“Chaos, Miss Cole. I’m talking about chaos. It’s everywhere. A force larger and far more powerful than us, but we want to pretend we’re in control.” She drags on her joint, inhaling deep.
“Is that why you painted her? Because…chaos?”
“In part,” she says. “I like sacred feminine energy because it scares people. Goddesses are”—she waves a hand in the air—“challengingto us. We need them, but we don’t want to admit it.”
I shake my head. “Why is that?”
She shrugs. “No one can love you like your mother,” she says now. “And no one can hurt you like her either.”
The words slam into me with all the force of Solidago’s winds. For a second, I can’t draw breath. “You talked about primordial goddesses the day I bought this,” I remind her.
She nods. “They are the beginning and end of everything, Miss Cole, the very stuff creation is made of. They shape the world.” She rolls the joint thoughtfully between her fingers. “This, too, is chaos.
“Did you know that in the tropics, elephants shape the forest? Not by planting trees, obviously, but by destroying them. They can create gaps in the canopy where seedlings flourish, they make pathways other species rely on and churn the earth for new seeds to germinate. Many plants depend on their digestive tracts for distribution.” She watches me through the smoke.
“I thought we were talking about goddesses, not elephants.”
Anneli shrugs. “To the ant, surely the elephant is a god, a creator and destroyer of worlds.”
I push my hair behind my ears, understanding dawning. “You think they’re real.”
She eyes me strangely. “Iknowthey are.” She takes a drag, lets it out slowly, and sets her joint down. “You know, I used to be a professor before the art took over, of mythology and religion.” She gets up and saunters to a bookshelf, plucks a volume off, and brings it over to me. The title reads,The Divine Autochthon: Goddesses of the Emergence. Beneath it,Dr. Anneli T. Nilsen. “So, I know what I’m talking about.”
I admit, I didn’t expect that. I remember the books at her gallery. Hers was the author’s name on the spines, the writer of them all. I set the book on the table. “Doctor? That’s impressive.”
“I was older than you are now, but still a young woman when I traveled to Svalbard for my work. It’s an archipelago belonging to my home country of Norway, and Longyearbyen is a settlement on the largest island there. I was there for the sun festival in March, when the sun first becomes visible after four months of polar night. To observe a place where humanity still echoed early rites of heliolatry, or sun worship, in modern times. I’d hired a guide to take me to a glacier plateau where I could experience the sunrise like I never would again. It was to be my last sunrise in more ways than one.”
I notice my fingers gripping the Oslo mug and slowly release them. “What happened?”
“An arctic fox,” she answers. “I followed it to snap a picture. Foolish in a place where you’re not allowed to venture withouta rifle-trained guide due to the polar bear population. It was still dark, and I got away from my guide, turned around in the uniformity of the landscape. I was suddenly and truly alone.” She looks at me, dread memory hanging in her eyes. “What came racing over the distant peak when the sun broke wasn’t just the day.”
“Was it a bear?” I ask, horrified. I imagine coming face-to-face with a polar bear might be enough to damage anybody, even if you lived to tell the tale.
“I wish that’s all it had been.”
Her words make my breath go still in my chest.
“It was a shadow, wide as the mountain and darker than night, flowing like water, pouring over the landscape in a flood. It wore the face of a woman and the antlers of a reindeer, the wings of an owl and the hooves of a herd of musk oxen, as if it had cloaked itself in animal parts the way an octopus covers itself in shells to hide from predators. It boomed like a volcano erupting as it barreled toward me. And, heaven help me, I couldn’t look away.”
“Was it an avalanche?” I ask, because it can’t be what she’s describing.
“No.” She peers through me, as if she can see it again on the other side. “It was the night itself, running for its life from the morning.”
“I don’t understand. Did you stare into the sunrise too long? Is that what damaged your eyes?” I recall a second after the words are out that she already said her blindness was caused by conversion disorder, not a physical injury.
She looks directly at me now, her face cold and blank. “It was power, raw and unrelenting. And it was darkness. And it was streaking straight for me like a comet dropped from the sky and screaming the whole way.”
Whatever she saw, it terrified her. “What happened?”
“It ripped a hole through me,” she says. “And I’ve never been the same. I couldn’t see to find my guide. He had to locate me on the ice where I’d been thrown more than a dozen yards fromwhere I’d been standing, help me up, and walk me like a child back to the vehicle. I started painting the day I arrived home. I’d never even so much as drawn a stick figure before. I gave up my career in academia, became a full-time artist, and my eyesight never recovered.”
“How awful,” I whisper into my tea.
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s what I was truly there for. Did I see her because of my background in mythology? Because I’d already been studying these beings?” she asks hypothetically. “Was I primed for my encounter by my work? I really can’t say. It’s an ancient place, Svalbard, where people still live close to nature, to the sublime—the beauty and the fear. But I heard one thing as she passed over me,” Anneli says now, voice grave. “Áhcešeatni.”
“Ah-chay-sayrt-nee,” I repeat slowly, breaking it down. “What’s that?”
“She’s an ancient deity of the early Sámi people. A goddess of winter, shadows, and night who was said to protect the deer and the wild animals. The Sámi are indigenous to the Arctic, much like the Inuit. They inhabited many regions of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland. An old one, like I told you about.”
