Here's a question: What if the ancient Norse weren't describing a literal cosmology but a map of consciousness?
What if Yggdrasil, the World Tree, isn't out there somewhere but right here in your psyche? What if the Nine Worlds aren't distant realms but different territories of your own awareness, different aspects of self you've been carrying around without knowing what to call them?
That's what we're about to explore.
The Norse didn't separate psychology from mythology the way we do. They didn't have therapy. They had stories. They didn't talk about the unconscious. They talked about traveling to other worlds. Same territories, different language.
Modern depth psychology has spent the last century rediscovering what the völur already knew: consciousness has layers, dimensions, territories. Some parts are easy to access. Others require trance, descent, intentional journeying. Some parts contain wisdom. Others contain monsters. All of it is you.
Yggdrasil: The Vertical Universe
Let's start with the tree.
Yggdrasil is the cosmic ash tree that holds all Nine Worlds in its branches and roots. It's massive beyond comprehension. Its roots reach into the deepest underworlds. Its branches extend to the highest heavens. It connects everything. It's the axis around which reality revolves.
Three great roots support it. One extends to Asgard (realm of the Aesir gods). One reaches to Jotunheim (realm of the giants). One goes to Niflheim (realm of ice, mist, and the deepest dead). At the base of these roots are three wells: Urd's Well (fate), Mimir's Well (wisdom), and Hvergelmir (the roiling spring from which all rivers flow).
The tree is constantly under threat. A dragon named Nidhogg gnaws at the roots. Deer nibble the branches. Yet it endures. It's dying and living simultaneously, always on the edge of collapse, always regenerating.
Sound familiar? That's your psyche. Constantly threatened. Constantly regenerating. Holding contradictions. Connecting everything even while parts of it are being eaten away by dragons and deer and time itself.
The Nine Worlds arranged around Yggdrasil form a vertical cosmology. There are upper worlds (Asgard, Vanaheim, Ljossalfheim, also known as Alfheim), middle worlds (Midgard, Jotunheim, Svartalfheim, Nidavellir), and outer worlds (Helheim in the South, Niflheim in the North). But this isn't a moral hierarchy like Christian heaven and hell. It's a functional map of different types of consciousness, different archetypal energies, different aspects of being.
When völur went into trance and traveled the Nine Worlds, they were navigating this internal geography. When they spoke with the dead in Helheim, they were contacting parts of themselves (and the collective) that had died or been buried. When they sought wisdom from Mimir's Well, they were descending to deep memory and ancestral knowledge.
This is shamanic cosmology doing what shamanic cosmology always does: giving you a map so you don't get lost when you journey into non-ordinary states of consciousness.
The Nine Worlds as Psychological Territories
Let's break down each world not as a place "out there" but as a domain within you. This isn't the only way to understand Norse mythology, but it's a particularly useful lens for internal work.
Asgard: The Realm of Order and Consciousness
Asgard is where the Aesir gods live. It's the realm of order, consciousness, structure, will, sovereignty. This is your executive function, your ability to organize, make decisions, assert yourself. It's the part of you that builds things, makes plans, takes action.
Shadow side: rigidity, tyranny, the need to control everything, fear of chaos. Asgard at its worst is the ego believing it's the whole show, trying to force order onto things that need to be wild.
When you're too much in Asgard, you're all head, no heart. You're planning but not feeling. You're controlling but not surrendering. You need to journey elsewhere to balance.
Vanaheim: The Realm of Fertility and Wild Magic
Vanaheim is home to the Vanir gods: Freya, Freyr, Njord. It's the realm of fertility, abundance, sexuality, wild magic, sensuality, connection to nature. This is your body wisdom, your erotic energy, your ability to be present in pleasure and growth.
Shadow side: hedonism without boundaries, getting lost in sensation, using sexuality manipulatively, fertility without form.
When you're disconnected from Vanaheim, you're cut off from your body, from pleasure, from the cyclical nature of growth and decay. When you're too much in Vanaheim without balance, you're all sensation with no structure, all growth with no pruning.
Ljossalfheim - Alfheim: The Realm of Light and Beauty
Ljossalfheim is where the light elves live. It's the realm of beauty, inspiration, art, light, refinement, aesthetic sensitivity. This is your creative capacity, your ability to perceive beauty, your connection to the sublime.
Shadow side: perfectionism, aestheticism that becomes disconnected from life, beauty that denies darkness, art that's precious rather than powerful.
When you can't access Alfheim, everything feels gray and flat. When you're stuck there, you're so concerned with beauty and perfection that you can't handle the messy reality of actual living.
Midgard: The Middle Realm
Midgard is the human world. It's where we live day to day. It's ordinary consciousness, daily life, the realm of work and relationships and bills and groceries. This is your practical self, your social self, the you that functions in consensus reality.
Shadow side: getting so lost in mundane concerns that you forget there's anything else, materialism, losing connection to the numinous.
Most people live in Midgard most of the time. That's fine. That's necessary. But if you never leave Midgard, you're cut off from everything else. You become two-dimensional. Shamanic work is about learning to travel from Midgard to the other worlds and bring back what you find.
Jotunheim: The Realm of Chaos and Giants
Jotunheim is where the giants live. It's the realm of chaos, raw power, untamed nature, the forces that resist civilization and order. This is your wild self, your rage, your unprocessed emotions, the parts of you that are too big and too loud for polite society.
Shadow side: destructive chaos, violence, losing all boundaries, the tantrum that destroys rather than transforms.
The gods are constantly in conflict with the giants, but they also intermarry with them and need them. You can't have order without chaos. You can't have consciousness without the unconscious. Jotunheim is necessary. The shadow work is integrating its energy rather than being overwhelmed by it or pretending it doesn't exist.
Svartalfheim: The Realm of Craft and Shadow
Svartalfheim is where the dark elves or dwarves live (the sources are inconsistent about whether these are the same beings or different ones). It's the realm of craft, making, the forge, working with your hands, turning raw material into something useful. This is your ability to build, create, work patiently with matter and material.
Shadow side: getting lost in craft for its own sake, obsessive making that becomes compulsive, the craftsperson who lives in the workshop and forgets to live.
When you can't access Svartalfheim, you're all ideas with no follow-through. When you're stuck there, you're so focused on making things that you forget to actually experience life.
Nidavellir: The Realm of Deep Earth
Sometimes distinguished from Svartalfheim as a separate realm of dwarves and deep earth treasures. If we treat it separately, it represents the deepest resources, the wealth hidden in darkness, the treasures that require you to go underground to find them.
Psychologically, this is your untapped potential, the gifts you haven't yet discovered, the resources you didn't know you had. It's also where the precious things are made, the magic items the gods need. Your own Mjolnir (whatever that is for you) gets forged here.
Shadow side: hoarding, greed, staying underground because it feels safe, never bringing your treasures into the light.
Helheim: The Realm of the Dead
Helheim is where most of the dead go. Not a place of punishment (that's a Christian overlay), just the place where people who died ordinary deaths reside. It's ruled by Hel, half-living and half-dead herself. This is the realm of grief, loss, what's finished, the dead parts of yourself, the past that's past.
Shadow side: getting stuck in grief, living in the past, identifying with what's dead rather than what's alive, depression that becomes an identity.
But Helheim also contains wisdom. The dead know things the living don't. Odin goes to Helheim to consult with dead völur. You journey to Helheim to retrieve what was lost, to speak with the parts of yourself that died, to integrate what needs to be remembered before it can finally be released.
Niflheim: The Realm of Ice and Mist
Niflheim is the deepest and coldest realm, the place of ice and mist and the oldest darkness. It's where Hvergelmir, the roiling spring, sends out frozen rivers. This is the void, the place before formation, the deepest unconscious, the cold that precedes life.
Shadow side: the freeze, dissociation, numbness, depression so deep it's beyond grief into just cold absence.
But Niflheim is also the place of potential, the formless that can become any form. Some things need to go back to ice before they can thaw into something new. Some frozen parts of you need to be acknowledged in their frozenness before they can melt.
This is the hardest realm to access and the most dangerous to journey to without preparation. You don't go to Niflheim casually. You go when you need to touch the void, when you need to let things dissolve completely before they can reform.
Shamanic Journey vs. Mythic Descent
Here's where we need to get precise about terminology because people use these words sloppily and then get confused about what they're doing.
Shamanic journey typically refers to an intentional, controlled trance state where you travel to non-ordinary reality with a specific purpose. You go up to upper worlds or down to lower worlds. You meet spirit guides, power animals, teachers. You ask questions. You retrieve information. You return with what you found. It's a there-and-back-again adventure. You maintain enough ego structure to navigate, to ask questions, to remember what happened.
Mythic descent is something different and darker. It's not fully controlled. It's the journey to the underworld that transforms you. It's Inanna descending to the underworld and getting stripped of everything. It's Persephone being dragged down. It's the dark night of the soul, the depression that becomes initiation, the breakdown that becomes breakthrough.
You don't choose mythic descent the way you choose a shamanic journey. It chooses you. Life throws you down. You lose everything. You hit bottom. And then, if you're lucky and you do the work, you find something down there you couldn't have found any other way. You meet parts of yourself that only live in the depths. You die and get reborn, actually reborn, not the fake rebirth of a nice weekend workshop.
The Norse myths are full of both. Odin hangs on Yggdrasil for nine nights, sacrificing himself to himself, and comes back with the runes. That's mythic descent. It almost kills him. But he also sends his ravens Huginn and Muninn out every day to fly through the worlds and bring back information. That's more like shamanic journey, controlled information-gathering.
As a practitioner, you need both capacities. You need the skill to journey intentionally when you choose. And you need the resilience to survive the descents that you don't choose, the ones that life imposes, and to find the gift hidden in the wound.
Seidr practice develops the first capacity. Life develops the second. Shadow work is what helps you survive the second and integrate what you find there.
Mapping Your Internal Landscape
So how do you actually use this cosmology for internal work?
Start paying attention to which worlds you inhabit most. Where do you naturally live? Most people have one or two default worlds and rarely visit the others.
Someone who's all Asgard and Midgard (head and practical life) with no Vanaheim or Jotunheim is going to be cut off from body, sexuality, emotion, wildness. Someone who's all Vanaheim and Jotunheim (sensation and chaos) with no Asgard is going to struggle with structure, boundaries, follow-through.
The goal isn't to live in all worlds equally. That's impossible and would be exhausting. The goal is to be able to move between worlds as needed. To descend when descent is called for. To ascend when you need perspective. To journey to the wild places when you've become too civilized. To return to structure when you've been too wild.
Here's a practical exercise: Take the nine worlds and rate yourself 1-10 on how much access you currently have to each world's qualities:
- Asgard (order, will, consciousness): _____
- Vanaheim (body, sensuality, fertility): _____
- Ljósálfheimr / Alfheim (beauty, inspiration, refinement): _____
- Midgard (daily life, practical reality): _____
- Jotunheim (chaos, wildness, raw power): _____
- Svartalfheim (craft, making, patience): _____
- Nidavellir (hidden resources, untapped potential): _____
- Helheim (grief, past, what's finished): _____
- Niflheim (void, formlessness, deep unconscious): _____
Look at your scores. Where are you strong? Where are you blocked? The worlds you can't access are where your shadow lives. The worlds you're stuck in are where you need to learn to leave.
Shadow work often means journeying to the world you've been avoiding. If you're terrified of Jotunheim, that's probably where you need to go. If you never visit Helheim, you're carrying ungrieved losses. If you can't access Vanaheim, you're cut off from your body and your pleasure.
The Nine Worlds give you a framework for identifying what's missing and a map for how to get there.
Spirit World Navigation: Helpers, Tricksters, and Things That Bite
Once you start journeying, you're going to meet things.
Not everything you meet is friendly. Not everything you meet is what it appears to be. This is where practitioners get into trouble, assuming every spirit they encounter is wise and benevolent and has their best interests at heart.
That's like assuming every person you meet in ordinary reality is trustworthy. It's naive. There are helpful spirits, neutral spirits, trickster spirits, and genuinely harmful entities. You need discernment.
Helpers are spirits, guides, ancestors, or deity forms that consistently provide useful information, protection, or assistance. They show up when called. Their information proves accurate. They help you grow rather than keeping you dependent. They challenge you when needed but don't break you. They respect your boundaries.
How do you know if a spirit is actually helpful? Track record. Does their information pan out? Does following their guidance lead to growth and integration, or does it lead to more chaos and fragmentation? Helpful spirits make you more functional, not less.
Tricksters are spirits that play with you. They're not necessarily harmful, but they're not straightforward either. They lie, they joke, they teach through misdirection. Loki is the archetype here. Trickster energy can be valuable (it breaks up rigidity, reveals hypocrisy, shows you where you're taking yourself too seriously), but you can't take tricksters at face value.
How do you know if you're dealing with a trickster? They're slippery. Their information is technically true but misleading. They promise one thing and deliver something else. They're funny but also frustrating. They reveal truth through lies.
Working with tricksters requires a light touch. Don't make them your primary guides (unless you enjoy chaos). But don't dismiss them either. They often show you exactly what you need to see, just not in the way you wanted to see it.
Things that bite are the actually harmful entities. Spirits that feed on your energy. Psychological complexes masquerading as helpful guides. Parts of yourself that got split off and turned predatory. Thought-forms that have gained enough energy to become semi-autonomous.
How do you recognize them? They leave you drained, not energized. They isolate you from other people and other sources of guidance. They tell you that you're special and everyone else is wrong. They demand more and more of your attention and energy. They promise power but deliver dependence. They keep you stuck rather than helping you grow.
The rule for dealing with things that bite: Don't engage. Set boundaries. Banish if necessary. Get help from a more experienced practitioner or a therapist who understands spiritual emergence. Don't try to be nice to everything you meet. Some things need to be told to leave, firmly and repeatedly.
The völur knew this. They had protective techniques. They knew curses were real. They knew not everything in the spirit world was friendly. Modern practitioners who've been raised on New Age "love and light" often have to learn this the hard way.
Protection isn't paranoia. It's common sense. You lock your door at night. You should also have ways to close your psychic space when you're done with trance work. We'll cover specific techniques later, but for now just know: discernment is not optional.
Practical Element: Your First Trip Down the World Tree
Alright, time to journey yourself.
This is a guided visualization to help you access Yggdrasil and begin navigating the Nine Worlds. It's simplified. The full seidr ceremony the völur did was much more elaborate. But you need to start somewhere.
Preparation:
Find a comfortable place where you won't be interrupted for 30-40 minutes. You can do this lying down or sitting. Set a timer so you don't drift too long (30 minutes is plenty for a first journey).
Have your journal nearby for afterward. Have something grounding (food, water, a stone you can hold) for when you return.
If you want, you can play repetitive drumming in the background. There are shamanic drumming tracks available online. The monotonous rhythm helps shift consciousness. But it's not required.
The Journey:
Close your eyes. Take three deep breaths, letting each exhale be longer than the inhale.
Imagine you're standing at the base of an enormous tree. Yggdrasil. It's so tall you can't see the top. Its trunk is wider than a house. Its roots disappear into the ground in three different directions.
Feel the bark under your hand. Is it rough or smooth? Warm or cool? What does it smell like? Let the sensory details build.
Look at the three great roots. One goes up and to the right. One goes up and to the left. One goes straight down into the earth.
Which root calls to you? Don't overthink this. Just notice which direction you're drawn to.
Follow that root. If you chose one of the side roots, you're going to an upper or middle world. If you chose the root going down, you're descending to a lower world. Both are fine. Let the journey unfold.
As you follow the root, notice what you see, hear, feel, smell. You might see landscapes. You might meet beings. You might just sense things without clear visuals. All of that is valid. There's no right way to experience this.
Keep following the root until you arrive somewhere that feels significant. A clearing. A cave. A body of water. A building. Somewhere that makes you stop.
What's here? Look around. Let the details emerge. Don't force them.
Is there a being here? An animal, a person, a deity, something else? If so, greet them. You can speak out loud in ordinary reality or just think the words. "I'm here to learn. I'm here to begin this work. I'm open to guidance."
See what happens. They might speak. They might show you something. They might just look at you. They might ignore you completely. Whatever happens is information.
If you feel called to ask a question, ask it. But don't be attached to getting an answer the way you expect. Spirit communication is often oblique, symbolic, requiring interpretation later.
Stay in this space for as long as feels right, but not more than 15-20 minutes for a first journey.
When you're ready to return, thank whatever you encountered (even if it didn't seem helpful). Then retrace your path. Follow the root back up to the base of the tree. Feel the bark under your hand again. Open your eyes.
Grounding:
This part is not optional. You need to fully return to ordinary consciousness.
Stand up. Stomp your feet. Do some stretches. Eat something. Drink water. Touch objects with texture. Remind your nervous system that you're back in your body, back in regular reality.
Journaling:
Once you're fully grounded, write down everything you remember. Don't interpret yet. Just record. What did you see, hear, feel, sense? What beings did you encounter? What did they say or show you? What surprised you? What confused you?
The interpretation comes later, after some time has passed and you can look at it with fresh eyes. For now, just capture the raw data.
What to Expect:
Some people have vivid, movie-like experiences on their first journey. Others get vague impressions and feelings. Both are normal. You're building capacity. The more you practice, the clearer it gets.
Some people meet helpful guides right away. Others wander around in foggy landscapes not sure what's happening. That's also fine. Sometimes the journey is just learning to journey, not getting specific information.
If nothing happens, that's data too. Maybe you need more practice with basic trance induction before you're ready for full journeying. Maybe you were trying too hard. Maybe it wasn't the right time. Try again in a few days.
If something scary happens, that's important information about your psyche. What scared you? Why? That's shadow material to work with. But also, if you encounter something that feels genuinely harmful (not just uncomfortable or challenging, but actually predatory), end the journey immediately, ground yourself thoroughly, and consider working with a more experienced practitioner before going deeper.
Most first journeys are somewhere in the middle: kind of interesting, kind of confusing, leaving you wondering if you made it all up. That's perfect. The line between imagination and vision is supposed to be blurry. You're learning to navigate that threshold.
The Map Is Not the Territory (But It Helps to Have a Map)
One more thing before we move on.
The Nine Worlds are a map. Maps are useful. They help you navigate. They give you categories and frameworks and names for experiences that might otherwise be overwhelming or incomprehensible.
But maps are not the same as the territory they describe.
Your actual experience of journeying might not fit neatly into the Nine Worlds framework. You might meet beings that don't belong to any particular realm. You might have experiences that don't match the traditional descriptions. That's fine. Let your experience be what it is.
Use the map when it's helpful. Set it aside when it's not. The völur didn't have scholarly knowledge of all Nine Worlds laid out in neat charts. They had direct experience of traveling in trance, and they used their tradition's language to describe what they found.
You're doing the same thing. The Norse framework is useful because it's gritty, realistic, psychologically sophisticated, and has been tested by centuries of practitioners. But it's a tool, not a dogma.
Your psyche is wilder and weirder than any framework can contain. The Nine Worlds are training wheels. Eventually you learn to navigate without constantly referring to the map. Eventually you develop your own internal sense of the territory.
But for now, while you're learning, the map helps. It keeps you from getting lost. It gives you language to describe where you've been. It helps you recognize patterns.
This article is part of our Mythology collection. Read our comprehensive Norse Gods guide to explore the ancient wisdom and mystical power of Norse spiritual traditions.
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