Hel, the beauty of death and reincarnation.

Mine and Remy’s experience, his fight with cancer, his twilight of fate taught me so much about death. In fact it brought me closer with the birth and death goddess herself. To better explain this I must first clear up any misconceptions.

I am not a Christian man nor do I believe in a Christian god. I also must clear up any misused literature or explanations brought to this westernized society about my gods and powers.

We must realize in the eyes of European Christians you were either with them or against them, and in fear many people converted over to save their lives, for the Christian faith spread like the plague killing all those in its path if they didn’t convert to its belief. Along with this much of what I believe was turned into a negative aspect of faith, including the powers (gods) that were once worshipped.

This is Hela, goddess of death if you strictly read what our sources explain, but even then there’s much more meaning behind names, places, times, events, and actions in all of our poems of the Eddas. In fact you can say that both the Poetic and Prose Edda are symbolic, one must crack the code to certainly understand the metaphors and codes within the Norse poem poetry. If you fail to do this, you simply become a pagan who treats our sources like a factual book, and this is extremely far from the truth.

Back to Hela, goddess of the dead and the underworld. However, as I mentioned there’s deep meaning inside of her lore including her appearance. Hela was casted into the underworld by Odin himself, she was given the authority to rule all of the nine realms. Her appearance is that of half beautiful woman, clear skin, bright eyes, and lushes hair. The other half is “blue” skeletal fragments of bone and mud.

If you were to read this in our source you would walk away thinking she was just a woman who looked after the dead, and to a degree this is true. However, her authority to rule in all of the nine realms is symbolic for everything will go through death no matter where you are, including the gods. Her appearance is symbolic for what dies, lives again, and what lives….will die.

Hela is said to rule in her halls of Helheim, which just so happens to be located in Nifelheim. A place of ice and cold, mists, and darkness. This is symbolic for both the beginning of time and a state of being without consciousness. That everything that dies, will go back to the beginning where the first consciousness was created in the Well of Origin.

Nifelheim, the realm of ice and darkness combusting with the realm of Muspelheim the land of fire and rock is symbolic for the first (waves) Yimir of time. Hence the beginning of the universe.

There the many names of Odin himself (Misty One) lingered for more waves of time, this is symbolic for the spirit was at rest without consciousness.

Over time Odin, Vili, Ve, the three brothers that mean the spirit, the mind, the passion created the first man and woman out of beachwood. Ask and Embla, which means Ash Tree and Elm Tree. This is symbolic for the ingredients of life creating its first consciousness, being created by the spirit, the mind, and passion. That both man and woman were created by the same material, meaning they are the same, yet different types of wood, symbolic for genetic differences and sex.

Hela is half Jotun, which has always represented laws of nature, and her mother Angraboda “Bringer of sorrow” mates with Loki “Passion” or ”Fire” and therefore creates the keeper of life and death. Hela is often depicted with her wolf Garmr and serpents in her halls and caves. Serpents have been a symbol of earth goddesses and transformation in many other cultures in pagan times. Hence, shedding the skin to transform, or in this case reincarnation. The wolf is said to devour the body as the serpent sucks the blood from the corpse, both symbolic for recycling the tissues and fluids. That our physical body will be recycled in life.

This is where Hela takes the “sleeping” consciousness and looks after it. The rivers that feed the world tree come from Nifelheim, just as the gods and all of life’s existence emerged into space and time from these rivers, this is symbolic for life’s spirits resting until reaching the Well of Origin again. From here reconstruction of the spirit is made, and fed into the world tree (new body) and life again resumes.