Rökkr:Twilight + Rökkr:Shadow + Rökkr:Darkness

Rökkr means darkness. The darkness that is implicit in the twilight and the shadow. It is only in the darkness of Hela and the Rökkr that we can hope to remove every illusion that surrounds us, and come face to face with the everything that is nothing, and the nothing that is everything.

The Rökkr darkness is the ultimate experience of the abyss of Ginungugap, in which all potential, all matter, all wyrd, is contained in a simultaneously expansive and concentrated state. To journey into Ginungugap is to return to the kozmic womb and its nurturing darkness, because it is from the dark womb of the goddess that all life flowed, just as individual lives all emerge from the darkness of individual wombs. With the end of life, these individual lives again return to the darkness of the goddess: the earth.

An extension of the darkness of the void of Ginungugap is the night which rises from the abyss as both an emanation of it, and as a form of the dark womb itself. We know this dark womb as Hela in her guise as the goddess Nott, whose black body rises up into the sky every night to send the world to sleep; she is echoed in the Egyptian Nuit, and Greek Nyx.

Darkness underpins our reality. It is not simply something that can be acknowledged and then forgotten, as psychology would have us believe, because it is all around us. Consider that what we interpret as day or light is only the temporary obscurement of darkness. It is darkness that is the natural, eternal state, whereas light (be it a flame, or a star) can only hope to mask the darkness for a time before its life is extinguished. We are really then, surrounded by darkness all the time, and only our eyes (reacting to light) fail to see this. When we acknowledge this darkness, we realize that we exist permanently within the womb of the goddess, within the void of Ginungugap, but is only at night, or in the realm of deep space, that she is unveiled to us.

Even some forms of Christian mysticism have realized that the core of the divine is darkness. In Treatise to Timothy, Pseudo-Dionysius says that the mysteries of Divine Truth are hidden far beyond the light, in "the translucent darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret." The German mystic Meister Eckhart also spoke of the divine as darkness, which we paraphrase here (replacing his God with our dark goddess) "Hela is utterly dark -the darkness behind the darkness, the superessential darkness. The darkness of Hela is the darkness of mystery. What is the final end? It is the mystery of the darkness of the eternal Goddesshead and it is unknown and was never known and will never be known. So deep is this mystery of the Goddesshead that there Hela remains unknown to Hela. Whatever one says that Hela is, She is not; She is what one does not say of Her, rather than what one say She is.”

The only light that exists in the darkness of the goddess is the unimaginable light of darkness (as the void contains all things as one). This dark light is presaged in the light of twilight, the shadowlight, where two worlds combine under the twin rays of the black and gold suns. The shadowlight is the spark of the soul (the shadow), which the Niflungar seek to awaken within the goddess of the Cloud of Unknowing.

"I have searched in the darkness, being silent in the great
lonely stillness of the dark. So I became an angakoq,
through visions and dreams, and encounters with
flying spirits." -Najagneg, Eskimo shaman.