About Niorun
by Clan Nautilus
Note: This article was written by Kearil, based on an earlier but more personally-oriented blog post by Shaynin.
Historical sources say little about Niorun, so when a friend said she was looking for my system - the many people who share this body with me - all we had to tell us about her was roughly a paragraph of text and the friend's instructions to prepare for a dream journey involving making an offering of something shiny and pretty. We don't often remember our dreams and we didn't remember that first meeting with her, but when we make an offering just before bed and petition her, most of the time there are clear results.
Others say she speaks in riddles and poetry, or what she says later cannot be remembered. Awake, we know what she says to us, but it’s interpreted through our internal language of (both physical and emotional) feeling: “Go sleep,” or, “Where is my offering?” Sensation, not words. We don't remember the dreams she sends any more frequently than we remember other dreams, but when our offering is sufficient payment and the dream slips from memory, the lesson of the dream remains. Like not remembering sitting in class on a particular day, but still knowing the things we learned then. The teacher is always lecturing in extended metaphors that we have to figure out, sure, but eventually it makes sense...and when it has to do with the stuff buried deep inside us, we have at least half an idea of how to interpret those metaphors.
And yes, she started expecting the offerings once we started making them regularly. At first we lit incense before going to bed, thinking the winding trails of smoke appropriate to her, but after being nagged about the room's air quality by a loved one, we changed that. Now our kaleidoscope - chosen for the shifting shapes inside - is dedicated to our relationship with her and our dreams are hers on any night when we look through it first with one eye, then the other. Away from home, or once we've gotten into bed and turned off the lights, creating a colorful and ever-changing energy construct or "incense smoke" made of ond (energy) has also pleased her.
She gives us three choices: See what our unconscious mind wants us to know, see what she wants us to know (which is perhaps the same thing), or have an easy rest if we’re able to get to sleep. (With chronic insomnia, there’s no promise of sleep, either.) Dreams gotten through her cooperation may be material from the dreamer’s Shadow, or messages so deeply repressed into the subconscious that we could not dig them out any other way. The latter often go hand in hand with our conventional work in psychotherapy - we've been working on rooting out our personal brain weasels for a while. But these choices probably also have to do with the way we negotiated with her in the early stages of the relationship; it may be she'll ask or offer different things to different dreamers.
We believe she is not just older, but closer to Source - the animating spirit of All that we believe in - and thus less comprehensible to human minds than most other gods. The “fear of god” that Rudolph Otto describes in Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy in English translation) comes more readily for us when near her, than with most other gods – Odhinn being another notable example. That fear is glossed over in modern Christianity as we’ve experienced it; the original concept is the knowledge that “god” or in the polytheist case a god is so powerful as to be able to destroy one, but chooses not to. If one is at least moderately sane, that’s a fear-provoking thought. Niorun’s power evokes the concepts of Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle: not always as malevolent as those of the Cthulhu Mythos, but just as capable of rending a mind apart. And, if we choose to work with her, it is always at her pace that we proceed.
Artwork by Chris Hortsch.