Encounters with Hela
by Galina Krasskova
I do not belong to Hela. I belong to Odin and it may seem strange that I now choose to write about Loki’s daughter, given that many Hela’s folk believe that Odin has a rather confrontational relationship with their Mistress. He is, after all, a God who consistently defies other people’s boundaries and He certainly attempted to circumvent Hela’s restrictions on Her own realm more than once. Be that as it may, I have found myself over the course of many years not only being surrounded by Hela’s folk, but also being consistently sent to Her for lessons and ordeals. I’ve had students devoted to Her and because of them, on more than one occasion, I have been blessed with the experience of carrying Her as a horse. Throughout everything, I have come to regard our Lady Death with awe, immense respect and, most of all, humility. It’s from Hela that I have been learning to appreciate my humanity and moreover, to care for the flesh that I inhabit—not an easy lesson for an injured ex ballet dancer with long term, chronic health conditions! Essentially, it is from Hela that I have learned how to live.
My first encounter with Her came nearly a decade ago. I was in the process of singing a hammer hallowing prior to singing some galdr. I had several fellow galdr-singers with me and we were, if I recall correctly, about to engage in a luck working. I had just finished the hammer and was about to begin the actual magical working when the room was filled with a very definite Presence, definite and disapproving. Hela had arrived. I was immediately chastised for working magic without first honoring my ancestors and the vaettir of the places I inhabited. Who was I to draw upon their power and vitality while giving nothing, not even common acknowledgement in return?
Up until this time, ancestral veneration had played no part in my devotional work. It wasn’t something that I ever considered. I was new to Heathenry, though not to magical practice, and I still had something of the magician’s self absorption in my regular work. It was a fault that was immediately sacrificed upon the altar of Hela’s ire. She is formidable at the best of times and when the Goddess of Death suggests in Her icy tones that one might want to consider making offerings to the dead, it is only sensible to comply! The galdr circle was cancelled and instead, I set up an ancestral altar and made the appropriate offerings as I had been instructed. For the first time, I also laid food and drink out for the household vaettir. That brief encounter transformed my spiritual life, adding a completely new facet to my practices. I rapidly became aware of the dead as important and valued parts of the household and family. I came to experience that connection of blood and affection palpably. Through Hela, I also came to understand the need for mindfulness: in what I say, what I do, in every bite of food that I take, and most of all in what I waste. She demanded that I become mindful of my passage upon this earth and both the damage and the good that I might do. She granted me no quarter then, nor has She ever in our interactions since.
It wasn’t long after this when Odin arranged for me to journey into Nastrond. This was at a point in my practice where I meditated nightly on the runes, often chanting them and drawing them into my body. This often involved fairly heavy trance, and equally often it would send me out of my body in spirit journeys. One night, after galdring and going into deep trance, I journeyed to the Tree. This place, Yggdrasil, has ever been my haven. It is my beginning and ending point for nearly every journey and it is the place where I would often rendezvous with Odin for trysts of mind and heart and spirit. The Tree itself is a doorway, and opens into numerous other worlds. Part of its roots straddle Hvergelmir, and if one knows where to enter the Tree, it is possible to gain access to that river. I was thrown in and its icy waters closed about me, sweeping me from the safe haven of the Tree and depositing me (eventually) on a barren shore. Piles of bones and skulls stood in stark relief against what seemed like a burnt out landscape. I was left laying back, sprawled over a pile of bones.
I saw a woman garbed in grey, her flesh bone white. She reached out with a staff and struck me on hands and feet. She kept me there for what seemed like a small eternity and eventually I was allowed to return to the Tree and then to Midgard. Over the next day and a half, the points where She struck burned and itched terribly. Soon after, I found that my ability to ground, contain energy and channel that energy through my hands directly into the web itself or into a person was dramatically increased. She taught me to see the threads of Wyrd and how to work them.
I next experienced Her through possession, where She inhabited my flesh, co-opting my consciousness. This perhaps has given me the most vivid and lasting of impressions as there was a point, during each of the two possessions, where I was given a stronger glimpse of Her than ever before. She is immensely still, as only Death can be, when She inhabits the flesh. And there is a tremendous yet detached compassion. The times She rode me, She never raised Her voice above a still, quiet whisper yet the force of Her presence was undeniable.
The second time She came into me, I had been sitting in a circle after a ritual, speaking with my students. To emphasize a point, I had just touched the arm of the student sitting next to me when Hela sank into me. As I noted above, She is immensely still when She inhabits the flesh, at least when She rides me, and so my hand remained on my student’s arm. The poor woman was struck by the numinous tremendens et fascinans that is Hela incarnate and was unable to shake my hand off. When Hela left me, and I removed my hand, the woman had a second-degree burn. It was not intentional, but the sheer force of Hela’s presence burns, as ice burns if it is cold enough.
Over the last two years, Hela has again become a prominent figure in my life. I maintain an altar to Her, an altar to the powers of rot and death and decay, festooned with ‘death and dying’ prayer beads, animal skulls, bones and small charms. I honor Her this way because She has been so very present for me spiritually of late. It seems that wherever I am, wherever Odin sends me, so too is there a servant of Hela. Her people have been my friends, teachers and my spiritual advisors and for that, I am grateful. Hela, unlike many other Deities I honor and serve, does not lie. She does not barter. She does not equivocate. She simply is, and when one approaches Her, it is with the knowledge that one enters a holy place where all facades, all spiritual and emotional clutter, all spiritual dross is about to be stripped away. She is the embodiment of ruthless compassion and She is compassionate. What offerings She receives go to fill Her table, to feed the teeming mass of the dead from all the worlds, that reside in Her realm. She hoards nothing, but nourishes an endless stream of souls as they pass through Her kingdom. Most of all, She is patient. All things come to Her in time. She can afford to wait.
The past two years began a cycle of ordeal work for me that has been largely overseen by two of Hela’s folk: one of Her shamans, who is both friend and spiritual advisor, and one of her ordeal masters. It was most unexpected for me. This cycle began at a point in my life when I was desperately in need of cleansing and healing. About four years ago, I had a falling out with a very gifted student. This student, in a fit of hostility and ire, elf-shot me. This effectively began to cripple me, causing excruciating and ongoing pain in my back. Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong or how to fix it, and I was unable to rid myself of the malignancy without aid. The goddess Eir led me to four sigils, and I was given to know that if I had them cut into my back over the area where the elf-shot penetrated, that it would rid me of the poison. I mentioned this at a gathering of shamans, spirit-workers, mystics, god-slaves and the like, and one of the women there — a Hela’s servant — said that she could do the cutting.
That night, in a gathering of over a dozen God-bound folk, while the senior shaman drummed for me, this woman cut those sigils into my back. Hela rode her for part of the time and the cuts by Hela’s hand were swift and clean, steady and sure. By Hela’s hand, a poison that had been torturing me for almost two years was drawn from my body and returned to the one who had crafted it. The Goddess of death brought healing to me and very likely spared me from quickly entering Her realm.
This past autumn, I began a series of ordeal rites to open me up and purge me of those things that render me a less-than-effective tool for the Gods in general and Odin in particular. This cycle is set to progress in a specific order through the nine worlds and up the body of Yggdrasil. It began, not unexpectedly, with Helheim.
For weeks before the Helheim ordeal, I’d been filled with a sense of impending doom and dread. I worried greatly for the health of my close friends until I looked clearly at the threads of wyrd in question and discovered that the doom I was sensing had my name written all over it! That’s when I realized that I was going into a death ordeal, that I would have to seriously relinquish parts of myself, my psyche, my emotional and psychological matrix to Hela. I was about to be re-patterned and once again, Odin had turned me over to Hela for the first part of the process. Hela possessed Her shaman and I was bound between two poles of a sacred gate.
She challenged me over and over about the contempt I held so dearly: for humanity, for the flesh, for Midgard, for the entire process of being human. She humbled me with both discernment and pain. She made me grateful for every breath I draw and at the end, she carved a series of rune charms into my back poisoning me. She put into me that which would force the poison of contempt to rise to the surface of my being, to rise to the surface until it could be removed in Niflheim at a later ordeal. I did not realize until quite recently that She also gave me another gift: she tied me strongly into my root.
Up until my Helheim ordeal, I had been very, very good at dissociating from pain. I had spent a career as a ballet dancer and then later became heavily involved in the martial arts. Both paths require a high tolerance for pain. I prided myself upon this, and a great deal of the ordeal work I was undertaking was less a challenge than it otherwise could have been because of it. Hating my flesh, it was not that difficult to withdraw from what assaulted it. It was only after undergoing the next ordeal in Niflheim that I realized that in tying me to my root, Hela removed from me my much-vaunted ability to dissociate from physical pain.
This makes a certain kind of sense, though I wasn’t thrilled to realize what She’d done. It makes ordeal work a true ordeal. It means that when I offer to share Odin’s pain on the Tree, I will not be permitted to compartmentalize and ignore the agony. It means that now, for the first time in my life, I actually have a working relationship with pain and by extension with my flesh itself. In removing my ability to ignore pain, in forcing me to confront my fear and my physical limitations, in forcing me to find better ways of overcoming these limitations, Hela has by extension forced me to find value in the most essential characteristic of humanity: the vehicle of our physical incarnation. Above all else, I learned that if there is one Deity that cherishes each and every flickering light of human consciousness, if there is one Being that watches and notes every word, every tear, every passage, if there is one being that truly understands and cherishes humanity in all its manifestations, it is Hela. She who is both beginning and end watches over those living in Her realm with a dedication and protectiveness that would put a mother bear to shame. Of all the Gods and all the Goddesses, I often think it is Hela who loves humanity the best.
I make regular offerings to Her now. I have gained so much from my interactions with Her servants. I have had nothing but blessings from Her hands, often harsh blessings, but blessings nonetheless. I have been both blessed and gifted with the opportunity to learn at Her feet. I think of Her often and I thank Her often for the yoke of humility that She has bound upon me. I honor Her now far more than I ever did before. I make regular offerings of food, knowing that She has a mighty hall to fill. Death has a hall in which none should go hungry.
Lady Death, Mother of Bones,
May I come to You naked of all pretense.
May I see in the bottomless abyss of Your eyes
All that You would have me become.
May I carry the knowledge of the care You provide
With me every single day.
May I walk mindfully upon this earth in homage to You.
May I never forget, that if all other eyes turn away,
You observe and record my passing.
May I value this flesh that has been given to me.
May I value my time in Midgard
And cherish each bond of love, of friendship, of companionship
Even as they pass away.
For these things connect me inextricably to You.
May I learn compassion, Lady.
May I learn to be kind,
As Death is kind in its passage.
