The Two Lokis

My mother's mother was born in Norway, so the old stories came to me with a return address. Of all the figures in them, the one I keep is the one no one is sure about: Loki. Here is why he stands at the door of this wing — and, because this project lives or dies on saying the inconvenient thing first, why claiming him is a risk I'm taking with my eyes open.

Start with the scene that earns him the place. In the poem the Norse called the Lokasenna — a flyting, a duel fought with words — Loki walks uninvited into the gods' feast and mocks every one of them to their faces. He names Odin's cheating, the shining assembly's hypocrisies, one by one, in their own hall, while they bluster. That is the oldest leveling tool there is, the one the old forager bands used on the would-be big man before there were words for politics: the laugh that says you are not above us. Ridicule aimed up. That is the whole job of this wing, and Loki does it in a banquet hall full of gods.

But there are two Lokis, and honesty requires the second one. The same sources give us the one who engineers the death of Baldr — the gentle god, the beloved, the innocent — and boasts of it to Baldr's grieving mother; the one who, at the end, breaks his chains and leads the host that burns the world. One Loki punches up at the powerful. The other murders the innocent and calls it the apocalypse. They are the same god.

Aspire to the hall. Never to Baldr.

Which is exactly why he belongs here — not as a mascot, as a warning. This wing has one rule, and it is the whole of its ethics: the joke is on the con, never the conned. The two Lokis are that rule drawn as a person. The Lokasenna Loki is what the Jester is for; the Baldr-killing Loki is what the Jester becomes the moment the laugh turns down — at the duped, the gentle, the neighbor — the moment satire rots into cruelty and calls it courage. The line between the two Lokis is the only line that matters.

And here is the thing the scholars handed me that turned Loki from a good costume into the right patron. The “evil Loki” — Loki the devil, Loki the author of the end — is, in large part, a later re-description. He was written down by a Christian scribe centuries after anyone believed in him, and the demon's robes were tailored on afterward; there is no sign he was ever even worshipped, and scholars have never agreed on what he originally was. Sit with that, because it is this book's whole argument wearing a horned helmet: a trickster whose work was leveling got re-described, after the fact, as evil — the same move that turned the leveling reflex into “envy,” that turned a seizure into “the natural order.” The demonizing of the trickster is the capitulation's signature, performed on a god. To reclaim Loki from the devil they made of him is itself a small act of leveling.

One more honesty, because the other Loki you know is a problem. The charming antihero of the screen — the trademarked, merchandised, beloved-brand Loki — is the trickster enclosed: the commons-figure fenced, licensed, and sold back to you as content. That is not the one I mean. (Though the Church of the Market would adore him; Loki™ is a perfect parishioner.) I mean the older, stranger, contested one — the shapeshifter who became a mare and gave birth, who is neither god nor giant, who refuses every fixed station, and who would be at home in a coalition of everyone the orderly were taught to rank below them. Him I claim, by inheritance, with all his ambiguity intact.

So I will not pretend he is settled. He is half-invented, much-demonized, possibly never prayed to, and the sources contradict themselves about him. That is not a weakness in the patron. It is the patron — the saint of exactly the ambiguity this wing works in, the laugh that can free or wound depending only on which way it is aimed.

Loose the trickster, then. Up at the hall, never down at Baldr. That is the Jester Wing, and that is its one commandment, and Loki — both of him — is here to remind us, every day, which of the two we are being.