NorsePlay manifests at Meow Wolf.

While wandering gobstopped through Meow Wolf Santa Fe's forest area last week, I heard a weird voice speaking above me that turned out to be a huge automated raven sporting a gold chain hung with a fat ruby. Of course this had to be Muninn manifesting his way into the densely accrued materials of this former bowling alley turned into its own elaborate sci-fi saga installation.  

But I didn't quite catch what the raven said, so I waited in the area for at least 20 minutes looking at other things while expecting the bird to launch into an audio loop, or be activated somehow into speaking again, but it never happened, which made me wonder if he only spoke once-a-day at Noon, which makes his input a rare clue in the Pastore family's story.

After being wowed and absorbing as much as I could of the deep narrative on-site from its videos & exhaustive documents, I longed for even more context and bought the giftshop book Don’t Read This! The Private Diary of Piper Pastore, which I read cover to cover that very night. In this, the painter mother notes that there's a blackbird in a nest outside her bedroom window that's particularly watchful of her. While this first strikes one as neurotic paranoia, this observer is later joined by what seem to be "men in black" outside the house, and the bird then leaves its nest to alight on one of their shoulders, issuing a report to them, all of which is pretty Muninn. 

In a weirdly lit hallway room's corner there's a sword in the stone, which has obvious Arthurian placement, but this actually has its origins in the Völsunga Saga from when Odin plants a sword in a tree that can only be drawn by the most worthy (I tried three times. I've already got melee weapons at home anyhow, so I don't need a sword to prove my worth).

One of the important subtexts of the complex & elaborate miracle of Meow Wolf Santa Fe is that the whole thing is an example to the viewer that they have the very same creative potential, that anyone who's willing to pursue their vision can make that happen. The above baroquely surreal Scrabble tile panel strikes one as particularly addressing the idea of heroic risk and comes across as very Heathen deed-centric.

On top of this, there's very much at play the Eliadean idea of sacred space, that this story of a quarantined cosmic event has made a numinous area that's outside the regular mundane world when you step into it. There's some very bizarre altars and temple-like areas inside that support this, and a remembrance object-made dome to one of the founder-artists who passed away. The leaving of offerings, mostly pennies, by visitors at the above and various other spots, speaks of the idea of sacrifice to the created holy otherworld nature of Meow Wolf itself. In what is a mostly secular world, this act of making such a space, and adorning it with its own mythology that seems to intentionally or incidentally include aspects of Norse Lore, begs questions of our need for more inspiration, whether that's creative, divine, will-driven, or otherwise. Plus in the larger organizational/group-unit Heathen community there's always the stated goal of building a temple hall, and there's design cues and successes here that could definitely be applied to that. (The pragmatic/cynical caveat behind this is that it's good to know a local millionaire author who will bankroll your real estate, in this case Santa Fe resident George RR Martin.) All this takeaway aside, Meow Wolf's House Of Eternal Return is an amazing artistic achievement, and there's a definitely the above Norsespotting to be had inside of the wonder of it all.

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.