Introduction to magic knots. The affinity between the bandages of Kronos and Loki’s nets and his capture sheds new light on the god of time.
Kronos Enchained
Among the various surprising facts contested by the priest against the god, there is also this: having reached manhood, his son Zeus would have defeated him in war, dethroned him, bound him with all his followers, and thrown him into Tartarus. Kronos replies to the priest that he can see that he is not bound and is not in Tartarus. In truth, the god is not entirely sincere; in fact, we know Rites and Games in the Ancient World: from other sources, the statue object of worship had its feet wrapped in bands, which were untied during the Saturnalia. In the family disputes of the gods, enchainment occurs quite frequently. It is, therefore, natural to wonder what its meaning might be. The statue of Kronos has bandaged feet. But why only these? Do you want to stop the god from walking? Or is it believed that the god of heads and pillars, and therefore of officers and squads, got stuck in his snares? Was the gameboard seen as a net trap? Even in the Nordic “game of the king,” the king of a party – the only one in existence – is chained all around.
We certainly don’t ask ourselves these questions purely as a joke or for entertainment, as Lucianus does, but for a well-founded reason. In the Hittite hieroglyphs, the syllable “dana”, meaning “each one, everyone”, is represented at will with a game board or a magic knot! Hittite spelling is very pedantic, leaving little choice. If the magic knot can be alternated with the game board, the two objects are perceived as the same thing; moreover, one is aware that the concept of “everyone” is necessary for the table and the magic knot. So here we are once again grappling with parties and pillars, a market of clay puppets and gingerbread men.
Comparative myth research has not neglected the frequency with which the enchainment occurs. The knot used in this case would not be common but magical. Uranus, who first resorted to chains – the other stories are more or less all repetitions – would be, like his Indian counterpart Varuna, the magician par excellence, and his magic would consist precisely in the weaving of the ritual knot. Varuna’s attribute is the rope, and Odin-Wotan, the Germanic god of magic, is defined as “the one who binds”?
In the Odyssey, Ulysses forms an artistic knot around the ark in which he keeps his treasures from any foreign attempt at appropriation. Why is no one else but him able to untie it? Is it just a matter of patience? Certainly not; this knot has its secret, following which the initiate can untie it with the utmost ease, while the uninitiated can only make it more intricate. Even the Gordian knot could be untied in some way other than Alexander’s sword stroke: only if the secret was known.
Knotting something with cunning and art is bread for the teeth of the crafty Ulysses, the man “of many ideas”. All the knots of the Greek legend are such that they cannot be untied, not for lack of physical strength, but because they are made with cunning and skill. Its author is the god Hephaistos, the artist god. Whether he ties Hera to the chair or captures the gods Ares and Aphrodite with an invisible net, he is always the only one able to untangle the entanglement. The bonds that bind the wolf Fenrir are also magical. After the wolf had torn two robust chains, such to embarrass even a giant, the gods placed him in a harmless bond, which closed more and more the wolf resists. But shortly before the world’s end, it will lose its bonds and kill the wizard-god Odin in battle. Precisely this fight between Fenrir and Odin constitutes the fatal moment in the struggle of the gods. Odin loses power and is at the mercy of the wolf’s wrath only because the knot’s magic fails.
However, the real god of the chain is Loki. Like Heimdal, he comes from the environment of the elves, who, although welcomed among the gods, were ill-adapted to that world. “Loki is pleasant and good-looking but bad-tempered and in a very fickle way of himself. He was superior to other men in shrewdness and cunning. He always got the Ases into big trouble and got them out with shrewd advice.”
Loki is, therefore, the one who, like Ulysses, knows how to invent traps with cunning and always finds a way out of difficulties. However, concerning Ulysses, the knot is only mentioned in the episode of the ark; for Loki, it is spoken of much more widely, and the knot appears both as a net and as a tangle.
Let’s start with the second, which, as we have seen, is closely connected with the game board. In the Faroese folk song “Song of Loki,” a farmer plays on the table with Skyrmir, the cunning giant, and loses. He is therefore forced to hand over his son to him unless he manages to hide from him. He then instructs two servants to call for help, one after the other, the three gods Odin, Hönir, and Loki. We will come across this triad again, and, as we will see, always in the same context. All three deities give themselves a great deal of effort in trying to hide the child from the eyes of the giant, from whom nothing escapes. Odin hides it in the grain of an ear, Hönir in the feather of a swan, and Loki in the egg of a fish. But in all three cases, the help turns out to be in vain since the giant tracks down the boy, who manages to escape each time barely. For his part, Loki, who had foreseen such an outcome, prepares a trap for the giant; and before hiding the boy in the fish egg, he says to the farmer:
You must immediately prepare a skein while we are away, cut a wide passage, and put in an iron pole.
After the vain attempt to hide the boy, we read:
The giant looks towards the beach; the boy stands in front of him on the ground; the boy jumps so lightly that he leaves no footprints on the white sand. The giant jumped into it so heavily that he sank knee-deep in the sand. He ran the boy in great fury; he passed through the paternal skein. He passed quickly; Ingenuous, the giant followed him: But he got entangled in the passage, and the iron shaft struck him on the head. Loki didn’t want to be inert; he cut the giant’s leg off the trunk.
The leg grows back; Loki then cuts off the other one and prevents it from rejoining the trunk by placing “stone and stick” in between. These objects immediately recall Hrungnir, who places himself on the shield, and Ulikummi, whose base is cut off. The iron pole appears superfluous, but, as we will see later, it constitutes a duplication, not clear here, of the skein.
This story has many essential elements: the giant, who notices every little thing; the three rescuers Odin, Hönir, and Loki; the skein as a ritual knot and finally, the board game.
If in this story Loki appears in a certain sense as the inventor of the ritual knot, in the Edda, he is the inventor of the net. Snorri’s account is very comprehensive.
When (after Baldr’s death) the gods were enraged, Loki fled and hid in the mountains, where he built a house with four doors to have visibility in all four directions. But often during the day, he took the form of a salmon and hid in the waterfall called Franangfall. He wondered what cleverness the Ases would have devised to capture him in the waterfall. And as he sat in the house, he took a linen thread and spun a twine, as nets have been made ever since, while a fire burning before him. He then saw that the Ases had but a short way to reach him and that Odin had seen from Hlidskyalf where he was. Then he jumped up, threw himself into the water, and threw the net into the fire. But when the Ases got there, the most intelligent of them, called Kwasi, first entered, and seeing the ash, he thought it might be a trick to catch fish. He communicated it to the Ases, so they took the flax and made a net after the pattern they saw in the ashes and which Loki had made.
A detailed description of how the gods go fishing and catch Loki in the form of salmon follows.
Loki was now captured and could not find peace, and they went with him to a cave. They then took three stones and stuck them pointed up, making a hole in each. Loki’s sons, Wali and Nari, were then seized. The Ases gave the first appearance of a wolf, and he tore his brother Nari to pieces. The Ases then took the intestines and tied Loki to the three sharp stones with these. One was under his shoulders, one under his hips, and one under his popliteus; the bonds became iron.
Loki then invents the fishing net that will spell his end – while thinking about how the gods could catch him in the form of salmon if they were as smart as he is. In peril, he indeed tries to destroy the fatal invention but succeeds only partially since the shape of the net burned by the fire is recognizable in the ashes. But what is the key moment of the story? Loki is caught not with the net but with his hands when he tries to jump it. It is not the appearance of a salmon that made Loki the inventor of the net, but it is the net itself, already connected to Loki from the outset, which made him a salmon. The starting point is the grate drawn on the ground by the ash.
Based on this story, Loki has even been made the inventor of fire and has been compared to Prometheus. And indeed, these two figures have a certain parallelism, but Prometheus does not invent a network: he creates men. Nor did the narrator Snorri refers to intend to make Loki the inventor of fire. He has it written in ashes; in fact, no figures can be drawn on the stone floor; therefore, he covers it with ashes. Thus the bishop, at the time of the consecration of a church, forms a magical cross in the ashes with his curved stick: therefore, not the plan of the church, which was already built at that moment.
The figure drawn by Loki in the ash is a net; what kind of network is specified in the second part of the story? Loki is not bound by the net, as Hephaistos does with Ares or Hera, but with the intestines of his son, torn apart by his brother in the form of a wolf. But is this the place of the wolf? Fenrir is also bound. What interests us now is the singular position on three stones with their points pointing upwards, which are three bowling pins in a certain sense.
To support it, the stones must be drilled since. Otherwise, the viscera could not be fixed to them. However, the stones cannot be very large because otherwise, they would not be easily pierced by the gods. They would instead have taken a whole range of mountains, as Zeus did with the Caucasus. Are we really to believe that legend invents something so laborious and eccentric? Or is it perhaps not more logical to think that this strangeness is due to the desire to find a way to insert the stones in the shape of a pin at all costs? The medieval listener, hearing about three mobile and pointed stones, especially in connection with the net drawn in the ashes, certainly did not feel amazed because he related them to the game board or an outdoor game. To do this, the base was drawn in the sand, or the sand was spread, and stones were chosen suitable to be used as pawns. What appears here as a punishment for Loki is the art of divination.
Even the waterfall, which appears in Snorri as an ornamental motif, is no coincidence. The dry clearing behind the waterfall, called ‘tagheira’ in Gaelic, is gladly chosen for the oracle. No wonder, therefore, that the dwarf Andvari, the “dwarf who answers”, also has his headquarters here. The gods had captured him to get the gold they needed as reparation for killing an otter. These are the three gods Odin, Loki, and Hönir. This time Loki doesn’t invent the net but borrows it from the marine goddess Ran. So these are the elements. It is up to “homo ludens” to link them together. Net, waterfall, dwarf, and the three deities of magic – of which the Hittites were still aware were the three dice necessary for the game – have the same meaning and are interchangeable.