Jason Malone

The pagan world is saturated with death.

This is not a bad thing, nor does it mean the ancient traditions were full of doom-and-gloom. On the contrary, paganism exalts life, warmth, and goodness — despite what contemporary depictions in modern media are wont to suggest. Nevertheless, as a tradition which encompasses every aspect of life, Fyrnsidu must necessarily deal with death.

Death was a daily occurrence for our ancestors. The inevitability of death, its potential, and its reality was a fact of life. It was, and is, natural. The Gods teach us that all things are born, live, and die. Thus, we have in our spiritual traditions a complex, layered, and sophisticated system of beliefs surrounding death.

To a pagan, the dead are not things that can be pushed to the fringes of society, exiled to graveyards, and banished from our thoughts. We venerate the dead, reminding ourselves of their existence and seeking their aid (I burn incense or wax before photographs of my ancestors twice daily); we worship Gods and Goddesses presiding over death and the life beyond; we ward off or propitiate restless or malicious spirits once belonging to the living that may seek to do us harm. We are constantly aware of the presence and influence of the dead — and of the fact that one day, at any time, our Wyrd will lead us to join them.

As I said, this isn’t a bad thing. Death is natural, necessary, and in many ways actually a good thing. In the natural world, death allows for the generation of life. Go for a walk in the woods and you’ll see this with every step — a metropolis of fungi, moss, and shrubbery growing on the trunk of a fallen tree; little seedlings destined to become forest giants sprout up through a bed of decay; birds, gracing us with their cheerful song, take the lives of insects, reptiles, and rodents to sustain themselves. On a human level, death is the passage through which we leave this world and go on to join our ancestors, meet our Gods, and eventually return to be born anew. When one spends each day venerating the dead, receiving their gifts and their wisdom, the prospect of one day sharing a space with them is quite a hopeful, comforting one indeed.

We pagans believe in a multitude of different “afterlives” and potential fates for a person after death. To make matters more complicated, the belief in a multi-part soul allows for the possibility of different simultaneous afterlives for one individual. The fate of one’s soul involves a mix of afterlives, rewards, punishments, transmigrations, reincarnations, and even deification. Thus (understandably) there is no single, unified agreement among pagans on the nature of death. Ultimately, death is a mystery.

Through the Veil

If we want to understand this mystery and look beyond the shroud separating our world from that of the dead, we must use the language of poetry, allegory, and metaphor.

In essence, myth.

Myth is not supposed to be taken literally. When reading (or hearing) myth, one must look between the lines and seek the truths hidden beneath the surface. Because when writing myth we are dealing with subjects beyond human comprehension existing in non-corporeal reality, we must wrestle with the fact that we cannot truly paint an accurate picture of said subjects. Myth is merely a tool for creating an imperfect image of a higher reality. It is not a photograph, but a painting — and a very abstract one at that. By reading myth, we can try to understand and interpret the worlds beyond ours and grasp at the metaphysical truths contained within them.

That is why, if you ask about my personal beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife, I’ll just point you to a handful of my short stories. Death is a prevalent theme in much of my writing, but there are two stories in particular which deal with the afterlife, and which are mythic depictions of my own beliefs as a Fyrnsidere.

A Dream of Death

Any pagan would be able to recognise some similarities between their own beliefs and the setting depicted in A Dream of Death (which you can read in The Mirror Worlds). This story was greatly inspired by Plato’s Myth of Er (as told in Republic), but with the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon veneer characteristic of Ardonn and loaded with my own beliefs as a Fyrnsidere.

Spoilers ahead…

In short, A Dream of Death follows the story of a warrior named Merewin, who finds himself lost in a marsh one night after being wounded in battle. He wanders the marshland, strangely healed from his wounds, until eventually he comes to a river. At the river, Merewin encounters a ferry poled downstream by an old man in a pointy, wide-brimmed hat. The ferryman offers Merewin passage, the warrior accepts, and is then taken along the river. They eventually arrive at a grand feasting hall — a welcome sight after being lost in the marshes — and the ferryman invites Merewin in.

It does not take Merewin long to realise he is in the Hall of Ancestors, a fabled afterlife for the good folk of Ardonn. In this story, the Hall is a place where the dead may rest, feast, drink, and enjoy each other’s company for a time. Each day they receive hearty meals, and those privileged enough to sit at the high table get to enjoy the meat of a great boar.

Germanic pagans may recognise some elements here. In our own myths, numerous halls where the dead reside are described. One might notice parallels between the Hall of Ancestors and Valhalla in the Table of the Slain, a place for those who have died bravely in battle where they may feast alongside the chief God; and the roasted pig, which alludes to Sæhrímnir, the regenerating boar from Norse literature. Valhalla is a place for a select minority, however. Most commonly, the ordinary dead will find themselves in Hel (or Hell, in English — a word which Medieval missionaries appropriated as a word for damnation), a place of rest presided over by a Goddess of the same name. Hell is often depicted as gloomy, dark, cold, and miserable, but this depiction does not fit my own beliefs about the place. To me, Hell is the Underworld, a transitory plane where the ancestors reside until it is time to move on. It is a place of comfort, rest, and reunion, and its ruler is a warm and gracious host. The Hall of Ancestors is my allegory for Hell. Do I believe Hell is literally like this? Of course not. However, I do believe the soul experiences a state of being that I’ve portrayed in this way.

And yet, this is not the soul’s only or final experience. Like many pagans, I hold to the doctrine of transmigration (ie. reincarnation, or the process of a soul going from one state to another), and this too is depicted in A Dream of Death. Those at the Table of the Slain are allowed to leave whenever they wish, but the rest can remain in the Hall only for as long as they have food. It is revealed that the food eaten by the souls here is provided by their living descendants, who leave it as offerings at shrines or graves. When these gifts cease to be given, when the dead have been dead for so long that the living have forgotten them, the soul must move on from the Hall and enter a new existence. At this time, they are led to a crossroads, where two bridges cross a fork in the river. One of these bridges is made of wood, and it is across this bridge that most of the souls go. From here, the individual reincarnates, knowing that he or she will one day return to the Hall. A few, however, are lucky enough to cross the stone bridge, where they “earn a fate too beautiful to speak of in worldly words.”

Essentially, what we have in this story is a depiction of my beliefs surrounding death. To put it simply, once we die, most of us go on to join our ancestors in Hell, the realm of the dead, where we rest and recover before our names are forgotten and our memory fades. Eventually, our soul must transmigrate and we enjoy (or suffer) a new life. At the end of the day we don’t truly know what our fate is, or where we will go, but there is a key teaching here that pagans will often debate over: that the soul is immortal, and though our body may decay, we never truly die. Our soul lives on, moving from one life to the next, passing through different worlds on one grand journey. This, I think, is the beauty of the mystery of death. Our myths teach us that there is hope and life even in death, and I’ve attempted to convey that fact in this story.

Lost Souls

To the Fyrnsidere, most ordinary dead will go to Hell on the condition that they receive an appropriate burial. Funerary rites were of great importance to our pagan ancestors, and should be just as important today — even during Christian times our ancestors have sensed the immense value of the funeral, despite the official Christian teaching that at death the body is “empty” and that the soul has already departed for its destined afterlife; its fate is in God’s hands, and human activity has no impact on it. Pre-Christian cultures across Europe held a contrary doctrine, insisting that proper rites were essential for the passing of the soul from our world to the next (the native Māori here in New Zealand have a similar belief). It is possible that this pagan belief was difficult to let go, perhaps because our ancestors sensed the truth in it, and persisted in the Catholic Church’s insistence on burial in hallowed ground despite contradicting Biblical teachings on the nature of the soul…but I digress.

Basically, if you want to join your ancestors in the afterlife, you need a funeral.

Not everybody is lucky enough to have a funeral, however, for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, something must happen to them. Our ancestors believed that many of these souls would remain “trapped” in this world, or in a sort of “in-between” state where at least part of their soul found itself bound to its body or a place of death, even occupying and animating its own corpse. This belief persisted well into the 19th Century at the latest, and is where we get stories about vampires, zombies, etc. Polish anthropologist analysed sources from the latter half of this century regarding “revenants” (dead people who struggled to remain dead, for whatever reason), and the results are interesting. Of the 500 cases of revenants analysed…

• 38 of these were hanging victims. This is worth noting because back when there still were hangings, it was typical to bury the victim standing upright so as to prevent them from entering Heaven.
• 93 revenants were the result of miscarriages or abortions (perhaps less likely to be given funerals).
• 15 died unnatural or violent deaths.
• 43 were suicide victims which, like hanging, were historically denied proper funeral rites.
• A whopping 101 — 20% of revenants — were victims of drowning. It is likely a large number of drowning victims didn’t receive proper funerals due to the fact that their bodies were lost to the sea.

There were a variety of other causes, but the common thread that links these deaths which I want to point out is the fact that many of these likely received no funeral, or imporper funerals. We can use this as evidence for the fact that the old pagan beliefs about the soul persisted somewhat through Christian times, but for those who believe in this stuff (like me), it shows that the laws that govern the fate of the soul after death are the same regardless of this or that society’s religion.

The soul is real, and without some sort of funeral, can become trapped. One way this can commonly happen, as we’ve seen, is by drowning.

The Hall of the Drowned

That brings me to the other short story from The Mirror Worlds that I want to talk about: The Hall of the Drowned.

It follows a similar pattern to A Dream of Death, as in both stories a living man ends up in a strange land with which he is unfamiliar, possessing little to no memory of the traumatic event immediately prior to his arrival (a drowning, in our protagonist’s case). He then seeks safety, which he finds in a grand hall wherein feast the souls of the dead (though our protagonist, Batward, is initially unaware of that crucial fact). Soon enough, however, the protagonist in both stories comes to the realisation that they are, indeed, among dead men. In this story in particular, the island on which Batward finds himself is exclusively the afterlife of those who die at sea.

This is of great trouble to Batward, who seems to be the only one who realises he’s dead. However, to maintain the joy and comfort of his new company, Batward decides to keep that knowledge to himself. It is revealed that the alcohol served in the Hall of the Drowned gradually wipes the memory of those who consume it, first removing the trauma of their death until eventually deleting all knowledge of who they were in life — even their own name. At this point, the amnesiac souls are taken off the island and into the sea, where they are subsequently reincarnated as ocean-dwelling animals (usually seals). Batward, however, is given a special task. He is tasked by the ruler of the Otherworldly isle with protecting and guiding sailors in the form of a storm petrel — a bird which, according to English folklore, is said to warn sailors of a coming storm should it land on their ship (hence its name). Batward initially refuses, but eventually he cannot resist the call of the sea any longer, and takes one final drink to wipe his memory completely and embrace his next existence. In this story Batward dies twice: once when he is tossed into the ocean, and again when the personality that is Batward ceases to be, drowned as it is in the ale of Seolho’s hall.

Some of my stories are indisputably set in a fantasy world. However, if I were to change a few names of places and people, and replaced the discussion of events in Ardonn’s history, this story could pass as a depiction of the real afterlife of drowned sailors known in Germanic lore.

In the Norse view, those who have drowned at sea are taken by the Goddess/giantess Rán, where their souls reside in a place at the bottom of the sea separate from the usual Hel. In more recent times, even as recent as the 20th century, English sailors have believed in an afterlife called “Fiddler’s Green” where, as the song says, “the fishermen go if they don’t go to Hell.” Both these places inspired Seolho’s Island and the Hall of the Drowned. In pagan cosmology, such places exist to cater to those who, by whatever unfortunate circumstance, are unable to receive the appropriate funerary rites which send them off to the usual afterlife (Hell, the Underworld, etc.) where they may join the ancestors. Those lost at sea cannot be given a proper funeral and thus cannot find their way to Hell; Rán’s hall, Fiddler’s Green, Valhalla, and my own Hall of the Drowned are all answers to this problem. They are a place where lost souls may no longer be lost.

As in A Dream of Death, I have also included the concept of reincarnation/transmigration of the soul, which goes hand-in-hand with the doctrine of the immortal soul. Batward and his fellow sailors, being souls, cannot be simply discarded or destroyed. Most of them must transmigrate and return to the World lest the World cease to exist, as the soul acts as the animating force within our world, and thus in my World. Because the state of the soul after death typically resembles its state at death, and because the men in this story are sailors and lovers of the sea, it is only natural that they reincarnate as creatures dependent on and bound to the sea. Batward, being a ship captain and an individual harbouring greater-than-usual compassion for his fellow sailors, becomes a sort of “genius loci” of the sea tasked with looking after those who traverse the waves. It’s even in his name, from two Old English nouns meaning “boat” and “protector.” He is Batward, the Boat-Ward.

Somewhat Fiction?

Both of these stories are fiction, set in a fantasy world, with made-up characters. At the end of the day, however, if you strip away the fantastical, fictional elements, you are left with a real metaphysical inquiry into the nature of the soul and life after death.

Like most of my mythopoeic writing, the themes within these stories are far from original. I have not “made up” a supernatural system; rather, the mythology, the theology, the metaphysics within Ardonn and beyond are expressions of my own beliefs, and the beliefs and traditions of my ancestors, portrayed through the medium of fantasy. In this sense, every single one of my stories is a spiritual work, an investigation into the metaphysical workings behind our own physical world, including these two.

The Hall of Ancestors, the Hall of the Drowned, and Ardonn itself are merely the canvases onto which I paint the image of our cosmos.