I’ve always struggled with the idea of karma. The notion that the universe is cosmically just and balanced, and gives each of us what we deserve.1 At the root of my dissatisfaction is a simple question: why do Bad Things happen to good people?
Because, make no mistake, bad things do happen to good people. Different spiritual traditions try to explain this in different ways. One way is to assert that the things are not actually bad – the classic “God works in mysterious ways.” While they may seem like Bad Things from our current perspective, later down the line we will realize that they were actually blessings in disguise. I find this to be trite. While some events may truly be blessings in disguise, many remain irredeemably horrific. If this is the case, I’d prefer God to work in ways less mysterious and more compassionate.
The other tack people take is to claim that it’s not that the events aren’t actually bad, but that the people aren’t actually good. They may not have done anything that we can see to deserve this Bad Thing, but they must have accrued negative karma from a past life that justifies what they are experiencing today.2
I’ve seen precisely one version of this that I found compelling, in Andy Weir’s short story The Egg. The Egg is one of the most profound stories I have ever read. If you’ve never had the pleasure, I recommend you go read it now before I spoil it. Seriously, it won’t take five minutes and it’s worth every second. The idea at the core of the story is that you can reincarnate not only across space but across time, and in fact everyone ever to live on Earth is a different incarnation of you. Such a universe balances itself: for every atrocity committed against you, there was or will be another lifetime where you were the perpetrator.3 This is a profound idea, and worth pondering, but doesn’t solve the problem of things like natural disasters, which aren’t caused by human activity.
Setting these explanations aside, where else can we look for answers? Let us take a brief dip into Norse mythology. Specifically to the Norns, the three mysterious figures who sit at the base of Yggdrasil – the World Tree – and weave the web of Fate. They are named in the Icelandic poem Völuspá: Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. These names are often translated as the Past, Present, and Future, but there are myriad shades of meaning lost in such a translation. A better way of translating them would be “That Which is Fixed”, “That Which is Currently Unfolding”, and “That Which is Owed.” These names have some fascinating ramifications for how we think about Fate.
Urðr governs the unchangeable past: the sum of our ancestral legacy and all the actions of our previous self. It is those things bequeathed to us. Skuld represents future outcomes – not in the sense of a fixed Fate, but as obligations we carry forward. She embodies the sum of all the debts and responsibilities we have taken on (voluntarily or not) up to this point. It’s not about some cosmic scale that balances the universe to enforce a certain outcome, it’s the simple nature of cause and effect. Whether we choose to meet those obligations or try to avoid them, there will be Consequences. Verðandi is where our personal agency lives. She embodies the choices we can make in the present moment – given all the fixed past leading up to this point, and all the obligations that we carry into the future with us – Verðandi lets us chart our own course. If Urðr is the hand of cards we are dealt, and Skuld is what is at stake, Verðandi is how we choose to play. This is the point where we get to navigate the web of Fate for ourselves.
And that’s the other important idea in the Norse conception of Fate: that it’s a web. The choices we make influence the future Consequences we face ourselves, but also those of the people around us, and the people around them in turn. The effects ripple out across the web of Fate. Some choices are minor, barely impacting the web at all. Sometimes we stand at a nexus point, where the choices of a single person can dramatically influence the balance of the greater web. Larger Fate patterns usually arise as the Consequences from countless individuals making similar choices. It’s not about cosmic justice, but it is – in a sense – balanced.
Which, I find, is a satisfying answer to the question we started with. Sometimes bad things do, in fact, happen to good people. Those are the outcomes of the cards they were dealt and the choices that were made with them – the choices of those good people, but also those of the people around them. While negative choices do in fact have negative repercussions, they may not be repercussions for the person who made the choice. Not always. Not immediately. But they do introduce snarls into the web of Fate that make life harder and more fraught for everyone they touch.
This also gives us a theory of how divination works; one that allows room for both foretelling and free will. Divination is the art of reading patterns in the web of Fate. Broad outcomes shaped by collective choices carry significant momentum. They’re easy futures to read, but also hard to do anything about – mostly we just figure out the best way to hunker down and weather them. Small, personal, detailed outcomes are the easiest to influence, because they are the most subject to change. When a certain future shows up in a reading, it’s not that it has to occur, only that it is likely to, given the current trajectory of Fate.
How likely? That’s up to us to determine.
- See also, the Witches’ Rede: what we send out into the world is returned to us thrice over, good for good and bad for bad. ↩︎
- This is a very Dion Fortune position to take. ↩︎
- This is also – incidentally – a fantastic tool for cultivating empathy, because you can look at anyone and ask “what must have happened to me, in that incarnation, for me to have turned out like that?” It neatly sidesteps the fundamental attribution error. ↩︎
Leave a Reply