by Lydia Helasdottir
You need to know that Hela’s definitely lovable. I mean I am completely in love with her. Romantically, obsessively, madly. And also, that she is pitiless, and that’s a good thing.
I met her first when I was very young, but I didn’t know that it was her, and then properly when I was 19 or so. I was having hunger stuff come up, wanting to rend and predate on people, and that was getting a little bit out of control; I was alienating the people around me. She came like a blast of cold wind and she made all my bones rattle, literally. It was as if I was just a skeleton and this cold wind went right through me, making me rattle. One also needs to know that She is Everywhere. I find that she does tend to listen to people, especially when they are in despair, and they can come to sit at her kitchen table and ask her advice, if they do it in a non-egotistical, “yes, I realize that I’m talking to Death” sort of way. The answers that she gives aren’t ever what you thought you were going to hear, and they are never comforting. You can’t expect comforting from her at all, whether you go there as a priestess of hers, or someone who is requesting help, or just one of her workers, there is never any comfort.
She never lies, ever - and she never makes you guess. If she’s pissed off at you, she will tell you exactly what she’s pissed off about, and what you need to fix. So you can’t ask her questions that you aren’t prepared for straight answers to. “Oh, I’m kind of not sure if this current boyfriend is good for my spiritual evolution or not...." “He isn’t. Get rid of him." “What! But...but.." “No. Get rid of him.” But she will answer questions of those who ask, as long as they are not frivolous.
That’s another thing about her. No cheating, no lying, ever. No slacking. Don’t promise her anything that you won’t be able to do. I have a problem with that. I’m always wanting to promise her things that will make me a better person, but she turns me down, because she knows I can’t come through on them. She says, “No. Just do what I tell you.” Seriously, if you fail, then you broke a deal with Death, and there are bad consequences for that.
Hela doesn’t ask for much in the way of tribute. She’s not one of those deities who are incessantly clamoring for offerings and doo-dahs. She doesn’t seem to be all that interested in that stuff. She likes jewelry, burned things, utensils like spoons and knives, but you have to be willing to give them up and leave them on her altar, or maybe even bury them in the ground or throw them in a river. She likes tea, for some reason. She’s not so much into food offerings. But most of all, she likes fear and pain and awe, and if you can generate those states and offer them to her, she likes that better than anything else you can offer her. If you can really get into one of your phobias and then offer that up, that will get her attention. But it has to be real.
She wears many different things. To me, she doesn’t always show up as the traditional half-and-half. It’s much more dynamic. You look at her skin and it sort of morphs from living to pale to ulcerous, and then you see the bits under the skin. It morphs over her body the whole time. Sometimes she will show up in full-on domme gear with spiky boots. I’ve seen her in very real eggplant-colored velvet formal gowns. I’ve seen her in grey veils, I’ve seen her in a dress of glass splinters. I’ve seen her in dresses made of razor blades - a bit like the River Slith, only it’s a dress. I occasionally see her in matte-grey scale armor.
I sometimes meet her in her kitchen, sometimes in her orchard. She seems to take me to her orchard when she wants me to do some healing on someone who is very sick, and she wants me to draw out whatever is making them sick. Then they will either heal or let the natural dying process happen ... but I never know which one it’s going to be. So I can’t make my living as a healer, because I can’t guarantee a reliable result in terms of getting better.
It’s hard to make Hela pissed off, but when she is, she’s pissed off really big and for a long time, and it’s hard to placate her. The first thing is not to ask frivolous questions. Have a good reason to talk to her. When I come to her asking for help, she asks me if I’ve thought about it, and what the options and consequences might be. She interrogates me on that, and if she thinks that I’ve done all I can to figure it out, she will answer. Don’t expect her to party. Her dad’s a partier, but she’s not. I find that an easy way to help other people talk to her is to actually go down their ancestor line, and associate with their dead ancestors, and find out about them, figure out what they were like before they died. Because they are actually in the realm of the Dead, or at least they’ve passed through it - most people aren’t going to Valhalla these days - she knows them. To go that way seems to make a useful bridge. Go and tend the graves of your ancestors. That starts the process.
Second, put your house in order. Get into living - at least for a little while, if you can’t do it permanently - as if this was your last day. It helps you to prioritize what you want to talk to her about. Talk to your ancestors, or at least show them some respect and honor them as the reason that you are on this planet now. These things seem to facilitate the communication with her. And then I would advocate for people to do some kind of divination about whether the time is right to talk to her. Then take at least three days before talking to her. One day should be for purification; at least take purifying baths. Take a second day to clean out your room and set up an altar with things related to dead stuff. Then take a day to think about her, and to live as if it was your last day. I wouldn’t go any quicker than that for your first meeting.
Utiseta, sitting out, works well for talking to her. You can sit on barrow mounds, if you’re in a part of the world that has them around. So does going under the cloak. You can spend a day being silent, being veiled, or not making certain gestures, such as not lifting your arms higher than your sternum. Mindfulness through temporary behavioral constraints. I have a cousin who had her hand tattooed on his shoulder, because she often comes up behind people and grips their left shoulder. I’ve seen Hela as a spot in the woods that was just darker than everything else in the dark. She’s very dense; there’s not graduated force-field energy at all.
She has absolutely no compunctions about hurting people, but it’s never done out of malice. There is no malice in Hela. She’s very professional and cold, almost clinical. “If we do not now excise and debride this wound, it will become septic. So we’re going to hold you down and do it. Get ready to have your road rash scrubbed with a wire brush.” There’s no mercy, and no anesthetic. I got to experience a dislocated kneecap for about an hour and a half, and it was just the worst pain ever. They got me to the clinic and pumped me full of morphine, and it didn’t work. Nothing helped, because this was a pain experience that I needed to have.
Hela cares about mad people, and cruel people, and sadistic people, and problem children in general. Like Shiva and Kali, whose people are untouchables and lepers and beggars, she is the patron of the socially unacceptable. It’s all about acknowledging, respecting, and eventually loving and integrating the monster inside. I know that if I was not working for her, I would be dead or in prison by now. I’ve got some pretty monstrous properties that are well chained, but it’s not enough to chain them. They have to be put to work and worn out daily, or they’ll just gnaw at the chains, and either keep you awake with the nasty clanking noise, or wear through them at some point.
But the flip side to that is that she accepts every part of you, even the most rancid, horrible, twisted, shameful, impossible-to-look-at parts. She is about redeeming the unredeemable. It’s a paradox, because at the same time that I speak of how horrid my inner demons are, I know that by making them work for her, I am nourishing and helping people through the physical manifestation of her presence around them. I can see it; there’s evidence for it. And it doesn’t at all contradict the fact that I am absolutely, irredeemably horrendous. Both of those things are true. People seem to do well and flourish from my work, and yet I am a monster. Eventually I had to come to terms with the fact that it is both. She’s never told me that I have to “heal” my inner monster; that’s not the point, and probably impossible anyway. But she shows me how it can be made useful. That’s the core of Hela’s mystery: the things about her appearance that are the most grotesque are the holiest.
