The critics don’t like it. Ragnarok, the battle to end all wars, given yet another take, this time in a Netflix series, but with high school kids who are reincarnated gods. Thor is a senior with dyslexia and social awkwardness and so full of angst it’s pathetic. I love that concept; but the series really got under my skin.

According to imdb and Wikipedia, even the people and government of Norway hate this series. There’s first and foremost the thought that it makes the Scandinavian country look bad. They don’t like the whole climate change and big corporation theme. Then there’s the question of which dialect is used. They say it’s wrong. And anyone who doesn’t speak the language has to use subtitles. In English, it’s dubbed, but none of these are problems for me, and that’s weird because it is not my habit to be patient with dubbed films, much less a series.

Then again, I remember the hit film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef, along with a huge cast. And only those three spoke English. All of the rest are speaking mostly Italian and were dubbed in post production with no effort at synchronization at all. If I loved that film enough to never notice that none of the cast but the main three spoke English the first time I saw it, then Ragnarok is no problem.

The series is well worth seeing, easy to binge and hopefully season 3, not yet confirmed, is going to happen.

But there were things I had trouble with. And none of them are the dubbing or the music or filming methods. Nothing technical or to do with the actors, who I found incredible.

First, and this is a spoiler, sorry; but a powerful character played by an extraordinary actress is killed off in the first episode. It’s necessary for motivational purposes for main character Magne as Thor reincarnated. She was his only friend in his new school, accepted him without reservation and was not romantically into him. Friendship in its most pure form is one of the most intimate things humans have the power to engage in, yet so seldom do. When she dies, Magne knows it was a homicide. Nor does he have long to find his prime suspect even though he is believed by no one and ends up in trouble with the school’s administration and with the police. Eventually he’s diagnosed in a forced mental evaluation as a paranoid schizophrenic, and it’s remarkable how the writers pulled this off.

But the problem I have with the series is where it is filmed and with one actress in particular.

I wasn’t triggered by any of the themes. Not loss, not the characters being cruel teens. I was very profoundly upset with the location. As if I had been there, and not under happy circumstances. On the contrary, I have never seen a place in film or TV that upset me more. It made the episodes uncomfortable for me. A haunting place to behold, a place the worst ones in my worst nightmares cannot possibly equal.

This feeling is not easy to describe. Not like deja vu as I’ve experienced it before. More of a primordial and vestigial terror at even the quickest shot of landscape. And the only explanation I can find is one I do not like.

As I’ve written about before, with nightmares, some are more vivid than others. Some have come true to an extent; others are tormented by what I believe are demonic spirits which are free to enter the dream realm because they are not human and never were.

DNA?

I’ve believed most of my life that memories are carried in our DNA. Long before I read anything about it, I believed in it.

Instinct cannot account for certain responses to stimuli in an infant or toddler, or even in older individuals. The unreasonable fear of an object or image is mysterious and a hotly debated subject.

Sometimes it’s described as a phobia by a parent or, in extreme cases, a pediatrician or even a psychiatric specialist.

I know phobias are very real and some are quite debilitating. They are resistant to psychotropic drugs and I have seen with my own eyes people who were full of medications and yet were still out of their minds with terror at certain things. Things that no doctor or nurse understood. Things that made nurses verbally abusive with their loss of patience at the moaning, cringing and crying. The subject was rendered immobile but vocal and was eventually injected with something strong, I’m guessing chlorpromazine as they became docile and often fell asleep within minutes.

Let’s be clear: I’m not confusing anxiety or psychosis with real terror. There was always a thing involved which served as a trigger. Away from it, they were different people.

I heard a woman being prepped for surgery once. I too was being prepped. Standard procedure, you go in, strip, put on a gown and lie down. Next comes the insertion of the IV needle and cath, with the needle removed once the catheter is secured by tape. Some people are “hard sticks”, very difficult to get veins to pop up and not roll with the syringe. I’ve had IVs in my chest, back of the lower neck, above the elbow, the dorsal portion of the hand and other weird places after attempts at more traditional sticking failed. Then again, while in the back of an airborne Huey, an Army medic got me in one try. It’s like that.

This woman was screaming bloody murder. Literally, because she shrieked, “You’re killing me!”

As far as I know: she survived getting an IV started.

I understand the Fear of needles. Older people remember the large bore syringes of yore that really hurt, especially in the ass. Most phlebotomists and anesthesiologists today use the much smaller ones with butterflies to provide a more steady hold.

But what if your grandfather served in Korea or Vietnam and was severely wounded? He would have gone to a veteran’s hospital, had surgeries, lengthy aftercare. And the endless needles. Would his loathing of them be available to you, passed to you, through genetic memory? Can that happen?

It is one thing to be afraid of a needle, another altogether to get absolutely fucking bozo.

Why are people apparently born with phobias? Because if you think about it, that shouldn’t happen. Fear is most often triggered by an unknown thing that a child may have been warned about. Or by instinct. When faced with peddling a bike like hell to escape a dog in full chase mode, what triggered the flight response? The child may never have encountered a bad dog before, so why evade it? Instinct, yes, but I say there’s more to it than that.

Why fear the night? That’s an easy one, isn’t it? Because of course each generation from Neanderthal to modern humans knew that people about at night vanished without a trace except for a few bones and some big piles of shit, right?

And of course competing and hostile tribes which were numerically disadvantaged would use the cover of darkness to stage thefts and surprise raids.

Humans searched for ways, from open fires to torches to oil lamps, candles and gas lights to do away with darkness, so fearful and dangerous. Therefore less and less have we feared the night. In modern industrialized countries, artificial light has caused a thing called “light pollution”, which means ground lights produce a glare which interferes with amateur astronomy and celestial event watching. Want to see the Leonid meteor shower in the United States this November? Good luck. Little of the United States is left with low levels of light pollution, and most of it is so obstructed that you won’t see much of anything at all.

Yet we do still fear the night, do we not? Crime. Accidents. Being lost after waiting too long to leave a national park. You name it.

In some European countries and certainly the African interior as well as most of North Korea, the darkness is never pierced by light; satellite imagery shows it in all of it’s shocking detail. There, they certainly fear the dark.

Every parent, no matter where they live, though, has to deal with their child being terrified when you say goodnight, tuck them in and turn off the light. Why is a child in a secure environment afraid of the dark?

Let us assume the house has no sign of being haunted. The child is too young to have friends who tell scary stories. You are a responsible parent and make sure not to expose him or her to any media that could cause fear of an unreasonable cause. Where does that fear come from, if not learned?

If we insist it is purely instinctual then other things automatically make no sense.

Like peculiar phobias and clear memories as told by toddlers and young children as well as symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

We’ve read accounts of anecdotal evidence of strange, inexplicable memories as told by kids. Some cannot be passed down through DNA because the details are intricate but involve people and places too far away, and too recent or involving different races which are not part of the family tree and point more toward reincarnation or some supernatural transference of memory.

What about this, then: I have an aversion to the Norwegian countryside, but no particular detailed memory to account for it, yet a DNA test specified Norway as part of my heritage. I don’t know what to make of it, because I had no knowledge of any Scandinavian country, defined as Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And until 1904 Norway and Sweden were one country. At least for some time. These are the Norse of old, and I’ve got this hunch that since they invaded England, and the rest of my ancestral DNA is Irish, Welsh, English and Scottish, that I come from Nordic kin that were not likely in Norway. Why then my queasy fear? No clue. Unless, of course, contained in their genes they retained ancestral memories from the homeland. And those memories were not pleasant.

***

Several times in my life, a particular word I did not know would come to mind. It would be there, unmoving, and I would not look for their meaning in the extensive collection of encyclopedias or massive dictionaries in my parent’s house. I feared words that made no sense to me because I hadn’t heard them. Where did they come from?

The first one I remember is “Ragnarök”. It just kept repeating over and over in my head. I had no education on the Vikings, on Scandinavia, or even much on Germany. I couldn’t have heard it or known it. I was far too young.

By now thanks to film and TV we know what Ragnarök is: a climactic battle between giants and the Norse gods, including Thor and Odin. The battle is fierce and ends in utter destruction. However, there’s a cyclical component: two humans survive to repopulate the world and eventually, the gods return. Whether a second battle eventually takes place is open to interpretation.

The second word is Götterdämerung, which basically means the violent, destructive, fiery downfall of a particular entity, a group, town, country, or civilization. However when translated properly it means the same event as Ragnarök. The downfall, marked by a destructive battle, of the gods.

All manner of the Norse mythological creatures are present and engaged, including Fenrir, a kind of horrible wolf, seen in ancient depictions devouring Odin or Thor.

Sure, it’s all myth, but the Germanic roots of Scandinavian people are old and steeped in its own preoccupation with mythology. It isn’t insignificant that Germanic peoples predated some of the later Scandinavians, because Hitler and even more so Himmler, had these ideas about pure Aryan blood.

I have other snapshots of memory as well, particularly of approaching a somewhat rounded cottage at dusk. I saw a light through the trees that lined the dirt path, and even now seeing someone’s lamp post through the trees puts me in a near trance.

People did not cut grass. At least not like today; grazing animals like sheep or goats did the job nicely.

I can remember approaching the door. Amber light came through a window set in the door. It had diamond-shaped panes and if I see anything like it now, I’m going into a state of mind in which I’ll be gone.

Is genetic memory real?

Anecdotal evidence aside, more experts are taking the possibility seriously. I wish I hadn’t been triggered; but I have so many triggers that this vestigial memory thing could not harm me more than I already am.

Christians don’t talk much about memories contained in DNA. Nor do they generally like the idea of reincarnation.

But who knows?

If God is really up there, who’s to say he didn’t provide us with tools to survive with? He gave us opposing thumbs, right?

But we’re a cocky bunch.

Too many of us think that they know everything.

Well, we don’t. And we never will, either.

I prefer to worship my own way, without the hindering influence of a church. I keep an open mind because I can’t prove that I know anything.