Faery and Ragnarök

In the history of Earth, the shift of world periods usually takes the form of a sharp break, after which the former laws of time become nothing but memory. One of the decisive events that altered the very mode of governance in the Middle World was the transition from the imperative, ordering activity of the Æsir to a smoother, immanent architecture based predominantly on Vanir currents.

This transition marked the entry of our world into a new world period and became the precondition for the rise of human civilization in the form in which we know it. Previously, people were immersed chiefly in inner experience and were still at the stage of forming a creative psyche, while the structuring of physical reality was carried out by hierarchies of the Æsir. After the break, the “transforming power” finally centered in human hands, and humanity became the primary force behind the “cultivation of the garden” of Midgard.

The world under the rule of the Æsir was the field of the “Great Designing.” Asgard functioned as a processing center of reality, and the forms of things were primary in relation to their content. The Æsir maintained the borders of Midgard, preventing the chaos of the Gap from penetrating the fabric of the manifest world. Yet this imperative model had a hard limit of scalability: as the informational complexity of the biosphere grew and humanity’s experience accumulated, directive containment demanded colossal energetic expenditure. The system overheated. Divine Order began to turn into entropic Stagnation; the rigidity of structure itself became an obstacle to the further evolution of consciousness.

We have already noted that one of the preconditions of this break was the invasion of the Fomorians, the onset of the glacial age that altered the very foundations of human thinking. Mind became more concentrated, more ordered, because its earlier “relaxed,” dreamlike state, characteristic of the Denisovan civilization (“Lemuria”), could no longer ensure survival in the conditions of the Ice.

By roughly 13,000 years ago, human consciousness had approached the threshold of maturity: the capacity for abstract thought, active goal-setting, and — most crucially — for instrumental transformation of the world had awakened. This maturity demanded a change of “operating system,” because once a species gains the ability to shape reality on its own, the “external nannies” must withdraw.

Ragnarök was the process of forced deconstruction of the rigid external skeleton of the cosmos. In place of divine diktat there was to arise human awareness, capable of sustaining the structure of reality through creative resonance with Vanir life-streams. It was precisely in the course of this transfer of the “keys to the world” that a zone of maximum instability appeared.

As the Fomorians continued to wield cold as an instrument of fixation and entropy, this plasticity became mortally dangerous. To survive in the conditions of the Ice, human thinking had to acquire concentration. The Fomorians, unwittingly, became “smiths” who, through scarcity and environmental severity, forged in humans the capacity for linear logic, planning, and a stark distinction between “I” and “not-I.”

At the same time, another bloc of governing powers — the Archons, the Fomorians, and the supporting Grigori — understood that the succession of gods and the transfer of mandate to humanity opened a window of extreme vulnerability. As the Æsir began to withdraw from direct governance, and humanity had not yet learned to hold balance consciously, a true power vacuum formed.

Predatory forces struck directly into this gap, provoking the climatic rollback of the Younger Dryas. Their task was to traumatize young human consciousness to the limit with cold, hunger, and the fear of extinction. Such a consciousness would be incapable of soft Vanir synthesis and co-creation with the faery, because it would first and foremost seek absolute guarantees of safety. The predators duly supplied these guarantees in the form of archontic logic: total control, machinery, and iron. The potential Golden Age of the Holocene was thus diverted into an era of the iron march of technogenesis.

After the large-scale confrontation at Lif, which marked the first overt triumph of chthonic powers and the end of the last glacial maximum, earthly history entered a period of deceptive quiet. It was a time of massive Fomorian incursion and a sharp collapse of biological productivity, forcing humanity into harsh survival strategies.

The late-glacial period that began with the Bølling–Allerød warming (around 14,700 years ago) appeared as a return of the world to life. For humanity, this meant territorial expansion, a broader resource base, and a proliferation of sites; for the Enchanted Peoples, it meant the critical thinning of the boundary between stability and the necessity of total systemic reconfiguration.

After this brief flourishing — several millennia during which the world revived and biological species expanded their ranges — there followed a new time of deep stagnation, which Tradition describes as a second incursion of the forces of cold: the Great Winter (Fimbulvetr). This was an era of fundamental arrest of movement. Reality had exhausted the resources for further development and froze in its inability to renew itself. On both the Macro- and Psychocosmic levels, this state was defined by the accumulation of entropy and rot, transforming the living Stream into motionless ice and making a catastrophic break the only path by which life could continue.

The first sign of the oncoming catastrophe was the eruption of the Laacher See volcano in the Eifel around 13,100 years ago. This event entered the Chronicles as the moment when “Gjallarhorn sounded”: the signal of the Change preceding the Change itself, marking the emergence of “fire in the earth and darkness in the sky” as omens of the turning of cycles. Fire kindling in the depths under a dimming sky signaled a shift in the order of influence of forces; the customary alignment of cosmic elements was no longer being maintained in the old way.

The subsequent “Battle of the Gods” corresponds to the onset of the Younger Dryas, a sharp climatic relapse into glacial conditions that began about 12,800 years ago and lasted some 1,300 years. Where forests had recently been spreading, open spaces returned; tundra-steppe communities and scrub grew once more. The contraction of the growing season and the catastrophic collapse of bioproductivity mirror the initial triumph of the Fomorians and giants, who sought to freeze the world once and for all in the state of a motionless farm. The mammoth fauna that had sustained humanity vanished, and vegetation zones shifted dramatically. An era of extreme scarcity began, in which every step demanded enormous energetic cost.

In this era of the Great Winter, the central figure of the crisis was Loki, the principle of interaction that reveals how the old world has completely exhausted itself and frozen in obsolete forms.

Ragnarök thus became the inevitable “molting” of the cosmos, in which destruction served as the instrument for freeing spirit from crystallized matter.

Accordingly, the Battle of the Gods was a conflict over the remaining charge of vital force.

The great Æsir Odin gathered the host of einherjar to secure the advantage of the living and return energy to the future, while Hel amassed the passive mass of those who chose existence by means of decay.

The five Eddic duels of Ragnarök describe, on a macrohistorical scale, the sequential destruction of the supports of the cosmos.

The clash of Heimdall and Loki marks the collapse of connectivity in the global system, corresponding in nature to the weakening of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, when the oceanic transport of heat became unreliable.

Týr and Garm embody the death of law from within its own guardianship — the moment when the established measure of seasonality no longer ensured survival and the very protective structures of society turned destructive.

The devouring of Odin by Fenrir on the macrocosmic level is the loss of celestial order under an ash veil and centuries of winter darkness.

Thor and Jörmungandr enact the struggle of order with boundary, perfectly mirroring the catastrophic reshaping of coastal zones and the dynamics of sea ice that rendered any human arrangement provisional.

Finally, Freyr and Surtr personify the invasion of forces of rupture, when heat ceases to serve creative harmony and becomes an instrument of annihilation.

Once these main supports were destroyed, the world fell into a state of ontological weightlessness. The withdrawal of the Æsir hierarchy meant that reality lost its preset density. Space became plastic, as in the “age of dreams,” instantly responsive to any inner impulse of the observer. During this brief interval, the Middle World switched to “autonomous nourishment” from Vanir energies — self-regulating flows of vitality. It was a moment of radical freedom: the world awaited from humanity a new Logos, a new song that would set a harmonious rhythm for the next cycle. Instead of song, from the depths of the human psyche clamped in the vise of Fimbulvetr there burst only a scream of primordial horror before the suddenly opened abyss. That scream, rapidly becoming the dominant frequency, fixed reality in its coarsest, heaviest, and “safest” forms — and the Archons seized those forms at once.

For the Enchanted Peoples, the Younger Dryas also marked a fundamental shift in the conditions of existence. Soft, diverse landscapes yielded to a coarse geometry of open spaces and dry winds.

From the viewpoint of the Enchanted Folk, Ragnarök was not their war, and in faery lore this period is often described with a shade of deliberate indifference. This “indifference” functioned as a form of protection: to acknowledge the significance of Ragnarök would be to acknowledge the absolute power of the Æsir over faery destiny. Beneath this stylized composure lay deep ontological anxiety and the recognition that the death of the gods meant the disappearance of a familiar mode of operating reality.

While humans saw in the darkened sky the “end of the world,” the faery felt the fabric of the Middle World cease to respond to subtle influences and resonances. The very tonality of the world-symphony changed, forcing the Sídhe and Alfar once again to curtail their overt presence in the Middle World, shifting from the aesthetics of “sacred groves” to a strategy of “hidden presence.” The preservation of their own peoples outweighed any participation in a history that was coming apart.

At the same time, Ta-Meru (“Land of the Masters”) remained almost the sole “island of stability,” a school and workshop where the Svartálfar tuned the passages between worlds, working with humans who by then had found their way to the islands and were cautiously learning new methods of governing reality.

Ragnarök therefore marked the close of the age of the Æsir— those divine forces that held the cosmos through direct will and hard law. In the new cycle, the governance of reality was to pass from forces of rigid law to forces of synthesis (Baldur, Víðarr), capable of sustaining forms and processes as a vessel rather than a press.

The Enchanted Peoples accepted this change and shifted into a mode of stream-based navigational being. At the same time, the withdrawal of the Alfar from the Middle World was not an effect of the catastrophe itself. As sacred ancestors and architects of the cosmos, they had begun the process long before the Younger Dryas, gradually moving their focus into the “high circuit” of Álfheimr to preserve the pure semantic templates of reality. Ragnarök merely sealed this rupture, rendering their direct presence in dense layers unnecessary.

The displacement of the Æsir created a vacuum of “vertical” power in the Middle World. The world lost its “divine shield” and rigid hierarchy and became definitively horizontal.

In the silence that followed, only the Vanir and the faery remained as bearers of living consciousness in dense reality. The Vanir continued to sustain the pulsation of the biosphere, the “inner fire of the cell” and the cycles of growth, while the faery took on the role of guardians of semantic configurations. Without the shielding of the Æsir, this alliance also became horizontal: the faery no longer relied on divine will but attuned themselves to the vital flows of the Vanir, striving to keep the world from final glaciation.

The adaptation of the faery to the coarse reality of the Younger Dryas demanded a radical change of navigational instruments. Their presence, formerly full-blooded and overt, became ever more ghost-like and concealed. They began to construct their dwellings not so much as architectural objects as zones of warped space where time itself runs differently, shielding them from the toxic pressure of entropy. Castles in the Gap served as “resonators” that maintained the purity of primordial Alfar forces in a world that was rapidly losing plasticity and growing ever more coarse and heavy.

The absence of external law rendered this horizontal world especially vulnerable to the mounting archontic logic. Humanity, deeply traumatized by the icy terror of Fimbulvetr, rejected the new balance. Bereft of the direct shield of the Old Gods, people became exposed to the whisperings of the Grigori, who channeled human fear into technogenesis. Exploiting the waning presence of the Æsir, the Grigori replaced the idea of “co-presence” with the ideology of “security.” They indoctrinated humanity with the conviction that in a godless world the only path to survival is total calculation and mechanical control. Terrified of freedom and the unpredictability of nature, humanity refused the synthesis offered by the faery and the Vanir and chose a surrogate order instead: the archontic logic of mechanistic control and environmental suppression.

Prolonged cold and the fear of absolute extinction of life drove the Atlantean civilization to the fatal decision to seek salvation through a violent incursion into Álfheimr, where the fullness of “living order” had remained almost intact. With “cold in their hearts” and formed under predatory influences, the Atlanteans tried to compensate for the lost vertical shield by force. They began to turn the Enchanted Folk into a resource for sustaining their own fading reality, building underground labyrinths and systems of coercion on Ta-Meru. The attempt to pierce a permanent portal into the higher worlds ended in the catastrophic sealing of the borders. Master Kaihir closed the breach at the cost of his life. Atlantis sank beneath the ocean, marking not only the catastrophic Sundering of the Lands but also the final divergence of human and faery destinies.

This human choice finally set the two humanities at odds. Seeking absolute guarantees of safety, humanity then discovered iron— a metal of aggressive nature that slices through subtle magical vortices. Metallurgy became the chief shield against the outer world; at the same time it rendered dense reality toxic to the faery by blocking living etheric currents. For the Enchanted Folk, the advent of iron brought an unbearable sensory shock, a physical sensation of life itself being “cut” by static noise. Where the world had once been fluid and responsive to song, it became fragmented, split into dead pieces. Metallurgy effectively switched off the surface of the world for them, turning it into a dead medium. This experience of the final loss of the world’s plasticity confirmed for the faery that the time of direct engagement was over.

Thus the Younger Dryas became the period in which the world claimed the right “to be civilized.” The “second water” of the Holocene that followed initiated the Great Exodus of the faery — the sole means of preserving the living Logos and the breath of crus in a world that, armed with fear and iron, had chosen the path of self-mummification. The Great Exodus preserved the capacity for “song” in a world that preferred a mechanical drone.

Ragnarök and the Younger Dryas together formed a time of colossal but unrealized opportunity. The Holocene could have become an epoch of co-creation between humans and faery under the aegis of the Nature Gods. The trauma of the Great Winter and the choice of iron instead turned it into an age of domination and fear. The finale of the Battle of the Gods became the sorrowful dawn of the Age of Humans, when the surface of the Earth was placed under the dominion of human calculation, and magic retreated into the depths to safeguard the seeds of mystery for a more favorable time.