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THE ROKKR

The Rokkr is a name given to those beings from Northern mythology who belong to the oldest pantheon within the cosmos. According to the legends through which we derive our understanding of ancestral beliefs, the first entities that came into their own existence were giants, who are commonly known as Jotuns. The first giant was the androgynous Ymir, from whom all the other giant races descended and from whom the conventional gods also, eventually came. In the myths we possess, the Jotuns appear as the enemies of the gods, and often cosmic order also. They are, generally ill-treated by the authors of these myths, although occasionally concessions are given to their intelligence, their wisdom, their virility, and also their immense antiquity. The Norse myths speak of two distinct families of gods, the Vanir, and the Aesir, who were the older and younger pantheons respectively. However, the Jotuns represent an even older pantheon, one that is so ancient that the hu8man memory of them as gods is totally not existent. Instead, they have suffered the fate they become demonized and placed at odds with the current, new gods. Runic author, Jan Fries quotes from a source he describes as the book of the Forgotten Ones in explicating this fate:

"The bright gods did replace us on your altars,
the dark gods hid us in their temple veil.
The starred ones stirred within their awakening-time,
and cried our call of returning unto man.
We come, flesh-children,
through the midnight portal,
to the noon tide mountain,
to the waking mind.
Know us, and embrace us, and be whole."

The Jotuns are, consistently, referred to as being giants, their name itself means "great eater", implying both their love for food, and also their immense size. This is not, however, a purely Norse archetype. In Greek myth, the oldest race of gods are known as the Titans, and are often noted for their immense size. Similarly the biblical record refers to a antediluvian period when a giant race existed. This provides a series of different scenarios to explain the presence of an elder race of giants. One suggests that, in a primeval period of human history, our spiritual and unconscious makeup dictated that the gods should be envisioned as being of an immense size, although this need gradually declined, or become more subtle, as history progressed. Another scenario could suggests that in the act of demonizing older pantheons, the human psyche projects them as giants, either as a concession to the immense power they held, and continued to wield, or as a symbol of the threat the new pantheons saw them as presenting. A third scenario theorizes that, at some early period of human history, there was a pantheon of gods who manifested as giants, in what could be termed reality, and were more intimate reflections of nature, and the cosmos, than the more recognizable gods are, or ever were.
There are a number of consistencies, and parallels, between the respective giant races, which may suggest a trans-cultural religion now largely forgotten. It appears to have been of a predominantly, matricentric nature, which a powerful Death and Dark Goddess at its center, underlying all reality. In the Northern version, She is the Jotun Hela, in the Greek she is the Titan Hekate, and in the Celtic she is the giant hag Cailleach. Beside her, is another consistent image, the trickster friend of mankind, who brings wisdom and fire. His Jotun form is Loki, while in the pantheon of the Greek Titans he is Prometheus. A third image is the World Serpent who encircles the world providing stability and instability, and who is found in Pre-Hellenic myth, Hindu cosmology, and the Norse form of the vast Iormungand.
The various Jotun pantheons also seem to be a more mature form of reality than the more modern inheritors. Paganism is fundamentally balanced, however the more recent forms of it contain a thoroughly polarized format, in which the life, and destroyer, aspects of the cosmos are, on a whole, regulated to completely separate entities; which often leads to the moralistic habit of relegating destroyers into stereotypes of being evil. The Jotuns, however, explicitly possess within themselves the two aspects. This is exemplified no better than in the figure of the Death Goddess, often associated with bird of prey totems, who is the destroyer who brings life. She represents a full cycle of existence, being the cosmic mother who brings forth all beings from her primordial womb, sustains them, destroys them when their time has come, and then welcomes them back inside her womb, to be reborn again. All Rokkr entities are both givers and takers of Life. Iormungand, the world serpent, who is of us just as water is of us, but whose movements shake the world; the fiery Surt whose primal fires stir our spirit, but which will also envelope our entire world in the end time; the vast chtonic dragon Nidhogg, who chews at the roots of the World Tree, and so endangers the cosmos, but who is also the life-affirming energies that flow within, and animate, the land. 
Such is the nature of nature, and the nature of the cosmos. There is nothing in existence that gives life without eventually taking it away. There are no benevolent forces. And there is no malevolent force. There is no god, or goddess, who loves, and there are none who hate. Neither Love nor hate exist in the workings of the cosmos at best there is attraction and repulsion, and this is embodied and expressed by the Jotuns and the Titans.


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