The Barrow

So, yesterday was 18 years since my sister and I were originally put in foster care after my family fell apart. That's wild to think about. It (and the events that lead to it) was the defining event of my adolescence and an axis around which I rotated for a long time. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday mostly because the foster care agency could no longer dictate any part of my life. It's a big reason why I stayed pretty straight-laced as a teenager. Now, it's been longer since then, than my entire lifetime was leading up to it.

These past few days I've been thinking a lot about my adolescence and the myriad ways in which it fucked me up. I am motivated to do better as a parent than my parents did. I want my children to have a normal upbringing.

Sometimes I hate myself and the ways in which I have coped with it, ranging from the innocuous to the very unhealthy.

I'm trying to pull myself together for my own family and be someone new. I want the person I was even as recently as a few years ago to be unrecognizable.

It might be too late for me to be normal, really, but my own children deserve that chance.

When one engages in detailed comparative mythology of the Indo-European peoples, one shared element emerges as the clear underlying idea behind the morality espoused by these belief systems: the struggle of life and order against death and chaos. This rings true from Ireland to India.

The principle deities and indeed the most important heroes represent and uphold the sacred order and natural law of the universe, Dharma, while the antagonists of the gods are always some force of chaos or entropy: Adharma.

Entropy, of course, is what drives the arrow of time: it is the breaking down of all things, from objects to institutions and societies. It is the eternal trend from more complex to less complex that can clearly be seen in language, art, culture, and all physical matter and objects. It is a fundamental truth of the universe: all of existence will someday be a uniform and homogenous colorless sludge with no temperature or motion of any kind.

In the Indo-European worldview, life contains the divine spark as the only force in the material world which can resist entropy and especially work against it. Living things and their growth are the only examples in this universe of any sort of reversal of entropy. A stone may resist entropy for some time but never grows or moves against it. A crystal may work against it slightly (and I would argue this means it possesses some form of life indeed) but the stone only breaks down over time after its creation by forces which I would also describe as possessing some form of life. To pagans, life should be held as the most sacred force in nature. In this way, our native spiritualities can be described as a “life cult” as opposed to the Abrahamic “death cults.”

We can extrapolate from this, that as Indo-European pagans, our highest moral duty is the resistance to entropy and chaos. This is in fact represented in myth and Indo-European cosmology. To the Greeks, chaos was the primordial state akin to the Germanic Ginninggap (ON Ginnungagap) and can thus be cyclically inferred to also be the final state of things as well. In addition, in Germanic cosmology, the end times are ushered in by Locke (ON Loki) and his forces of entropy such as the World Serpent and the Wolf. This is also seen in the struggle between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu (also known as Ohrmazd and Ahriman) in Zoroastrianism,

We also know that entropy's victory is inevitable and assured. However, the mortal struggle of the gods against these forces, despite their unavoidable demise, symbolizes our duty to struggle against it wherever and whenever possible, though we always know the outcome. For example, we mortal humans know we will die someday, yet we struggle against this death daily. We do this because it is the primary force that drives all living beings.

Get out there and live! Resist entropy. Embody life and strength and beauty as long as you can!