C5.2) Although it's been said her dead subjects will fight the Aesir's, I have similar inclinations - for one, I don't have a source on hand, but I've read arguments I considered convincing that the Germanic afterlife was distorted into Valhalla-centrism and that goind to Helheim originally wasn't supposed to be considered unfortunate; and you might want to consider https://lyricstranslate.com/en/therion-helheim-lyrics.html (if you don't know it already - but in any case you have heard about Thomas Karlsson already, right?).
Yeah, I also feel like the evidence we have for "Valhalla = end-all, be-all of desirable afterlife" and "Helheim = where gross losers go to suck for eternity" is likely late, skewed, and not a terribly accurate picture of how pre-Christian Heathens, except maybe very late ones, looked at the afterlife. Add in the Western Occultism lens and a belief in reincarnation, and things get even messier. For what it's worth, in The One-Eyed God (again!), Kershaw floats the idea that the notion of a feasting hall for the honored dead warriors of the tribe likely originally meant "all adult men", since all adult men would serve as warriors when needed. This belief getting narrowed and made more exclusive would be consistent with the warrior-class becoming more exclusive.
As for Thomas Karlsson, I think maybe someone shared the same link before, but I basically only know what Wikipedia can tell me. Do you feel like his writings (as opposed to his lyrics) are worth checking out?
That song's pretty rad, I'll have to check out at least the rest of the album, if not more Therion. Thanks to "Survive the Jive", I've been enjoying Wolcensmen lately, which is "dark folk", and so not as hard, but still high-quality music made by a practicing Heathen about relevant topics.
C7.1) Possibly, but I'm sure I still have Progressive thought in my mind, and it makes me think we aren't a whole lot like the people that wrote this stuff, therefore JBP's putting a *lot* of himself and his much more recent influences into it (with admittedly pretty interesting results?).
Yeah, that's a fair point. That's one thing JMG has gotten me a lot more comfortable with - it doesn't necessarily matter if what I get out of a myth is the same as what the folks around when it was written down got out of it - what matters is if it puts me in touch with spiritual truths, and since those insights can be guided by separate, conscious Beings, "different but still right" is a valid outcome.
C7.6) Might there be things he thinks he can't say? But, I dunno, he actually seems fairly transparent to me? (And has been argued to have become a trans-parent to many people?)
I don't think it's a matter of him feeling like he can't say things, and more like that as good as he is at following the implications of things out to their uncomfortable conclusions, I think there's a few places he can't/won't see things because his worldview is still pretty fundamentally that of a Western Liberal Materialist Scientist. For example, he sees School of Rome-derived "limits to growth" thinking as inherently anti-human and dangerous. His counter-proposal is to be smarter about spreading the industrial capitalist opportunity around, because historically, richer countries have taken more steps to preserve the environments within their borders than they did when they were poorer (see: reforestation of England, establishment of national parks in US, and so forth). As JMG would be the first to admit, *yes* many "environmentalists" are actually Stalinists or other flavors of control-freaks, and JBP's not wrong to pick up on that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea that we live in a finite world with finite resources and thus the long-term carrying capacity for humans might be far lower than where we are now is wrong. " The opposite of one bad idea. . ." and all that.
no subject
C5.2) Although it's been said her dead subjects will fight the Aesir's, I have similar inclinations - for one, I don't have a source on hand, but I've read arguments I considered convincing that the Germanic afterlife was distorted into Valhalla-centrism and that goind to Helheim originally wasn't supposed to be considered unfortunate; and you might want to consider https://lyricstranslate.com/en/therion-helheim-lyrics.html (if you don't know it already - but in any case you have heard about Thomas Karlsson already, right?).
Yeah, I also feel like the evidence we have for "Valhalla = end-all, be-all of desirable afterlife" and "Helheim = where gross losers go to suck for eternity" is likely late, skewed, and not a terribly accurate picture of how pre-Christian Heathens, except maybe very late ones, looked at the afterlife. Add in the Western Occultism lens and a belief in reincarnation, and things get even messier. For what it's worth, in The One-Eyed God (again!), Kershaw floats the idea that the notion of a feasting hall for the honored dead warriors of the tribe likely originally meant "all adult men", since all adult men would serve as warriors when needed. This belief getting narrowed and made more exclusive would be consistent with the warrior-class becoming more exclusive.
As for Thomas Karlsson, I think maybe someone shared the same link before, but I basically only know what Wikipedia can tell me. Do you feel like his writings (as opposed to his lyrics) are worth checking out?
That song's pretty rad, I'll have to check out at least the rest of the album, if not more Therion. Thanks to "Survive the Jive", I've been enjoying Wolcensmen lately, which is "dark folk", and so not as hard, but still high-quality music made by a practicing Heathen about relevant topics.
C7.1) Possibly, but I'm sure I still have Progressive thought in my mind, and it makes me think we aren't a whole lot like the people that wrote this stuff, therefore JBP's putting a *lot* of himself and his much more recent influences into it (with admittedly pretty interesting results?).
Yeah, that's a fair point. That's one thing JMG has gotten me a lot more comfortable with - it doesn't necessarily matter if what I get out of a myth is the same as what the folks around when it was written down got out of it - what matters is if it puts me in touch with spiritual truths, and since those insights can be guided by separate, conscious Beings, "different but still right" is a valid outcome.
C7.6) Might there be things he thinks he can't say? But, I dunno, he actually seems fairly transparent to me? (And has been argued to have become a trans-parent to many people?)
I don't think it's a matter of him feeling like he can't say things, and more like that as good as he is at following the implications of things out to their uncomfortable conclusions, I think there's a few places he can't/won't see things because his worldview is still pretty fundamentally that of a Western Liberal Materialist Scientist. For example, he sees School of Rome-derived "limits to growth" thinking as inherently anti-human and dangerous. His counter-proposal is to be smarter about spreading the industrial capitalist opportunity around, because historically, richer countries have taken more steps to preserve the environments within their borders than they did when they were poorer (see: reforestation of England, establishment of national parks in US, and so forth). As JMG would be the first to admit, *yes* many "environmentalists" are actually Stalinists or other flavors of control-freaks, and JBP's not wrong to pick up on that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea that we live in a finite world with finite resources and thus the long-term carrying capacity for humans might be far lower than where we are now is wrong. " The opposite of one bad idea. . ." and all that.
And heh, I see what you did there.