The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/northern-lights)
Auroras are becoming more frequent as we enter the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. An event tonight may result in the aurora borealis being visible as far south as southern Oregon and northern California, Denver, Kansas City, and Cincinnati as well as the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
It is like living in a lighthouse, surrounded by nothing but the wild, often unwelcoming nature. You merely need to take three steps outside the door to remember where you are. Locals have a saying about that: “Vi vet kor vi bor” (“We know where we live”) and it is often in November that you start hearing it out loud.
How can city-dwelling Heathens bring back the old sense of wonder when gazing upwards? How can we reenchant the post-post-postmodern skies in this third decade of the 21st century?
In the history of European Paganism and Polytheism, it is known that numerous Pagan concepts, gods, spirits, and ideas remained part of the people’s psyche even long after the beginning of the conversion process. While these figures did not necessarily retain their original religious place and spiritual function over the centuries, many managed to nevertheless survive by being carried on, if not through religious traditions, then through popular culture. The Norse-Icelandic sagas are a good example of this phenomenon. Even though there likely weren’t any Pagan Icelanders around after the 11th century, their descendants kept on compiling, adapting, and writing down tales of Þórr, Óðinn, and countless Pagan heroes all the way to the 20th century. While these figures had left the purely religious sphere of the Icelanders’ worldview, they nevertheless remained latent characters about which tales were told, and even created, until being finally spiritually and religiously brought back in the late 20th century.
The time is a few minutes past midnight, on the night between the seventeenth and the eighteenth of August; the place, Svinøya, an outlying island close to the town of Svolvær, the unofficial capital and most populous locale of the Arctic archipelago of Lofoten in northern Norway. I am standing by a bench on the tip of a breakwater, facing the city’s waterfront. Next to me is my colleague Heinrich, a South African who, by a succession of unlikely events has ended up, like me, working in the tourism industry of this Scandinavian nation. Tomorrow isn’t just a normal day at work, it is the season’s last cruise ship and our employer sent us from our home of Tromsø all the way down to Lofoten; an eight hour car ride through some of the most stunning vistas there are which I have done too many time to count, but not enough not to be amazed — every single time — by the wild majesty of its landscape. The ride was in and of itself uneventful, and we got into town early, ate well (codfish pizzas, a local specialty) and looked forward to the next day’s tour.