Here is a thing you already know, even if you have never said it out loud. When something you built comes down — a plan, a self, a whole way of living — it feels final. It feels like the end of the world. Not a chapter closing. The book burning.
Hall spent a long time with the biggest ending anyone ever wrote down. Ragnarok. The twilight of the gods, the age of fire and gravel. And the first thing he says about it is that it is not the end of the physical world. It is, in his words, a vast psychological symbol. What burns in Ragnarok is not the ground under your feet. It is the world run entirely by law — the world of the mind and the ego that mind builds to fight its battles.
He puts Odin at the centre of it. Odin, who is never born, who wakes up out of the ice — universal mind, the immortal mortal who can order everything beneath him and never once fathom his own depths. And in the last battle, in the narrow gap between the mountains, mind meets the hero it made and finds it is not a friend. The serpent rises from the sea. Loki slips his chains. The dead sail in on ships built out of human fingernails. Every hero kills his enemy and himself in the same stroke, and the world tree, gnawed through at the roots, falls back into the dark.
So — is that the end? The wheel stopped, the fire eating everything?
Look at where the old rite actually leaves you. The gods perish, good and evil together, the earth goes desolate — and one couple escapes to a mountain to seed a new race. The story does not stop at the ash. It stops one step past it, on high ground, with two people and a morning coming.
Hall's whole cosmology runs that way. He says there are no permanent things, only rhythms. India has a word for the great sleep between the days of the world — pralaya, the night that lies between manifestations. The maker rests, and when it stirs again it does not come from nothing. It comes, he says, from the previousness of itself. It has done this before. Dissolution is never an ending. It is the in-breath before the out-breath. The night that guarantees the morning.
And there was a line cut into an old statue of the god Nebo, the oldest prophecy Hall knew of. That which has been will be. He read it not as fortune-telling but as plain cause and effect. Whatever was, returns, if the cause returns. Which cuts both ways. The ambition that burns the world down comes around again — but so does the ground, and so does the green.
So no. Ragnarok is not the end. It is the wheel turning over, the way it has turned before you and will turn after. The law-bound world you were so sure was everything burns off like morning fog, and it clears the ground for something that could not grow while it stood.
The fire is real. But fire is not the last word in the story. Grass is. Give the ash a season, and the mountain the couple climbed goes green.