jprussell: (Default)
Jeff Russell ([personal profile] jprussell) wrote 2025-04-06 01:16 am (UTC)

Hmm! I read your post on Apollon's hyperborean origins and was too dumb to consider there might be something "heathen"-ish about it. Off the top of my head, none of the Germanic Gods come to mind, other than that Baldr/Baldaeg is sometimes associated with the Sun, and is the favorite son of the King of the Gods, but that's pretty thin. If there's anything to that, there's some interesting speculation on the shared background and/or mutual influences of some Celtic myths about the conflict between a young solar hero and a terrible (usually one-eyed) giant and the Norse myths about the death of Baldr. There's a striking number of similarities between pieces, but they're assembled in very different ways. The best discussion I've seen of this is in The Four Branches of the Mabinogi by Will Parker, but it's helpfully supplemented by reading some more Norse-oriented sources on the Baldr myths (and presumably by better knowledge of the Irish Myths of Balor and such). It strikes me that this might have a tie-in with the notion that the Celts were a refugee Atlantean caste, given your mention of Atlantis in your linked post.

As for Asgard as Troy, to my knowledge, most Heathens see that equivalence as folk etymology ("Asgard" sounds kind of like "Asia") plus medieval Classicizing taken to an extreme ("the Romans claimed descent from Troy, we can too!"). I haven't encountered the idea that there's a philosophical equivalence worth exploring, except perhaps for the book Taliesin's Map by J. Dolan, which I've skimmed, but not fully read yet. His basic thesis is to give the Iliad (and to a lesser extent, the Odyssey) the same treatment that scholar's have done to the Mahabharata, and see it as older, likely Indo-European, myth transposed into "historical" events, and then to look for comparisons between figures in the two epics and extrapolate the similarities to other Indo-European pantheons/bodies of myth. The book includes a set of tables showing proposed correspondences between figures in these different bodies of myth, similar to the correspondences you've shared between Egyptian and Greek myth - it might give you some further threads to run down.

Lastly, as for "history is propaganda," my own take is that that's true, but not the whole story. Maybe I'm being humano-centric, but I think that narrative might have a more fundamental role in the nature of reality than a lot of modern takes insist, and while it's well-attested that myth gets "applied" to historical events (see above, or JMG's discussion of the background of the stories that fed into Wagner's Ring Cycle), there are enough instances where the myth-taken-as-history lines up with things we seem to have good evidence for (like that the Greeks conducted an end-of-Bronze-Age raid on a city in Asia Minor that lines up with the geographic references to Troy in the Iliad and seems to have been called something like "Wilios" by the Hittites/Luwians) that I'm loath to discard the "historicity" of such stories entirely, even if it's doubtless muddier than either "it happened just like the story says!" or "it's all made up and never happened."

Anyhow, hope these help!
Jeff

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