Why we can all be more Loki

From excavated Nordic temples to the forces that drive our own lives, ambitions and relationships, things are never what they seem with the shapeshifter god. And that’s a very good thing.

There’s a riddle that nags away at specialists in Norse myth.

In ancient Norse culture, each God or goddess had a cult, a temple, followers. There were the Aesir, who tended to be more warlike and warrior-ish and the Vanir, who tended towards fertility, cultivation, and farming. If you were a blacksmith, you might have some allegiance to Thor, as if he was a guild. If you were a fisher or boatmaker, maybe Njörðr, who looked after those things. There was a hierarchym and there were attributes, and it all made sense.

There is one god who was not worshipped. Who (as far as archaeology can tell us) never had a single temple, or cult. And that is Loki. God, or god-adjacent being, of (depending on his frame of mind and yours) mischief, trickery, deception, creative play, imagination, fantasy, shapeshifting and what we might now call kink. And if all that mixed together sounds great, loads of fun, or like, REALLY problematic? Well, welcome to the corpus of stories about Loki.

There has been some debate about what his omission from the pantheon in terms fo cults and temples and adherents means. Scholars argue whether it’s because he was a later addition, or a sign of disapproval, or illegitimacy, and I’m not here to argue with them. But I do think it’s interesting. He was very clearly different.

He does appear to have been a necessary chaos particle, added to all that order and hierarchy.

Think about it. Everyone has their authority, their place, their role. It gets quite stale quite quickly, right? Not much changes. Everyone obeys Odin, everyone leaves Thor to his work, the crops grow, the fishermen fish, the seasons change, life goes on. What you need, to generate stories, is a character who can pop up in the middle of this stultifying order and perfection, this model universe, and go: “Yeah, but what if I shave Thor’s wife’s head while she’s asleep?” followed by, “What if, so I don’t get killed by Thor, I go and pay the Dwarves under the mountains to make replacement hair for Thor’s wife out of pure gold, to make amends?” Or, “What if I twisted the words of prophecy, so that Baldur dies even though he’s immortal?

Unpredictability, in other words. And in the ordered world of the gods, that’s an occasional guest, erupting into the hierarchy. But it has to be managed. Chained and imprisoned, in fact, as Loki was by the giantess-goddess Skadi. With a serpent dripping poison onto him from above. Forever. And Loki being Loki, he finds humour in it as well as misery. Loki being Loki, he might well find a bit more in it, but we needn’t go there right now.

Now, if that reminds you of someone else, you’d be right. Promethius, chained on a mountain with an eagle (the emblem of Zeus) pecking out his liver every day. Promethius, the demigod, who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to humanity. Yup, here it is again: The unpredictable act of rebellion and what-if, and being chained up and tormented forever as punishment.

Now if that reminds you of anyone else, you’d also be right. Lucifer – meaning light-bringer, or carrier of light, so a bit like Promethius there too. The most favoured of all the angels, bristling at Yahweh’s instructions as to the Way The Hierarchy Was Going to Be. Who then went to the Garden of Eden, shapeshifted into a snake, and whispered: “Sure, this is a perfect and orderly sealed world, in which nothing can happen. But what if we stole knowledge? What if it went like THIS instead?” and of course it was a trick, but of course if it wasn’t for that trick, humanity would not have been let loose, and live and die and become the generators of madness and brilliance and pain and progess and beauty and terror that we are.

So there’s the perfect, orderly, sealed, universe. And there’s the disruptive presence, who uses their ability to imagine things otherwise, to turn things on their head.

This is where you get Plato, proposing all poets be banned from his perfect, idealised Republic, because, “The poets lie.” They “corrupt the minds of the young”, like Lucifer and Promethius and Loki.

So Loki is the god of something after all.

And that something is the What-if. It’s the chaos, the creativity, the ironising of authority. It’s the suggestion that things might be otherwise. It’s the roll of the dice, the dopamine hit, and it’s creative thinking.

Not just the art form – Bragi had that nailed down, with music and dancing. Loki was the great remixer. He was Bob Dylan’s words when his band went electric, shuffling onstage and saying simply, “It used to go like that. Now it goes like this.”

So there’s something fitting about him not having any temples, or settled purviews, or authorities, or established cults. That’s not what he was for. He was for looking at the ones that were there, and thinking how they might benefit from a catalyst, a spark, a confusion.

To cast him as a villain is very Marvel, very Hollywood. Also to try and bring him back into the family, by making him Thor’s brother (he wasn’t, he just liked to fuck with him). After all, it’s what happens to outliers, weirdos, genre-mixers and mischief-makers at first.

But without that spirit of what-if, there probably wouldn’t be a Hollywood. Because there wouldn’t be any stories to start with. Just a perfectly ordered world, in which everything has its place.

Fishers fish, farmers farm, the seasons change, and everyone – everyone – finds that in their sleep, in their daydreams, in their quiet moments, they’re wishing him into existence anyway.

He’s the subconscious, he’s dreams, he’s creativity. He shapeshifts through culture, erupting back into the mainstream thousands of years on. In the same year as Tom Hiddlestone’s Loki stole the Tesseract, author Louie Stowell made him a children’s character, who taught The Bad God’s Guide To Being Good. He’s the phantasms of Freud before Freud, he’s hilarious, sexy, wrong, cool, kind, cruel, impulsive, scheming. He’s everything you need to be if you’re going to make stories, jokes, myths, viral shit that pisses authoritarian gods off happen, where before there are only temples and worship.

So let’s make a temple for him. Maybe here. Inside a flickering screen. Or maybe just in your mind. In the potential for what you do with the next idea you have, the next thing someone briefs you on.

Spice it up a bit. He’d like that.