"I trow I hung on that windy Tree, nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to mine own self given, high on that Tree of which none hath heard, from what roots it rises to heaven."

(Part of the Nordic Poem, "Odin's Quest" from the Elder Edda, also known Saemund's Edda)

"At the end of days, the thunder shall be silenced and darkness will hold dominion over the earth."

This is not a Christian apocalyptic quote from the Book of Revelations, but a Nordic/Teutonic parable that is associated with Gotterdammerung. Also known as "going into the Shadow of the Gods" sometimes it is also referred to as the "Twilight of the Gods" or doomsday; when all the old deities shall be absorbed back into the Great Mother, Skadi the Shadow. Skadi, like Mother Kali of India, represents the great dark earth womb from which we all came. She is the very essence of the primordial. From this primal womb all things re-emerge anew; a rebirth of all things, by the primal goddess.

One cannot help but see the references to procession, the turning of the sky wheel, all throughout this myth. As time passes ever onward, gods change and belief systems change. The old ways step aside, for a time, making way for new patterns of belief, only to ride the wheel of time, disappear and then re-emerge once again as the neoteric faith. The Scandinavian and Teutonic concept of a cyclic universe, with a new set of gods, is essentially the same as that in Hindu India. The Indo-Europeans, as a collective, shared this belief. The Celts, the Greeks, the Etruscans and Slavic peoples all had belief systems based on the conquest of one set of gods by another set, usually the children of the "aging" deities, such as Zeus overthrowing the Titans. This was paralleled on earth with the overthrow of the father, by the son, and the establishment of one kingdom over another. Crowns are not passed from hand to hand without at least a bit of social warfare.

Certainly, earthly political factions and tribal warfare had a high degree of influence in the matter of a people's given religion. For instance, ancient Nordic culture, circa 300 B.C.E., was a Vandal tribal society. They worshipped the Vanir deities, and their great mother was the Goddess Ran. But eventually the Nordic/Teutonic tribes invaded and set the Vandals into exile, hence the mythic tale of Odin's overthrow of the Vanir and the establishment of the Aesir gods. According to the Voluspa, war among humanity occurred for the first time when the Aesir peoples left their home of Asaland and laid waste to the world of the pre-Indo-European cultures of the Goddess.

It was believed that this world revolves and exists upon the cusp of a great serpent, whose name means all things, the infinite. It is Ananta, (no, I am not going to get into Atlantis cognates here), the empyrean Kundalini, upon whose coils the Hindu gods spend their periods of rest and death. She, whose coils wrap around the world in both the day and night. Like the ancient Egyptian Goddess, Mehen the Enveloper, who enshrouded the sun god Ra, every night as he slept, Ananta engulfed the sun as it sank below into the underworld. In Hindic belief, these cycles of the serpent goddess are called Infinity, and they are a focal point for sacred sexual imagery in both nature and humanity. The Norse believed that the Midgard serpent encircled the world only to uncoil at the calling of Ragnarok.

According to the Nordic mythos, Ragnarok is the ending of the present universe. Heimdall, much like the Archangel Gabriel in the Christian mythos, would announce the end of days and the last battle of the gods, by blowing the "Last Trump" on his horn. All things would fall from its temporal stasis of order and plunge back into the primordial chaos.

It can be interpreted that such a collapse would result into a singularity from which the next universe would be born. It would be the starting point of the next Big Bang. Could this be what these simple folk tales are saying; a complicated scientific theory broken down in a folktale? Did we begin from the remnants of the last universe? A most intriguing possibility.

"From the womb of Skadi I have come, the schism in the order, prepare the way." Further Reading

Mallory, J.P.
In Search of The Indo-Europeans, London, England, Thames and Hudson Publishing.

Turville-Petre, E.O.G. .
Myth and Religion of the North, London, England, Weidenfield and Nicolson Publishing.

Davidson, Hilda Ellis.
The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe, London, England, Routledge Publishing.

Magoun, F.P. .
On The Old Germanic Altar, Symbology of the Oath Ring, Copenhagen, Denmark, Acta Philoloagica Scandinavica.

Gimbutas, Marija.
The Language of The Goddess, New York, HarperCollins.

Gimbutas, M., and Marler, J. .
The Civilization of the Goddess, San Francisco, Harper.

Husain, Shahrukh.
The Goddess: Creation, Fertility, And Abundance; The Sovereignty of Woman Myths and Archetypes, New York, Little Brown.

Baring, A., and Cashford, J. .
The Myth of The Goddess: Evolution of An Image, Viking Arkana, Harmondsworth.

Walker, Barbara G. .
The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers.

Woodman, Marion and Elinor Dickson, eds. .
Dancing In The Flames: The Dark Goddess In The Transformation of Consciousness, Boston: Shambhala.

Various Authors.
Ancient Europe, 8000 BC to AD 1000: An Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World, USA. Thompson & Gale Publishing.