[Main Blog Post] The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old

[jprussell]

This week, I take my first step in tackling Maria Kvilhaug's massive tome The Seed of Yggdrasill. As with some of her other work, it is a frustrating blend of genuinely wonderful insights and sloppy organization, but hopefully sharing my thoughts on them will help both of us get more out of it!

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

I have to say that some of the issues you raised around lack of editing sound very similar to those I encountered with The Three Little Sisters edition of Kweldulf Gundarsson's Teutonic Magic - which read like it had been scanned from a previous printed edition and not copy checked - and really put me off buying more from them.

[jprussell]

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me, but is unfortunate. Gundarsson's Teutonic Magic has a slightly special place for me, because it was while following one of its guided rune "pathworkings" that I had my "oh wow, this stuff is real" religious experience. That being said, I have no idea if the kindle edition I have was put out by TLS, and I haven't read the whole thing very closely.

As I said, it's a shame for dumb stuff like this to cloud otherwise good material.

[k_a_nitz]

Re: "Kvilhaug's interpretation is that these are initiatory tales, and that the sequence of tales shows a soul getting part of the way there, dying, reincarnating, and then getting further along each time, turning what can feel like a loosely-linked anthology into a coherent spiritually relevant cycle."
This would be a cool exercise for anyone wanting to write their own myth cycle - figuring out which lessons should be learnt in each 'life', and what order to put them in.

[jprussell]

Indeed! It's also a valuable theme for meditation to look at other existing mythic cycles and ask "what if this were a tale of different levels of initiation?" I've gotten a lot of out the Mabinogion following that advice, for one.

[k_a_nitz]

Funnily enough I just came across the word "euhemerization" in its German form yesterday in a translation I'm doing - completely new to me and so I needed to look it up!

[jprussell]

Synchronicitous!

[k_a_nitz]

Regarding: "So, if you wanted to take this approach to Odhinn winning the Mead of Poetry, you'd focus on how Odhinn changes shape, goes underground, meets a female figure, they have sex, he takes a precious liquid, and then changes shape to escape again, chased by a giant who has also changed shape. Now, clearly, the details of each of these steps likely have meaning (why does he change into a snake at first and an eagle at the end? Which female figure gives him what precious liquid?)"

My interpretation:
Odhinn changes shape = gets horny
goes underground = goes to woman's bedroom (dark chthonic place)
meets a female figure, they have sex = as it says
he takes a precious liquid = gets inspired as a result
then changes shape to escape again = no longer horny and does a runner
chased by a giant who has also changed shape = pregnant woman wanting commitment
why does he change into a snake at first = got horny
and an eagle at the end? = got inspired (mind soaring)
Which female figure gives him what precious liquid? = muse gives him inspiration

[jprussell]

That certainly strikes me as a valid interpretation, and indeed, I think is the "baseline" that gives a lot of the rest of it its charge. On the other hand, another take might be that the first shape change is into a snake, associated with cthonic death and rebirth. Going underground might be getting buried, or going to the underworld. Having sex with an underground female figure might be a symbolic representation of death, the precious liquid is something only available "out of this life," and transforming into the eagle is escaping from the usual fate of the dead to something else.

[k_a_nitz]

I also like to think of stories of Odin from the point of view of him being a representation of learning, and especially that of learning as gaining through sacrificing a part of yourself (whether that be literal or just time and effort). So for instance:

The change to a snake is representing stepping out of your skin and going beyond the everyday concerns of this life.
Going underground is digging down to the underlying principles.
The female figure down there is sophia (the norns?) - knowledge as a lover.
Sex with her is the striving for enlightenment.
The precious liquid is the gained insights (links to the well).
The giant who changes shape is the past self resisting the change that the insights bring.
The eagle because you must take the knowledge further to escape your past self's limitations.

[jprussell]

Wonderful! I think there's a lot of good food for meditation there. Incidentally, one of the "formulae" that Kvilhaug has spent a lot of time on is "The Maiden with the Mead," where the pattern is "Male Being overcomes challenges to meet with Female Being to get Precious Drink." Almost every version is somehow associated with knowledge/wisdom, so you're not alone in seeing that particular link for stories like this.

[(Anonymous)]

There are also some alchemical themes here, in that there is a fixed, or salt form, for the serpent, and a flying or sulfur form for the eagle. Odin starts out as fixed, undergoes the change after uniting with the female principle, and then gains the ability to "fly" afterwards. Thinking about the themes in The Seed of Yggdrasil, where women are the inner motivating principle within solid things, this makes sense of what is going on.

I also agree that the book is an editors nightmare. Argh.

[jprussell]

Ah, that's really cool. I don't know enough about alchemy (yet) to pick up on such things. Thanks much for pointing it out.

[(Anonymous)]

I would even argue that the themes go further, given that we can actually find the same motif echoed in the Tree. At the top is the Jotun eagle, while at the bottom is Nidhogg, and so there is something here in Odin's activity that repeats this relationship wherein the activity of these beings becomes reconciled. Is the mead the very sap of the Tree? I wonder.

[jprussell]

Hmmm! Now, that's an interesting speculation. It is sometimes called Mimameiðr, "Memory Tree," so I think you might be on to something.

[k_a_nitz]

Which may suggest that the tree is a static representation of an initiation?

[jprussell]

Huh, I hadn't considered that. That feels like some pretty good meditation fodder, right there. Off the top of my head, if the Tree is a representation of the world, and if the point of living in the world is the initiation of the higher Self, that makes some good sense.

[k_a_nitz]

Re: "The other thing she does is to point out how her understanding is that the myths can be understood, enjoyed, and found meaningful at multiple levels, whether as magical tales, clues to religious ritual, or representations of deeper spiritual realities."

There is a whole cottage industry in academia around this idea for literature in general - the keyword to look for is intertextuality (my MA thesis was around intertextuality in a German novel). You could say the equivalent of kennings for Anglo-Saxon Christians would be references to phrases from the King James Bible or the Book of Common Prayer - if you pay attention when reading English novels from about 100 years ago or older you will often catch these (intertexts) and if you know the original context you may grasp the deeper meaning buried in the text.

[jprussell]

Thank you, that's a term I had heard before, and I could infer the basics of its meaning, but having a more precise definition is useful. Absolutely that's a major part of what gives most myth its staying power (Jordan Peterson makes a point about how much intertextuality there is just within the Bible itself, for example). But I wasn't just stating that the references within a given myth give it more depth, but also something about what kind of depth those references might be trying to evoke. To go slightly farther afield for an example, I'm meditating my way through the Mabinogion for JMG's Dolmen Arch books. The book The Four Branches of the Mabinogi by Will Parker does an absolutely fantastic job of laying out how each story simultaneously has elements from 1) half-remembered ancient Celtic history, 2) myths and folktales, 3) references to recent history/dynastic politics, and 4) individual psychological processes. Many of these layers are accomplished simultaneously through things like intertextuality (like referencing the Welsh Triads), but from your description, it doesn't sound like the inclusion of those different takes is necessarily intertextuality itself - or have I misunderstood?

[k_a_nitz]

The thing with intertextuality is that it is connected up with Reader-Response Theory, which from memory is based on the idea that the meaning is constructed by the reader (so different readers will get different things from the same book) and so in a sense intertextuality encompasses not just the inclusion of texts from other works or the references to them, but also the connotations that those intertexts bring out in the reader's mind. So you get the ideas of shallow and deep reading - shallow reading takes the text as it is, deep reading goes down the rabbit hole of all the intertexts and their connotations/associations, as deep as you like. I hope that make sense.

[jprussell]

Ah, okay, so it does have a wider meaning than I was inferring from your description, thank you for the clarification!

[k_a_nitz]

Re: "As such, she raises the thought that all of that which is might be thought of as a story or a poem being told by Whatever or Whomever the creator might be."

This sounds very Christian to me for some reason - "what is written shall be" - though it also sounds very familiar.

[jprussell]

You're not wrong there - what with the Logos and all, but Kvilhaug also explicitly compares it to Hindu ideas about reality as we know it being a dream of some vast cosmic being and some other examples, so as you say, it's pretty familiar from multiple traditions.