Monday, February 24, 2014

Ragnarok? I doubt it.

But something is happening.

The Vikings said that, prior to the end (which they called Ragnarok), three winters would follow one another with no summers between.  Then Heimdallr, the Herald of the Gods, would take his place and blow the mighty horn Gjallerhorn, singalling that the end would take place in 100 days.  Morality would fail, fights would break out around the world.  In the depths of the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, Jormundgandr the Midgard Serpent would wake and stir.  The seas would turn to poison.  A mighty wolf, Skoll, would devour the sun: his brother Hati would eat the moon.   War would break out between the gods of Asgard and the other great beings (the Giants, among others), and none of the Old Gods would survive - except two.  Life and Lust alone would make it through, and repopulate the world.

It is a grim tale from a grim people, a cold story from the icy North.

But is there any truth to it?




I can't say for sure.  I am no expert in Norse myth.  But I doubt it.  We saw the Mayan date come and go, apparently without incident (though I've seen a few things since then that have made me scratch my head wondering...).  Y2K was a bust.  Every prediction of the Rapture so far has been a failure - and there's been lots of those.  You know, we as human beings are just not all that good at looking at the future and determining what's supposed to be The End and what's just AN end.

Why all the fluff?  Why now?

Well, 100 days ago today, it made international headlines that someone - presumably quite mortal - stood on a rooftop in York, England and sounded a very large horn that was modeled (by humans, one would guess) after descriptions of the Gjallerhorn, as a prelude to a Viking festival to be held in York which happens to wrap up today.  Somehow, that became a fluff that Heimdallr Himself blew that horn, and that Ragnarok begins today.

You know, I can see it, in some ways.  Three winters following one another, no summers between: Europe has seen three consecutive very cold, wet summers in a row with record-breaking winter storms rolling through.  Looking at corporate profits and CEO parachutes versus the lives of those they exploit (both directly as employee-serfs and indirectly as the people who live on the land with the resources they steal), it could well be argued that the bottom morality fell out of the capitalist system years if not decades ago.  Skoll and Hati is a good description of a total eclipse, which always occurs in a solar-lunar set over about two weeks.

Fukushima Daiichi's stricken nuclear power plant continues to spew deadly radioactivity into the Pacific.  Berkeley confirms has made it in high levels to the shores of California and who knows how much further?  If not quite turning the seas to "poison" yet, it does raise serious questions about the safety of Pacific seafood for consumption.  (I live in Hawaii, and I notice a studious avoidance of any question of our safety here by ANYONE, even though it is wintertime and the storms are rolling in from the Northern Pacific, driving the massive sea swell that creates our famous surf before it and dropping their load of Pacific-salted rain on our islands.  Even the military, with its massive presence here and many Navy Sailors who were on the Reagan when she responded to Operation Tomodachi and have come down sick from sailing through a radioactive plume, shows little sign of concern.) 

On the other side of the Americas, BP has yet to be called to account for the massive damage done by the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig and the subsequent blowout of the Macondo field - indeed, they've made record profits since then.  (Who of the mystically-minded could watch that early footage, as I did, and fail to draw the connection of that deep red crude, like the Earth's own blood, roiling up from the depths in an accusing stain across the blue waters?  I will not forget.)  There is a major oil spill pretty much weekly in many other places around the world, like Mexico and Nigeria.  China's booming economy is sending acid rain down on American crops from their many coal-fired plants.

And speaking of coal - and fossil fuels in general - there was a blowout of a fracking well in North Dakota's Bakken shale, a rail train carrying Bakken crude derailed and overturned, another massive coal-ash slurry spill in the American South (this time by Duke Energy) and the MDMA-laden sludge from another power plant in West Virginia that leaked and left dozens of West Virginia residents sick and hundreds of thousands without potable water for days.  (The state government said about three days later that it was "safe to drink" while still cautioning pregnant women to avoid it - this indicates that there were still reasonable doubts.)

That's just a portion of what made it to the news so far in 2014, the items that happen to be still fresh in my mind as I type (this is very much a stream-of-consciousness post, apparently I had much to say).

So I'll call it out as another round of crying wolf.  And the Gods save us from the wrath of the Danes.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments welcome. Please keep it civil.