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! - Yeah, there's little doubt about that. Again, not like I'm even advocating for getting away from Thorsson/Flowers as a goal, just looking for supplemental viewpoints. Oh, and speaking of folks influenced by Flowers, Scott Shell is an academic runologist youtuber who dared to cite Flowers in his thesis (which might have something to do with his status as an "independent scholar"). He didn't make the list above (yet), because I believe his thesis is in process of getting published as a book, and this was a *book* list, but I've rather liked his videos. He has a focus on continental Saxon material (like the Heliand), but he's very knowledgeable on the Runes and is a practitioner to boot.
A2) 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". - Indeed, Chaos magic strikes me as likely getting some stuff right and having some useful insights (for example, the emotional and semantic loading of every symbol has got to be at least somewhat individually/arbitrarily determined), but JMG's assessment that it goes too hard in "make this compatible with the modern scientific worldview"
It's good to hear that there's an older, more serious branch of what gets called "Left Hand" that has gotten its name tarnished by some grubbier stuff. I'm not surprised, but I had only ever heard that claim from folks who a) had some interest in it (like, say Aquino), or b) I had no way of judging the credibility of. Other than Thorsson/Flowers, I suppose, though I haven't yet read any of his explicitly LHP stuff, he was always pretty careful to mostly put that in another box than the more "mainstream" (hah) Runic/Germanic Religious Revival stuff.
It gladdens me to hear you recovered. - An aside on Libertarianism: the combined assault of JMG's Burkean conservatism and Yarvin's Neo-Reaction and Jordan Peterson's "Centrism" (a milquetoast name for what I think is actually a more profound point: political problems are too complex to solve a priori ahead of time, you actually need debate and experiment and multiple points of view to get anywhere that doesn't suck) have left me with very little idea what good political solutions look like, but with a pretty strong view that anarcho-capitalism misses some important things about how the world and people actually work. Which is tough, because my political-moral intuitions are still pretty strongly libertarian-ish ("do what you want! leave me alone! can't we just make a deal?"). Sorting all of that out is likely going to take rather a few blog posts that I'm not sure I feel either prepared nor secure enough to attempt just yet.
Not that it counts for much, but I'll be ready to apologize should you have that problem. :( - Anyhow, thanks for the apology in advance, but I think I'll be okay - for one, I'm a grown up, and for two, by the time I start engaging with those materials seriously, I'll hopefully have done a heck of a lot of balanced spiritual work that will make me less susceptible to "spiritual speed" or the like.
B1) 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? Hmm! I don't think I had yet stumbled upon trying out that manner of grouping, in part because I had been focused more on Aesir = Celestial, Vanir = Telluric (roughly, of course), and/or on individual correspondences. The idea that the jotnar are mainly Telluric is at least going to make for some fruitful meditation. I haven't done a lot in trying to map Germanish myths onto the AODA-style seven element framework, other than assigning Gods for my daily SOP and paying attention to appearances of the material elements. There is definitely something very important involving "above" and "below" going on, with the motif of descent into somewhere watery/snakey/underground/full of the dead and rising up to somewhere bright/glorious/immortal seen very clearly in a lot of myths, especially the core Odin ones, but my meditation plate has been too full to explore very deeply. The Maria Kvilhaug books mentioned above along with HRE Davidson's Myths and Symbols of the Pagan North, which explicitly compares Celtic and Germanish material, are where I'll likely start when I dig in there.
B2) Same, though I intend as well to deal with Týr as being truly the bright-sky/lawgiver deity. Yeah, I get the impression that Tyr is under-appreciated/understood. I've got a new edition of Dumezil's Mitra Varuna on pre-order (coming out in June), which I believe includes Odin and Tyr in his "dual sovereignty" hypothesis, which is something I had gotten kind of close to with an insight during meditation: Tyr is the God of deciding who gets his way, and Odin is the God of getting your way (among many other things for both, of course). Another interesting source of insight on their relationship is Kris Kershaw's The One-Eyed God (I know, I bring this one up a lot). Specifically, if her thesis that Odin was the God of the coming-of-age warband that exists outside of polite society for a time, and Tyr is the God of the adult warriors fully integrated into society, some interesting interactions suggest themselves (including a new way of looking at losing a hand for the trouble of binding the wolf).
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). - Yeah, the ambivalence of Odin has always been interesting to me, and I think the idea of Loki as both his best friend/brother and his mortal enemy are a part of that. Because even if you don't see Loki as literally a manifestation/hypostasis of Odin, they're obviously very closely linked in some way - they're blood brothers, they go on quests together, Odin rides Loki's son around, and so forth. More on this a couple points below.
Do you remember a specific source offhand? Actually, wow, praise ridiculous note-taking methods, one of my old, poorly-incorporated digital zettelkasten slips has a reference: Episode 4 of the Jordan Peterson podcast. It also wouldn't surprise me if "Rule 6: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World" has something to say about it, and it likely comes up at least once, maybe around the Garden of Eden bit or around Cain and Abel, in his Genesis lectures.
How compatible with Christianity's? And do you have some elaboration on that available, if I didn't take your time excessively already? - Hahah, no worries on "excessively taking my time", I've been worrying that I've been giving tl;dr responses likely to alienate you and anyone else who stumbles on them. So, trying to be somewhat brief, and recognizing that this likely deserves at least a blog post, here are some thoughts:
Peterson argues (briefly) that the Christian conception of the Devil, especially as elaborated in Paradise Lost and The Inferno, is a wonderful example of what happens when the individual, especially as represented by the ego and the rational mind, is not balanced by other forces properly. He simplifies the Jungian archetypes to Good/Bad Masculine (more society), Good/Bad Feminine (more nature), and Good/Bad Individual (the mediator between the two). God the Father is Good Masculine, the Holy Ghost/Mary is Good Feminine, Jesus is Good Individual. The parts of the material world that draw you to worldly wealth and power are Bad Masculine, the parts that draw you to worldly pleasures are Bad Feminine, and the Devil is Bad Individual. Basically, the Devil looks at the Feminine and Masculine, sees only the bad, rejects the Good, and says "F*** it, I'll do it myself". Peterson argues that the genius of the elaborated Christian view is that it recognizes the very tendency to fall in love with your own creations and elevate them above Being, and become convinced that you can do anything because you are so smart and powerful, and that this can start from some noble places, but easily go to some bad ones ("wow, it sure sucks that babies starve to death --> better medicine --> forced eugenic sterilization and killing" to take an overly short and simplified example).
I give all that as background, because I think it's a pretty good analysis. I'd add the caveat that it's an especially Faustian conception of evil, and it doesn't account for Steiner's Ahrimanian evil (that is something I need to look more into). All that being said, to the degree you accept that Loki is (at least sometimes) a mythic representation of evil, I think that the view complements Peterson's analysis of the Devil. Actually, tying into your response to B3), a suspicion I have, but haven't followed up on, is that part of the Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, was that views of who the Devil was and what he was about became more Germanish (but this may be impossible to sort out, especially since you can pretty easily argue that Loki was Satan-ified by the time the Eddas were written down).
What is interesting about the Germanish take to me? Well, for one, the Highest God is bros with this evil! They have a lot in common. This evil gets shit done - sometimes very necessary stuff, like recovering Idun or Mjolnir. And yet. . . he still leads the armies of Chaos on Ragnarok. He causes as much strife as solves (if not more). You string his stories together into a kind of "fall" (as Gaiman did in his recent adaptation). Whatever he is, whatever he's about, it is not the lasting harmony of conscious beings that the Aesir seek to uphold. Maybe one difference between Odin and Loki is that Odin steals stuff to make it available where needed (Promethean!) whereas Loki steals stuff to deprive the world of it (Luciferian!), or Odin strives for higher spiritual ends, whereas Loki strives for more material ones.
As I said, I haven't done enough reading, meditating, writing, or just plain thinking on this one, and I originally formulated the idea with a conception of Gods as only archetypes and myths as "just" evolved sense-making tools, and I haven't fully re-examined it in light of my current beliefs.
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. - Oh man, dumb dreamwidth noob moment here. On a journal of which I'm the admin, there's a "select" radio box at the bottom of every comment for moderation. I saw your question, then a radio box that said "Select", and I though you were going for something like "Which linguistic group invented the modern Western LHP?" A) Germanic B) Western Germanic c) English D) All of the above
no subject
A2) 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". - Indeed, Chaos magic strikes me as likely getting some stuff right and having some useful insights (for example, the emotional and semantic loading of every symbol has got to be at least somewhat individually/arbitrarily determined), but JMG's assessment that it goes too hard in "make this compatible with the modern scientific worldview"
It's good to hear that there's an older, more serious branch of what gets called "Left Hand" that has gotten its name tarnished by some grubbier stuff. I'm not surprised, but I had only ever heard that claim from folks who a) had some interest in it (like, say Aquino), or b) I had no way of judging the credibility of. Other than Thorsson/Flowers, I suppose, though I haven't yet read any of his explicitly LHP stuff, he was always pretty careful to mostly put that in another box than the more "mainstream" (hah) Runic/Germanic Religious Revival stuff.
It gladdens me to hear you recovered. - An aside on Libertarianism: the combined assault of JMG's Burkean conservatism and Yarvin's Neo-Reaction and Jordan Peterson's "Centrism" (a milquetoast name for what I think is actually a more profound point: political problems are too complex to solve a priori ahead of time, you actually need debate and experiment and multiple points of view to get anywhere that doesn't suck) have left me with very little idea what good political solutions look like, but with a pretty strong view that anarcho-capitalism misses some important things about how the world and people actually work. Which is tough, because my political-moral intuitions are still pretty strongly libertarian-ish ("do what you want! leave me alone! can't we just make a deal?"). Sorting all of that out is likely going to take rather a few blog posts that I'm not sure I feel either prepared nor secure enough to attempt just yet.
Not that it counts for much, but I'll be ready to apologize should you have that problem. :( - Anyhow, thanks for the apology in advance, but I think I'll be okay - for one, I'm a grown up, and for two, by the time I start engaging with those materials seriously, I'll hopefully have done a heck of a lot of balanced spiritual work that will make me less susceptible to "spiritual speed" or the like.
B1) 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? Hmm! I don't think I had yet stumbled upon trying out that manner of grouping, in part because I had been focused more on Aesir = Celestial, Vanir = Telluric (roughly, of course), and/or on individual correspondences. The idea that the jotnar are mainly Telluric is at least going to make for some fruitful meditation. I haven't done a lot in trying to map Germanish myths onto the AODA-style seven element framework, other than assigning Gods for my daily SOP and paying attention to appearances of the material elements. There is definitely something very important involving "above" and "below" going on, with the motif of descent into somewhere watery/snakey/underground/full of the dead and rising up to somewhere bright/glorious/immortal seen very clearly in a lot of myths, especially the core Odin ones, but my meditation plate has been too full to explore very deeply. The Maria Kvilhaug books mentioned above along with HRE Davidson's Myths and Symbols of the Pagan North, which explicitly compares Celtic and Germanish material, are where I'll likely start when I dig in there.
B2) Same, though I intend as well to deal with Týr as being truly the bright-sky/lawgiver deity. Yeah, I get the impression that Tyr is under-appreciated/understood. I've got a new edition of Dumezil's Mitra Varuna on pre-order (coming out in June), which I believe includes Odin and Tyr in his "dual sovereignty" hypothesis, which is something I had gotten kind of close to with an insight during meditation: Tyr is the God of deciding who gets his way, and Odin is the God of getting your way (among many other things for both, of course). Another interesting source of insight on their relationship is Kris Kershaw's The One-Eyed God (I know, I bring this one up a lot). Specifically, if her thesis that Odin was the God of the coming-of-age warband that exists outside of polite society for a time, and Tyr is the God of the adult warriors fully integrated into society, some interesting interactions suggest themselves (including a new way of looking at losing a hand for the trouble of binding the wolf).
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). - Yeah, the ambivalence of Odin has always been interesting to me, and I think the idea of Loki as both his best friend/brother and his mortal enemy are a part of that. Because even if you don't see Loki as literally a manifestation/hypostasis of Odin, they're obviously very closely linked in some way - they're blood brothers, they go on quests together, Odin rides Loki's son around, and so forth. More on this a couple points below.
Do you remember a specific source offhand? Actually, wow, praise ridiculous note-taking methods, one of my old, poorly-incorporated digital zettelkasten slips has a reference: Episode 4 of the Jordan Peterson podcast. It also wouldn't surprise me if "Rule 6: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World" has something to say about it, and it likely comes up at least once, maybe around the Garden of Eden bit or around Cain and Abel, in his Genesis lectures.
How compatible with Christianity's? And do you have some elaboration on that available, if I didn't take your time excessively already? - Hahah, no worries on "excessively taking my time", I've been worrying that I've been giving tl;dr responses likely to alienate you and anyone else who stumbles on them. So, trying to be somewhat brief, and recognizing that this likely deserves at least a blog post, here are some thoughts:
Peterson argues (briefly) that the Christian conception of the Devil, especially as elaborated in Paradise Lost and The Inferno, is a wonderful example of what happens when the individual, especially as represented by the ego and the rational mind, is not balanced by other forces properly. He simplifies the Jungian archetypes to Good/Bad Masculine (more society), Good/Bad Feminine (more nature), and Good/Bad Individual (the mediator between the two). God the Father is Good Masculine, the Holy Ghost/Mary is Good Feminine, Jesus is Good Individual. The parts of the material world that draw you to worldly wealth and power are Bad Masculine, the parts that draw you to worldly pleasures are Bad Feminine, and the Devil is Bad Individual. Basically, the Devil looks at the Feminine and Masculine, sees only the bad, rejects the Good, and says "F*** it, I'll do it myself". Peterson argues that the genius of the elaborated Christian view is that it recognizes the very tendency to fall in love with your own creations and elevate them above Being, and become convinced that you can do anything because you are so smart and powerful, and that this can start from some noble places, but easily go to some bad ones ("wow, it sure sucks that babies starve to death --> better medicine --> forced eugenic sterilization and killing" to take an overly short and simplified example).
I give all that as background, because I think it's a pretty good analysis. I'd add the caveat that it's an especially Faustian conception of evil, and it doesn't account for Steiner's Ahrimanian evil (that is something I need to look more into). All that being said, to the degree you accept that Loki is (at least sometimes) a mythic representation of evil, I think that the view complements Peterson's analysis of the Devil. Actually, tying into your response to B3), a suspicion I have, but haven't followed up on, is that part of the Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, was that views of who the Devil was and what he was about became more Germanish (but this may be impossible to sort out, especially since you can pretty easily argue that Loki was Satan-ified by the time the Eddas were written down).
What is interesting about the Germanish take to me? Well, for one, the Highest God is bros with this evil! They have a lot in common. This evil gets shit done - sometimes very necessary stuff, like recovering Idun or Mjolnir. And yet. . . he still leads the armies of Chaos on Ragnarok. He causes as much strife as solves (if not more). You string his stories together into a kind of "fall" (as Gaiman did in his recent adaptation). Whatever he is, whatever he's about, it is not the lasting harmony of conscious beings that the Aesir seek to uphold. Maybe one difference between Odin and Loki is that Odin steals stuff to make it available where needed (Promethean!) whereas Loki steals stuff to deprive the world of it (Luciferian!), or Odin strives for higher spiritual ends, whereas Loki strives for more material ones.
As I said, I haven't done enough reading, meditating, writing, or just plain thinking on this one, and I originally formulated the idea with a conception of Gods as only archetypes and myths as "just" evolved sense-making tools, and I haven't fully re-examined it in light of my current beliefs.
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. - Oh man, dumb dreamwidth noob moment here. On a journal of which I'm the admin, there's a "select" radio box at the bottom of every comment for moderation. I saw your question, then a radio box that said "Select", and I though you were going for something like "Which linguistic group invented the modern Western LHP?"
A) Germanic
B) Western Germanic
c) English
D) All of the above