Accepting Death & Destiny.

When agnostics and atheists speculate about why people believe in God or other supernatural systems, an oft cited reason is that without the comfort of the ultimate triumph of good and an afterlife, living would be too hard for many to bear. I suspect that this is true. Through sheer biological accident, I came into this world infatuated with everything in it, and while very prone to anxiety, very resistant to depression. (Yup, they are not the same thing.) That and the (also accidental) blessings of my life have equipped me to generally find life pretty fucking awesome. (Here’s hoping that general lucky streak never runs out.) But I’m very aware that this is not the norm and, many have been dealt the opposite hand, both in terms of disposition and experience. And I can never really know what others endure unless I experience it myself. So this has always seemed the best argument, in my mind, for laying off people have certain beliefs that do no apparent harm to anyone else, as unfounded as they may be. Of course this doesn’t mean all religious belief; if you believe in a God who condemns gay people, for example, that is bigotry, and immensely harmful. But if you’re sure that astrology is real, other than maybe lining the pockets of a few exploitative scammers, I don’t see where the harm really lies. At that level, whatever helps people get through the day.

For myself, however, comfort is not really what I am looking for in a religious practice. Of course on some level it is all comforting, otherwise I wouldn’t devote time and energy to it. But what I find gives me strength is not the reassurance that God loves me, or that death is not real. Because I don’t believe those things, and couldn’t if I wanted to. 

I do not believe that there is a moral order to the universe. Neither the cosmos, an anthropomorphic God, or any other supernatural force designed all of this to ultimately come out as more good than bad, and there’s nothing other than the agency of humans and other living things pushing the balance one way or another. In this sense I am a hard core materialist and, of course, it means I think death is real, and final. When I die my consciousness will blink out of existence, and whatever is left of me will return to the state it was in before I was born. 

To be clear, I’m not happy about this, either. I’m not even content with it; it fucking blows. But it is, as far as I can tell, the reality of life. So I want a practice and a set of related symbols and traditions that can help me interact with what I believe to be true. This is how I practice acceptance: confronting, and contemplating, the things I cannot change. This doesn’t, again, necessarily make me feel okey dokey about my eventual demise; but it does help, and can bring me moments where I nearly feel at peace with these truths. Acceptance, however, is a never-ending process; I feel like a lot of people think that “accepting” things means that you never get upset about them anymore, or you just somehow cancel/let go of all those upsetting feelings. But I don’t agree. Acceptance, to me, is feeling the pain, the sadness, the hurt, the suffering, letting yourself sit with it and express it in the healthiest way you can, and then with the recognition that you cannot change it, continue in life by taking joy in that which is, as undeniably as the reality of death, full of love, and beauty, and truth. 

Sometimes I feel utterly alienated in these views, as our monotheistic soaked culture very close to never reflects them. Most of Western society and most of all, American society, is deeply steeped in a denial of death, and a denial of how fundamentally unjust our lives can be. I don’t agree with Martin Luther King that the arch of history leans towards justice; I wish I did. But I have found a way to still fight for making it so, because it is truly our actions only that can bring such an arch about, and the human animal is most truly happy when we commit ourselves to fighting for something larger than ourselves. (That’s a positive truth; we’re altruistic motherfuckers, at the end of the day.)

Until I started working with atheopaganism, I did not have a framework with which to revisit and respect these aspects of being alive. Now to be clear, a lot of how I’ve constructed using my practice to do so is pure invention from someone steeped in a 21st century atheist perspective. Germanic pagans and the Celts clearly did believe in an afterlife, so there’s nothing like the finality of final death in these belief systems. All the same, there’s so much more to work with than in the Christian tradition (which is the only one I can really speak to). We get our name for the Christian hell, after all, from the Germanic Hel, the place the dead who didn’t get to go hang out in the badass warrior halls went and were ruled over by a goddess of the same name. So there is some concept, in Valhalla and Freyja’s hall, of the super-awesome people (according to the warrior values of that society) getting to go to a “better place.” But Hel does not appear to have been understood as either a particularly good, or a particularly bad, place; and the dead often came back around to visit on Midgard, as well. Even the gods, such as Odin’s son Baldr, can go to Hel when they die. Lacking is any sense of an eternal torment that all the “bad people” go to. Likewise the concepts of the great halls make a bit more sense to me than the Christian concept of blissing out with God all the time in an ill-defined state of eternal tripping; after all, what do they do in Valhalla? They feast, hang out, drink, and then fight. They party, basically. This is something I can relate to. 

Much more important to me, however, is the Norse/Germanic idea of fate. Basically, the course your life is going to take is set, and you cannot change it. You might make what seem to you to be decisions, but that’s a bit of an illusion. No one can change their fate. No one is smart enough, strong enough, holy enough to alter the course of life. If you’ve ever read (or even watched) the series The Last Kingdom, you’ll be very familiar with this concept. Destiny is All, Uhtred always says. Constructing our fate are the three norns; women who live at the base of the Yggdrasil tree of life (according to some accounts), and weave our lives together (sometimes reportedly with guts, metal!) Once they’ve done their weave, that’s it. You can curse at them, cry out at them, and be generally pissed about your fate. But there is no suggestion that you can change it, or should even expect them to do so. 

What a delectable corrective to our individualism obsessed culture!, that never accepts the limitations that all living creatures face and insists with such arrogance and delusion that whatever we dream we can make possible. No wonder tragedy is so incomprehensible to the American mind; we’ve no framework for explaining it when most of the population believes either that “God will never give you more than you can handle” or “what you visualize you actualize.” What an insane and callous way of looking at the world; how the fuck does anyone who believes these things ever become an adult? And no wonder then that we blame ourselves when things go wrong or we come up short; as though it was all in our control. It’s not only callous towards other people — how does someone who has lost a dear friend to suicide feel about that claim about getting what you can handle, for example? — but it is callous towards ourselves. We are indeed, as cheesy as the song is, dust in the wind. I don’t want to go through life expending energy on denying this truth because I fear it. I’d rather face it head on. 

And I find encouragement to do so from the same tradition. Because despite the inevitable nature of fate, Norse/Germanic paganism suggests to us that life is still worth living — and that the fight is worth more than merely whether or not it is won. Consider Ragnarok. Odin and all the gods know it is coming. They know they will lose. And yet they still take steps (such as binding Fenrir) to be prepared, to resist the inevitable. And when it comes, they won’t simply surrender as soon as they’ve started; they fight to the death. Because an acceptance of death does not entail a rejection of life; quite the opposite. To embrace life when you acknowledge that the path it takes is substantially out of your control and the end is assured, is the greatest act of love for life imaginable. It is to say, although it will come to an end and my choices are limited, I will be, feel, do, see, and witness everything I can of this life, and will still rejoice, and exert my agency on this earth for as long and far as it can go. I will still be. Now that’s some life-affirming shit I can sign up for. (1)

(1)  Come to think of it, there’s actually a lot of overlap here with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return.