I’m not afraid of dying. Even before I became a polytheist I liked what Socrates had to say about it. He provided an example for us all in his Phaedo, when he told his friends that there was nothing to fear:
Quote:
Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?
My Heathen ancestors had a great many conceptions of death, and to what road it led: to the halls of our ancestors, to Hel (nothing like Christian hell but just a place you go when you die), to Valhöll if Odin chooses you. Skjöldunga Saga speaks of “going to King Odin” and “the underworld,” and there is some sense of going “into the mountains” to join your ancestors. There is also a limited appeal to reincarnation, as Ellis-Davidson puts it, “belief in the birth of the souls of dead ancestors into the living world again, in the persons of their descendants.”[1] And of course, there are the dísir, who are female ancestors who have stayed behind to help the household.
Who knows? It is difficult to know what to make of all the various ideas surrounding death. Islamic traveler Ibn Fahdlan, when watching a Varangian funeral, spoke of “paradise” which was the best he could interpret the Norse word as he was made to understand it. But anything that smacks of paradise cannot be bad.
Outside of the claim to Valhöll (a claim no mortal can make) the poem heard by Ibn Fahdlan at the chieftain’s funeral, and re-rendered by Michael Crichton in the 13th Warrior, captures the essence of Heathen ideas of death:
Quote:
Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.
My ancestors did not live their lives towards an afterlife, or for a hope in some afterlife, though ideas of joining their ancestors shows that they expected them to be there already, waiting for them. They lived their lives as part of a continuum, inheritors but also progenitors, descendants and ancestors to be. And they lived their lives for life, for what mark they made on this world, what they did for their families and communities – and for their gods. And for what name they left behind them. As I quote in every email I send out:
Quote:
Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
oneself dies likewise,
but good renown
will never die
for him who earns it.
- Hávamál, 76
I think this is true. And who does not want to be well thought of when they are gone? Who would choose ill-renown over good? We all want to have had a good impact on those whom we love and care for. We want that “son of” or “daughter of” to mean something.
So how have I done? Too soon to tell. As another Norse proverb tells us, “Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”
And I think that is as it should be. We should not be judged on our accomplishments until we are done with the opportunity to affect change – that is, when we are dead. I hope that when the day comes that I have shaped my final fate that I will have done some praiseworthy deeds. That is what we should all hope for.
Followers of the White Christ hope for some form of eternal salvation, a nebulous form of afterlife in which they will enjoy the fruits of their devotion to their god. I find there is a disconnect between “up there” and “down here.” But our gods, like us, are of this world; there is a connection that is very real between we mortals and the Otherworld.
It is only fitting that as I have lived “down here” that I be judged “down here” and by the people I have lived among, whose lives I have in some way impacted and whose lives have impacted me. I hope that my deeds will have been found worthy of my ancestors, that the good will have outweighed the bad, wisdom foolishness, and piety impiety. I would very much – like Theoden King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – to go before my ancestors unashamed, just as I have hoped to live my life unashamed.
We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we are not proud of; say and do things we regret later, or fail to say or do things we feel we should have said or done. We don’t have to apologize to our gods for those oversights. Instead, we redeem ourselves here. It is redemption – not salvation – that is meaningful.
But in the end, as each of us shapes our own fate, we have nothing to complain about. Our decisions, our actions, have brought us to where we are now. If sometimes genetics jumps in with a “surprise!” then there is still no reason for complaint, no reason to rail against gods or fate.
So in the end, my concern is where it should be, not with some nebulous and unknowable afterlife or paradise but with the world I leave behind, the world I belonged to, and whether or not I’ve done enough to have made it a better place.
The gods will know, but they will not judge. That will be left to my fellow mortals here on the little island in space we call Midguard.
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