If you look at various commentaries on Rígsþula it is often described as a "strongly aristocratic song" that describes the emergence of different social classes. But the real meaning has nothing to do with actual social classes. This is, as I have pointed out before, metaphors and symbols for psychological processes and spiritual development within one psyche, or everyone's psyches, as psychological laws and as potentials.
Rígsþula tells or describes how the god Heimdall, in the guise of the wandering man Rígr, visits different homes on earth and shares bed with the couples he meets. The first couple is Ái and Edda which means "great-grandfather" and "great-grandmother." The second couple is Afi and Amma, meaning "grandfather" and "grandmother." And the third couple are simply named Father and Mother. After Rígr's visit to each couple, the woman gives birth to a child nine months later. Great-grandmother gives birth to the son Þræll (Thrall) who is dark-haired and whose kind become ugly but strong slaves. Grandmother gives birth to the son Karl (Churl) who is red-haired and whose kind become free people and farmers. Mother gives birth to the son Jarl (Earl) who is blonde-haired and whose kind become the highest: warriors, kings, and scholars.
I don't think I need to go through again why this should not be taken literally, because it becomes pretty absurd if it is taken literally: everything from the names of the couples Rígr visits, to the fact that he is allowed to sleep with the couples and impregnate the woman, and the origin of the castes in this particular order. How can there be slaves before there are kings, elites or other classes to enslave them?
This very imaginative and unlikely description is deliberate, as a safety measure, so that if the culture begins to take the stories literally, people will become more and more skeptical of the truth of the stories and question them. Ancient religious stories focused a lot on the supernatural and abstraction, not because the people of antiquity were more superstitious than us, but precisely to convey that it should not be taken literally.
So what, then, is the true meaning of this story? To understand, we must first translate the characters and events into principles and psychological processes. Men and women in spiritual writings do not refer to real people. Men and women are aspects within yourself. But which aspects? Based on my study of ancient systems and religions, I have come to the conclusion that the man is a symbol of our inner I, our identity or will. The man is related to our inner observer, the Self, but I think the man more represents the shape the Self assumes based on spiritual health or maturity, etc. Even if you are biologically a woman, the man still represents the center of gravity of your inner Self in your psyche.
So what then is the woman or women in spiritual texts? My conclusion is that our inner woman is our memory, and that women are the form our inner memory assumes. Different aspects of our memory, again based on spiritual health or maturity. Our memory is very closely related to knowledge. It is in our memory that everything we learn is gathered.
That's why the woman is a good symbol for our memory, since the memory is like a container that receives fertilizing knowledge from the outside, like how the woman's uterus receives seed. And the woman's psyche in general is more susceptible to external influences. And this is also a detail that explains why homosexuality between men was often considered bad in antiquity, while they were indifferent to homosexuality among women. Our inner men, different identities or temporary centers of gravity of the Self, cannot produce knowledge on their own. I think it should be interpreted as pure imitation of someone else without reflection or attempt to learn. And pure imitation without reflection is of course destructive both for yourself and others. So in religious texts, even in the Bible, homosexuality has this psychological meaning, and only this psychological meaning.
Same thing with marriage and intercourse. Marriage and intercourse has only a psychological meaning. Intercourse is our inner Self's encounter with knowledge, and what we choose to fill our memory or storage of knowledge with. It is thought process and reflection, which produces a progeny in the form of a new idea or world view. This new idea or concept is represented in spiritual texts by children; by sons and daughters. And again we should consider whether sons and daughters represent different psychological concepts. The son will, after all, grow up and become a new man in the psyche. And the daughter a new woman. So is the son a new identity? A new incarnation or shape for our "I"? Is the daughter a new form of knowledge or world view we retain in our memory?
I think this is on the right track, but we should also consider if the authors of this symbolism were perhaps even more sophisticated than that. In Rígsþula, it is told that the son Thrall married a slave girl and had twelve sons and nine daughters. Also Karl and Jarl got twelve sons each. The ancient number 12 is related to the Zodiac, and the Zodiac is a map of our inner Self's psychological wandering that is repeated. So we have a very complex system here where each cast has its own psychological shape with its own psychological cycle. Obviously, the three different castes represent different degrees of spiritual development or psychological maturity.
"Great-grandfather" and "great-grandmother" were, of course, early forms of our inner Self and memory that did not have enough development or maturity to be able to produce a rich and healthy psychological life. The fact that our psyche is filled with thralls and slaves means that we enslave ourselves through our choice of knowledge or lack of capacity for wisdom. "Grandfather" and "grandmother" are more developed forms of our inner Self and memory that can produce something better. But when we reach a stage of "Mother" and "Father" we have the best possibilities for developing a rich inner psychological life and liberation or spiritual self-realization.
But it is important to understand that our inner self and memory are not alone capable of this. Without the god Heimdall, who comes to visit, is welcomed, and gets to sleep between our inner self and memory, we cannot produce complete spiritual maturity or a rich inner life. Heimdall, like the other gods, is a guiding principle. But what does this principle represent?
In my text about the Edda I analyzed how Heimdall expresses the level of transformation, which happens in the encounter with higher knowledge. This means that Heimdall has about the same function as Holy Spirit in Christianity, since the second baptism is Holy Spirit and is done through education, which also represents consciousness level 2. Holy Spirit means higher knowledge – right knowledge – based on the principles of Ultimate Reality. Same thing with Heimdall.
Both Holy Spirit and the god Heimdall help to fertilize the woman to produce special offspring. Your inner self, the shape of the man you are psychologically, cannot fertilize your inner partner – your memory – with truth, unless it comes from a higher source. And this higher source must be welcomed into your psyche, very important, just like every couple in this story welcomes Heimdall even though they can only identify him as a wanderer. Same thing with knowledge. We cannot know that higher knowledge or truth is truth until later, after it has produced fruit. The concept of welcoming a guest, no matter who it is, symbolizes being open minded and receptive, because we can never find higher knowledge if we become prejudiced, narrow-minded and unwelcoming to new knowledge.
But even if Heimdall, or the right knowledge, visits us, it does not mean that we will understand it or take it in correctly.
If our maturity has not reached beyond Ái and Edda, or Afi and Amma, then we will inevitably distort it and misunderstand a little, and thus not reach full development. Even meeting truth, or the right knowledge, and welcoming it, as Ái and Edda do, does not produce much more than Thrall in the psyche if we are not fully ready or mature enough to take it in. But even Thrall is at least a product of having been open to higher knowledge. This means that people who are not even welcoming to new knowledge are probably at an even lower spiritual level than even Thrall. Their psyches probably still consists of Ymir, or of giants and hrimthurs. Their inner light may even have been swallowed by the Fenrir wolf.
Regarding sons I said that they symbolized new shapes and identities or attitudes in the psychological cycle. But what about the daughters? Thrall got nine daughters, and Karl got ten. It is not said that Jarl got any daughters, but since the whole poem has not been preserved it is possible that his daughters would've been described later on. The ancient number nine has to do with knowledge, since it was the basis of arithmetic or numbers. So, if sons symbolize new shapes and identities, daughters probably represent new systems of knowledge and ways of viewing the world. Women are often interchangeable (analogically) with cities in spiritual texts. And cities also often represent systems of knowledge, culture, and world views. And since the daughters are a product of encountering higher knowledge, it is logical that it happens to be nine in particular as in the base-9 number system.
But why did Karl get ten? If it is not a mistake or addition over time, it is possible that 10 is a representation that includes the zero and thus makes it higher. If Jarl did not get any daughters at all, it may symbolize that the highest development gets rid of systems altogether, and instead relies entirely on experience. Systems, even higher systems, can become unnecessary dogma that gets in the way of true openness and receptiveness. Systems can be very useful as a support in the beginning of learning and essential development, but when we reach complete liberation we should no longer limit ourselves to any systems at all.
The fact that the higher psychological kind is both warriors, royals and scholars, means that the main form of both warrior and king is precisely the educated whose sword is the truth and whose nobility is one's own authentic nature. In other words, this symbolism should not be confused with literal warriors or literal kings and nobles. And it is unfortunate that this symbolism came to be misinterpreted in such a literal way. But what came first, spiritual castes or social castes? Perhaps it was historical social classes that inspired spiritual castes with its symbolical analogy. But in any case it is not difficult to see how this symbolism is problematic, and also obsolete. And that is a pity since spiritual castes have a certain legitimacy, unlike social classes where noblemen, the military and elites rarely are wise or developed.
