Dagnabbit, I apparently can't edit comments after they're replied to, even as the admin, so, my apologies for the unclosed italics tag - that's what I get for trying to be all fancy with my html.
A2) Agreed! It strikes me as "I have to do it differently/make it my own/break from tradition no matter what." I can recognize this tendency, as I have a lot of it myself (see below on the Dolmen Arch).
Also, "there are no good political solutions, we need to make better people" - I think I've also absorbed a lot of that from JMG, and the rule of thumb "if you're not willing to take even tiny steps in the direction you're asking policy to take, maybe go jump in a lake" comes in very handy.
B1) Some very interesting points here.
B1.1) That's an angle I hadn't exactly considered, though it's an interesting one. If taking that assumption and mapping it onto the AODA-style seven elements, you might say that the Vanir then were more of the four elements than of any of the three spirits, which has some interesting implications, but also might overly downplay their link to Spirit (of whichever direction).
B1.2) I think there's at least two different historical fusions of some significance between PIE speakers and historical Germanic speakers, but I'm wary of overly-neat identifications like "the Danube-merger is where the Vanir came from, and the Nordic Bronze Age merger is where the Jotnar came from". Not that there might not be a lot of truth to those identifications, just cautious treating them as exhaustive, especially with examples like the Romans and the Sabines, which we have pretty good reason to think is both recent (for the Romans) actual history as well as a mythic echo of whatever led most PIE folks to have myths of warring tribes of divine beings that came together to some degree.
B1.3) Hmmm, you know, I think you might be right that none are presented as "just Vanir" in the implied "end state" of the myths we have - instead, there are parts of some of the stories where they are explicitly called out as Vanir at that point in time (like Frey, Freyja, and Njord). A metaphor that came to mind as I was thinking this over while getting my daughter's lunch ready for tomorrow is that "Vanir" might be best thought of as something like "one side of a large extended family". So, like, everyone is all married/adopted/otherwise accepted into the Aesir family, but everyone knows what "that side of the family" is like. This also hits on the wider idea that I'm pretty sure our modern brains must handle categories differently than ancient Germanish folks did - I mean, Frey was a Vanir, an Aesir, an Alf, a human baby that grew up to be a king and then went away again over the sea, and so forth. That ties us in knots (me, at least, with my Gygaxian desire to taxonimize the supernatural). I don't have a good answer of what the right way to handle this is, other than as good themes for meditation!
B1.4) Yeah, mostly Dolmen Arch, but keeping my toe dipped in the Druid Magic Handbook waters. My current default meditation schedule is 3 days of Dolmen Arch themes (I'm hopefully wrapping up the second grade next week), one day of scrying (currently working through the Ogham), then three days of meditating on the scrying. If something really makes me go "whoah" or if I have a crazy dream or a divination that needs more attention, I'll skip one or more days of the Dolmen Arch work and pick up where I left off. One of the things I've realized is an important lesson for me to learn from JMG is "pick a system, do it start to finish no matter what" - so I'm keeping up with as much of DMH as I can safely with a baby and a small child until they're old enough, and then I'll do the more advanced stuff. In the meantime, the Dolmen Arch is something that didn't initially appeal to me all that much, but I have been finding super rewarding (my take on Revival Druidry in general has undergone a pretty big transformation from something like "that's silly, why would anyone do that?" to "Yeah, well, I guess I'm on my way to being a druid now, whatever else I might be or become".
B1.5) On Maria Kvilhaug - Yeah, Seed of Yggdrasil is, um, daunting. On the other hand, the bits and pieces I have dipped into have been fascinating. Idhunn in Poetry and Myth was likewise fascinating, but also insanely frustrating because it's literally a transcription of some video lectures she gave, and those are not as logically organized as I would prefer a book to be. She seems to go a bit farther than I would in treating the Gods as metaphors for elements of human consciousness/souls (and maybe as only that?), but her takes make for great meditation fodder. As I think someone on a Magic Monday put it, her translations of every single Old Norse name discussed to its literal meaning is worth the price of admission alone.
C) On JBP's take:
C1) "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" IMO: compatible with Greek philosophy, but not Indo-European religions closer to the original. What do you think? - I agree that that particular mapping is more heavily Greek/Christian, and less fitting with what we know of other IE religions, but that all still have both Good and Bad Masculines and Feminines. Thjazi would be an example of the bad masculine in a more "brute force" way, the various female trolls are more about messing you up than tempting you into sin, and so forth.
C2) "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"." - Huh, very interesting. I might be biased due to thinking it describes me ... Well, Peterson's whole re-making of Solzhenitsyn's point that the line of good and evil runs down every human heart is in part that this describes (at least part) of everybody. The good side of the individual sees the Bad and asks "how can I bring some of the Good into the world to heal it/make it better." It's the degree to which the individual over-estimates himself and under-estimates the goodness outside of him that he shows the evil side of the archetype.
C3) "very tendency to fall in love with your own creations and elevate them above Being" - Similarly to your comment below: I don't think this describes his own Bad Feminine (arguably not even the Bad Masculine, just the Bad Individual, who apparently tries to be a rejecter of the other 2 Bads).
That's correct as I understand it. The Bad Masculine's failure mode is trying to control everything to the point that it is sterile, dead, and/or crushed. The Bad Feminine's failure mode is to devour, break, smother, or absorb everything. As the mediator between the two (order and chaos), the Individual is showing the Good archetype to the degree he recognizes the power, importance, and necessity of the two forces he's balancing. He shows the bad archetype to the degree he sees himself as the imporant, powerful, necessary part, and the other two forces as mere tools/servants/enemies.
C4) (Heh) "it's an especially Faustian conception of evil" - Just to make sure: you mean this evil has Faustian characteristics, not at all that it's what a Faustian would consider evil, right?
Ah, here, my attempt at brevity left out some nuance I was trying to convey. I think that Milton's Satan, the most fully developed presentation of the "character" is both super-Faustian in the sense of "only Faustian culture would make this kind of bad guy this sympathetic" as well as "only Faustian culture would push this kind of evil this far this 'effectively'." Another way to maybe put it: Milton was Christian and spiritual enough to recognize that Satan was fundamentally wrong in a way that turned everything he did toward evil, but he was Faustian enough to reeeeaaaalllly sympathize and not be entirely happy with his conclusions (that's my read anyway, as far as I know, Peterson doesn't know Spengler). I think the nature of how members of Faustian culture regard this kind of evil is a bit funky - after WWII and some of the other horrors of the 20th century, most Faustians have grudingly accepted that "we can go too far," but they/we just can't quite accept that the problem was in the trying to go as far as possible, rather than in the choice of which compass bearing to follow.
C5) "I think that the view complements Peterson's analysis of the Devil." - Do you mean in the sense of Loki being someone who wanted to make a better order?
Okay, so, here, I think I need to clarify a few things before going further: 1) When I first came up with this line of thinking, I was deep into Peterson's neo-Jungian interpretation of things as I've presented in very rough form above, 2) I also thought that all of these archetypes were basically extremely deep and subtle evolutionary psychology, rather than stories about external spiritual Beings with agency outside of how they influence human behavior, and 3) I was pretty sure that Loki was evil, if you had to make one judgment over the entire body of the myths.
These days, I still find Peterson's archetypal framework helpful for providing insights, but I think it risks missing subtleties, especially since myths are almost by definition about more than one thing all at once, I do believe the myths are about actual external spiritual Beings, and I still lean toward Loki as mostly evil (I don't pray to Loki or make any offerings), but I have more sympathy for folks who see Him as a positive figure and point to the good things that come from his actions (even "leads the armies of Hell against the rulers of the Cosmos" results in "rebirth and possibly new golden age" in Ragnarok!)
So, what I meant when I said I thought the view of Loki was complementary was that if you accept Peterson's analysis that "Luciferian evil" is pride in your own ability to understand things, fix things, command things, and a rejection of the helpful stabilizing of the Good Masculine and the rejuvenation of the Good Feminine, then I think Loki gives you further insight into what Luciferian evil is like, especially how it grows and develops from more-or-less on the side of Good to full-on "Enemy of Existence". With Lucifer/Satan, we don't really get much about what him being God's favorite and highest angel was like - what did he do that was helpful? how was he different from other angels? what problems did he solve? The fact of his rebellion is presented as this one, singular thing, and everything else comes from there (maybe Milton gives us more of that than I remember, I haven't read Paradise Lost since high school, and I was a slacker who didn't give it the attention it deserved). Loki, on the other hand, we get to see maybe from the very beginning (if you buy that Ljodhurr is a hypostasis of Loki) helping Odin and Thor on their world-defining quests, then you see Him do some stuff that screws up, but that He fixes, then you see Him go too far and become a full-on "Enemy of Existence" (again, apparently). Maybe this is all an over-long way of saying "I think if you meditated on myths involving Loki with Peterson's understanding of evil in mind, or vice versa, you'd get some good insights."
C6) "Well, for one, the Highest God is bros with this evil! They have a lot in common." - Undoubtedly they have much in common, but "are" they still bros? If those myths should be understood as representing cycles, maybe they should be seen as sometimes bros and sometimes not?
Indeed! The idea of "mythic time" is a tricky one, especially when it comes to Germanish myths, because there seem to be so many stories where things "were done" or "will happen" - they confuse with explicit chronology, while still almost certainly demanding to be understood outside of day-to-day concepts of how time works. I don't know that I had considered the idea of Loki and Odin's relationship as representative of cycles, but that's worthy of some meditation, I think. My current working approach to trying to understand mythic time in the Germanish myths is that the stories are told chronologically/narratively, because that's how we experience events, but the whole breadth of any one story, and especially multiple stories about the same God, are meant to convey a sense of "character", and when it comes to multiple Gods, of the relationships between them. Like, if you met me and my wife today, the sense you got of our relationship would be informed not only by how we met, but also by what our wedding was like, the fights we've had, the trips we've been on, the jobs we've worked, the times we've helped each other when we were sick, raising kids together, and so on. All of that is baked into what our dynamic is like, but the only way I could try to communicate it to you would be to pull out stories that illustrate those contributing factors and tell you as many of them as I could - because focusing just on that one fight we had would give no more an accurate picture than would focusing on just the way we met. In myth, since the relationships we're talking about are through spiritual/divine/cosmic beings, it would make good sense if they included cyclical elements.
C7) "steals stuff to deprive the world of it (Luciferian!)" - Is Satan actually like that? Leaving aside a possible interpretation in which he's faithful to Yahweh, if the serpent was Satan, didn't it/he want to make stuff available? (You read "The Tower", so you know what I mean.)
Yeah, as theologically necessary as "Satan is just doing the job Yahweh gave him" might be, I agree that almost no one in the Faustian west ever thinks of him like that. As for the role Satan/the Serpent is playing in Eden, it gets hard to say what his motivation was. Even if you accept Hotel Concierge's interpretation that God's reaction was one of fear, a punishment to prevent humans becoming too much like him, and even if you accept the (maybe?) implication that humans could have done so/maybe will do so and that might be a good thing, is that because the Serpent wants humans to have those things, or because he wants to spite God? The Miltonian version is that he's trying to screw up God's new favorite thing, humanity, as an act of spite and rebellion. When it comes to the Garden of Eden myth, I'm even more indebted to Peterson than in other areas, as he's devoted a lot of time and attention to it - his Genesis lectures went a long way to convincing me that there was something worthwhile in the Old Testament, whether you literally believed in Yahweh or not. Those lectures are rather hard to pick and choose from, and I found much easier to jump into after digesting his Maps of Meaning lectures/the book (I tried starting with those in the first place, and that was a mistake). Briefly, the key insight I got from him is that a lot of what seems arbitrary or perplexing about the Old Testament Yahweh, what makes him seem tyrannical or what have you, makes a lot more sense if you think of that figure as the ancient Hebrew's best attempt at conceptualizing of "this is just what the world is like" and then thinking about how to deal with that fact.
no subject
A2) Agreed! It strikes me as "I have to do it differently/make it my own/break from tradition no matter what." I can recognize this tendency, as I have a lot of it myself (see below on the Dolmen Arch).
Also, "there are no good political solutions, we need to make better people" - I think I've also absorbed a lot of that from JMG, and the rule of thumb "if you're not willing to take even tiny steps in the direction you're asking policy to take, maybe go jump in a lake" comes in very handy.
B1) Some very interesting points here.
B1.1) That's an angle I hadn't exactly considered, though it's an interesting one. If taking that assumption and mapping it onto the AODA-style seven elements, you might say that the Vanir then were more of the four elements than of any of the three spirits, which has some interesting implications, but also might overly downplay their link to Spirit (of whichever direction).
B1.2) I think there's at least two different historical fusions of some significance between PIE speakers and historical Germanic speakers, but I'm wary of overly-neat identifications like "the Danube-merger is where the Vanir came from, and the Nordic Bronze Age merger is where the Jotnar came from". Not that there might not be a lot of truth to those identifications, just cautious treating them as exhaustive, especially with examples like the Romans and the Sabines, which we have pretty good reason to think is both recent (for the Romans) actual history as well as a mythic echo of whatever led most PIE folks to have myths of warring tribes of divine beings that came together to some degree.
B1.3) Hmmm, you know, I think you might be right that none are presented as "just Vanir" in the implied "end state" of the myths we have - instead, there are parts of some of the stories where they are explicitly called out as Vanir at that point in time (like Frey, Freyja, and Njord). A metaphor that came to mind as I was thinking this over while getting my daughter's lunch ready for tomorrow is that "Vanir" might be best thought of as something like "one side of a large extended family". So, like, everyone is all married/adopted/otherwise accepted into the Aesir family, but everyone knows what "that side of the family" is like. This also hits on the wider idea that I'm pretty sure our modern brains must handle categories differently than ancient Germanish folks did - I mean, Frey was a Vanir, an Aesir, an Alf, a human baby that grew up to be a king and then went away again over the sea, and so forth. That ties us in knots (me, at least, with my Gygaxian desire to taxonimize the supernatural). I don't have a good answer of what the right way to handle this is, other than as good themes for meditation!
B1.4) Yeah, mostly Dolmen Arch, but keeping my toe dipped in the Druid Magic Handbook waters. My current default meditation schedule is 3 days of Dolmen Arch themes (I'm hopefully wrapping up the second grade next week), one day of scrying (currently working through the Ogham), then three days of meditating on the scrying. If something really makes me go "whoah" or if I have a crazy dream or a divination that needs more attention, I'll skip one or more days of the Dolmen Arch work and pick up where I left off. One of the things I've realized is an important lesson for me to learn from JMG is "pick a system, do it start to finish no matter what" - so I'm keeping up with as much of DMH as I can safely with a baby and a small child until they're old enough, and then I'll do the more advanced stuff. In the meantime, the Dolmen Arch is something that didn't initially appeal to me all that much, but I have been finding super rewarding (my take on Revival Druidry in general has undergone a pretty big transformation from something like "that's silly, why would anyone do that?" to "Yeah, well, I guess I'm on my way to being a druid now, whatever else I might be or become".
B1.5) On Maria Kvilhaug - Yeah, Seed of Yggdrasil is, um, daunting. On the other hand, the bits and pieces I have dipped into have been fascinating. Idhunn in Poetry and Myth was likewise fascinating, but also insanely frustrating because it's literally a transcription of some video lectures she gave, and those are not as logically organized as I would prefer a book to be. She seems to go a bit farther than I would in treating the Gods as metaphors for elements of human consciousness/souls (and maybe as only that?), but her takes make for great meditation fodder. As I think someone on a Magic Monday put it, her translations of every single Old Norse name discussed to its literal meaning is worth the price of admission alone.
C) On JBP's take:
C1) "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" IMO: compatible with Greek philosophy, but not Indo-European religions closer to the original. What do you think? - I agree that that particular mapping is more heavily Greek/Christian, and less fitting with what we know of other IE religions, but that all still have both Good and Bad Masculines and Feminines. Thjazi would be an example of the bad masculine in a more "brute force" way, the various female trolls are more about messing you up than tempting you into sin, and so forth.
C2) "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"." - Huh, very interesting. I might be biased due to thinking it describes me ... Well, Peterson's whole re-making of Solzhenitsyn's point that the line of good and evil runs down every human heart is in part that this describes (at least part) of everybody. The good side of the individual sees the Bad and asks "how can I bring some of the Good into the world to heal it/make it better." It's the degree to which the individual over-estimates himself and under-estimates the goodness outside of him that he shows the evil side of the archetype.
C3) "very tendency to fall in love with your own creations and elevate them above Being" - Similarly to your comment below: I don't think this describes his own Bad Feminine (arguably not even the Bad Masculine, just the Bad Individual, who apparently tries to be a rejecter of the other 2 Bads).
That's correct as I understand it. The Bad Masculine's failure mode is trying to control everything to the point that it is sterile, dead, and/or crushed. The Bad Feminine's failure mode is to devour, break, smother, or absorb everything. As the mediator between the two (order and chaos), the Individual is showing the Good archetype to the degree he recognizes the power, importance, and necessity of the two forces he's balancing. He shows the bad archetype to the degree he sees himself as the imporant, powerful, necessary part, and the other two forces as mere tools/servants/enemies.
C4) (Heh) "it's an especially Faustian conception of evil" - Just to make sure: you mean this evil has Faustian characteristics, not at all that it's what a Faustian would consider evil, right?
Ah, here, my attempt at brevity left out some nuance I was trying to convey. I think that Milton's Satan, the most fully developed presentation of the "character" is both super-Faustian in the sense of "only Faustian culture would make this kind of bad guy this sympathetic" as well as "only Faustian culture would push this kind of evil this far this 'effectively'." Another way to maybe put it: Milton was Christian and spiritual enough to recognize that Satan was fundamentally wrong in a way that turned everything he did toward evil, but he was Faustian enough to reeeeaaaalllly sympathize and not be entirely happy with his conclusions (that's my read anyway, as far as I know, Peterson doesn't know Spengler). I think the nature of how members of Faustian culture regard this kind of evil is a bit funky - after WWII and some of the other horrors of the 20th century, most Faustians have grudingly accepted that "we can go too far," but they/we just can't quite accept that the problem was in the trying to go as far as possible, rather than in the choice of which compass bearing to follow.
C5) "I think that the view complements Peterson's analysis of the Devil." - Do you mean in the sense of Loki being someone who wanted to make a better order?
Okay, so, here, I think I need to clarify a few things before going further: 1) When I first came up with this line of thinking, I was deep into Peterson's neo-Jungian interpretation of things as I've presented in very rough form above, 2) I also thought that all of these archetypes were basically extremely deep and subtle evolutionary psychology, rather than stories about external spiritual Beings with agency outside of how they influence human behavior, and 3) I was pretty sure that Loki was evil, if you had to make one judgment over the entire body of the myths.
These days, I still find Peterson's archetypal framework helpful for providing insights, but I think it risks missing subtleties, especially since myths are almost by definition about more than one thing all at once, I do believe the myths are about actual external spiritual Beings, and I still lean toward Loki as mostly evil (I don't pray to Loki or make any offerings), but I have more sympathy for folks who see Him as a positive figure and point to the good things that come from his actions (even "leads the armies of Hell against the rulers of the Cosmos" results in "rebirth and possibly new golden age" in Ragnarok!)
So, what I meant when I said I thought the view of Loki was complementary was that if you accept Peterson's analysis that "Luciferian evil" is pride in your own ability to understand things, fix things, command things, and a rejection of the helpful stabilizing of the Good Masculine and the rejuvenation of the Good Feminine, then I think Loki gives you further insight into what Luciferian evil is like, especially how it grows and develops from more-or-less on the side of Good to full-on "Enemy of Existence". With Lucifer/Satan, we don't really get much about what him being God's favorite and highest angel was like - what did he do that was helpful? how was he different from other angels? what problems did he solve? The fact of his rebellion is presented as this one, singular thing, and everything else comes from there (maybe Milton gives us more of that than I remember, I haven't read Paradise Lost since high school, and I was a slacker who didn't give it the attention it deserved). Loki, on the other hand, we get to see maybe from the very beginning (if you buy that Ljodhurr is a hypostasis of Loki) helping Odin and Thor on their world-defining quests, then you see Him do some stuff that screws up, but that He fixes, then you see Him go too far and become a full-on "Enemy of Existence" (again, apparently). Maybe this is all an over-long way of saying "I think if you meditated on myths involving Loki with Peterson's understanding of evil in mind, or vice versa, you'd get some good insights."
C6) "Well, for one, the Highest God is bros with this evil! They have a lot in common." - Undoubtedly they have much in common, but "are" they still bros? If those myths should be understood as representing cycles, maybe they should be seen as sometimes bros and sometimes not?
Indeed! The idea of "mythic time" is a tricky one, especially when it comes to Germanish myths, because there seem to be so many stories where things "were done" or "will happen" - they confuse with explicit chronology, while still almost certainly demanding to be understood outside of day-to-day concepts of how time works. I don't know that I had considered the idea of Loki and Odin's relationship as representative of cycles, but that's worthy of some meditation, I think. My current working approach to trying to understand mythic time in the Germanish myths is that the stories are told chronologically/narratively, because that's how we experience events, but the whole breadth of any one story, and especially multiple stories about the same God, are meant to convey a sense of "character", and when it comes to multiple Gods, of the relationships between them. Like, if you met me and my wife today, the sense you got of our relationship would be informed not only by how we met, but also by what our wedding was like, the fights we've had, the trips we've been on, the jobs we've worked, the times we've helped each other when we were sick, raising kids together, and so on. All of that is baked into what our dynamic is like, but the only way I could try to communicate it to you would be to pull out stories that illustrate those contributing factors and tell you as many of them as I could - because focusing just on that one fight we had would give no more an accurate picture than would focusing on just the way we met. In myth, since the relationships we're talking about are through spiritual/divine/cosmic beings, it would make good sense if they included cyclical elements.
C7) "steals stuff to deprive the world of it (Luciferian!)" - Is Satan actually like that? Leaving aside a possible interpretation in which he's faithful to Yahweh, if the serpent was Satan, didn't it/he want to make stuff available? (You read "The Tower", so you know what I mean.)
Yeah, as theologically necessary as "Satan is just doing the job Yahweh gave him" might be, I agree that almost no one in the Faustian west ever thinks of him like that. As for the role Satan/the Serpent is playing in Eden, it gets hard to say what his motivation was. Even if you accept Hotel Concierge's interpretation that God's reaction was one of fear, a punishment to prevent humans becoming too much like him, and even if you accept the (maybe?) implication that humans could have done so/maybe will do so and that might be a good thing, is that because the Serpent wants humans to have those things, or because he wants to spite God? The Miltonian version is that he's trying to screw up God's new favorite thing, humanity, as an act of spite and rebellion. When it comes to the Garden of Eden myth, I'm even more indebted to Peterson than in other areas, as he's devoted a lot of time and attention to it - his Genesis lectures went a long way to convincing me that there was something worthwhile in the Old Testament, whether you literally believed in Yahweh or not. Those lectures are rather hard to pick and choose from, and I found much easier to jump into after digesting his Maps of Meaning lectures/the book (I tried starting with those in the first place, and that was a mistake). Briefly, the key insight I got from him is that a lot of what seems arbitrary or perplexing about the Old Testament Yahweh, what makes him seem tyrannical or what have you, makes a lot more sense if you think of that figure as the ancient Hebrew's best attempt at conceptualizing of "this is just what the world is like" and then thinking about how to deal with that fact.