So far Christianity, Heathenry, and even the Greco-Roman understanding of the origin of the cosmos agrees. Where the difference creeps in is what this meant to the monotheist versus the polytheist. To the Christian, Muslim, or Jew, the beginning singularity is “big G God”, Jehovah, Allah, or whatever you wish to call him. To my own Heathen ancestors he was Ymir.

The Judeo-Christian group sees the unity that begins as being worthy of all worship, as being the sole possible focus for devotion, sole source for truth. We try not to giggle when this view is expressed, because those who hold it find deep meaning in it, and we try not to offend. To us, it is literally impossible to comprehend why they think so.

In the beginning was Ymir, neither male nor female, neither good or evil, Ymir was literally all that was, and therefore it was impossible to determine self/not self, form and formless; impossible for identity to exist, impossible for awareness, virtue or vice to exist. In the beginning the universe was one, physics agrees. The big bang pretty much did away with unity, and gave the universe differentiation. To the Christians, unity spoke and brought forth stuff because he could, and wanted to. To the Heathens, and many other polytheistic pagans, the universe began with unity, from that unity came the first primordial beings, and their first act upon achieving identity was murder; from the destruction of Ymir was built the material world, and the primal forces that drive the interactions of matter within it.

We don’t worship Ymir; his slaughter gave rise to the universe, and made possible the ability for the universe to be experienced as form and formless were now separated, matter and energy were now separated, from the mist of Ginnungagap formed the spirals of galaxies, the birth of suns, the creation of planets.

The primal forces of fire and ice, creation and destruction, order and entropy are given name as Jottun, or giants to us, Titans to the Greek and Roman. We know they are the primal forces of existence, and yet we worship them not. They do not care; they are, their nature is pure and elemental, and no offering, no plea, no prayer will turn them aside from following their nature, so our ancestors didn’t bother trying.

The universe is more than matter and energy, there is something more to it, something spiritual. There is a higher order, a deeper meaning, a thing that stretches beyond matter and energy, something that survives the transformations between states. It has always been my belief that the rising order and complexity of the universe represents on some level the universe attempting to know itself. Ymir could not know him/herself as in unity there can be no understanding of self, if there is no thing that is not self. Unity is not perfection, it is indistinguishable from nothingness. Unity is not divine, it is meaningless.

Our lore tells us from the Jotun or Titan came forth a new race, the race of our holy gods. They did not create the universe, they were born from it as it increased in complexity, arising as necessarily and inevitably as gravity follows mass. These beings, in our lore, these gods chose to put their will upon the worlds and the primal forces within it and create a place where ice and fire were balanced. Those who study planetary formation and life sciences call this the liquid water zone, that place where liquid water can exist, and where, as a result, life can form. Our gods did not kill off the Jottun, they created a place where the primordial forces were balanced, but they did not destroy them. Oddly enough, it is the existence of life that stabilizes the liquid water zone, and leads to conditions on earth, rather than those of Mars whose water was bound by the oxidation (rust) cycle rather than the carbon based water cycle. It is the existence of life, of the liquid water zone that allowed plate tectonics to continue, that allowed the cycles of fire and ice to continue on earth long after they died on Mars {1}

The gods are not credited with creating life, only conditions where it could arise. They are not credited with creating us, only seeing in us something that called out to them, and granting us gifts so that we could rise to achieve a higher understanding, both of our world, and of them.

We did not worship our gods always, nor were our gods always worthy of worship, or even interested in it. There was a time before either of us existed. There was a time when they existed and we did not, and there was even a time when we were far from being able to perceive them in any but the most halting fashion.

Are we not the universe written small? What better model of the universe attempting to understand itself than mankind. We who were given the gifts of inspiration by Odin have used that gift to seek to understand our universe, our place within it, our own nature, to find our purpose, and to wrestle with the truth that once we were not, now we are, and one day, we will cease to be.

Our gods are not eternal. Every act of creation begins a cycle that must end in destruction, every birth prophesies a death. Who better to be our guides in this mortal existence that gods who understand this mortal limitation, who chose to take that step to bind themselves to wyrd, to subject themselves to the wyrd woven by the Norns, to fate, to death itself, by daring to create this place of balance, by daring to limit primordial chaos and bring forth the order that made life possible.

There is no one face to divinity, for when the universe was one, it was unknowing, unknowable, ignorant, and as devoid of worth as it was form. The gods and goddesses, the divinity as we experience and know it is not fixed and permanent, is not “as was in the beginning, and as shall be eternally”; the only thing that is eternal is the cold and silence of the void. Non-existence is unchanging, existence is change.

My gods were not always, nor was my race. Heck, the human race is less than 200,000 years old, barely a blink in the existence of the planet, less than that in the existence of the universe. How long have we worshipped our gods? Really a tiny fraction of that. As a species, our understanding of our universe and ourselves has been growing as fast as our biology and our lifespan will allow. As we grow, and as we have the luxury to explore our world and ourselves, our awareness and understanding grew, and changed.

Different gods found different tribes, some of these may well be different understanding of the same gods, shaped by different peoples experiences and understandings; some are just obviously different gods. Its a big complex universe, if you want simple answers you will just have to accept being closer to wrong than right most of the time. The truth is something we generally understand in painfully limited fashion, each new understanding being a halting step forward from the last, and an unimaginable distance from full comprehension. Some of our steps are not advancements, but mistakes; that is the wonder of humanity, no matter how far we have come, each generation knows we have far further to go than any of us will live to see.

I am a hard polytheist, I accept that our gods are discrete and knowable entities. I seriously doubt they are “eternal and unchanging”, nor would I find it worthy for them to be so. We know from our lore that many of them are fated to die with this world, hopefully buying us a chance to save a remnant of a remnant. As an aside, science reassures us that the planet we are on, which has enjoyed multiple planetary extinction events already, has a best before date, and even if we avoid unscheduled catastrophes, we will be seared of all life and atmosphere where our sun progresses into a red giant (oops, those pesky fire Jottuns of Muspelheim mentioned in the lore as proximal doom) before the sun collapses to leave the earth a cold airless rock spinning in the eternal ice of space (those pesky frost Jottuns born from Ymir who seek to return to the nothingness that was). If we are bright enough, work hard enough, and refrain from killing ourselves off, we just might get some of the human race off this rock and out of this solar system so we, as a species, can out live this event. The gods promise to buy us time, they don’t promise we will get our shit together and make it work, the lore promises a chance, but we still have the choice to screw up.

The universe was singular once; Ymir, unknowing and unknowable. I can’t worship that unity, ignorance is unworthy of devotion. On this I will just have to disagree with the Judeo-Christian view, as they are actually forbidden to agree to disagree on this point. This would be their problem, not ours, so I leave them to it.

Our gods did not always exist, our species did not always exist; we did not always understand the gods as we do in the last few thousand years of recorded history, and I am unsure whether this represents an actual change in our gods, or simply a change in our ability to understand both the gods and ourselves. Like a lot of Christians with the question of the Trinity, I find this essentially unknowable question to be a source of both wonder and joy. Maybe it’s a Heathen thing; but I find exciting the thought that every single generation from now until our sun burns out will have to struggle for itself to deepen its understanding of itself, the physical universe, and that which is a part of us that extends beyond the simple summation of matter and energy that describes the physical universe.

To those Judeo-Christians who claim to be worshiping the primordial god, the first god of existence; this is hardly a selling point to Heathens like myself, or to a Greco-Roman pagan. Your claim to worship the one we know as Ymir or the Greco-Romans as Uranus is to claim to worship a being whose destruction created the universe we inherit, whose death was a prerequisite for the development of life, awareness, and spirituality.

Our gods, like our species was not always. In the beginning, we were not. In the end, when the universe reaches ultimate dispersal of heat death, or collapses back into singularity, I have no idea if we (gods or man) will still exist. I do know that we represent the universe’s attempt to know itself.

The gods are formed of the primordial, the great divine power that drives the universe, and we, the most ephemeral of all mortal beings. It is through us that the divine may experience our universe, and it is through them we can grow to understand the parts of us that will not die when our mortal flesh returns to the soil as ash or meat. Together we grow, together we are greater, the parts of us that are not limited to matter and energy call to them, the parts of us that yearn to know, to understand, to love, to dream, to create, to dare and to achieve call to them; they shine a light into the darkness to allow us to see a little farther, to know a little more, to chose a little better. We give them the sum of our choices, our experience, our life, and yes, our death. Together we learn and grow, and if we are smart, lucky, and swift enough, perhaps some of us will continue to do so long after our planet is burned clean, and left to spin frozen in the eternal dark.

I can’t know. All I can do is strive to make the world a little better, a little wiser, and trust that uncounted generations to come will do the same. The gods will be there to guide, it remains to be seen if we will continue to listen.

{1} http://www.biology-online.org/5/3_water-cycle.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1664679/