Viktor Rydberg

“ Women and children, men and the aged, they who have practised the arts of peace and they who have stained the weapons with blood, those who have lived in accordance with the sacred commandments of the norns and gods and they who have broken them—all have to journey the same way as Balder went before them, down to the fields of the fountains of the world. ”

“ Humanity, as well as the beautiful earth which is its abode, is under the curse of God.
The world is no longer an unbroken harmony, a moral unity. It is divided forever into two antagonistic kingdoms, those of Good and Evil. That God so wills, and permits the inevitable consequences, is confirmed by an immediate change in the structure of the universe. Death is sent forth commissioned to destroy all life. Hell opens its jaws in the once peaceful realms of earth’s bosom, and is filled with a fire which burns every thing, but consumes nothing. ”

“ With the tenderness of a father, and with the devotion of a fellow-warrior, the mighty son of Odin bears on his shoulders the weary and cold star-hero over the foggy Elivagar, filled with magic terrors, to place him safe by his own hearth south of this sea after he has honoured him with a token which shall for ever shine on the heavens as a monument of Orvandel's exploits and Thor's friendship for him. In the meantime Groa, Orvandel's wife, stays in Thor's halls. ”

“ Then every thing begins again to live and grow. Add every month an ounce of this mixture. If then the glass ball is well closed, and is not stirred, a vapor gradually arises, and is condensed into two shining stars, like the sun and the moon, and like the latter, one of these stars waxes and wanes; and all the phenomena of nature, thunder, lightning, hail, rain, snow and dew, will appear in your glass ball as in the real world around you. All this will happen if you keep the great Creator before your eyes and in your heart, and if you conceal from the wicked world this great secret. ”

“ This behoves, above all, a youth while still he is wearing
Wreaths on the curls of his head, sweet-scented flowers of spring.
Handsome to women, stately to men, he may seem in his life-time;
Handsomer is he in death, fall’n in the thick of the fray. ”

“ With judges on the one hand who, in spite of all their loftiness, and with all their superhuman keenness, nevertheless are not infallible, and with defendants on the other hand whose tongues refuse to serve them, it might happen, if there were no proofs and witnesses, that a judgment, everlasting in its operations, not founded on exhaustive knowledge and on well-considered premises, might be proclaimed. But the judgment on human souls proclaimed by their final irrevocable fate could not in the sight of the pious and believing bear the stamp of uncertain justice. ”

“ Every divinity that has violated its oath is "a perjurous hapt," and the mythology speaks of such perjuries. If a god has committed perjury, this is no reason why he should be called a giant. If a giant has committed perjury, this is no reason why he should be called a hapt, for it is nothing specially characteristic of the giant nature that it commits perjury or violates its oath. In fact, it seems to me that there should be the gravest doubts about Thjasse's being a giant in the strictest and completest sense of the word, from the circumstances that he is a star-hero ”

“ It is the home of the frost-giants, of the subterranean giants, and of the spirits of disease. Here live the offspring of Ymer's feet, the primeval giants strangely born and strangely bearing, who are waiting for the quaking of Ygdrasil and for the liberation of their chained leader, in order that they may take revenge on the gods in Ragnarok, and who in the meantime contrive futile plans of attack on Hvergelmer's fountain or on the north end of the Bifrost bridge. ”

“ These correspondences are strung from above downwards as strings on the harp of the universe, and on that harp the causalities move up and down like the fingers of a player. While your students of nature seek the chains of causality in only one direction, the horizontal, that which runs through things on the same level, that which connects things in one and the same elementary world; we, the students of magic, search with still greater diligence those perpendicular chains of causality which run through and combine corresponding objects in the three worlds. ”

“ When the heroes who have slept through centuries sally forth, the trumpets of the last day sound, a great battle with the powers of evil (Antichrist) is to be fought, an immensely old tree, which has withered, is to grow green again, and a happier age is to begin.
This immensely old tree, which is withered at the close of the present period of the world, and which is to become green again in a happier age after a decisive conflict between the good and evil, can be no other than the world-tree of Teutonic mythology, the Ygdrasil of our Eddas. ”

“ This highest and immovable heaven, enveloping all the others and constituting the boundary between created things and the void, infinite space beyond, is the Empyrean, the heaven of fire, named also by the Platonizing philosophers the world of archetypes. Here “in a light which no one can enter,” God in triune majesty is sitting on his throne, while the tones of harmony from the nine [Pg 2] revolving heavens beneath ascend to him, like a hymn of glory from the universe to its Creator. ”

“ A terrible winter threatened to destroy everything on the surface of the earth. Then the ruler of the lower world built on his domain a well-fortified citadel, within which neither destructive storms, nor physical ills, nor moral evil, nor sickness, nor aging, nor death can come. Thither he transferred the best and fairest human beings to be found on earth, and decorated the enclosed garden with the most beautiful and useful trees and plants. ”

“ A correct answer to this question is of the greatest importance to a proper understanding of the events of mythology and their connection. Strange to say, it has hitherto been assumed that the castle is the citadel of a giant, a resort of thurses, and that Menglad is a giantess.
Svipdag has before him a scene that enchants his gaze and fills him with a longing to remain there for ever. It is a pleasure to the eyes, he says, which no one willingly renounces who once has seen a thing so charming. ”

“ Wherever in religion, or state, or civilization, in art or science, the inner is developed more strenuously, and the spiritual earnestly sought after, be it with more or less transformation of what is existing, there progress is at hand; for from the inner, life comes to the external, from the centre to the circumference. There is also the way which leads to life. There new paths are opened to the soul, and genius lifts its wings with divine assurance. ”

“ If, as already indicated, Hlebard is identical with Thjasse-Volund, then he who was the cause of the fimbul-winter and sent the powers of frost out upon the earth, also had his hand in the death of the sun-god Balder and in his descent to the lower world. There is logic in this. And there is logic in the very fact that the weapon with which the sun-god is slain is made from the mistletoe, which blossoms and produces fruit in the winter, and is a plant which rather shuns than seeks the light of the sun. ”

“ And what again is this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as the son’s place in his father’s house is superior to a servant’s! Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some investigation, and within a hair’s breadth of the revelation of some new and dazzling truth. ”

“ Like the most of the Greek myths in the form in which they have been handed down to us, the Orion myth is without any organic connection with any epic whole. The Orvandel myth, on the other hand, dovetails itself as a part into a mythological epic which, in grand and original outlines, represents the struggle between gods, patriarchs, ancient artists, and frost-giants for the control of the world. ”

“ Do you not shrink before the idea that human hunger for truth must have been satisfied from Adam to our own days by nothing but illusions? that you are the children and children’s children of mere idiots who have fixed their hopes, their faith, and their convictions on baseless falsehoods? Put [Pg 117] your godless plan of investigation to the test! Do it openly, and the theologians will burn you! Do it in secret, and you will finally crave the stake as a liberator from the terrible void such a science would leave in your own soul! No, the magician believes just as devoutly as the theologian. ”

“ While they paid their tribute of weakness to tradition, and formed their system on received dicta, it was among them that presentiments of the future began to stir, and a longing for a clearer light than that with which the scholastics and doctors angelici et seraphici felt themselves well contented. When the study of ancient Greece was recommencing, when the dawn of the renaissance appeared, it was these enthusiastic natures, still groping among the dreams of magic art, that first began to awake and think. ”

“ If you can only collect in the crucible those elements and life-germs which were stirring in chaos, then you can also produce, in the crucible, the six days of creation, and find the spirit which formed the universe. I have abandoned alchemy only to escape this thought; but a parchment will, sealed with seven seals, and hidden in the most secret corner of my vaults, contains the remarkable experiences I have had when experimenting for the perpetuum mobile and homunculus. ”

“ The individual seeker after truth may gain enlightenment, but for himself alone, not for humanity. Therefore a magician confines the wisdom he acquires to his own bosom, or imparts it to a single pupil, or buries it under obscure expressions which he commits to parchment; but he neither can nor will impart it without reserve to humanity whose path appears to lead downward into a constantly deeper night.
“Even the theologians speak of the pristine wisdom,—the theologians with whom we, who practice the occult science, agree far more than the simple and suspicious among them think. ”

“ Compassion, benevolence, love,—those qualities through which man feels a kinship with the divine, lose their significance and are despoiled of their eternal seal, when they are found no longer in his Maker except as limited or rather suspended by the action of another quality which the pious man will force himself to call justice, but which an irrepressible voice from the innermost recesses of his soul calls cruelty. ”

“ II. THE MAGIC OF THE CHURCH.
Magic is the harbinger of Science. In the history of human development, the dim perception precedes the clear, and the dominion of imagination that of reason. Before the latter could take upon itself the laborious task of connecting together by its own laws the facts of external and internal experience,—before there was any philosophy or natural science, imagination was bestirring itself in the creation of magic. ”

“ It was for man that God called forth the four elements from nothing by his fiat, and it was for man that he fashioned this wonderful earth from those elements in six days. Man is the crown of creation, its master-piece, and within the narrow limits of his nature an epitome of all things existing,—a microcosm, and the image of the supreme God himself.
But since man, as a microcosm, must partake also of the coarsest matter, his dwelling-place could not be within the Empyrean, but must be fixed on earth. ”

“ And this place of habitation explains symbolically by its very position the destiny of man and his place in the kingdom of God; for wherever he wanders, the zenith still lingers over his head, and all the revolving heavens have his habitation for their centre. The dance of the stars is but a fête in honor of him, the sun and moon exist but to shine upon his pathway and fill his heart with gladness. ”

“ Far, far away behind these hills, behind the snowy summits of the Alps, behind the mountains of the ‘farthest-dwelling Garamantes,’ on nameless heights which disappear among the clouds, the temple of truth was built long ago over the fountain from which life flows. That this temple is demolished we well know; only the first human pair has wandered through its sacred halls. ”