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Chapter 2. Connections 26
workings of Urð will lead one to wisdom, and the Eddas imply that such
knowledge is not easily gained.” 10
Knowledge or wisdom then was another characteristic of the Waters flowing up and
out of Hvergelmir as they passed through the Wells of Mímir and Urð: knowledge
of movement.
The ancient Scandinavians had a very simple periodic table of elements: fire and
ice combined to form everything in the Universe. From the standpoint of our modern
worldview this sounds like a metaphor, but from the worldview being presented here,
it is not. It was fact. The current way of expressing the same thing, however, is
E=MC 2 ; mass, or “things,” is equal to the amount of energy divided by the speed
of light squared. Now, it would be ridiculous to even suggest that early Germanic
peoples had some understanding of the Theory of Relativity (this is a type of tactical
comparison often used by New Age writers: pure and utter nonsense), but they did
have some feeling that what was experienced on Midgard was an expression of energy
(fire) and mass (ice) and the way they communicated this was through the use of
poetic language to describe something that was to them real but intangible. The
point here is that the modern Cunning Man 11 , the scientist, is privy to the wisdom
that what is experienced is part and parcel of the human perceptual system and, as
such, is part of reality.
It is interesting that the average man, utilizing the common 20 th century worldview,
feels his life is separate from the rest of Creation and, because of this, feels
himself to be individually important. On the other hand, scientists, as well as
people following some of the more primitive spiritual paths, know (as part of their
worldview) that all “things” are related, or in other terms, little more than swirls and
eddies within the flow of the Waters of Life whether they choose to label them God,
the Tao, or simply Energy (with a capital einsteinian “E”) –nothing more than little
pools of mass and energy. They know that all things are constantly in a state of
flux, ever moving and changing, and that the feeling of being separate from the rest
of the Universe is an illusion, or a corporeal metaphor, resulting from reality having
to be filtered through the human perceptual system. The feeling that things, events,
or people have some kind of stability, some kind of physical realness, comes from
how one whirlpool within Round River relates to another, and, if the relationship
changes between two of these swirls in the Waters, the things themselves appear
to change. A normal human changes the complete lining of his stomach every six
days but does not notice the change because no relationships have changed; on the
other hand, a dead animal as it decays appears to change because its relationship
to the rest of the universe has changed: parts have been exhausted as gasses, other
10 Bauschatz, p. 23.
11 ”Cunning man” is a translation of Klocka män.