Time to talk #Loki again!

So I wasn't kidding in those earlier toots; I did actually semi-seriously promise Loki that I'd do them another solid if they gave my dice rolls in "Elder Sign" a bit of a kick every now and again, and damned if it didn't seem to produce results, and I want to be a witch who makes good on her bargains. So I'm gonna talk a bit about an issue friends have brought up with me: why devote myself to a deity who's got a reputation of being a murderous bastard? To answer that I want to discuss the worst thing Loki ever did. @kel did this over on the birdsite but now it's my turn to talk about Baldur.

(seriously, I managed to beat some pretty long odds in that game, I think @Ulfra_Wolfe and friends would agree...and I think I heard a choice word or two from the flame-haired bastard in my ear)

I talked a while back about how I went into my "fling" with #Loki and how at the time I thought it was just hilarious. The night that Loki made unambiguous contact with me, I thought it was the greatest joke in the world, and I was laughing my ass off as I agreed to the affair. But believe me, in that moment I hadn't forgotten what a dangerous entity Loki was, even while laughing and consenting to get involved with them. I've since added other images to my library, but back in October my chief visual reference for Loki was this chilling bit from Gaiman and Hempel's "The Kindly Ones" https://witches.town/media/IBagu9R1TCqYlMOuw2E

My scholarly knowledge about #Loki is sadly limited. Most of what I remember about them comes from popular summaries of Norse mythology. Anyone who's better educated on Norse spirituality can correct me here, but my general sense is that Loki in stories tends to change over time from a more light-hearted trickster, helping the Aesir hoodwink their rivals, to a more calculating and cruel figure whose crowning outrage was orchestrating the death of Odin's and Frigg's beloved son, Baldur. Blamed for the murder, Loki is caught and imprisoned, Prometheus-like, for eternity with a snake dripping venom into their eyes.

When I first learned this story about Baldur I accepted the surface reading that #Loki had committed some horrible crime, and deserved what they got for killing the beautiful, luminous Baldur. Even now I feel an echo of the same wave of longing, of "Joy", that C. S. Lewis described feeling upon encountering these lines of Longfellow's poetry (https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/11/26/baldar/):

I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead——

Lewis's experiences of "Joy" led him to become a Christian, while my own led me to become a chaos witch...possibly because I now don't think Loki's to blame for Baldur?

The trouble began for Baldur when he had a dream (or more than one, I don't know the source material) that he interpreted as foretelling his death. This saddened him and _alarmed_ his mother Frigg to the point that she went through the entire world *making every single entity she found* PROMISE that they would not cause Baldur's death. And I mean everything_--people, animals, plants, inanimate materials...heck, she probably extracted promises from mercury and lead and arsenic not to poison her wonderful son. The entire world was to be Baldur's safe space, because Baldur was so wonderful he deserved complete safety...right?

But just think about the implications of this. This is a world in which animals, plants, objects, _everything_ has a soul, a soul able to be reasoned with and to make agreements with the gods. So imagine being something like, say, a sword with a soul. Your purpose as a sword is to be sharp, and to be a weapon. And now a fiercely protective goddess is telling you, "You will *forget* your purpose, if ever you should meet my son; if you do what you were made to do, I will visit unimaginable punishment on you. Yes or no?" Not that this violation of purpose matters to Frigg, extorting perfect safety for her son from all the world.

No, not quite all the world. Frigg neglected to extort a promise of safety from mistletoe. There's some speculation, it seems, about why the myth decided that mistletoe was the exception--but anyway, Frigg's stated reason was that she couldn't imagine harmless, wimpy little mistletoe ever being a potential danger to her son. She'd tried to wall her son off from all danger but her lofty disdain of "harmless" mistletoe left a gap in her wall that #Loki would eventually drive a truck through. But Loki didn't act, not yet, not until the Aesir's culminating act of arrogance and heedlessness.

For the other gods decided that Frigg's astonishing act of coercion was a _great_ opportunity for some harmless fun. They started hurling objects at Baldur, knowing that because everything (almost) in the world had promised not to hurt Frigg's golden boy, they could chuck rocks and knives and arrows at Baldur all day and nothing would happen. "Oh, you're a sword, huh? Sharpest in the world, eh? Could cut *anyone's* head off in a blow? Well, joke's on you, because I'm about to do--THIS!"

Needless to say this final piece of egotism finally got to #Loki, and they decided they would show just how flimsy Frigg's "safety" was.

So #Loki found the one guy who wasn't tossing pointy things at Baldur as a "joke"--not because Höðr thought that it was a poor joke to throw projectiles at his brother (even though it was) but because he was blind and couldn't enjoy the joke as much. Well, Loki gave him what he wanted, in the form of a mistletoe spear and a helpful guiding hand, and Baldur went down. (One suspects that Höðr was secretly pleased; his prettier brother probably got the lion's share of his mother's love, and one doubts that Frigg would have made _anything_ promise not to hurt Höðr.)

But Frigg wasn't done, oh no! The Aesir had tempted Fate's--practically danced on Fate's chest--and lost the gamble; rightfully Baldur needed to pay the cost like everyone. But Frigg wasn't done. She appealed to Hel, the goddess of the underworld (and #Loki's daughter, by the by), to release her son. Hel reasonably demanded proof of Frigg that Baldur really was SO wonderful and glowy that he deserved exemption from the rules that govern even the gods:

"If all things in the world, alive or dead, weep for him, then he will be allowed to return...If anyone speaks against him or refuses to cry, then he will remain with Hel."

And damned if Frigg doesn't make the rounds of the Earth _again_, demanding that all things, even inanimate rocks and metals, weep for her glorious son Baldur. Now here, I admit, I feel compelled to cut into Loki's story with an observation of my own: Loki's pushing me in the direction of sarcasm about the "golden boy" but Baldur really _must_ have been something, if Frigg was able to secure this second round of promises so readily. When @kel wrote xer first version of this tale on Twitter, xe got an interesting response from someone who was more inclined to Baldur's side in the matter.

My friend's view was that Baldur's loss was a reminder that even the most beautiful and kindly of people are not immune from cruelty and destruction. She found Kel's Loki-influenced perspective on the tale fascinating, but she definitely felt that Loki was wrong to cause Baldur's death even indirectly. And it reminds me that...I've received some hints that I can't JUST be a Lokean. I can't separate Loki from their milieu and honor them without at least _acknowledging_ the Aesir...at least, that's a hint I got during meditation some nights ago. I haven't fully digested the information yet. But I digress...

In any case Frigg _almost_ succeeds in getting all the world to weep for Baldur...but one giant-woman, Þökk, refuses.

"Þökk will weep dry tears; let Hel keep her own."

It is thought that Þökk was perhaps actually #Loki in disguise, throwing a last wrench into Frigg's failed attempt to compel the Universe to keep her son in eternal safety. Yet again, surely it is absolutely _unhinged_ to DEMAND that all the world's entities weep for one person, however universally beloved. Heck, I'm not sure I'd do it; I've never met Baldur and it's rather a blind leap of faith to accept that he was really all that awesome. I weep dry tears.

Anyway, for the crime of embarrassing Frigg and punishing the Aesir for trying to cheat death, #Loki gets to be tortured for the rest of existence. In a way...the torture is real: Loki's name has been mud for a while now, cursed not merely with being linked forever in the eyes of the public to that dark-haired Marvel impostor, but with the reputation of being violent, chaotic, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". I've had people (like my ex-lover K.) suggest to me that Loki was rather a curious choice of trickster god for me to make. Nicer tricksters like #Coyote and the even nicer #Otter seem favored, rather.

But I never really could accept too nice a god, ever. That partly was why we were drawn into classical paganism back in the late '90s when @mono was ploughing through Latin and Greek classes: Mono's severe passions were moved by stories of the madness that afflicted priestesses of Apollo, and one of our first genuine spiritual experiences came at the Cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, whose inspiration by the god is described in hair-raising detail as something like a demonic possession. Apollo heals; Apollo kills. Apollo brings knowledge; Apollo destroys reason. No truly powerful deity is safe.