Being of Andvari's Blood
by Fuensanta Arismendi
It seems only right to start at the beginning, with how I
came to know Andvari and how that knowledge slowly, surreptitiously transformed
my life. I think again and again how much Andvari taught me before choosing to
show Himself as my teacher; and how He waited even longer before claiming me as
His great-granddaughter. It is not always a pretty story, but it is my story
and thus mine by right to tell.
It all started when I was about five years old. My parents and I were having lunch and as usual, my father was ranting at me: I was insane, a rag, a piece of filth. I was nothing without him. On and on the voice bellowed, as it always seemed to bellow. Suddenly there was another voice within me, a stronger one for all that it was also quiet. That voice told me that maybe I was indeed stupid and insane. If so, this was not because my father screamed so, nor was it my fault. Maybe I was intelligent and perfectly sane; if so, my father’s screams did not change this, and it was not my merit. My father was unkind and uncontrolled, and that was his behavior to own—not mine to own for him. So I took back what was mine: my self-worth—and gave him back what was his: his ranting. From that moment on, insults had no hold over me any more.
The next episode seemed trivial: my mother cancelled an appointment for a manicure at the last minute, and paid the manicurist for it. This lady was utterly stunned; no one had ever paid her before in such a circumstance. Sure enough, that voice was there again, quiet and powerful, telling me: “This is right doing, not charity. Remember.”
Smaller such incidents happened as I grew up (whatever that is) and left what did not feel like home. I became many things: a student, a lover, a teacher, an atheist, a Heathen and finally a devoted Loki and Sigyn’s woman. My family had cut me off without the proverbial penny, and this caused me neither grief nor surprise. What did surprise me is that my father couldn’t disinherit me, though he tried again and again: his efforts failed as though my mother’s money had a mind of its own.
One thing I had always kept from a past I tried to put away was the ring my grandfather, whom I dearly loved, had given to my mother on her fifteenth birthday, and which she in turn had given to me. I was cleaning it in my kitchen one day when the phone rang. It was my dearest friend, calling me to tell me she had been diagnosed with advanced cancer. After I hung up and pulled myself together, I couldn’t find the ring. I heard myself saying, “Andvari, it’s not the gold. It’s not the stone. It’s the roots this ring represents. I claim my roots, and I claim that ring. Please give it to me.” And part of me was thinking, “Andvari? Why the heck am I thinking of Andvari?” But I had the sensation of a deep pool, and deeply tangled roots at its edge, and of Andvari in fish form motionless at the bottom of the pool. I recognized that same sense of unshakeable calm, that inner core of strength that had come upon me when I was five … and the ring was there, glittering at me from the kitchen counter. Little by little, I realized Andvari had been around me all my life, saving me again and again from the foolishness of others, and from my own foolishness as well. Little by little, I learned to reach out to Him for advice, for thanks, and in prayer.
A few years after this, I was reading a manuscript in which the author mentioned Andvari sewing Loki’s lips together. I wrote to the author pointing out that Brokk, not Andvari, had done this. Then something made me ask Andvari, “It wasn’t You, was it?”
He replied curtly, “I forge consciences, not gold—and I don’t work for Loki.”
I thought about this and objected, “But you help me all the time, and I belong to Loki.”
Suddenly, there was a forefinger jabbing at my chest, and I heard an irritable voice saying, “You. I forged your ancestors. I forge you.” He would not say another word after that.
In retrospect, given Andvari’s interactions with Loki prior to the latter’s marriage to Sigyn (as retold in Elizabeth Vongvisith’s story Andvari’s Bride), I am not surprised by my great-grandfather’s irritability. When I mentioned the incident to Galina, she commented that it was possible that Andvari had possessed one of my ancestors and if so, I might have Duergar blood in me. It turned out to be so, to no one’s very great surprise. When a shaman later did a bloodwalking for me—a shaman’s technique that allows one to ferret out information about one’s bloodline—and found Duergar ancestry, he was even able to pinpoint the exact generation. It was my great-grandfather, Pedro Maria Arismendi.
Pedro Maria Arismendi was a schoolteacher in a small village, who, despite his position (an important one at that time!) persisted in doing his own shopping and carrying his (live) chickens home for dinner, to my great-grandmother’s very great chagrin. “This is below your dignity!” she would remonstrate. My great-grandfather would look up at his towering wife and remark calmly, “With chicken or without it, I am Pedro Maria Arismendi.” Four generations later, his five-year-old great-granddaughter, by the grace of Andvari’s blood and his, would say to herself, “Insulted or not, I am Fuensanta,” with that self-same unshakeable certainty.
This is the cornerstone of what Andvari teaches: What do you truly own? Your status or your dignity? If you believe you lost your dignity by carrying a live chicken, was it ever yours? Where do you root your dignity to make it yours? In your possessions? In your actions? In your heart? What makes you truly own the money in your pocket: the presence of it, or what you do with it? What makes you truly own your home? The deed of sale? The care you take of it? The people you shelter in it? All of those? None of those?
Andvari will teach you to distinguish what is yours by right and what is yours by accident; and once you have that knowledge, you will find it impossible to turn your back on it. He will also teach you that the concept of ownership is twinned with that of transformation.
Whatever you own has to evolve and change or it will die. He is a God of luck, but luck hard won and hard forged.
Hail Andvari,
wise Teacher.
Hail Andvari,
and the elements
with which You craft.
Hail Andvari,
Whose presence is
as deeply rooted as the marrow in my bones.
Hail, my Ancestor,
may my actions ever do You honor.
Artwork by Jack Holliday.