Hel

So you said that you're mostly in charge of the lyrics.

So w- uh, was it your idea to bring a lot of, uh, Norse mythology and stuff like that, uh, into the, into the songs? 'Cause you have a track about Fenrir, uh, The Serpent of Midgard, Jörmungandr [laughs] Helheim.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

Um, it started with Helheim.

I, I have no idea.

Uh, like, Helheim is now a little bit time ago, so I don't really remember who started the topic.

But Helheim started the whole Norse mythology thing.

What I'm going to do here is break down what Helheim actually represents within heathen practice and spirituality, and also what its significance is for modern practitioners.

I'm going to start by first recapping a little bit about the Nordic concept of death and the death realms, and then I'm going to get into Helheim as well as the goddess Hel for just a little bit.

So, let's jump on into the big theory stuff first.

Generally speaking, the ethics of Nordic spirituality can be described as consequentialist, with influence of certain virtues as being praised and certain actions and behaviors as being condemned, which also has some strong components around your responsibility to others and connections to the world around you.

It is neither reward for specific kinds of good behavior or punishment for bad, or particularly, as we see in American evangelical Christianity, the promise of heavenly reward paired with the threat of hellfire and damnation.

Instead, if, for example, you should arrive in Valhalla, it's probably because you led the kind of life that would lead you to such an ending.

If you wind up in Helheim, the place of the straw death of those who die of illness, old age, or injury... then that's a product of living the kind of life that would lead to that outcome, which is to say, the kind of life that's experienced by the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of human history.

There's also nothing that's particularly wrong with this.

So, what we have right here is Yggdrasil, which is in the Norse mythology, and So, at the center of Norse cosmology stands Yggdrasil, an immense ash tree whose branches and roots extend throughout the cosmos.

The worlds of gods, humans, giants, and the dead exist in relationship to this cosmic structure with places such as Asgard, Midgard, and Hel woven into its geography.

Three great roots extend toward powerful cosmic regions, while beneath them lie wells associated with fate, wisdom, and primordial forces.

At the well of Urur...

And of course, you can go all the way up.

You can go, you know, to Udur and Asgard.

And then you got below, you got Hel down here, the Niflheim down here.

Yeah.