Urdarbrunnr: The Well of Fate
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” ~Carl Jung, From Christ, A Symbol of the Self; CW 9ii, par. 126.)
(From Christ, A Symbol of the Self; CW 9ii, par. 126.)
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.
The Norns are three women who shape the life of each man from his first day until his last, and they determine the moment of his death.
The Norns live in Ásgarð by the Well of Urð, where the gods meet each day in council. Of the three women, Urð is old and decrepit, looking backwards to past events and people. Verðandi is young and active, looking straight before her. Skuld is closely veiled, and looks in a direction opposite to where Urð gazes.
The Norns carve men’s fate on a stave of wood, in much the same way Norsemen might carve their individual marks on pieces of wood before throwing them together to draw lots.
In Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson writes that other norns, descended from the Æsir, dwarves, and elves, visit each new-born child to determine its life. Good norns grant a good life, while malevolent norns grant lives filled with misfortune. (Source)
Die Nornen: Johannes Gherts (1889)
Urth is the guardian of a sacred well at the base of the World Tree. Each day as the roots of the World Tree are worn away by care and ill-will, the Norns take up some earth, moisten it with water from Urth’s Well, and place this clay with care on the roots of the tree, healing and renewing it.
The tree that links all worlds draws up water from the well, up through trunk and branches and leaves, and the well’s water falls again from the tree as the dew, where it re-enters the well again to renew the cycle.
I don’t know about you, but I have been used to considering Norse mythology as pretty much the most brutal and patriarchal of all mythologies. And yet, here at the center of its cosmological myth, with the sacred Well and the holy Tree, are images of the three Goddesses doing their work of healing and renewal. It is one of the loveliest images in all mythology. (Source)
(Why are there are three roots, three well, three norns?)
(from Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, p.33):
Numbers as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind. It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential’
(from Psychology and Religion: East and West CW 11, par. 179):
One is the first from which all other numbers arise, and in which the opposite qualities of numbers, the odd and the even, must therefore be united; two is the first even number; three the first that is uneven and perfect, because in it we first find beginning, middle and end.