Jeff Russell

A1) I have no doubt gullindagan will both find and make stuff otherwise not found easily, but if he doesn't rely on Flowers substantially I will eat a hat. As for JMG's translation, of course if he only translates it it won't have even the slightest smell of Flowers, but if he comments on it Flowers will end up in the bibliography!

A2) "I didn't find chaos magic appealing, as I had enough respect for the non-obvious selective powers of tradition to arrive at better/more meaningful/more effective ways of interacting with these archetypes than purely individually-significant symbols" - Indeed. While Gordon White and Michael Kelly both use chaos magic ideas (well, the former *is* a chaos mage - *plus some other stuff*) to what seems to be good effect to me, I don't know what could lead someone willing to practice magic to prefer chaos magic "pure".

"I've been pretty far into the anarcho-capitalist flavor of Libertarianism" - It gladdens me to hear you recovered. I'd say the Church of Satan fits Right-Libertarianism much better than the Temple of Set, should it matter - the joke has been made that Aquino was a Protestant Satanist, and (of course keeping in mind that they're incomparably smaller than any noticeable branch of Christianity), from my limited knowledge about particularly the CoS (my sympathy for it is much smaller), I think the split between them is bigger than the Romanist-Lutheran one (perhaps I shouldn't compare it to the Romanist-Calvinist one, however).

"folks who had seemingly steered me well (like JMG and his commentariat) had a default negative assessment of LHP groups, practitioners, and philosophies." - Let me be the last one to say they were generally wrong: the recent Western stuff labeled as "LHP" has generally been *painfully* stupid (and at least sometimes worse than that) IMO.

"Oh, and add to this that I was starting to more seriously question the kind of "do what thou wilt" individualism that libertarianism and LHP spiritual paths seemed to share (without looking too deeply into them, of course)." - The vulgar versions (i.e. what you find the vast majority of the time) certainly deserve the scorn! As for the non-vulgar versions, well, I haven't read Crowley, so I don't know the non-vulgar meaning - if any! - of his "Wilt".

"Anyhow, where all of this has gotten me (for now) is that anything LHP should be approached with caution, not necessarily because it is eeeevilll, but precisely because some of what might be most attractive about it to me and my predispositions might be the very stuff that I need to think harder about." - Not that it counts for much, but I'll be ready to apologize should you have that problem. :(

"(not that I'll be in the market for new daily practices anytime soon!)" - oh, I'm sure of that!

B1) (I'll have to look for the female Ás/male jötunn I supposedly remember later.) Sorry in the likely case this part is already obvious to you, but I think you didn't make a remark that makes clear it is, so for the doubt's sake: since you know the AODA/etc. system, do you already think about jötnar as of the telluric current and Aesir as of the celestial? AFAICT, the celestial is older, but that doesn't prevent some of its products from being younger than some of the telluric; a human should access both, but we formed first most directly from the telluric and our ancestors were pretty fracking dumb when we had much less celestial access; the telluric currents makes us move and the celestial makes us control how we move (i.e. I believe the ancient German(ic)s (and a number of other Indo-Europeans) thought the telluric current should be used, under celestial control to the extent possible - in AODA terminology). Right? (AFAICT, Sigurdhr cooking Fáfnir's heart is unsubtle.)

B2) "Yeah, the whole "bringer of the secret fire"/"maker of the first sacrifice"/"morally ambiguous trickery for greater good" angle of Odin is one that I am interested in exploring more deeply" - Same, though I intend as well to deal with Týr as being truly the bright-sky/lawgiver deity.

"I feel like this whole angle, especially the degree to which it is "left hand", is also linked up with Odin's relationship with Loki" - There *is* Flowers' hypothesis of Loki being a manifestation of Ódhinn, but I'd say even if they should be understood as mortal enemies - what about Ódhinn does *not* have the opposition of a bunch of other religions (arguably including Indo-European - it's not unknown elsewhere for the dark-sky deity to be seen as enemy of the bright-sky, usually the boss or the boss' retired father).

"Jordan Peterson has praised Christianity's model of evil and how it works psychologically" - Do you remember a specific source offhand?

"I suspect that Germanic myth has some very useful insights here, especially as regards the ambivalence of "the rationa intellect" as a part of consciousness." - How compatible with Christianity's? And do you have some elaboration on that available, if I didn't take your time excessively already?

B3) AFAICT, what I intended to say (not a joke and without the answer) went out just fine - I meant the modern LHP is IMO entirely a Germanic invention including Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia (I'm highly skeptical it owes anything to 19th-century French "Satanism" - though I know very little about the latter), and that's not unrelated to the previous Germanic religion.