Winifred Hodge Rose
Here are a couple of questions a reader asked about the afterlife of the Ghost, and my thoughts about those questions.
Question: “If you are close to more than one deity which a lot of Heathens are, do you think your Ghost could possibly travel easily to each of their halls as long as they’re willing?”
As for our Ghost and multiple Godly halls: yes, I agree with you! Think about this: the tales of our lore are full of instances where the Holy Ones visit one another, go about on adventures with one another, get together for feasts, and so forth. They are also much involved in Midgard affairs. They are by no means sequestered in their own God-Halls, having no contact with one another or with us! I expect that it is the same with our Ghosts: we also will be free to move around, visit and spend time with various Deities, their God-Homes and spiritual lands, participate in their festive get-togethers, and interact with the Ghosts who live within their Halls as well. We will be free to come and go as we wish, assuming that the Deities we want to spend time with are accepting of us and have no problems with us. In my article “Goddess Sif: Kinship and Hospitality” I offer a brief picture of what it might be like in her and Thor’s Hall Bilskirnir, in company with all the folk whose patrons they were during life.
It’s good to spend time during our Midgard life building relationships with all the Deities we might want to spend time with during our afterlife, getting to know them and having them get to know us, tuning our spirits together. My articles “Earth, Water, Wind & Fire: Elemental Modes for Relating to the Deities,” and “Heathen Contemplation: The Resonance of the Heart” are examples of some of the many ways we can work on such relationships, though these are not the only ways to do so, of course.
Another very important way to build relationships with them is to work on understanding what any given Deity wants to accomplish in Midgard, and work to help them do so, making whatever contributions we can to their Midgard interests, functions, and goals. For example, near the very beginning of my conversion to Heathenry, both Frigg and Frey pushed me hard to develop the concept and application of frith among Heathens. Frigg pushed me to found and run an organization focused on Heathen frith called Frigga’s Web. Though it is no longer operational, it was a large and influential organization in its time, and contributed to the concept and practice of frith in modern Heathenry. And on my own, I’ve written and spoken much about frith, and promoted it wherever I can both within and outside of Heathenry. This, among other things, is my service to Frigg and to Frey Frith-King. My name, Winifred, means ‘friend of frith’ in Anglo-Saxon: it seems I was designated for this role from birth! That’s an example of what I mean when I suggest that we try to understand what our closest Deities want, what they’re trying to accomplish in Midgard, and do what we can, what we feel called by them to do, in their service.
My own belief is that we can continue to support their aims and work with them when we are disembodied Ghosts as well, through subtle influences of wode flowing through our Ghosts into Midgard. Though I have not yet discussed this much in my writings, I think that our Ghosts may reincarnate as well as our Hugr, likely by their own choice when they are ready, and that the time we spend in the God-Halls can be seen as a period of further self-development and training for future Midgard lifetimes and life-works. Just as the Einherjar Ghosts train daily for Ragnarok, our own Ghosts can undertake training during our time in our chosen God-Halls, training in many different ways and for many different purposes that the various Gods may be pursuing in Midgard, depending on our own Ghost’s interests, abilities, strengths, and what we care most about, as well.
Our Ghosts have access to Wode-energy, and can use that energy both when embodied and when disembodied to nurture inspiration in living persons and in other ways as well. Unbalanced Ghosts can be dangerous because of this access to wode and can influence others toward unbalanced mental states and behavior, something that is recognized in many religions and cultures around the world, but Ghosts can also be recognized as saints, sages, bodhisattvas, muses, voices of wisdom and inspiration that bridge between Otherworlds and Midgard. I hope and intend for my own Ghost to participate here, as well!
Bottom line: there’s plenty for our Ghosts to do, both living and during the afterlife! It’s certainly to our advantage to cultivate relationships with any / many of our Deities so as to provide our Ghosts with supportive guidance, companionship, environments and ‘habitats’ to support the very best possible activities, development, and contributions of our Ghost while embodied and disembodied. And for our Ghosts to inspire and enjoy themselves, while doing so!
Question: “On the subject of Ghost reincarnation- do you think that it has the option to reincarnate whenever ready as you said or that it will do that in time no matter what? Or can our Ghost (Gods willing) continue to reside in their halls?”
Of course I can’t know the answer to your question about Ghost reincarnation for sure! That’s part of why I haven’t yet written more thoughts about this, because I am still wondering and trying to explore this question. If, as I’ve written previously, the Ghost is given to us at the moment of our birth, Ahma enwrapped in a soul-skin to give it personhood, then it seems that it must be new for each new person, right? Not reincarnated, but coming into being at the moment of each birth. If that’s true then I don’t see a place for reincarnated Ghosts in Midgard.
But other beliefs, including both Eastern and Western esoteric traditions, posit that the Spirit or Ghost goes through an evolutionary process over the course of multiple rebirths, and those perspectives also seem to me to make sense. Ghost is a powerful being with great potential, and perhaps needs to have more than one lifetime in Midgard to do all it can and wants to do, and become all it can be.
So what I’m currently thinking is pretty much what I wrote to you earlier: each Ghost makes that choice, to return to Midgard if and when it is ready–perhaps after centuries of Midgard time spent in the God-Homes, or to stay in the God-Homes and do its growing and its work there. At any given time, there are nowhere near enough ready-to-return Ghosts to enspirit all the children being born, so that many people receive a newly-formed Ghost at birth. But in some cases the Holy Ones attending the births may instead midwife a Ghost who is returning from the God-Homes into Midgard for another round of Midgard life. I expect that then the Gods with whom that Ghost spent most of its time in the afterlife will be the special friends or patrons of the newborn person with the reborn Ghost.
Does the Ghost really have a choice about rebirth? Some religions / beliefs say that choice is not available: our spirit or soul gets only one Midgard life. Other beliefs say that karma or something similar is at work, it’s an evolutionary process and Ghost is reborn at the right time for it, without an active choice–it’s automatic. Some say that it is a choice, but that the spirit always does make that choice to be reborn because it knows it needs to do that.
For us as Heathens, I would say that freedom, and especially freedom of our souls and the choices our souls make, is a fundamental spiritual value. We don’t have dogma and doctrines, we don’t have commandments, we don’t depend on Deities for the existence and nature and fate of our souls. There is Wyrd, yes, and the role of Wyrd in all of this has yet to be fully explored by modern Heathens, in my view (one reason I’m currently writing a book about orlog!). My gut sense is that our souls possess this fundamental freedom to make their own choices, during Midgard life and afterlife as well, even though there are cosmic constraints on our options in the same way that there are natural laws here on Earth that make some things possible, other things impossible.
Wyrd operates, among other ways, as cause and effect: this is Skuld’s domain. Deeds and choices have consequences that must be dealt with. But does Wyrd operate the same way in the God-Homes as it does in Midgard? Wyrd does affect the Gods, this is clear in the lore. For what it’s worth, my sense here is that if our Ghost chooses to remain in the God-Homes, then the wyrd that affects us is the wyrd of the Gods we are attached to. Their wyrds are greater and more powerful than ours, and ours is subsumed into theirs. We follow them as they play out their wyrds and participate in that, as the Einherjar do while preparing for Ragnarok, following Odin’s wyrd. If we return to Midgard then we play out our own wyrd independently. I don’t know for sure about this, of course; but it seems to me that my Ghost is explaining it this way.
If these insights are true, then here is the situation for our Ghost, the factors that will influence our choices. We cannot escape the weavings of Wyrd, whether in Midgard or in the God-Homes. Do we choose to pursue our own wyrd through multiple lifetimes in Midgard? Or do we choose to throw in our lot with our chosen Deities and their wyrds once we settle into their God-Homes? Both of these are consequential choices; there is no right or wrong here, just our own choices and their consequences. But I believe we–our Ghosts–are free to make those choices.
Note: I go into more depth on the afterlife of the Ghost in some of the sections of this article, also in response to readers’ questions: https://heathensoullore.net/thoughts-about-heathen-afterlife/