Loviatar is a goddess of pain of Finnish origin, the blind daughter of Death and mother of the nine diseases, whose realm lies on the burning ice of Mungoth in Gehenna. She formed the girl who became the Lady of Pain.
| Type | Deity |
| Parents | Tuoni and Tuonetar |
| Realm | Ondtland, on Mungoth (Gehenna) |
| Symbol | A white dagger in a pale hand |
| Spanish entry | Loviatar |
Description
In the oldest northern songs, collected by the Kalevala, she is the daughter of Tuoni and Tuonetar, lords of the Finnish underworld, tied to Pohjola, the frozen North from which evils come. She began as a bearer of illnesses in the house of the dead, not as a goddess of an ordered pantheon.
She is depicted as a pale maiden in white armor holding an ice dagger low, with dire wolves at her feet, carnivorous caribou behind her, and her palace of ice spires under a green and violet aurora, in falling ash-gray snow.
Her realm, Ondtland (“land of evil”), lies on the frozen slopes of Mungoth, third mount of Gehenna: a waste of ice and snow with packs of dire wolves, strangely beautiful and deadly to the unwary. She repays her faithful with cruelty and abuse.
The Burning Ice
Mungoth, the hielo ardiente (“burning ice”), is not elemental ice. Its snow mixes with volcanic ash, turns acidic and burns through clothing, then becomes a mud that makes the slopes slippery; avalanches and lava flows bury possible shelters, all on volcanoes with neither base nor summit.
The land of Ice reached by Sogol’s gesta (campaign-cycle) through the Arch of the Not Yet shares this nature: biting black ice, volcanic embers in the white coffin, and an unending war of cold and fire with mephits on both sides. It is a mixed Gehenna.
Role
The northern pantheon is said to be dying of consumptive apathy, and Loviatar is one of the two who swore not to yield to it; she moves worlds and changes rank rather than fade. She is both queen and servant of a greater god of tyranny. Her chief antagonist is the god who suffers for others: she inflicts what he takes on.
The little lady of pain
An old chronicle of the Deep Ones records that Loviatar raised a kidnapped, broken girl in pain. Offered the erasure of everything she had lived, the girl answered: no, quiero recordar todo (“no, I want to remember everything”).
She was formed as the little lady of pain and became Thel, the masked regent of the City of Doors. At the end of Antiterra, in the Hall of Speakers, her son killed her with a dagger of the blackest obsidian. In death she was captured: her soul remained in the sea under guard, and her helmet fell to the primary plane.