You know, Yule is supposed to be a time of peace. A time when we put aside the sword and the axe, where we drink the mead of brotherhood and share the feasts of kinship. Gifts for gifts, joy for joy, perhaps a kiss under the mistletoe to bring joy with that plant rather than sorry. Tis a season of mirth, in a long, cold winter.

So why the fuck do people have to keep fucking this up for me! Seriously, I get it, not everyone celebrates Yule, but you’d think we could put aside all this god damn bullshit for even a week! No, we have to keep pushing for a god damn race war because some lives are more valuable than others, or so people claim.

If anyone wants the link to the article that spawned this, ask and I’ll provide it. Suffice it to say, that it was one of those posts that starts off with “my white voice doesn’t mean as much,” and went down there, calling out the Congress of the Goddess for making a weak, non-specific statement decrying the police violence and calling for justice because all lives matter. Well, according to the poster, it was black lives that matter.

Given the last few days, you can imagine my response to that. I attempted to be polite. I even, as an aside, mentioned that to Hel and the other gods of death I’ve worked with that hold every life, regardless of whose it is, to be equal. I also pointed out the inevitability of where their matrices of privilege and valuing deaths and voices above and below each other.

My points of inevitability were ignored. My statements about how Hel and other Gods of Death view those who die were mocked, I was told I did not speak for Hel, I did not work in the “black building,” with them, and that the Gods of Death do in fact value certain lives more than others, and I was just putting on airs, trying to be spooky, and assuming my internet presence meant more than it did.

Now, those who read my blog know who, what, I am. I don’t put on airs, I don’t try to be spooky, and despite some people’s claims I really don’t claim to be more spiritually connected than others. To be honest, I’m probably one of the less spiritually connected people out there. Everyone else, it seems, has an easier time seeing and talking to spirits, where as I often have trouble. And no, I don’t work in the “black building” (which I had to check on and seems to be one of the names for the central hub all souls go to before being sent on to their proper after lives. It apparently popped up in the last few hundred years as humans began mass scale travel).

But I am the Son of Hel, adopted to the very throne of She who Keeps the Dead. There is virtually no day that I do not speak with her, or spend the entire day hanging out. The only exceptions are when she has work she has to do, or I have work I have to do with my generals or by myself. So we talk, a lot. Hel has been a part of my life for over 12 years now, she has shaped and molded me into the being she desires for her kingdom. We don’t always agree on everything, but we always talk it out. And one of the things we have talked a lot about, and some things I know instinctively as the power of Helheim flows into and through me is this.

The dead are equal.

That has been one of the universal truths since time begin. In fact, if one was going to make a case for a universal truth out there, death being equal is the only one I could point to as being universal without debate. Old, you, rich, poor, white, black, yellow, green, everyone dies. You can argue about taking it with you when you go, but you can’t argue that you go.

Go and read the myths of any people. While I can’t claim to have read them all, those I’ve read share a similar set of rules: everyone can die, everyone stays dead, and no one gets preferential treatment about their dying or getting out. Now, there are stories of people coming to saved loved ones from death, and nearly succeeding, but there is not universal rule of race, wealth, or any other class being the ones who get that special treatment. Anyone has the right to ask that…and the right to fail.

There’s a very important reason for this. The living often put more or less importance on certain groups. “Women and children first!” “#blacklivesmatter” “Axis uber allies.” Etc. The living can do this, and do do this. They say that certain races are better, or they are worse, or that men are better or that women are better, that people with privileges are good or people with privileges are bad. And we all see the damage that kind of attitude does. We all see the racial hatred as those screaming that black lives matter try to shout down those who say all lives matter. When those who claim that white voices have no place in arguments that effect the white person as much as the black person. Or that the black person need to be silent because white people are talking.

Because I have seen where that kind of attitude takes us. And, at night and sometimes even in the day…I hear the voices of those slain because of those attitudes. People are eager to call for justice in the death of Brown…but it is not Brown’s voice I hear calling for justice…it is Zemir’s. I hear those slaughtered because of their skin color, and yes, many of them are “White.” Hel is a European Goddess, and to her come European dead, just as Hades receives, just as Lucifer and Christ receive. I have been afraid to speak with them on this, for fear that they gets as many at seems we do if not more. People slaughtered in the name of race and justice and privilege. Numbers I fear, with my understanding of these models and matrices of racial privilege and racialized systems, will only grow. Because when people believe that the entire system is against them with no hope…they will destroy those systems and the people who “make up” those systems.

Because I have studied history and I know how little humans value human lives. I remember the words before the Holocaust, how the Jews were privileged, how they did not suffer as the German people suffered, how they ran the banks and the entire system that was keeping down the German people and how there was only one way that Germans could be free.

Kill the Jews. Kill the Jews! KILL THE JEWS!!!!!

And so…they killed the Jews, because that was the only way to removed the privileged from their position of oppression.

The one who insisted I was wrong, who insisted I needed to educate myself, who insisted that the Gods of Death valued some lives over others, who feels that Gods of Death should value lives over lives because of socially constructed differences created by the living, seems to feel that such is only right. Let the wealthy, the privileged, the white, be reaped without care, but take not those lives which are more precious. Not realizing, not caring, what an imbalance that would create, what message it would send.

Call me weak, call me a fool, but do not say I do not speak for Hel when I can assure the world that in Helheim, each life is precious, each life has value as we take it to our eternal Queendom, and each life is equal to the one before it and the one after it. Because that is our promise. You may not have been equal in life, but at least in death you are made equals. Because to have it any other way would be to disrespect the sanctity of both life and death.

Hela Bless.