Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

The Trans-Siberian Railway running
along the shore of Lake Baikal

A sense of disorientation pervades this short novel. 

Eastbound was written by French author Maylis de Kerangal, published in French in 2012 and in English by Archipelago Books in 2023, translated by Jessica Moore. 

The basic story is this: Aliocha is a young man who has been conscripted into the Russian army. Despite efforts to avoid military service, he finds himself on the Trans-Siberian railway rattling across the endless taiga to some unknown Siberian destination for his military training. Desperate to escape, he strikes up a relationship with a foreigner, a French woman who is also riding the train. They become co-conspirators, hiding Aliocha from the vicious sergeant Letchov for the duration of the trip so that Aliocha might escape and be free.  

The novel begins with disorientation. The opening sentence of the story is "These guys come from Moscow and don't know where they're going." So already we are on a journey into nowhere. To pass the endless time, the conscripts bully one another aimlessly. The disconnection is profound. Early in the book, two nameless conscripts come up behind Aliocha on the train and begin to harass him, pushing and punching. At first he plays the victim. But eventually Aliocha turns and with sudden violence punches one, sending him sprawling to the floor. The buddy, left standing there, "looks at his friend lying there among puddles of beer and cigarette butts, looks him up and down, expressionless, and then even gives him a kick in the side, turns on his heel and abandons him there" (15-16). No good samaritans here, only profound isolation and alienation. Everyone is a stranger.

Aliocha himself is disoriented. Wanting desperately to escape, he looks for a map listing the train stops, but he can't find one -- talk about a classic existential dilemma (18). He is simply lost on this train in a world of brutes and sadists. He loses track of the days and the time. He doesn't know how long he has been on the train. His memory is patchy and he can't string it together, "Aliocha concentrates hard to locate a few temporal reference points . . . .but fails to restore the sequence of nights and days since Moscow, fails to identify what the date is today" (91). He is disoriented about the people around him and the world in general. When he first encounters the French woman Hélène, he confuses her for an American perhaps "from Wyoming or Arizona" (38). So he knows nothing, and even confesses that he knows nothing about western women (69). And because of the language barrier, they can only communicate in pantomime.

Hélène the other protagonist is also disoriented. She too is trying to escape, from Siberia where she moved with her boyfriend yet now feels alienated, "how difficult it was for her living here, out of place, out of her own climate, her language, blind and deaf she would say over and over, laughing, and alone (55). Impulsively she takes the train, trying to leave Russia behind but going in the wrong direction, eastbound toward the sea. Her own sense of the world is disoriented, "she has a tragic and patchy image of Russia, a jumbled montage (59) of books and snippets of images from media and the news. There is no integration no wholeness, just a jumble of phenomenological perceptions. She also is devoid of purpose. She doesn't know where she is going or why. She chooses to help Aliocha seemingly on a whim. She doesn't know him and doesn't know why she even decided to intervene. "What's done is done," she tells herself (50). It's just a choice, made "without hesitation, without even weighing his requiest"  that sets things in motion, creates a bond between these two strangers. Aliocha muses that "she may not even know why she did it, maybe just for fun, to play the game" (69).

Meanwhile, the train rolls through the endless Russian landscape. The landscape through which they move is also bewildering, without human scale. It takes on many meanings throughout the journey. It is an abyss in which one disappears, a "blurry territory from which no one returns" (10).  It can be an inhuman and alien landscape, the endless taiga, "the skin of the Earth, the epidermis of Russia" (41), it is the "realm of bears" (48). It is rapturous sublime of Lake Baikal, so mythic that the one compliment Aliocha has ever given to a woman is that her eyes are like Lake Baikal (71) - a lake that he nor she has ever seen. In one of the best descriptions in the book, the train compartments erupt in hot-cultured expressions of ecstatic joy as Lake Baikal comes into view (85-88). 

On the train, Aliocha and Hélène exist in a sort of timelessness or jumbled time - time stretches and snaps, slowing and elongating then suddenly speeding up "the train that rolls unerringly, crossing time zones one by one, breaking up time as it charges through space; the train that compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with earth's clocks (92). The passengers have "little by little renounced the alignment of their biological clocks with the terrestrial cycle of night/day/night, tick=tock-tick-tock and something else in the had given way, freeing an unknown temporality, elastic and floating" (124-25). This confusion of time is deeply disorienting, loosening their grip on what is real, what is happening. "Their REM sleep time has been whittled down as well, so they have trouble committing to memory the things they are experiencing" (125).

Yet within this profound disorientation, a precise drama unfolds. These strangers, thrown in this train together as the bewildering world rushes past, enact their own play, take sides, make choices, and risk all.  

This is French existentialism at its finest. We are all riding this train speeding into unknown, rushing through a bewildering world. Thrown in medias res  among these strangers - whom we don't really know, with whom we can only pantomime and not really communicate, just thrown together in this crazy ride with us. And none of us really know why. There is only the drama on the train, only the now, only the choice to act in the moment. All we can do is reach out, take a risk to connect as best we can with another stranger. All we can do is to act, to create our own story, to find a meaning and purpose in what we make of the world around us. 

Odinism and the Monstrous

This is an AI generated image made by DeepAI.org
with the prompt "haunted forest."

We live in a haunted age, a world of monsters. For all the technology and rationalism, the monsters lurk all around us. Have there ever been so many monsters?

Monsters are stories we tell and pictures we paint, literary or cinematic constructions that embody the fears and perceived threats that we can't otherwise name. Monsters haunt the pages of books, movies, media, true crime podcasts, government propaganda and campaign speeches, courtrooms and unsolved murder cases, all woven from the haunted threads of our own cultural failures and horrors, the dark fairy tales and monster stories of our own society.

In his article "Monster Culture: 7 Theses," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that the monster's body is a cultural body. "The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment— of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to  be read: the monstrum is etymologically 'that which reveals,' 'that which warns,' a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement." (Monster Theory Reader, 38)   

The monster stalks the edges of imagination – the monster is the misanthropic rage, the moral desolation, the savage inhuman strength, the will to destroy without reason or purpose, a barbarism that would shred the sinews of civilization if we let it in. So it must be displaced--we must have an Other to take it on.

Monster theory is a type of literary analysis that deconstructs or decodes monsters into their constituent parts - not flesh and blood of course -- but into the social, cultural, religious, and psychological forces from which they emerge.

The Delphi murders – savage, unexplained, unsolved – of course they slip into the realm of the mythic, the realm of the monstrous. The conjecture posed by the defense has more akin with True Detective than to anything based in the factual evidence of the case. The defense distracts us - points us away from the defendant and toward the monstrous Other. Odinism – this shadowy vague threat – becomes a convenient place to displace our fears. 

What do we know about Odinism? What does the average person know about Odinism? Nothing--it is a blank slate, a shadow upon which fear and terror and blame can be thrown. Cohen points out that "the monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond— of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within" (Monster Theory Reader, 41).  So Odinism--already so strange, so bizarre, so enigmatic--comes forward as a monster. Clothed in the unknown, a vague, ambiguous, shadowy threat that provides a hook upon which to hang the fears, the unresolved nightmare, the senseless and savage violence of this horrible event that only a faceless monster could have perpetrated. 

In an immediate sense, it siphons off suspicion from the defendant -- accurate enough to be possible but vague enough to be unprovable. The defense has tried to build a narrative from the vague evidence that could be interpreted as pointing toward Paganism. This evidence--a bloody mark on a tree imaginatively reconstructed as a Fehu rune, the girls' bodies posed in runic shapes or as the hanged man Tarot card, a jumble of sticks thrown across the bodies that are supposed to be a runic sigil? It is the same "witchy" aesthetic that anyone could have picked up from watching the first season of True Detective or the latest folk horror movie.  

Enough perhaps to raise doubt, to raise new questions that will at least spin off into more months of delay, perhaps even rise to the level of reasonable doubt. Monsters can do this--in a scape-goating kind of way, they distract us, pulling our attention away from the immediate and casting it onto the vague, the distant, an imagined rather than a real evil. We can blame the monster rather than ourselves or one of our own.

To some extent we don't even need Odinism to be real - we don't need or want too many facts and details, we don't desire to focus in too much. To some extent we just need Odinism to be the monster, the placeholder for all the violence, savagery, misanthropy that we cannot make sense of or accept otherwise.

This monstering of Odinism is complicated for Norse Pagans, Heathens, and Pagans. Why? 

On one hand, Pagans participate in this monstering. It is a strategy to define contemporary Paganism as socially acceptable. It establishes a dichotomy between good Paganism and bad Odinism. It clearly distances Paganism from any association with racism, violence, sociopathic behavior. That's what the Odinists are. 

This is one of the unfortunate but ongoing stereotypes of all Pagans - that they are evil, demonic, engaged in human sacrifice, consorting with the devil, you name it.  Setting up Odinism or other categories as the Monstrous enables contemporary Pagans to say - we are not that. I remember being at a Contemporary Pagan Studies session a few years ago at the AAR conference and hearing the phrase "those racist Heathens" thrown about in a vague way - no one seemed to know who "they" were, - just a vague shadowy evil presence out there somewhere -  just that "we" weren't them.

But this monstering of Odinism may not work -- it might drag other Pagans along with it. Odinism as a religion of child sacrifice, runes, witchy symbols, violence, and evil may just cast its monstrous shadow over the rest of Paganism in the minds of the average American consuming this true crime material. Beware of creating monsters.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. "Monster Theory: 7 Theses." In The Monster Theory Reader. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Mittman  Asa Simon.  Dendle  Peter. The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. United Kingdom: Ashgate  2012.

Runic Astrology

I actually checked the book out of
my local library and read it.

 Lister, Richard. The Book of Runic Astrology: Unlock the Ancient Power of Your Cosmic Birth Runes. London: Hay House, 2023.

There is a tension that exists between popularization and dilution -- not only in religion. Insiders often object to and resist the popularization of their tradition, whatever it may be. 

Should interested newbies be required to cross a high bar by working their way into a tradition through learning, training, and experience? Or should a tradition be made more accessible--simpler, diluted-- so that newbies can more easily enter it?

Back in October, a friend sent me this article from the Daily Telegraph, "How Viking Runes Can Transform Your Life" - a marketing piece for Richard Lister's book "The Book of Runic Astrology."  Lister is doing this for Norse Paganism--presenting it in a way that is easily accessible to those who are outside the tradition but intrigued and interested.

This isn't new. Astrology has been part of pop culture forever. But as Norse Paganism has become trendy through shows like Vikings, interest in runic astrology has also grown. A few books have been published (two of which I have written about here and also available here). Even Vogue Scandinavia published an article on "reading your viking birth runes" and you can't get more pop culture than Vogue, right? Great stuff. With his new book and marketing savvy, Lister is making a play to be the popular expert on runic astrology.

And that makes sense. Lister is not a scholar of Old Norse or religious studies. He isn't a Heathen religious leader or gothi (goði). He is a holistic life coach who developed this system to do astrology readings with a Norse flair. His Norse Paganism isn't an artifice -- according to the book he has twenty years of experience doing viking historical re-enactment and a long personal history with Norse religious practice. In fact, Lister opens and closes his book by recounting two personal spiritual experiences he has had with Odin, the God of the runes. Given his Norse Pagan credibility, Lister is also an eclectic spiritual practitioner whose focus is working with people and their problems. And one form of guidance he offers is astrology with a Norse aesthetic. 

This is Norse Paganism crafted for the global consumer culture of late-modern individualism. Wyrd is not "fate" in Lister's interpretation. Rather it is a "guideline that we can influence," he writes, that is "always consensual." "You do you boo," he sums up (10). In Lister's approach, runic astrology is a tool that anyone can use to read the energy of the Wyrd, the "pattern and path laid out for us by the Norns," and navigate one's Runic Star Path to "co-create the life you want." 

In a sort of media-savvy makeover, Lister engages his niche market by overlaying traditional (Greco-Roman) astrology with aspects of Norse religion. The runic calendar of 24 runes of the Elder Futhark maps onto the astrological calendar of 12 zodiac signs. The names of Norse Gods are substituted for the usual names of planets and heavenly bodies. The elementals are loosely connected with figures from Norse myth. And the houses of the zodiac become Norse Stamme, "branches" of the world tree Yggdrasil. 

The power of Lister's approach is its simplicity. Even an astrological idiot like myself could easily get my free astrological birth chart from a website and use Lister's charts to find my birth runes. Lister calls this the "Runic Star Path" - quite catchy, right? : Gebo is both my Sunna soul rune  and my Manni emotional rune (Sun and Moon signs respectively.) Raidho is my Jord rune - the rising sign, or "rune of practical purpose" according to Lister. And Tiwaz is my Nordir or luck rune, equivalent to the North Node. Once you have these four runes, Lister provides his own set of descriptions to help you interpret your life journey. This transposition of astrology into a Norse timbre is topped off with a sprinkling of Old Norse neologisms--my favorite is glóa stigr the “Glowing Path Makers” (34), Lister's term for the three main birth runes. 

While reading this book, I definitely realized that my understanding of astrology is woefully lacking. I don’t really understand it and haven't spent much time on it. However it is an important dimension of Paganism and Pagan cosmology. Weren’t almost all the elder Pagan cultures in dialogue with the heavens? Tracking its changes, sensitive to its energies, aligned with its powers? There are hints in the Old Norse sources of astrological/astronomical sky lore in Pagan Scandinavia. Beyond Europe, astrology in Hindu religious culture goes back thousands of years. And there are fascinating discoveries regarding MesoAmerican astrology.  That said, not all Pagans use astrology. It is simply there as part of the cosmology, available as a spiritual resource. Even among the elder Pagans (arch-Pagans), some cultures and times would have made more of astrology than others. All religions change and consulting the stars undoubtedly would have waxed and waned as a popular practice.

Beyond the historical frame, astrology is congruent with the cosmologies of Pagan religions and the worlds of many powers they describe. Both polytheism and animism involve cosmologies in which many powers operate. Like these ontological systems, astrology is about living in an interconnected world – where all these powers interact and influence each other. These polyvalent interrelationships are sometimes referred to as correspondences in magical practice – things and qualities that are connected, influence each other, represent and resonate with other entities. Astrology is one type of interrelationship – a recognition that the movements and relationships of cosmic bodies influence our lives.

Lister's system is not particularly compatible with earlier presentations of runic astrology. For instance, there are few similarities with Nigel Pennick's book Runic Astrology. Even basic aspects like the God-planet associations are different: Lister associates Neptune with Ran while Pennick went with Aegir. Of course, Pennick's book is so complex to be almost impenetrable by the average person--as Lister mentions in this great interview "Change Your Life With Runic Astrology.". There is no attempt to connect this to archaeo-astronomy or actual Norse cultural knowledge of the heavens. As Lister makes clear, his astrology is about magic more than "maths" - "This is more than just rune maths and planet maths. It's trusting your intuition, your insight and your heart. Trust your feelings as you build Runic Star Paths for yourself, your event or your clients. This is where power is to be found. Right there. In you. Your heart will lead you to victory" (232)

For more on MesoAmerican astrology: An old but good article on the complex Mayan cultural relationship to Venus: Aveni, Anthony F. “Venus and the Maya: Interdisciplinary Studies of Maya Myth, Building Orientations, and Written Records Indicate That Astronomers of the Pre-Columbian World Developed a Sophisticated, If Distinctive, Cosmology.” American Scientist 67, no. 3 (1979): 274–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27849219. 

Additional Sources:

Claim Your Magic by Magin Rose

Donald Tyson, Runic Astrology

S. Kelley Harrell, Runic Book of Days: A Guide to Living the Annual Cycle of Rune Magick

Nigel Pennick, Runes and Astrology

Harry Holland, Viking Astrology: Unveiling the Secrets of the Norse Runes

Kevin Rowan-Drewitt, Astrology of The Runes