed around. Eventually it all gets processed and purified by the ‘wetland’, but in the meantime, new imagery is produced, passed around, and amplified: some of it good, some not so good.
This is where our Midgard life and its responsibilities enters in. As I mentioned before, Saiwalos and Dwimors have no judgement, no analytical abilities, whereas many of our other souls do. Our lifetime in Midgard is our great opportunity, the time when all our souls can interact with each other, each with its own strengths, counterbalancing one another and creating within us a spiritual environment where our souls can grow together into greatness.
We have the option, during our Midgard life, to take on the responsibility of ‘image-management’, creating our own images of beauty, spiritual health, life-enhancing power, richness of experience: gifts we can give not only to the Midgard-world, but to Hel and the Saiwalos as well. Every time we communicate, we pass images back and forth with each other. Every story that is told through whatever medium, every item of news reported, every interpretation of events, every dream or nightmare, every creative work, every fear and hope: all of these, and more, generate images that stick in our minds and in our Dwimors. It’s a lifetime’s work to learn to filter these, to take control of the images that we take in and accept, and images that we give out to others, so that we shape our Dwimor’s treasure-hoard, over the course of our life, into richness, power, beauty, meaningfulness and goodness. Thus, we shape a true treasure for Dwimor to bear back to Hel and share with the Saiwalos, as I described at the end of my article Hel-Dweller.
Here is an eerie but beautiful verse from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (I, ii) that poetically describes this process, using the image of a drowned man lying on the floor of the ocean:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are corals made,
Those are pearls, that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
~~~
This passage takes an image of death and decay, and transforms it into an image of enduring treasure and mysterious beauty. Strange and unsettling, yes, but meaningful, significant, transformative. Hel is an unsettling place from the perspective of the living, no question. But Hel and the Saiwalos have an essential, life-supporting role to play in the cosmic processes that maintain the Worlds. We can choose to play a conscious and supportive role in this process during our life in Midgard, by mustering the powers of all our souls to create, within and around ourselves, an environment of spiritual health, beauty, power, knowledge, and goodness, and spread it as far as we can. In this way, we participate in our Saiwalo’s vital role of purification, transformation and fertilization of the spiritual energies of the Worlds.
When I talk about managing, transforming, recreating the imagery that we take in and that we give out to others, I am not suggesting that we pretend things are other than they are, that we choose denial over hard-edged truth. Think about the many, many instances, in all times and places in the world, where people have undergone terrible experiences but have turned them to good. Great poetry, art, music, social change, personal transformation, are often born of suffering. Adversity can turn good people into great people: generous, loving, heroic inspirations to others. A person living a quiet, boring sort of life can turn to pointless or even harmful pastimes and habits to liven things up, or can choose instead to find creative and worthwhile ways to give their life meaning and share that meaningfulness with others.
We can choose the sources, the media, the amount of time we spend taking in information and images every day, and use some of the time we save by limiting this, to engage in creative and positive endeavors. We can cultivate healthy habits of thought, spiritual practices, deep and genuine relationships, self-awareness, gentle humor, honesty and generosity. We can choose to transform adversity and the challenges of life into wisdom, compassion, and the motivation to bring about change where it is needed. Through all of these activities, we transform potentially negative, destructive images into images which inspire and encourage us and those who associate with us. In doing all of this, we help our Dwimor gather its hoard of the true treasures of life, to carry back to Saiwalo and Hel, and enhance the great transformations that they perpetually carry out.
This is my view of the ecology of Hel. In The Alchemy of Hel, Part V, I’ll explore an alchemical perspective on these phenomena.