From the dark waters of the unconscious there comes a particular call that, when realised, pulls our waking minds towards it with a force as unavoidable as death. This is the call that cries out to us when we feel the deep resonances of myth, culture and tradition binding themselves anew to our beings. This is the call that stokes the flames of our deepest passions and longings; the silent, wordless voices of those who came before sharing the soul, lore, crafts and wisdom of a less perverse age. It is the residue of the touch of the Allfather; the Ancestral god; he of the Regin who gave his people breath, speech and senses, though their memory now fades as they become blighted and numbed by the frosts of Utgard. This memory is that of both the dead and of the living. It is the collective unconscious spilling into our own dark, vast chasms of waters that, to most, remain unexplored and unstirred. It is that to which we are all bound but are mostly asleep to except for the occasional, haunted sense of yearning, the sudden, brief urge towards Mystery or the innate sense of wrongness that grasps at us through our dreams, lost hopes and lonely boredom.
Yet we can find this memory again. It lives on within us and within the world. The keys to our lost selves lie Tradition. For the spark of memory is not dead, nor will it ever die; as long as even just a few minds sustain it, it will remain. Silent, unbidden and elusive it may now be, but it cannot be repressed from the soul of man entirely, though forces of blindness and forgetfulness exist in both man and in Midgard that will always strive for this to be so. Though the gathering storm of convenient witlessness swells in the minds of many, a memory persists in the core of man’s being that will tug and gnaw and burn its way to the surface of the soul of he who can hear its echoes through the ages. But so also shall it confuse and confound the senseless and the lost into a maelstrom of oblivion.
