Christians at War

Introducing the lesser demons of chaos

Nota bene: A few days ago my computer died so there’s no audio this week. I apologize. Lord willing we’ll be back with audio next time.

Once upon a time there were two northern kings: Helgi and his half-brother Sinfjotl. 

Sinfjotl was strange. As a child he discovered a wolfskin hanging by men in the woods. Donning it, he found himself in a wolf’s shape, with a wolf’s tastes, and so for a long time Sinfjotl roamed howling. In the end he recovered himself, but even as a man he was dangerous—golden-eyed and interested in blood. An unfit companion for any but the greatest of kings. 

And yet Helgi was such a king. At his birth Norns appeared and in their wintry voices prophesied. As gifts, his father bestowed the Land of Rings and the Sun-litten hill and also a sword. When he was fifteen, Helgi took the wars, and Sinfjotl went with him. Those two were champions. 

Now it happened one day that Helgi and Sinfjotl were returning from battle. The clouds were low, and the ocean was gray, and rain pelted the yellow sea grasses. By the ocean Helgi tramped, when suddenly, on the edge of the wood, he beheld nine women riding. 

Or something like women. 

They wore mail shirts stained red with blood. They carried long spears, and on those weapons enchantments hung like horse’s hair. Their eyes, though beautiful, were flat and feral. Of course, Helgi knew what they were.

They were Valkyries.

And yet even so Helgi was mesmerized. “Stay, lady!” he called, “Accompany us home and be welcome!”

Turning, their leader regarded the king. In those feral eyes lights appeared. “We have a different task,” she said, “than drinking with you.” 

Indeed, they did—the next time Helgi saw those Valkyries they came riding down into a battle of kings at the Wolfstone. The carnage was terrible that day, but of all the forces assembled the Valkyries were worse by far. Even to look at them “was like gazing into a fire.” 

A replica of the Saxon helmet from the ship burial Sutton Hoo. Check out that mustache.

I have to say: Though no Scandinavian spirit is nice, the Valkyries (henceforth Slain-choosers, because that’s what Valkyrie means) in particular are ominous.

Like all of the gods of the nations, the Slain-choosers have been whitewashed since the Enlightenment. They have been transformed into golden-haired divas riding bareback into  battle. But that’s not what Slain-choosers are. They are, in the words of historian Neil Price, “demons of carnage.” Price continues:

…“primal” Valkyries did not visit the battlefield, swooping gracefully down to bear away their chosen heroes; instead, they were unleashed upon it and personified its harsh realities…The sense of swirling chaos is increased by the significant portion of the Valkyries whose names refer to noise, the overwhelming din and screaming confusion of a Viking-Age battlefield. 

Thus, we meet Göndul, the “War-Fetter,” who brought the freezing hesitation that could be fatal; perhaps the same is meant by Hlökk, the “Chain,” or Mist, the “Cloud.” Around them move Hjalmthrimul, “Helmet-Clatter;” Hjörthrimul, “Sword-Noise;” and Hjlod, “Howling.” There is Rand-gnithr, the “Shield-Scraper,” and behind her Skalmjöld, the “Sword-Time;” Sváva, the “Killer;” and Tanngnithr, “Teeth-Grinder.” 

Other Valkyries' names focus on weapons in combination with different elements-Geirahöd, “Spear-Battle;” Geirdriful, 'Spear-Flinger'; Geirskögul, 'Spear-Shaker'; and so on. Their many sisters' names include Battle-Weaver, Shaker, Disorder, Scent-of-Battle, Victory-Froth, Vibration, Unstable, Treader, Swan-White, Shield-Destroyer, Helper, Armour, Devastate, and Silence. The list goes on.

“The Valkyries,” Price concludes, “were the essence of violence, unsettling and terrible.”

They really are. 

In one poem the Slain-choosers are seen weaving a tapestry from severed limbs. In another, a Slain-chooser curses a man to live in the woods, eating what the wolves discard.

(Note: Actually, it’s more intense than that. The text goes like this: 

“The ship shall sail not | in which thou sailest,
Though a favoring wind | shall follow after;
The horse shall run not | whereon thou ridest,
Though fain thou art | thy foe to flee.
The sword shall bite not | which thou bearest,
Till thy head itself | it sings about.

Vengeance were mine | for Helgi's murder,
Wert thou a wolf | in the woods without,
Possessing nought | and knowing no joy,
Having no food | save corpses to feed on.”

Yikes.)

Now, here’s the thing about the Slain-choosers: They’re accurate. They are a real depiction of demonic chaos and a fair representation of chaos demons.

And we’re talking about them because chaos is coming and those of us who are in Christ need to know how to respond.

This series is about the spiritual spine of civilization-crashing trends and the probable short term future of Christianity in the West, so I should make it clear at the outset that I am not a fortune teller. I don’t have special access to the future, and I don’t chant in gadralag. Unlike some people writing on the internet, I try to be honest about the fact I have no idea what will happen tomorrow. 

Instead, I am a book nerd. 

As such, I keep evaluating the chess board that is our historical moment and thinking: Jesus, have mercy. 

It’s not that any one trend in the (so called) physical or the (ostensibly) spiritual realm is going to unseat the world.

The plain fact is, there are not many civilization-crashing forces. 

(Note: I realize that’s a claim with some intuitive appeal but it should get your attention: Most trends cannot destroy peoples en masse. Destabilize, sure. But not destroy. The ones that can are unglamorous; students who took Politics 101 or Economics 101 used to know what they were: bad weather, famine, war, mass migration, technological imbalance, spiritual caprice, stuff like that. There are more complex culprits, but most of the time they can be reduced to something primal.) 

Also, a civilization-crasher is not dangerous on its own. 

It’s when two or three co-occur, and the powers of the unseen realm jump in, that things get really serious. 

And the issue now is that right now, beneath the suicidal infighting that attracts so much of the West’s attention, several of those forces are smoldering. In the not-too-distant-future they may well erupt into flame. Even so, I keep seeing very shallow or downright errant descriptions of our moment. I also see ordinary people making it worse. 

And so here is my thesis: By all reasonable accounts we are still in the preliminary stages of a very unsettling time, because there are great transfers of power occurring in the spiritual as well as the natural. Lord willing the most violent expressions of chaos will be diverted. But maybe not. 

To introduce the issues involved, let’s consider a story or two. 

When the Assyrian juggernaut Sennacherib invaded Judah in 701 BC, there was an interesting distinction in his treatment of King Hezekiah. When Sennacherib conquered Ammon, he accepted a tribute and moved on; when he overthrew Ashdod he took the cash and hit the road. Not so with Hezekiah. When Sennacherib’s invincible armies arrived outside Jerusalem, they issued a different order: Open the gate. Hezekiah paid them off and they did not withdraw.

Sennacherib wanted Hezekiah himself. 

The reason lay in the past: A few years before (around 705) Hezekiah took advantage of a period of Assyrian vulnerability and rebelled. The issue in question was—as it so often is—treasure. Hezekiah didn’t want to send the Assyrians foodstuffs or gold, and so he led a coalition of minor states to buck Assyrian rule. 

Whenever an empire declines, even a little, some territories revolt. 

Sometimes those empires bounce back but eventually they don’t. Though Sennacherib tried, he never reconquered Jerusalem. God intervened. Not long after that, God raised up Babylon and unleashed the dogs of war. 

No nation gets to lead the others forever. When one empire recedes and another ascends, that is called regime change. Sometimes it happens peacefully but on a global scale that is rare.

Moving on.

In the first century, Caesar Nero raised his wife from the dead. 

Or so they said—in reality Nero replaced his favorite wife, Poppaea, with a doppelgänger, and that doppelgänger wasn’t actually a woman. 

(Note: Here’s historian Tom Holland, “A new Poppaea had been brought to the emperor's bed. Soft-skinned, auburn-haired, she seemed to all who saw her to be the ultimate manifestation of Nero's genius for transmuting fantasy into reality. Dressed in the dead empress's robes, arrayed in the dead empress's jewels, borne in the dead empress's litter, she was treated exactly as though she were the dead empress herself. Nero had even married her. First, though, prior to the wedding, the bride-to-be had been readied for her future as Caesar's wife. A surgeon had been summoned. Poppaea's doppelgänger, strapped onto the operating table, had been obliged to endure the loss of his genitals”). 

Nevertheless, it fell to the ersatz queen to bestow upon Nero his strena, his new years gift. In Rome strenae were sacrosanct. They secured good fortune, communicated the future, and, in Caesar’s case, anticipated the direction of the empire. And so it was more than a little unsettling when the new Poppaea bestowed upon Caesar a ring, and on the ring was carved an image, and that image was the rape of Proserpina, an event that, in Roman mythology, plunged the world into an age of starvation. 

You see, Caesar owed every Roman in the eternal city a provision of grain, called the Corn Dole. The might of the empire rested upon it. But it just so happened that when Caesar received his new ring the imperial budget was under considerable strain, and the unrest hunger produces was about to unleash years of instability. 

Families can endure seasons of all kinds; kingdoms can suffer a famine or two. But empires need prosperity. When the economy shrinks, when famines come, they must beware. 

One more.

In the late sixteenth century a fleet embarked to conquer England. Woe to those ships, a mammoth seaborne invasion is a hard thing to pull off (ask the Mongols about their encounter with the kamikazes, the Divine Winds, near Japan; ask the Persians what an untimely storm can do to an otherwise overwhelming invasion). The adventure miscarried. But before the English people knew that, terror swept through the countryside. So intense was the fear it sent women into early labor, and one in particular bore a son. He was a tiny blue infant whose imagination would refashion the world. Even at the height of his powers, that man never seemed to get over his terrifying entrance into the world.

“My mother,” he joked, “gave birth to twins: myself, and fear.” 

It’s hard not to see that fear in the background of the philosophy our man developed. His name was Thomas Hobbes; he all but created the form of liberalism that became Late Modernity’s founding doctrine. We’ll say more about Hobbes anon. For now, it is enough to say that there is a time bomb inside Liberalism, a catastrophic error stemming from a demonic streak in the philosophy. That time bomb is detonating now and I am shocked how many otherwise intelligent people think it can be stopped.

Now.

Why these stories? The vignettes here point to the main forces destabilizing the world: Liberalism’s demonic contradictions, economic pressure, and international competition. 

Taken together they may create a perfect storm (though I hope they don’t). At the very least, they will create a general instability that you will feel personally. You’re probably feeling it now.

And there’s more. 

In the Christian worldview, chaos isn’t random. 

In a Christian scheme, rolling a dice isn’t chaotic, and neither is swirling snow, and neither is a traffic jam (on its own). Things like that occur within a wider architecture, the weave, if you will, of meaning in God’s universe. 

In the Christian story, chaos is intelligent. It has a will. 

If you’ve studied history at all (or listened to the Bible Project) then you know that almost all cultures include a dragon-slayer myth. In the Sumerian stories, there was a dragon named Asag, a creature so hideous his presence made fish boil alive in the river. (“Who can compass the Asag’s dread glory?” the story asks. “Who can counteract the severity of its frown? People are terrified, fear makes the flesh creep; their eyes are fixed upon it. My master, the mountains have taken their offerings to it”).

In Babylon, there was a creature called Tiamat. 

In a particularly interesting example, Japanese stories recall a creature called Yamata no Orochi, an eight-headed dragon besmeared with blood. What unites those stories is the intelligence of the creature involved.

Something, humans remember, does not want the world to exist at all.  

That is a fact and as is so often the case Jesus sets the record straight. Yes, he agrees, there is a primeval dragon. Not a competitor with God, but one of His creatures that is nonetheless diametrically opposed to His order. Jesus overcame and humiliated that dragon but the thing’s still at large in the world. 

For most of us that power manifests itself as a common experience: resistance to life. Or better, as resistance to living. We feel like we’re operating against a headwind. It grinds a person down, little by little, engendering discouragement, disappointment, and eventually despair. 

That is chaos. 

In his book on the topic, Cornelius Plantinga Jr., gives what is probably my favorite definition of sin: “any agential evil for which some person (or group of persons) is to blame. In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.”

That’s a good definition and we can extend it to define chaos. Chaos is an expression of the disordered will; at its worst, it is the permanent, willed opposition to shalom.

It doesn’t feel good to be near the chaos dragon (remember Asag’s hideous aspect?) but then we Christians don’t have a choice: To follow Jesus is to engage in chaosmacht. War on the chaos dragon. In fact, in every domain, the life of the disciple of Jesus is a continuous manifestation of shalom over and against the chaos dragon. 

Make no mistake: We will need to know how to do that in the season (probably a long season) ahead. 

In the next few posts I’m going to (try to) unpack the spiritual dimension of the trends shaking the world. Because honestly—any ancient person would see our age as a struggle between gods, and most ancient Jews would see our moment as an expression of God’s judgment. It probably is. 

This series might feel like a hard right turn after Equal to the Apostles. Weren’t we just talking about an extraordinary move of God in our time? Indeed, we were—and that extraordinary move may coincide with extraordinary circumstances. It’s happened that way before. And the power of the people of God comes not from ignoring the times but from defying them. We live with wide-eyed clarity but our vision includes powers the world does not understand. 

Some of what we have to discuss is very disturbing. But we can handle it because God has a dog in the fight. 

Which takes us back to the Slain-choosers of Viking lore. 

Of all the attributes of the Slain-choosers the most dangerous by far is their attraction. They hate humans. Even so, they are literally spellbinding (isn’t that just like your social media feed).

If you want to survive an encounter with a Slain-chooser—which few do—there’s only one way to do that.

You need a destiny.

A powerful fate has to weigh you down. King Helgi survived because the words of a Norn had not been fulfilled. Sigrun the dragon slayer survived his encounter with Brunhilde because he had work still to do.

That is one of the many superpowers of those who are submitted to Jesus: We are held in place by the resurrection and the restoration of all things. We are stabilized by the mission of Christ, which is our pole star. It is a weight that can keep a person focused in disorienting times.