[Open Post] Heathen Open Post

[jprussell]

Howdy,

So, I'm looking to strengthen some connections among Ecosophia-adjacent Heathens, and an easy first step seemed to be a regular open post here on my dreamwidth.

A few ground rules:

1. The overall goal here is for folks interested in Heathenry to meet, share resources, and so forth. So, even though I won't draw a hard line on "on-topic" against "off-topic," it would be best if posts have something to do with Germanic/Northern European polytheism, whether ancient or modern.


2. Let's keep things civil. Disagreement is welcome, but insults, rudeness, and attacks are not.


3. I don't expect enough traffic to need to put a hard limit on when this post will be open, but once the next open post goes up, please post any new discussions there.

Otherwise, welcome, and kindly say hello!

Comments

[jprussell]

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

[sdi]

Thanks as always for the references, Jeff. Taliesin's Map, in particular, seems like exactly what I'm looking for, like a parallel project to my own.

Regarding Hyperborea: yeah, Hyperborea is traditionally held to be the island of Great Britain, and I've seen books arguing, on the basis of place names, that Troy could be possibly placed in Cambridgeshire. As I have said many times, I am not a linguist, so I can't assess those arguments, but there's a lot of internal evidence in the Iliad that makes the traditional location in Anatolia seem rather silly even to someone as untraveled as myself. (The sea beside Troy is tidal, whereas the Mediterranean is not. It is always raining at Troy, but Anatolia is arid. Akhilles is blond; Menelaus is auburn-haired; various women, but especially Helen, are said to be white as snow; etc.; which doesn't fit the people we believe to have lived in the Aegean at the time. The times and distances described are not merely wrong but ludicrous if the Aegean is the sea between the Danaans and Troy. That sort of thing.)

Regarding symbolic equivalences: I was also thinking Baldr was the obvious Apollon/Horus equivalent, all being gods of sunlight and victory; in particular, Plutarch recounts a tradition that Horus defeating Set is the return of the Sun after an eclipse, which sure sounds a lot like Baldr slaying Fenrir after he gobbles up the Sun! Othin, is, if anything, more Osiris-y than Zeus ever was, since Othin is a (the?) divine mind striving to know all, and Osiris is the discoverer of all things (and, following the Pythagoreans, I have related him to Plotinus's Intellect, also the divine Mind striving to know all, many times in my Horus series). The Aesir-Vanir war erupts over Gullveig/Heithr coming to Asgard, which is reminiscent of the Trojan war erupting when Helen came to Troy. If the Aesir are, indeed, Trojans, it's also noteworthy that Zeus and Apollo were the two main gods fighting on the side of Troy...

Regarding history as propaganda: I think what I'm trying to say is that things exist at a level of being "below" whatever created them. Historical events exist at the material level of being. If historical events give rise to a narrative, then the narrative is "below" the material level of being; if, on the other hand, the narrative gives rise to the historical events, then the narrative is "above" the material level of being. Therefore, if we want to go "up," it is important to separate the spiritual wheat from the historical chaff. (Or, to put it another way, I'm interested in the question of whether Troy could be Hyperborean because it may provide more versions of the myth for me to compare against, which could help me abstract the myth's essential meaning from any one version of the myth's particulars!)

[sdi]

Oh, you know what? My mistake, it is Vitharr who slays Fenrir, not Baldr. Well that certainly weakens my case!

[jprussell]

1) Fair enough on Hyperborea and the inconsistencies in the description of Troy's locale. I was mostly going with the celebrated fact that Heinrich Schleimannn used the descriptions in the Iliad to find Hisarlik, which has many points of evidence pointing to its being the historical location of "Troy," at least as described by Homer. Of course, as with some of the examples I cited (like the historical events that got smashed together into the Nibulungenied and associated tales), it's quite plausible that more than one historical event "resonated" with the underlying myth, and they got merged (which fits pretty well with your third point below). One example I've given some thought to is the recurring pattern of the "War Between the Tribes/Functions" in various Indo-European bodies of myth, as especially highlighted by Dumezil in his Tri-Functional hypothesis - the Aesir and Vanir, the Asuras and the Devas, maybe also the two sides in the Mahabharata, the Romans and the Sabines, arguably the Dorian invasion of Greece, and so forth). Various historical-reconstruction-oriented folks have tried to find the "real" event that originated these myths - some going as far back as when the Indo-Europeans formed from two or more disparate groups, others going slightly farther forward, to when the Indo-Europeans started bumping into other established groups, like the "First Farmers" of Europe (referred to in the Ancient DNA literature as the "EEFs" - which I think stands for "Early European Farmers"). On this particular story, I've started to feel that all of the proposed historical antecedents might be "right" - for one reason or another, various Indo-European-derived groups had a story pattern of two groups with different proclivities coming into conflict and then finding some kind of uneasy peace, with a new order that incorporates elements from both. When that pattern played out multiple times historically (which isn't so surprising), each time got identified as when it "really" happened, even if elements from earlier versions got kept. So, according to my view, something like the "Rape of the Sabine Women" likely really did happen among the early Romans, but before that, the Early/Proto-Romans likely had similar stories about some other similar event, and some of those likely got incorporated as details to the story that may or may not have really happened with their Italian neighbors.

2) I was going to say about Baldr slaying Fenrir, then you corrected yourself with the follow-on comment :) That said, Baldr does have a less violent triumphant return - after Ragnarok, He comes back from Hel to rule the reborn world in His father's stead, so all is not lost. As for the Odin-Osiris equivalence, that's quite interesting! That also brings to mind the possibility of Loki as the Set equivalent, for His "dark counterpart" role to Odin and trouble-making ways, if nothing else.

3) Ah, fair enough! I find it easier to be onboard with this way of putting it than my interpretation of what you said before, which is likely a failing of mine. I agree that it's a mistake to view myths as "just" garbled versions of "real" historical events, and am primarily interested in teasing out what "really" happened historically to cast more light on what the myths related to them might mean. To go with my above example about the war between the functions, it's boring (to me) to posit that the Aesir-Vanir war is a dim memory of when the Germans ran into the earlier inhabitants of Scandinavia, or when the Indo-Europeans ran into the EEFs, or when the groups that merged into the Indo-Europeans ran into each other, or whatever. By that view, we get something like "Well, these other folks had a religion with more Goddesses and a greater emphasis on the land and fertility, and the Indo-Europeans/Germans had masculine war Gods, and so the historic Germans ended up with both, due to peacemaking, ethnogenesis, or whatever." It's much more interesting to propose that there is something "above" the material world (astral, mental, spiritual, whatever) with some kind of shape to it that has manifested in various ways in material history, and each of those manifestations might cast a little more light on that pattern by being slightly different.

All of which is a long way to say, it sounds like I agree with you :)

Cheers,
Jeff

[sdi]

Yeah, it sounds like we're in agreement! And, in all fairness to the historical-reconstruction folks you cite, my only real criticism of them is that I think the "real" event is spiritual rather than historical. So I'm trying to track down that "archetypal" Troy, and would not be surprised at all to see the "Trojan War" play out in many times and places over the last few thousand years. Since the "Trojan War" is all about the children of the heroes, my guess is that the myths I've been tracking—Horus, Apollon, Perseus, etc.—are all tied into it somehow, and out of devotion to the gods I'd love to try and understand how, though I despair of actually accomplishing it. (I dearly hope the daimons will be kind enough to explain it all to me once I'm dead, though!)