“Real Magic”
By Aaron McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara
October 26, 2008
The Earth spins. It spins as it always has; spins as it dances its eternal dance around the life-giving sun. There are no mileposts, no markers more powerful or more enduring than the steps of our Earth’s sacred dance around the sun. The waxing and waning of dawn and dusk, the ebb and flow of seasons, the rise and fall of ocean tides in time with the moon’s changing light.
Even today, with all our technological conceits, our nostrils still flare with the crisp tang of changing leaves and hardening soil. Even as we sit under the artificial lights of climate controlled office buildings, our whole bodies can feel fall, and winter coming.
In just two more graceful twirls of the Earth, the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain will be upon us. For over 2,000 years the Celts, have marked summer’s end with family and feasting, prayer and reflection, and the telling of stories around warm hearths and bonfires that blaze until dawn. On this sacred night, the last before the New Year, which begins in darkness, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead, past, present and future – blurs.
So with our senses full of the changing earth and air and fall, let us feel the boundaries give, let us listen to and learn from the stories of voices long since returned to dust and soil.
Let me tell you a story about a tree. Its name is Yggdrasil, the World-Ash, and World-Tree. Its story was passed down orally, word for word for centuries before finally being written down by Icelandic skalds about 1,000 years ago. Much of what I am about to tell you comes from an edda, or prose poem, called Gylfaginning.
Imagine a towering cathedral of a tree, so tall and so broad that the buds of its topmost branches blossomed in Heaven, and its roots shot all the way through the Earth, giving our fragile globe stability in a chaotic cosmos. Yggdrasil’s deep roots sank down, down through the Earth into the underworld itself so that every part of creation was connected to every other part by this primordial ash, which held all the worlds together.
Like all trees, the World Ash is a home to many things. Among the heaven-lit leaves of its topmost branches sits an eagle, with keen eyes and knowledge of many things. Four stags run along the branches feeding on the tree’s rich bark and soft budding leaves. And lower still, in the bowels of the earth, coiled among the Yggdrasil’s thickest roots lives the Nidhogg, a vast and terrible serpent and her innumerable gnawing young. They devour the ash from below. Finally there is Ratatosk the messenger, a squirrel who scampers up and down the length of the tree passing insults between the eagle and the Nidhogg.
At the base of the tree are three wells, perhaps even older than the already eternal ash. These are the wells of the past, the present and the future – welling up from the same unknown and unknowable source, there at the foot of the tree. There is a beautiful dwelling next to the wells under the dark green eaves. The three norns live there, beings that see and shape the destinies of us all.
The Gylfaginning tells us that the norns dip into “Weird’s well each day and take water and the mud that lies round the well and pour it up over the ash so that its branches may not rot or decay. And this water is so holy that all things that come into contact with that well go as white as the skin that lies round the inside of an eggshell.”[1]
But the norns, even with their days spent drenching the tree with endless coats of white and sacred mud, cannot fully counteract the rot of the bark, the loss of eaten leaves, and the appetites of ravenous snakes below. Sooner or later, in a time beyond our reckoning, the World Tree will begin to fall. Its fall will be slow, far, far slower than the wearing away of a mountain by a single soft feather. But fall it will. Mighty Yggdrasil, sacred Yggdrasil will collapse upon itself until it eventually sinks completely into the well of the past.
When this happens, the world will end. The Norse called this final catastrophe, “Ragnorak.” Ragnorak is terrible and it is unavoidable, and represents a complete and total environmental and social catastrophe. The Voluspa, another edda, tells us that at this time people will go mad with greed, abandoning all moral law:
“Brothers will battle to bloody end,
And sisters sons their sib betray
The spear of no man will spare another”[2]
Even as communities dissolve in a rising tide of greed-fueled strife, the Earth herself will groan. The climate will undergo dramatic change as the seasons themselves are wrenched from their cycles. Blood red sunsets, dim sunshine, and famine will all preside as the air and water are poisoned by the venom of serpents and the breath of the Fenris wolf.
Ragnorak is a nightmare vision of everything that humans’ love, everything that humans depend upon – turned inside out. It is the end of the world and it is inevitable.
Inevitable, but not eternal. Because something unexpected happens, something amazing. Out of the well of the past, rising slowly, so slowly up into the well of the present, and reflected in the well of the future, the World Tree emerges once again, dripping with the water of creation. In due time, mighty Yggdrasil resumes its former station, reconnecting what was broken.
“I see green again with growing things
On unsown acres the ears will grown,
And all ill grow better.”[3]
And so it goes. The whole cycle going on and on – the world tree rises, stands, falls and sinks. The cycle is a perfect ring, smooth and immutable and unchanging. It is a beautiful image, but also terrifying. You see, brothers and sisters, within such a conception of the world there is no room for creativity, for evolution, for invention.
These stories are full of gods and elves and other beings that can only be described as supernatural – magical. The gods know that Ragnorak is coming, and they use every bit of magic, cunning and wisdom at their disposal to stop it all from falling apart – but to no avail. And then, it all starts over – the same gods with the same magic locked in the same futile battle against the inevitable for all of eternity.
Their magic couldn’t save them, couldn’t change anything. These gods were powerful, yes, in their way – but not creative. They were as incapable of change as the rest of the cycle they were caught up in.
I have read pages upon pages of eddas and sagas, stories of the exploits and misadventures of these gods, and guess what? In all those pages, all those stories – never once do any of them change – they never grow up, never learn from their mistakes, never change roles or relationship. Thor is doomed to spend eternity chasing after his brother Loki trying to bash him on the head with a hammer, while Loki dances ahead forever dreaming up new and even more diabolical schemes to make Thor even angrier! For all their power – they create nothing, invent nothing. Thor and Thorin, Frigg and Freya, Baldr and Brag – they are what they are – forever. And all the superpowers in the world can’t change that.
What then, is magic? Real magic? There are a lot of ways to answer this question, but as I struggled over my keyboard writing this sermon I found a definition that intrigues me. Magic is not power the way we usually conceive it. Not power, but potential. Magic is that which can change the unchangeable. It is that which can turn a closed circuit into an open spiral, fostering direction, growth and possibility.
This is the kind of magic the people of pre-Christian Iceland yearned for when they wrote their eddas, yearned for it even as they feared that they did not live in a world where such magic was possible. They could feel their fragility in every blizzard, every failed crop and poor fishing expedition, just as they knew that every good crop, good catch and mild winter might be followed by three bad ones. Who were they to presume agency in such a world?
I believe that we still yearn for such magic, even today. Many of us look around our world and feel dwarfed by the scope and complexity of the challenges facing us. And yet, we dream of living in a world where change is possible, where not all laws are set in stone, a world where we can initiate and participate in change even though we are small and often foolish creatures.
We yearn for this kind of magic, even though we fear it is only illusion.
We all know that illusionists like David Blaine have tricks up their sleeves, that David Copperfield can’t really walk through the Great Wall of China or make a jumbo jet disappear. And yet we watch. And watch. I don’t know about you, but I am strangely schizophrenic where this kind of magic is concerned. One part of me, knowing full well I am being tricked, spins along pleasurably, trying to figure out “how’d he do that?”, while another part doesn’t want to know. That, I think, is the part of me that wants to believe, even for a moment, that I live in a world where such things are possible, where the laws of nature can be bent, if not broken. It’s the part if me that secretly wants to believe that what I am seeing, against all odds – is real.
And I think we have good reason to feel this way, to want to believe we live in a world where magic is possible. You see, our world is not so different than the world of these pre-Christian Icelandic poets.
Ragnorak, that inevitable, steamrolling apocalypse, bears an uncanny resemblance to what I see every time I read the newspaper – or go to Los Angeles, for that matter. The approach of Ragnorak was marked by massive human suffering and conflict: driven mad by greed, brother turned against brother, communities atrophied or were torn apart; people broke their covenants and abandoned their deepest moral principles. The end of the world was also marked by an environmental collapse of epic proportions: famine stalked the land and millions perished; the sunlight grew dim as it struggled to pierce a stubborn and noxious haze in the air (anyone here been to Los Angeles lately?); radical climate change made life dangerous and unpredictable.
Sound familiar? It does to me.
It seems to me as if images of apocalypse are becoming almost commonplace. For example, some years ago, walking across a bridge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I watched with my own eyes as the river beneath me turned bright red. It went on for miles and miles, winding through towns and cities; fields and forests – like a bright and bloody ribbon. It lasted for some days, and no definitive explanation was ever offered. I recently read an article about how a whole flock of Canadian geese heading home landed in a big lake in the middle of Butte, Montana. The water was so toxic that it ate their feathers and flesh as they slept, killing every single one of them by morning. And I don’t think I need to elaborate on the greed-fueled madness, bigotry and casual brutality I see every time I pick up a newspaper. I know that we can all fill in the blanks. If any of those ancient poets were here today they would go pale, begin to tremble and whisper, “Ragnorak.”
I am not claiming that these old eddas are prophetic texts. Just that it seems to me that many of us feel just as fragile, just as paralyzed and just as despairing as any ancient Icelander. I have lost count of how many times people have said to me – perfectly good, well intentioned, reasonable people, mind you – that they don’t recycle because there is no point. It won’t do any good; it’s just a drop in a bucket full of holes, a bucket that is beyond repair. Same thing goes with democracy – less than half of Americans vote, and every election cycle, vaguely disapproving pundits furrow their brows and ask why nobody votes – and then they struggle to appear surprised when the answer is the same again as always – our votes just don’t matter, what’s the point, voting doesn’t change anything. There is even a disturbingly large segment of our society that doesn’t even want to change anything – that wants the world to end, fulfilling some prophecy or another from some other dusty old book.
Sure, we surround ourselves with mountains of technology, evidence of our ingenuity, but let’s face it – all too many of us are paralyzed.
But I believe we do live in a world where such magic is possible.
Indeed, I think the evidence is all around us. This particularly human magic tends to take one of two primary forms: first there is the magic that attempts to divorce humans completely from the great cycle of life represented by the world-tree. The invention of the nuclear bomb is a good example of this. This is a device capable of skipping the whole slow fall of the world tree, simply ending the world whenever some group of humans want it to end. Instant Ragnorak.
The second way to practice this kind of magic is to do so in a way that seeks to create or guide change in partnership with the wider unfolding of creation. Remember, it was only an eye-blink ago that Mahatma Gandhi raised the world’s first non-violent army. And inexplicably, against the grain of all human history, they won. Gandhi recognized that conflict was a normal part of life, so he didn’t try to create a utopia – he didn’t try to outlaw conflict, but to shape the way we resolve conflict.
Those dusty old Norse gods would look on us with amazement. They come into the world completed, finished. But we, we are always in the process of becoming. We grow and change throughout the whole of our lives. Many of us are free to play roles, even switch roles in ways that would have been unimaginable to those gods, for all their magic rings and troll-hammers and eight-legged horses. Those gods would think us the greatest magicians of all because we are not only capable of change, but capable of changing with intention. We can live creatively with our feelings, our reason and our experience - surfing ripples of possibility and potential that extend far beyond our tiny individual selves. We don’t have to wait for the World Tree to fall, we can fall with it, dance with it, shape it and be shaped by it.
I can see them now, sitting in Othin’s vast feasting hall, hundreds of gods, ettins and alfs. They’re sitting packed on great carved benches laughing and gambling and quarrelling and bragging. They drink their ever-full tankards of mead and sing, lit by a thousand blazing torches.
Othin, being the most clear-sighted of gods, notices us first. He can see us just as we can hold this Viking hall in our own mind’s eyes. He can see us because today, this day so close to Samhain, the boundaries between the worlds waver and blur. The golden hall falls silent as the others become aware of us too. The only sounds are those of guttering torches and dogs playing tug o’ war with scraps under the tables.
I imagine that we can see one another quite clearly, deeply. They on their feasting benches and we ghostly faces hovering in, perhaps composed of drifting wood smoke. After a time, perhaps a very long time, Othin raises his tankard and all his company do the same, hundreds of burnished and clinking tankards poise before red lips and thick bearded faces.
He speaks, “Welcome and hail, ghosts. I can see you clear through the mists of time and space. Today, like every day, we here in Valhalla feast and fight and sing, while we wait for Ragnorak to lay us all low. But you, you are changelings – you can change things. You can make things, ride things, shift things – imagine things. This is powerful magic, a free, wild magic that makes my heart beat loud in my ears. Hear me now, even though my voice rises to you from the dust of ages. Know your magic, practice it, live it with vision and intention so that it does not come to use you. Use your magic to strengthen and nourish that which you love best. Yggdrasil, the mighty ash of the world will always fall – for us, for Skuld and Surt; Ratatosk and Nidhogg; Loki and Fenris and all of our world it falls in an unbreakable circle; but for you, for you it can spiral if only you will learn to be its lover, and to be the change you seek. We drink tonight in your honor, and we give you our blessings. Remember us.”
And with those final, whispered words and hundreds of tankards tipped in toast, a strong gust of wind blows open the huge oak doors of Othin’s Hall kicking up plumes of smoke, extinguishing the torches, and blowing us away, back across the boundaries.
This is what I imagine today, as Halloween, Samhain, approaches. But while I may have imagined us being toasted by all those old gods, I still side with Shakespeare, who one wrote that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in all our philosophies.”[4] And so, I choose to believe that we do live in a world where magic is possible – and that such a world lives in us.