There is no archaeological evidence of any site in Scandinavia dedicated specifically to Loki. He is, after all, responsible for the end of the world and lots of other mean stunts. MUCH GEAR, HOWEVER.
He is also the god who always got the stupid, complacent Aesir out of trouble when they lived beyond their means and wouldn’t get a day job. When the walls of Asgard were to be constructed by the Master Builder at the price of the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja to wife, Loki transformed himself into a mare in heat and lured away the stallion Svadilfari responsible for hauling the boulders and thus enabled the Aesir to get out of paying the Builder for his work.
(This is another example of the Germanic motif of tricking the builder that appears in so many bridge tales–and is probably responsible for the preponderance of trolls under bridges, including the Fremont Bridge in Seattle.)
I have always respected Loki for the fact that once he had lured the stallion away, he went ahead and stayed a mare until giving birth to their offspring, the eight-legged steed Sleipnir, Odin’s own mount, who is one of my favorite giants. In my opinion, if you don’t know what else to do, the horse god is always a good bet for results–and fast! A horse god got me a job once, in a very elegant firm at a good rate of pay.
I was once asked to write my own personal account of the Abramelin Operation, in which I lamented the following diatribe:
“Why doesn’t the Golden Dawn teach magic that works? I have spent fifteen years in the literary company of the luminaries of Victorian western art magic, people who were supposedly magical geniuses, and they couldn’t figure out what I knew by doing a single magical operation of African-American witchcraft?
Mathers, Crowley, Regardie, Fortune, Case and all the rest are either idiots or they conned us. Were we not supposed to notice that all this talk of magic was bunkum and they were mostly just swishing around in fancy robes and being essentially priests like in Church? This is a more stylish church than the Christian one, and lots more fun, but it is, in the end, a church.
What if the Golden Dawn and its offshoots were not, at inception and now, fundamentally dark and/or ill-informed?
The way to get magic to work is to provide offerings as do the practitioners of folk magic in recognizable formulae that work, and the spirits need to be the type who have the power and expertise to make things happen in magic. Not all spirits are that highly evolved, and not all ritual structures are solidly built in the group soul.
Regardie dissed the spirits who are actually able to get magic to work—the Solomonic spirits–by calling them “qlippotized etheric entities” that are best left alone. Paul Case recorded that he witnessed over twenty-five people go insane using the Enochian Angel magic of the Golden Dawn and removed it from his system—which has a style of mental magic that doesn’t work, either. While I haven’t gone insane doing Neo-Enochiana in the style of the Golden Dawn, I will say that the results of my limited experiments with it have been full of astral delusion and were synchronous with damage to my home, health, and pocketbook. And the Egyptian godforms are not controllable outside of their original practices, a fact we have omitted to observe, causing horrendous problems in Golden Dawn and its offshoots. The best the Christian powers can do with the Egyptian gods is to get them off us–and vice versa! [I still love the Egyptian gods.]
This is terrible.
A lodge needs to decide whether it is a religion or Hogwarts and get rid of something, either the magic that doesn’t work or the religion that partly does.”
It was Loki who informed me that the Golden Dawn was a trick from the get-go and I should figure out how to function having built myself with its structures.
It was also Loki who insisted that I get rid of all of my material possessions because of their magnetic properties and start life entirely anew.
My old one the Viking Warrior informs me that it was Loki who insisted that he answer the call of love with a man, and this is how he came to be able to allow me–a male soul in a woman’s body–to love men with the power of the Norse in me. Most of the beings of my recent Deep Self are male as are most of the others currently alive in my oversoul (Higher Self), and they do not want to mate with men; and most of the energy workers of ceremonial magic have been homosexuals. There was a strong inclination in the system to turn me into a lesbian or a celibate, which I do not want. It was this spiffy power maker who was willing to endure the passion of love with men because he had been willing to answer the call of it–and was selected by the great King Beleth to rise in the magic of Solomon. King Beleth is the god of the old ones of the Deep Self, and once raised, they say he is never far. So put on your silver ring and confront the stinking breath, because King Beleth is great, and I revere him.
Loki is a giant and became one of the Aesir by a bond of blood brothership with Odin, the All-Father.
In one way of thinking, the Aesir are death gods. They manage the civilization of human dead and track on the living to enable humanity to evolve. It is a never-ending job. A god is an energy group run by the illuminated animals, plants, and land spirits that takes in human ghosts and causes them to become part of a team. The death gods eventually become choked up with humans who become outdated (as in the religious regime changes of conquest or the gradual change of new ideas) and cannot function with the living anymore or who won’t do the hard work of evolution and become troublesome pests. At this point, the death god disbands into its disparate parts, though it can re-form if it needs to. Some of the gods we work with in Solomonic magic involve ancient ghosts who have decided to re-form into the chthonic gods to work with us in this way again.
The point is, sometimes the Aesir get tired and want out of the job. Hence the cyclical nature of creation and destruction with the gods. In one way of thinking.
Loki is a god who is not completely “in” human civilization. He stands at the boundary of humans and giants–animals, plants, aliens, and other energies–and thus is able to judge the whole system.
The gods wear out.
There is much evidence in Mayan civilization that occasionally the people ritually destroyed their temples them moved a mile over and created a new temple almost exactly like the old one.
Loki is a difficult god to work with because of his intermediate position between normal human underworld functioning and the transitions of the human underworld. Loki himself warned me not to work with him too much because I would go mad.
He is also the god of lost causes. He is the only god who is undefeated and who always figure out how to accomplish the necessary BY MEANS YOU CANNOT REMOTELY EXPECT.
He turned himself in a mare and had a baby. That I did not expect.
We humans cannot and perhaps should not escape certain animal energy patterns: males dominate females, the rich dominate the poor, men cannot say no to beautiful girls, women cannot say no to rich men, money talks, fear works, we’re number one, etc.
Loki is able to accomplish things because he works at the level of the animal energy patterns in humanity. He changes the patterns of the animal body accumulated in a life.
People become very angry when you change your energy–or anyone’s energy–at this level, because this is how we function in the body.
Many are afraid of Loki, because he is written of as evil, but he says he only strikes you if you do not play his game.
I suspect once you play his game you must function in giant/human intersection forever. I am okay with that. He is helping me with things.
His children are Fenrir, the ultimate destruction; Jormungandr, the serpent biting its tail in the sea at the edge of the world; and Hel, the queen of the dead. Thus Loki, with Odin’s editing, destroys what has become outdated; constructs the boundaries of the human world vis-a-vis nature; and keeps the dead from eating the living.
A pretty important god.
Building the Underworld 