The Killer's God

by Raven Kaldera

A man who works with wolf spirits once spoke to me, troubled. “Fenris isn’t a proper wolf spirit,” he said. “He doesn’t act like a wolf. My wolf-friends tell me that. He kills for sport and wastes the meat. He has no pack. He would devour anyone.”

He’s right. Fenris is not a wolf, or a wolf spirit. He is a God of Destruction who just happens to take wolf form. He is the Power that will take down the Universe. He is Hunger Incarnate, and no one is safe. If he were to be freed, he would immediately begin to devour everyone and everything in sight, starting with the poor sod who freed him.

And yet, he is sacred. And, further, he is worthy of love and I do love him.

Why? My reasons are both intensely selfish and intensely transcendent. His blood is in me, in my family. His wrath and destructiveness runs in my veins. There is a creature in me—I can’t even say what form it takes, except that it is Predator—and he would gladly destroy everything in its path, starting with those I love. He would even take great joy in the destruction. He is capable of loving someone intensely and simultaneously, as a friend said jokingly, digging their eyes out with a teaspoon—and he sees no discrepancy there. And if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand Fenris.

But this is a part of me, this inner Fenris. I can’t make him go away. He’s there, and he’s necessary. Just because there is no place for him in this, Midgard’s sister realm of laws and rules and prison sentences doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a use. He is my will to survive, my surety that no matter how bad things get, nothing can break me. People hear what I went through in my childhood and say things like, “Why aren’t you broken?” It’s because of him that I am this close to unbreakable … but as a price, it means I get to live with him all the time, clanking his chains in my basement and plotting prison breaks where I can hear it at night.

If there’s a Rule I understand, it is the Rule of Shadow Work: You must love all parts of yourself, unconditionally. You cannot go down to them hoping that they will change, or heal, or whatever. That’s not loving them as they are, and they smell it, and they won’t listen to you. And if I am to be able to love myself, I must love that part of me—the part that would thrill to the rape, the kill, the blood rippling in great pools across the floor and drenching my throat with its metallic rawness. (Yes, of course I’ve dreamed it. I live with that, remember?) So I begin as many people have begun, in many faiths: if it’s hard to love yourself, start with loving God.

So I started with loving Fenris. If I can love this God of Destruction who embodies the sacredness of all that I fear in myself, perhaps I can then make the jump to loving my inner Fenris. A simple equation, but it started out with going before the Great Wolf and seeing him as he is, no romance, no chance of making him anything else. He is what he is, and he glories in it. He would eat the whole universe and love it. He would devour his own parents, who still love him even in his extremity. The first step was weeping for him, not out of pity, but out of awe. I could see his sacredness, and the predator inside me threw himself at his bars, howling in praise of his God.

Slowly, slowly, over time, I have been able to move from loving Him—even while I appreciate why He must be chained—to loving that part of me, which must also be chained. I’ve just got a lot more than six impossible things in those internal bars. I think that when mental health workers deal with people who present with unacceptable urges, they get caught up in the urges themselves. They are shocked, horrified, perhaps even vaguely titillated, and probably experiencing a surge of self-righteousness—why, they would never have desires so twisted and sick! With all the emphasis on the urges, they miss the fact that there are people walking around who have the same urges as Joe Serial Killer, and never lift a finger to one of them. The issue isn’t the desires, it’s what goes wrong in the self-control department. It’s that the inhibitory mechanism is faulty. The magical chain isn’t working right.

Fenris hates that chain, with all his might. So do I. I am also profoundly grateful for it, both his and mine. It allows me to have a life, to live, to love without it all spiraling screaming down the drain. Both sides are true, and both are sacred. And this, too, is a Mystery of Fenris: the chain is as much a part of his destiny as the possibility of the final bloody banquet. He is the weapon held at arm’s length that you hope, with all your might, that you will never have to use.

I love the Great Wolf, even though I know him. Every scarlet, rageful drop of him. He is in me, and we are both worthy of it.

Artwork by Pluevior.