Sunday, January 29, 2006

Ginnungagap by Therion, a Swedish black metal band


[In the beginning there was a void, a big gap of darkness, filled with the primal forces of creation. The heat of Muspel and the ice of Nifel made the essence of life come forth from the void. The first living being, The Giant Ymer, was born out of darkness and he is the ancestor of the creatures of the universe. The world was formed from his slaughtered body. Ginnungagap is the black hole from which everything came out and into which everything will return in the end.]


Fall deep into Void
(in the) black hole of Nothing

[Soprano:]
Hail, Flow of Vergelmar
Hail, Flow of Vergelmar
Hail, Flow of Vergelmar
Hail, Old Void!

[Alto:]
Hail, Flow of Vergelmar
Heat of creation
Hail, Flow of Vergelmar
Hail, Old Void!

[Tenor/bass:]
Spark in the Nothingness
Heat of creation
Make the ice start to melt
life wake up in the void.

Ymer is born, fire and ice
Chaos will form, Megin will rise

Fader Ymer drack fran urkon
En strom av mjolk som gav oss liv.

Oppna gapet i ryndend mitt
Floda av blod fran Ymers kropt
Varldar skapas utav hans kott
Nio (till) antal pa Yggorasil.

Ymers gap - Ymers runa
Ymers ond - Ymers urlag



"Some things don’t translate very well and that’s why we kept them in Swedish. That’s why the first song is beginning in English and ending in Swedish, these lines translated to English wouldn’t make any sense." Christofer Johnsson, Therion

(quote from Metalbite)
"Ginnungagap (Scandianvian Norse). The "cup of illusion" literally; the abyss of the great deep, or the shoreless, beginningless, and endless, yawning gulf; which in esoteric parlance we call the "World’s Matrix", the primordial living space. The cup that contains the universe, hence the "cup of illusion".

...

The gaping void of Norse mythology; space as an unimaginable abstraction, without form and void. The formless void that preceded creation, and the abode of the gods during the long night of nonbeing. The prefix "ginn" is found only in conjunction with such words a ginnheilog (the supreme divine essence), ginnregin (the highest gods, superior to the aesir and even the vanir). Ginnungave represents the "most holy sanctuaries" -- the universe. Odin in his loftiest aspect is referred to as ginnarr, connoting the aether or Sanskrit akasa. The verb ginna also means to delude or play a trick on.

According to the Edda's poetic description, before the existence of worlds, there was naught but Ginnungagap. All matter was frozen in a state of nonbeing, for in the absence of the energizing impulsion (the gods) nothing moved, no atoms existed, hence no matter. This state of non-existence was portrayed as the frost giant Ymir, which resulted when heat from the fiery world, Muspellsheim (home of flame), met the vapors from the world of mists, Niflheim (home of nebulae), creating fertile vapor in the void."

From A Wisdom Archive on Ginnungagap
From a fabulously verbose review in Stylus Magazine of the heavy metal band Ginnungagap:

"Ginnungagap is THE Void—the one that predated all the let-there-be performative polysyllabic spew; the selfsame chasm as Hesiod’s chaos, as the Pre-Socratic void-as-some-sort-of-gap principium sapientiae, as a pinprick of a point affixed to a Euclidean Plane where matrices decide its transformation in an axis wholly arbitrary. Pre-universe, pre-particular, pre-pre’s basement’s basement, there was the neuroscience drenched Nordic yawn, the reaction involuntary to a Boredom disseminated from the Gape of Nothingness. Whilst reading the Eddas, one’s clued into cosmology’s state pre-cosmology: there was once this boundless boundlessness; a period of no heaven nor earth placed at the end of a declarative sentence devoid of syntax, or judgment—logical or illogical. There was only Space. —Space w/out top nor bottom. Space populated only with a mist/fog that flew from a central fountain; an origin that originated twelve rivers that ran upon one another; and in the grip of the Great Cold, froze, filling the void as water weighs its well. Contra Newton’s notion of Space as absolute, as the great Unchanging Unchangeable, the Nordic Void altered out of alteration itself; boundary belted across the waist of the Primordial. — Hence Ginnungagap. Thus Ginnungagap, once keeping Muspell (flame’s locus) and Niflheim (mist’s locus) seemingly contained, loosened its grasp: warm winds wore down ice and birthed Being: Ymir. Like the Christians’ Christ, Ymir was ‘blood ransom’: for the Earth to be rendered extant, he was slain. Ymir’s body became terra firma; bones broke into ranges of mountains; blood slipped into seas; hair hardened into trees; his skull split into the clouds and became the heavens. Common dictum: To make, one must have material."